No Man Is An Island

He can barely sleep. His mind keeps churning at night with checklists for the next day, details, minutiae. He is consumed by his own impatience. He can't cry. He's numb. He has lost his Roarkness, the ability to find joy on the reef, the desire to pick up a golf club and do the one thing that saved him, all those years ago, from falling, falling....

He swallows. He has thought about turning down Euclid Avenue, then Adelbert Road. That's where Rainbow Babies & Childrens Hospital is. That's where a padlocked trunk of memories waits. But he has staked his life on the premise that pain is to be locked away, turned into achievement and character. He doesn't make that turn. He turns onto the interstate and heads toward his temporaiy home in Atlanta, 12 hours of flat, gray concrete away.

Nothing happens on this car ride. That's not who David is. It's just important for you to sit here, to know the smell of flatness and the silence of grayness.

Six more weeks, this lasts. A fifth-place finish, a 14th, then another missed cut. Puggy. He has to see Puggy. The one who said he'd fall one day. Puggy looks at David's eyes, sees what almost no one else in the world can see: This is bad. Puggy opens his mouth, and the old song comes out, more fervent than ever, for now he knows David is listening. The world's not about you, David. Bring people along for the ride. At the end of it, relationships will be all you'll think about, not golf, not winning. For four hours Puggy talks. As they walk across the Georgia Tech campus, Rice, the athletic director, approaches. He greets Puggy, then turns and introduces himself to David.

David is dumbfounded. A first-team All-America four straight years...and the athletic director for all four of those years doesn't recognize him? Dammit, he'll have nothing to do with Georgia Tech, he'll pulverize another piece of his past, and doesn't this prove, once more and for all, the folly of looking anywhere except yourself for support, and that David is right and Puggy is wrong and....

So how in god's name does Puggy get David to the College Golf Fellowship, a Christian conference, a few days later, instead of that Nike tournament in South Dakota that David has to play in to start digging out of the hole? How does David emerge from that week of brotherhood, surrounded by three dozen people at meals and at discussions of love and letting go, with a firecracker string of top five finishes to finish eighth in earnings and gain entrance into the PGA?

He appeared before the world in 1995, wearing a shirt buttoned to the throat, a hat tugged low over his forehead and sunglasses that curved all the way back to meet his temples, frustrating even the onlooker who edged to one side to look into his eyes. Then came a goatee. The gallery didn't see people like this at country clubs. It parted instinctively, made a path for him. This is no come-to-Jesus tale. Everything with David was subterranean and slow.

Few mustered the courage to approach him and learn that the dark wraparound glasses were there to protect his sensitive eyes from the pollen, dust and glare that made them water and itch. Or learn of the delightful irony that it was Puggy, cringing over David's affliction during his senior year, who had handed him his first pair of wraparounds, and he had donned a second pair himself. Those who did approach David with questions were warned: I remember almost nothing about my past.

But why? Why did this man have to keep the hat and shades on when he walked off the 18th green? Why, everyone wondered, did he give the camera and the galleries almost nothing? A pant leg riffling in the wind, a small tightening of the lips around a chaw of tobacco, a blowing of the nose—those were the only bulletins from the front that a Duval correspondent could report. And a swing shorn of wasted motion, a clean and simple and ruthlessly efficient act. In his first three PGA events, he finished 14th, sixth and second—37 under par in his first 12 rounds, and everyone, intimidated by him or not, agreed: Look out.

Anesthesia had brought David to the ledge of greatness, to that circle of a few dozen men who were threats to win on the PGA Tour. What if that numbness, as Puggy insisted, was preventing him from taking the final step? What if it kept him pinned right there, on the ledge, the prize beneath his eyes to see and smell but never to touch? Then the media would begin asking about failure, about choking, rather than about his $881,436 in earnings, a rookie record, 11th best on the Tour in 1995, or about his 10th-place finish the following year. Then, because he couldn't permit anyone else to dictate how he felt, David would grow short with reporters, insisting that the near misses didn't disturb him. Then, of course, that overmuscular mind, the one that often still kept him awake half the night, the one that had blanked out so much anguish, would fall prey to his sport's most savage calculus—the 253.2 minutes of inaction that occurred around the 1.8 minutes of meaningful motion in an average PGA round—and squeeze the one free and natural interval of David's existence, the 1.5 seconds of his swing. Then it would be clear once more what a powerful tide David Duval was walking against.