Itch

As in:

The spirit for the match had gone out of Bert and Duke even before Stuart drove his tee shot onto the 14th green. The death of the crow on 13, when Bert’s Callaway War Bird golf ball struck the unlucky large bird in the head, was just too much of a page from an Alfred Hitchcock script. You can try to joke about something like the dead crow spiraling to its death, but as every talented golfer knows, it doesn’t take very much to knock you out of the sort of zone that Duke had been in before Bert’s $3 missile brought down the bird.

The match suddenly ended at 15, a short but hazard-robed par 3. Stuart struck a pitching wedge to within 12 feet and after Father Lynch hit a tree near the front of the green, Bert hit an 8 iron over the green into a deep sand trap. Duke’s tee shot then hit the bank in front of the green and rolled back into the water hazard. When Bert couldn’t unplug his ball with his second shot, he surprised everyone by simply picking it up and walking over to shake Stuart’s hand.

Stuart didn’t know what was happening and waited a couple seconds before presenting his hand.

Father Lynch observed this from thirty yards away as he was preparing to hit a wedge and was just as baffled. He thought, for a moment, that Bert had injured himself trying to dig his shot out, but then he remembered it was match play and that the match, for all mathematically possible purposes, was over, even if Stuart missed his putt.

It was all very awkward. Father Lynch had just won his $300 for the church but he felt terrible for Bert and Duke. The way he imagined the match ending he thought he would persuade Bert, win or lose, to take the whole batch of towels, markers and Slazengers from Ballybunion. But under these raw circumstances, this now seemed like a bad idea, because he was sure that Bert would not want to be pitied with gifts from Ireland.

So they all walked off together in stunned silence after the handshakes. Upon reaching the locker room, Bert handed Father Lynch three crisp $100 bills in a bank deposit envelope. Stuart had never experienced anything quite like this before and while he rolled with the awkwardness of it all he was also more than a little miffed that he didn’t get to play 16, 17, and 18. A golf itch can be like that.