Would we be on the next plane out of Bhutan? Perhaps my fear was severely overblown. The chances of Lotey punching me and of my family getting expelled from Bhutan might have been remote, if not impossible, but at the moment I felt like they were very real possibilities. While the men continued restraining Lotey, he flailed his arms and continued screaming. "Accuse me to my face!" he kept saying.
After a couple of moments, Lotey calmed down, and the men convinced him to putt out. He grudgingly went back to the green.
Visibly shaking, Lotey three-putted for a double bogey. That gave Randy a chance to tie him for the title and force a sudden-death playoff. Randy had hit his short-iron approach a little weakly and it had landed in the small and shallow bunker to the front and right of the green, leaving him a relatively simple 20-yard shot. Holing it for a birdie would have erased Randy's three-shot deficit and sent the tournament into overtime. Randy hit a pure sand shot, nipping the ball cleanly, and it landed a few yards short of the flagstick and began trickling toward the hole. Alas, the ball stopped a few feet short.
Randy made the par putt, but it was for naught. He finished two shots back.
But all was not done. Randy hadn't necessarily lost. If the tournament committee decided to penalize Lotey for tamping down the grass behind his ball when chipping from near the seventeenth green, Lotey would have been penalized two strokes, and that would have left him tied with Randy. Even worse, the committee might have decided to disqualify Lotey.
The tournament committee huddled for a few minutes behind the eighteenth green. After they broke up their meeting, Yougs came over to tell me that they had determined that because most, if not all, of the players in the field had probably been improving their lies, no penalty would be given to Lotey. Yougs's explanation didn't make sense. Because others cheated, Lotey would be exonerated? But I was in no mood to argue.
While I was walking back to the clubhouse, a Bhutanese brigadier who'd played in the tournament approached me and said, "Thanks for raising the issue. We have to put one severe rule into place."
About ten minutes after Lotey and Randy finished playing, there was a brief awards ceremony outside the clubhouse. While watching Lotey clench the trophy as the hundred or so spectators gave him warm and rousing applause, I decided that I needed to speak to Lotey. I wanted to explain how I felt, that I had no grudge toward him but was simply following the moral code of golf that impels observers to report potential rule breaches.
After the ceremony, Lotey walked toward the parking lot toting his clubs and the trophy. I scurried up from behind and asked if he'd sit and talk. I wasn't expecting Lotey to accept my request, and I was half expecting him to scream at me or even try to hit me. Instead, Lotey was calm and polite. "Sure, let's sit down and talk. I'm hungry, he said."
"Can I get you something to eat, too?"
Minutes before, Lotey had tried to attack me, but now it was as if nothing had happened. I'd like to think that I could be so forgiving so quickly, but I'm not sure.
We sat down on the terrace surrounding the clubhouse. Lotey ordered hot tea and ema datse, a super spicy dish including white rice, boiled potatoes, melted cheese and tear-inducing red chillies, for both of us, and for the next thirty minutes candidly told me about the cheating incident and his life.
Now forty-three, Lotey had grown up wanting to be a movie star, which was unusual in a country that at the time didn't have a film industry or a single actor. So at age twenty he took a bus to Bombay, checked into a cheap hotel, and spent the next several weeks wondering what to do. "I was so lonely, but I had my dream," said Lotey.
After about a month, Lotey bumped into a friend, Danny Denzongpa, a Sikkimese who was a fairly famous actor in Bollywood. "There is heavy competition, and you have no chance," Denzongpa told Lotey.
