No Man Is An Island

During summers David spent a few weeks with his grandparents Harry and Vickie Poole, who lived on a golf course at Fernandina Beach, a 45-minute drive northeast of Jacksonville. David loved Harry, the gentle man who had spent the most time with him while Diane and Bobby passed weeks in vigil at the hospital in Cleveland. One day, in David's 11th summer, the boy teed off on the last hole, about to beat his grandfather for the first time. He double-bogeyed and lost. His grandfather, startled, watched the stoic boy burst into tears. "You beat me today," David sobbed, "but you won't when I come back next summer. You'll never beat me again."

If life were fair, and people got what they deserved, then the boy was guilty. He deserved a dead brother and a sledge-hammered family because something was wrong with him, dreadfully, all the way down to his marrow.

No. That was unbearable. Life couldn't be fair. Six more bags of balls, Woodrow. There were no deserves. The boy stood beneath the merciless Florida sun, in his second shirt of the day, driving a third hour's worth of range balls into the August afternoon. He extended this thought, like taffy. If this...then that: That's how the boy's mind functioned, in cool and remorseless progression, a set of marble steps. If there were no justice in the universe, then you built up no points for pleasantries, small kindnesses and gestures. All that was wasted motion. If nothing was fair, then you got whatever you settled for—or whatever you took. "You can level your own playing field by realizing that life only becomes fair when you realize it's unfair," he would say years later.

Of course, it wasn't easy. To swallow such a hard, jagged premise, one would have to make oneself hard, sometimes even jagged. Six more bags, Woodrow.

Small talk? What for? Hang out? How come? The mall? What was the purpose? Chase girls? He had to get up early in the morning and go to the club. Party? "It's very damaging to goals," he would say later. "It's not an efficient use of time." Manners? Yes, absolutely efficient for a boy growing up among adults at a country club, for a nonmember to retain access to that placid, perfect place. Friends? He had four or five, a cadre he had known from before his brother's death and with whom he felt safe, boys who had little to do with golf. He barely had the time to see them anymore, let alone the need to add more friends. He was attending Episcopal High School, a private school with a collegelike campus, where none of those old friends went anyway, and his classmates had no clue what was incubating in their midst.

In the summer of his 13th year, the power came. In a matter of months, it seemed, his 170-yard drive had found an extra city block, and suddenly the boy was standing at the open car trunks of 40-year-old members who had won club, city and state championships, collecting bets—there was nearly a grand in the wad in his cigar box at home. "Dammit, Pro," the men started telling his father, "we'd rather have you out there than that little s—-son of yours." The Air Force Academy team stopped by Timuquana on a Southern swing; someone suggested a driving contest. The college boys ripped. Then 6'4", 250-pound Steve (Sasquatch) Young, supposedly Timuquana's biggest belter, ripped. David stepped up last and outripped them all by 40 yards.

Golf was the perfect sport for David. It all hinged on him. No one else could affect his performance—not an overpowering pitcher or acrobatic defender, not a distracted teammate or timekeeper or referee. It confirmed the logic of his experience, of his organs and tissue: Rely on no one, be affected by no one...except me. He would place himself inside a cavern with one pinprick of light high above, one way out: the PGA Tour.

"Are you sure you don't want to go to your school's football game tomorrow, David?" his father would ask. Bobby was back home now, giving the marriage another chance. "David, you don't want to go to your prom?"

David would look up from his bed, from behind one of the books he had taken up for company. Would going to the game or the prom inch him closer to the pinprick of light? "No, Dad."

"Why not, David?"