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Regular readers know that I don't play a lot of golf. But a little while back I played 54 holes in the space of a few days. I probably should have given my body a little advance warning, as afterward I could hardly move. My back was sore, and my recently repaired and still bulbous knee sprouted a couple of new nodules, but it was worth it.
You're going to hate me for this, but I had to play Pebble Beach and Cypress Point.
Hey, hey -- somebody has to play there. I've played at Pebble dozens of times, and it's always a treat, but I'd only been to Cypress Point once. In a nasty turn of events, I'd been forced to leave the course after only 14 holes to shoot a segment for the "Late Night Show" at the Lone Cypress with McCord. We needed a sunset shot, you know, something romantic like him and me holding hands, gazing out into the Pacific. I know -- how the hell could you do a golf highlight show without a shot like that?
But, because of this meaningless rendezvous with the elderly congenital idiot in eelskin Prada cross-trainers (who showed up an hour late anyway), I didn't get to play the 15th and 16th, the two most beautiful par-three holes on the planet. We had to wait for the damned moon to come up, by which time it was a miracle McCord wasn't dangling from the Lone Cypress.
As I go about what I have the gall to call work, there is one question I'm asked with relentless, bran-like regularity. As sure as the top of Allen Iverson's head looks like a blimp shot of Firestone Country Club, someone will inevitably ask me, "So, what's your favorite golf course?"
I'm so accustomed to responding to this question, it's like wrapping a finger around a ring and yanking a cord in the small of my back. After a short pause, and a cursory upward glance, I purse my lips as if there actually is some electromagnetic activity going on in my cranium. Then, I launch into what is essentially a taped segment of a person who, by virtue of the place of his birth, is in love with Royal County Down in Northern Ireland.
"But then again, I adore the Augusta National, too," I say (like that's a surprise). "But if push came to shove and I were only allowed to play one golf course for the rest of my life, I'd have to pick the Old Course at St. Andrews. It's like playing in a graveyard, you see, and so different every time you play it. A hundred yards wide, but depending where the flagstick is, there's always a 20-yard stripe you want to be in." Then I go to commercial.
The thing is, I never included Cypress Point in my list because I'd never played the last four holes. I mean, how good could they be?
Little did I know it, but this time I was to go the distance at Cypress Point. Mad, windswept, and interesting young announcer that I am, from the Shark Shoot-out in Naples, Florida -- our last show of the year -- I made an impetuous cross-country dash to the Monterey Peninsula, playground of the corpulent guest.
Pebble Beach was the first of the three links that was to remind me why I quit competition. As always, as part of a group photo with my partners on the 18th tee, I was the one with his pants down. It's part of a long-standing personal tradition of disgraceful behavior in famous places captured on celluloid. The collection includes images of trouser-shrouded ankles on the potty in the Royal Box at Covent Garden Opera House, and chilled kneecaps in the Road Hole bunker. It's very artsy-fartsy.
My personal favorite was taken many years ago at the Blarney Stone, on a day so cold that an elderly German tourist who accidentally stumbled onto the scene shouted at me, "Young lady, you vill haff to put your panties back on!" I maintain to this day that his eyesight was dreadful, and incidentally, I wouldn't kiss that damn thing if it had been swabbed with alcohol. Come to think of it, I'd think twice about kissing the Blarney Stone, too.
