Sticks - A Golfer's Tale by W. Sautter (whitelam books .TXT) 📖

by the narration and wrenching emotions it conjured up.
After a short pause the old man spoke.
“I always wanted to be a good player too. I mean really good, and then finally when I had the chance it was too late for me. I just ran out of time. I got too damn old just when I could have done it, I mean done it big,” he said in a melancholy tone.
He stopped and stared into space for a moment. Then he continued.
“I’m ninety two years old now. I’ve been taking care of myself since I was sixteen. My wife’s gone. She’s been gone for ten years now. We had a boy but he never made it back from Vietnam. All my friends and my brothers and sisters are gone too. It’s just me and me now, I guess.”
Again he paused with an idle gaze.
“I’m to the point where I can’t handle being alone anymore. I just can’t do it. That’s why I’m selling this place. I’m going to, I guess you’d call it, an old age home. You know, where I can get some help with the stuff I can’t do anymore. I hate to admit it but it looks like the body went before brain, if you know what I mean? I guess it’s better than the other way, the brain first I mean.”
“Oh shit! You don’t want to hear all this crap about me,” he suddenly admonished himself for his ramblings.
Then he paused and turned his head towards Bob and peered straight to his eyes.
“Like I said before it’s too late for me,” he mused.
“But maybe it’s not for you,” he added with a mysterious smirk.
“Go down the cellar. In the back, by my workshop, in one of those cabinets on the right, on the bottom, you’ll find a gray golf bag with clubs in it. Bring it up here,” he instructed in a sturdy commanding voice.
Bob knew exactly the bag he was talking about. He had inspected the entire shop, top to bottom and he had especially noticed the bag and its contents. The clubs in it seemed to be different, different from any of the others he’d ever seen, but he couldn’t say exactly how or why.
Without a word, Bob rose dutifully at Merle’s command and walked to the basement. He found his way to the cabinets at the rear of the shop and removed the old but well preserved leather bag from it. The club set it contained was from the fifties, like most of the other items in the shop but again he noticed an unexplainable uniqueness about it.
As he lifted the bag, he could tell that there was something special about them in spite of their age. They were not special in appearance but special in the sensation he felt when he touched the bag. Bob pick them from their resting place and carried them up to the porch. He placed them against the railing in front of the old man.
Merle reached over, drew the driver from the bag, slipped the cover from the club head and cradled the club gently in his hands.
“Son, these don’t look like much. They’re old and out of date but they’re different. When I say different, I mean there’s none other like them, anywhere.”
He held the club up closer for Bob to examine as he continued to speak.
“Here, let me show ya. See this shaft and head. Look at it real close,” he demanded.
Bob leaned even closer to look at it more carefully, as the old man instructed. It was a metal club head and a metal shaft. That’s odd he thought. Metal woods didn’t even exist until the eighties as far as he knew. Well, maybe the old man just put a new head on an old shaft. So what!
The old man thrust the club up closer to him and bid that he looked again more carefully. He obliged and to his surprise he noticed, that upon closer inspection, it did indeed look different than anything ever seen. It wasn’t just a new metal head on old shaft. The metal, or what looked like it might be metal, had a faint purple cast to it and a very light gold fleck embedded in it just under its deep, lustrous surface. Bob took the club in his hands and searched meticulously for other oddities as Merle began to speak.
“Back about fifty eight a guy came to me to get a set of clubs made. At the time, I was one of the best-known craftsmen around. I would make them from scratch. I had a lathe in the basement and I would machine the heads out of stock, right to specs. Not many guys can do that. Most of them, they just got the heads from a manufacturer and maybe they trim ‘em up a bit and then they just stick ‘em on the shaft. Put a grip on it and you’re done, you know what I mean? I was different though, I was a club maker not club assembler.
I made sets for lots of the pros in the old days. I made sets for Sarazin, Parkes and even Nelson one time. They all knew me and what I could do and they came here. All those guys, some of the greatest, sat on this very porch with me like you’re doin’ right now,” he said waving his thin, bony finger excitedly.
Then, he paused for a moment, regained his composure and continued.
“Well, anyway, like I was saying, this guy came to me, he said his name was Max Goodhoff. He wanted me to make him a set of clubs. He said he heard about my work and that’s why he came to me. He wanted me to use this special material that he brought with him. He had some small blocks and some small round pieces of it.
I wasn’t sure how the stock would work. I didn’t even know what it was. I never saw anything like it before. And besides, I thought the guy was nuts. Nobody ever brought their own materials to me before.
The first thing I told him it was going to cost him a bundle and if he wasn’t a pro, well, what’s the point of spending all that money? But that didn’t seem to bother him any. He didn’t even flinch. He said he wasn’t any pro but whatever it costs, he was good for it.
Now, I thought that was a little strange but then when I ask him about the kind of club he wanted me to make for him, it got really strange. He said he didn’t care! Just make the best kind I could. Make a set that I would like. That was weird! Any guy that I ever met, that was going to pay what he was paying, would always tell me down to the last detail what he wanted. This guy just says, ‘Make whatever you want!’
After we went through this stuff in the basement, we went upstairs and I offered him a beer. Ever know a Kraut that didn’t want a beer?
We had one beer, then another and another. You know what I mean? Pretty soon we were both shot.
Then, he starts tellin’ me this crazy story. He said he was a Jew and he escaped from Germany at the start of the war. He was a scientist over there, a ‘polymer chemist’ he called himself. Then, he says the stuff that he gave me was a top-secret, experimental material that he’d been working on for Hitler in the old country. When he left, he took it and old formulas, with him. He said this stuff had, what he called a ‘memory’. He said it could actually learn and remember?”
“Learn and remember what? ” interrupted Bob.
“Well, he said that it could remember what he did before and do it better and better each time it did it again. Like, he said, if you made car springs out of it, the more you rode, the better they would work and after awhile, the car would ride with no bumps at all, perfectly smooth, all the time. It would learn how to take all the bumps perfectly.
I asked him, it was such great stuff, why didn’t he just sell it to some company or the government and make a lot of money? When I asked him that, he got a scared look on his face.
He said he couldn’t because the other scientists he was working with back in Germany were Nazis. They thought this material was going to help them win the war and they were plenty mad when he took off with it and the formulas. He heard through the grapevine that all during the war they were trying to find him, to get it back and kill him for taking it. He said he changed his name and laid low. He told me he was still scared even then and that was an easy fifteen years after the war was over. He said he thought that they were still after him.
He said he was getting tired of being afraid all the time. He said he didn’t have enough guts to let anybody know about the stuff but then again he wasn’t going to just throw it in the garbage either. He said he really liked to play golf and he thought maybe clubs made out of this material could eventually learn the right swing like car springs would learn how to take the bumps.
It was kind of a crazy experiment he said. You know, those scientist guys are always experimenting, and besides what else was he going to do with it anyway?”
“If he was so afraid, how come he told you all this? ” asked Bob.
“That’s what I asked him. He just said he had to tell somebody. He’d been carrying this in his mind for years and had to tell somebody and I was it. He just trusted me I guess. And, of course, the beers helped I’m sure.
I guess it’s kinda like the reason I’m telling you right now. Everybody’s got to unload once awhile.”
“And you believed all this crap?” asked Bob incredulously.
“Are you kiddin’? Of course I didn’t. I thought the guy was nuts or maybe just drunk, but then I thought, he’s a scientist, a German scientist at that, like that rocket guy, Werner von Braun, you know. And then too, there was two thousand dollars in it for me and back in the fifties, you know how much money that would be today, maybe ten thousand. I sure wasn’t going to argue with the guy and tell him I thought he was nuts, even though I did. Would you?” answered the old man emphatically.
“Not really,” agreed Bob.
“He left a deposit of a thousand bucks that night and I started the very next day, early. It took me more than a month. I worked sometimes day and night. I went through a bunch of blades on that lathe but look at that club.” He pointed with a touch of pride to the driver, which Bob was still