The day's carnival atmosphere peaked when our group was waiting on the tee at the sixth hole, a flat, 180-yard par 3. Dema had just made an 8 at the fifth hole, but to my surprise he was happy. "That's very good for me," he said.
I was befuddled. "How can that be good?" I asked. "You're not such a bad golfer."
Dema smiled. "It's good because my handicap will go up. So please, keep giving me higher scores."
"Don't you want to play well? Don't you want to win?" I said.
Dema and Pema smiled, but I was just beginning to learn about the shady side of Bhutanese golfers, the same shady side that golfers everywhere seem to have. Dema wasn't just a happy-go-lucky Bhutanese unfazed by some bad shots. I now realized why I. J. had told me earlier today that he wanted to begin taking lessons after the tournament.
"High scores are good for the Maruti," Pema explained. "A higher handicap means a better chance to win the car."
Dema was looking ahead to the crown jewel on the Bhutanese golf calendar-the India House tournament, a handicap-scoring event whose winner gets a new Maruti car worth $4,000.
In my mind, the Bhutan Open was the title to gun for. But the Bhutanese golfers didn't care about prestige. The pinnacle of golf for them is to win the car, and India House was just two weeks away.
Standing in the fairway of the eighteenth hole of my first round, I looked at the sky. It was full of dark clouds that were dripping a light rain. I closed my weary eyes as drops dappled my face. I'd been playing golf for thirty-one years, since age four, but I'd never experienced such a maddening round. Finally I'd hit a straight drive and was laying one in the fairway.
Then I envisioned something unusual: Guru Rinpoche flying on a tiger, his big, round face looking down at me with a grin. I'm still not sure why I envisioned Rinpoche in the eighteenth fairway. I'm not Buddhist, and Rinpoche was not, by all accounts, a golfer. Perhaps, though, there's some truth to the stories that my Bhutanese friends have told me about Rinpoche and his proclivity to fly around on his tiger and heal people. Maybe on this afternoon, thirteen hundred years after Rinpoche's arrival, the revered lama had returned to sprinkle some of his positive karma on me? Heaven knows, I needed some.
I was eighteen over par and embarrassed. I had made a 10 on one hole and an 8 on another. I'd lost three balls, accrued nine penalty strokes, and fired my caddie on the eleventh hole. The little boy had been daydreaming for much of the round, and when he admitted that he hadn't watched my drive careen into the rough at eleven, I lost my temper and asked him to give me my bag. I paid him 100 ngultrums and carried my bag the rest of the way.
When Adair left us after nine holes, I'd felt like packing it in, too, but I'm not a quitter. Now with one more approach, crazy thoughts were swirling. Would the Royal Thimphu members lose faith in me as their pro? Was I qualified to teach a game at which I had been so inept? How could I have the nerve to tell people to play golf one shot at a time, with no regard for the past or the future, when I'd been unable to do that?
Then something funny happened. After lofting a crisp shot at the flag and two putting for par, I signed my scorecard and gave it to Shayam, who was sitting inside his little hut outside the clubhouse. The final tally: I'd shot 84, Dema 83, and Pema 103.
Winning wasn't in the cards for me because of my poor play on Saturday. But I think Guru Rinpoche sprinkled some good karma on me last night because things went much better on Sunday in my second round. I didn't have a whiff of nervousness and shot a respectable six-over 72 while playing with a captain from the Bhutanese Army and a twenty-two-year-old student. The student, Tashi Dorji Jr., was especially entertaining. Not because of his golf, which was atrocious, but because he was a bon vivant whose casual attitude and sarcastic wit reminded me of Rodney Dangerfield.
