The Sand Trap Read Online Free PDF Page B

where she knew
it would.
    But Bob never even saw the ball’s flight.
His brain was still on her swing. He had never seen anything like
it. The only thing normal in his mind was the grip. The rest was a
swing somewhere between Lee Trevino, Chi Chi Rodriguez and Babe
Ruth. For a start she started her swing with the club head a good
foot behind the teed up ball. Then she kept her left arm and the
club in a perfectly straight line. No dropping the arms straight
down from the shoulders like he had been taught. And her right
shoulder was very low at address. The rest happened too fast for
him to really grasp or analyze. But the result was unmistakable.
She hit a perfect 5-iron draw farther than he had hit his 3
wood.
    Neither Bob nor Helen said anything as they
all picked up their clubs and headed down the path though the
cornfield to the landing area. Helen took a free ball from the
landing area bucket and hit another ball into the cornfield with a
muttered, “Shit! Oops, excuse me, Melanie.”
    “It’s OK,” Melanie suggested. “I work on a
golf course. You can't imagine what I’ve heard from the guys that
come out here.”
    Bob hit his 120-yard second shot into one of
the bunkers near the green while Melanie used the same swing
technique to hit a shot that landed fifteen yards past the pin and
spun back ten yards to leave her a five-yard uphill putt. Bob hit
out of the trap to twenty yards and missed his par putt. Helen just
dropped a ball on the green and four putted from twenty feet.
Melanie pulled out her putter and walked over to her ball. She did
not mark it. She did not wash it. Or line it up from a prone
position. Or pretend her putter was a plumb bob. With no practice
swings she just walked up and stroked it into the hole. She picked
up her ball from the hole, put the flag back in place and walked
over to the next tee box as if this was as common as brushing her
teeth in the morning.
    “That’s an interesting putter you have
Melanie,” Bob observed. “How did you come to be using that?”
    In truth he was being polite. The putter she
used could not have been two feet long and she had to bend way over
-- almost to parallel to use it. And the grip was a fat piece of
PVC piping that had been slipped over the shaft of the club.
    “Most people don’t leave their putters
behind and any who throw them usually wait until they can throw
them into the North Saskatchewan, so I don’t have much choice for
putters to play with,” Melanie explained. “One guy suggested I putt
with a hockey stick. Be a real Canadian. I tried that – was not too
bad. But this other guy wrapped his putter around the only one big
tree on the Folly, on number six, and broke it in half. So I just
put an old piece of PVC piping over the top of the shaft for a grip
and it seems to work real well. I don’t think there are any rules
about using a short putter are there?”
    “No. Not that I know of. But you would
certainly set chins wagging at the Regina Golf and Country
club.”
    Halfway through the round both Bob and Helen
realized they were witnessing something special. Melanie’s shots on
the first hole were not an anomaly. She consistently hit shots
exactly where she wanted with the ball flight she imagined. The
only way a player could hit the par three, sixth hole that ran
along the river was to play a high fade around the only big tree on
the course, and to approach the green from the left side. Any other
ball would never hold the green and end up at best in a greenside
bunker and at worst bouncing its way along the bottom of the North
Saskatchewan River towards Edmonton. Bob’s $6 balls – he tried
twice to hit the green, ended up in the river. Melanie’s shot was a
perfect fade that landed in front of the green and bounced up to
the hole.
    By this time Helen was just simply enjoying
the spectacle of her sanctimonious golfing husband being severely
trounced by farm girl with a mix and match set of clubs, a two feet
long, PVC grip