Baffled
As in:
The best Father Lynch could do from the buried lie in the bunker was to two-putt for bogey. Now Bert Mallox and Duke Walkins were behind only by a hole and the longest, toughest holes at the Links at Birch Meadows, the part of the course that could really chew your leg off, were next to play.
“Jesus have mercy before the shanks,” Father Lynch prayed again, as he picked up his ball and headed of to number nine tee.
The problem with the shanks is that there’s no human solution for them. Efforts to treat the dreaded golf disease like it were the hiccups are useless, as are any one of hundreds of more conventional efforts. You can’t practice your way out of it, and there’s nothing a teacher can do. It’s a click in the brain, an obscene malfunction of chemistry and neurotransmitters.
It’s the sort of tragedy where one would logically appeal to spiritual guidance and, to be fair, Father Lynch, as a somewhat experienced exorcist, would normally have been pretty good in this pinch. The problem was he came with unclean hands. There was money at stake, he had a big investment in this match, and that disrupts the whole integrity of the demon rinsing.
And he knew that. Poor Stuart was baffled. He really was a rare, natural golfer and had even begun to think so. But Father Lynch knew that whatever heap of confidence Stuart had acquired was quickly being decimated. The humane thing to do, really, was to call off the match. But that wouldn’t be sporting given Bert and Duke’s involvement, and it ran against all his Irish instincts.
“What should I do now?” Stuart asked.
“Oh, I would hit driver,” replied Father Lynch, as if nothing were awry.
Stuart did, and though he caught the ball on the inner third of the club, and the strike sounded as horrible as a bird hitting a window, the ball actually ran out to 260 yards down the left side of the fairway. Not bad at all and certainly a vast improvement over his previous five strokes. He only had 170 left, uphill, to the 9th green.
He pulled six-iron.
“You’ll want to put that away son,” Father Lynch said. With that Father Lynch also collared his five and seven irons, and handed him a five wood.
“But Father, I hit five wood 230,” Stuart said, baffled.
“Well try not to hit it 230 this time.”
Stuart shrugged and shook his head.
“You’re going to have to trust me on this,” Father Lynch said.
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