The Legend of Bagger Vance Read Online Free PDF

Atlanta Constitution . My dad had taught my brother and me to read by poring over the great wordsmith’s columns. Langer came with a friend from Boston, a former classmate from Harvard who was an actual book writer;they took over both spare rooms upstairs as office space, plus Garland’s room which he vacated, moving in with me.
    It was barely nine in the morning when their cab arrived from the station, and they were already lathered in sweat, their white shirts sticking to their undershirts, which were wringing wet beneath their wool jackets. They stunk of cigarette smoke and sweat and pure literary glamour. Both of them chain-smoked and coughed and hacked and when I carried their coats up to Garland’s room which would now be theirs, I felt the weight of whiskey flasks in the pockets.
    Sitting to breakfast, Langer’s friend asked for his eggs softboiled, the first time I had ever seen eggs cooked any way but scrambled or sunnyside up. I watched mesmerized as he set a steaming uncracked egg upright in its little porcelain cup, rapped it sidewise with a butter knife to knock its crown off, then spooned the gooey innards right from the shell, to vanish with a worldly slurp beneath his mustache. It was the most glamorous sight my eyes had ever beheld.
    Over coffee, the journalists regaled my mother with tales of Jones and Hagen. How Jones never traveled to a tournament without his friend and Boswell, O. B. Keeler, who was a newspaperman himself, covering sports for the Atlanta Journal , and a true scholar of science and history, almost mystical in his study and appreciation of the game. Jones, in fact, gave Keeler half the credit for the 1930 Grand Slam and insisted when posing with all four trophies (and the Walker Cup, which the Jones-captained team had won that same year) on Keeler’s standing beside him as an equal.
    Hagen traveled with a staff of five, headed by his caddie-cum-valet Spec Hammond, whose responsibility it was to supervise the shining of the Haig’s thirty-eight pairs of shoes and the pressing of his seventy pairs of slacks and plus fours. Hagen habituated the Savoy in London, dined on oysters and champagne for breakfast, and never had his hair cut except by his own personal barber from the Detroit Athletic Club, whom he either flew personally to visit or had flown in, worldwide, at his own expense.
    In the cool of the screened rear patio, Langer lit a Chesterfield and began to turn the subject toward Junah.
    Did we know of Junah’s exploits in the Great War? That he was a bona fide hero? Of course, my mother replied; our city had produced numerous men of valor, and certainly no less could be expected of a man of Junah’s background and breeding. Langer smiled as my mother recited the names of Junah’s forebears and their heroism at Antietam and the Wilderness, Shiloh and Bermuda Hundred. Langer acknowledged appreciatively the South’s long record of bravery and the fine fighting men she had produced. But, he said, he had never heard a story quite like Junah’s. Did we know what happened to him in the Battle of the Argonne Forest, and how he reacted afterward? Langer’s memory was fresh because he had looked up the accounts and dispatches in the news files before leaving Atlanta. He thought they might somehow work in to the reports he would file on the coming match.
    My mother declared that she—all of us in the city, in fact—were familiar with aspects of those wartime events, but the fullpicture remained rather mysterious and unclear. Something about a French wife who died and Junah’s daughter, now being raised by grand-mère in France.
    The journalist corrected her: it was a German wife. And a queer story behind it.
    It seems Junah, at some desperate point during the battle, faced with being imminently overrun by the enemy, had called in artillery fire on his own position. He and one machine gunner were the only two still alive, cut off from their unit, behind their single gun whose barrel