No Man Is An Island

Yes, Howard Roark, the fictional architect in The Fountainhead, the 695-page novel by Ayn Rand that David would soon discover in a New York City bookstore, and in which he would finally see himself. Roark was the flame that burned inside him, the fire the world kept trying to extinguish: the premise that a man's integrity could grow only from following his own truth and ego, serving his own purpose and passion. Roark's was a noble and healthy selfishness that accepted the hatred of all the sheep who called it arrogance. "The basic need of the creator is independence," Roark declares. "The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary."

David would read passages like that and feel his life justified, his heart sing. After he finished the book, he purchased it on tape and drank it with his ears. God, it was almost eerie; architecture was the path David would have pursued at Georgia Tech if it hadn't left so little time for golf. Somehow, because Roark existed, if only as a concept, David wasn't quite so alone. He smiled when his friend Kevin Cook read the book and called him the Howard Roark of golf.

Oh, yes, Puggy sensed how complicated a task he had undertaken. Asking the boy to change his stance toward life was like asking him to change his stance over the ball: Would those 280-yarders still scream off his driver if he opened up more, if he bent, if he reached out, if he felt? Would his two-irons still land and lie down one caress from the cup? No, David couldn't risk it; somehow the two stances seemed inextricably entwined. As if to verify his thesis, his two grandfathers died within three days during his sophomore year; he carried the coffin of Harry Poole to the freshly shoveled hole and looked inside. Where was the togetherness down there?

Yet the boy couldn't resist the magnetic pull of Puggy, his wife, Gail, and their three children. There was a wholeness to that family of five that kept drawing David to their dinner table, to their family room to roll on the floor with the kids, to their backyard to play catch. David let Puggy see something that few others could see: "That little soft spot," as Puggy would put it, "on the underbelly of that hard shell. You'd see it and start to give your heart to him, and then he could stick his hand in your chest and jerk your heart right out."

The shepherd kept coming back for David, leading him slowly toward the human flock. As a senior David won four tournaments and his fourth straight berth as a first-team All-America and came within a stroke of winning both the NCAA individual and team championships. He was getting along with teammates a little better, beginning to believe that Puggy might be, well, a tiny bit right.

Then the day after the NCAA tournament, a story appeared in The Courier-Journal of Louisville. A reporter took three events he had witnessed during the final round—David telling an opponent on the fairway to move his golf bag out of David's sight line, David spitting out apple chunks, David urinating in a stand of trees 40 yards off the fairway rather than waiting in line at a bathroom—and delivered them to the public in the harshest light. A Florida newspaper picked up the story, eyebrows shot up, and athletic director Homer Rice asked David for an explanation.

The shepherd groaned, his work undone. Thunderstruck, David tucked the article inside the cover of his day planner and began a ritual. Each year when the calendar ran out, he would transfer the article to the fold inside the next year's calendar cover. A reminder to refortify his guard.

It's true, there was no one in the passenger seat of David's green Nissan Pathfinder on June 13,1994. But let's imagine we were. It may be instructive.

Odd that it's Cleveland we're in, that it's here that David's world is disintegrating again. Having been the surest bet to go straight from Q school to the PGA in 1993, after leaving Tech two quarters shy of a degree in management, he failed to make the cut and was cast into the minor leagues, the Nike tour. He had failed by $2,875 to break into the top 10 money winners on the '93 Nike tour and was punished with another year there to chew on the husk of his dream. Now the '94 Nike season is half finished, and he's dropped to 22nd place in earnings, losing contact with the top 10 he must crack, staring down the barrel of yet another year in the bushes. For god's sake, he doesn't belong here. For god's sake, he has just shot a 75 and 78 in Cleveland and missed another cut.

His parents' marriage is ending. Brent's death was an acid that finally ate away the last of what once brought them together. Diane is drinking, falling apart. Bobby is unable to stand and face their trouble. It's ugly, and David's caught in the middle, bouncing from city to city across the country, feeling helpless. Just when it's time for him to become a man, the last wisps of his fog-shrouded past are vanishing, but suddenly, for the first time, he can't see his future.