NEW YORK — You say: “What a nice day.”
I say: “Drop dead.”
You say: “Can I help with your luggage?”
I say: “Drop dead.”
I am practicing. I am rehearsing my lines. I am following the advice of every general from Napoleon to MacArthur. Know your enemy. Think like your enemy. My enemy is the New Yorker. From now until a week from Sunday. Ten days. Seven baseball games. I am practicing.
“Call if I can be of service,” you say.
I say: “Drop dead.”
Here was the idea: Find the Tiger who had waited the longest to be in first place. A timely concept, I figured. After all, the Tigers were awfully close to the first-place Yankees. I mean, very, very close. How close? Remember when Groucho Marx told his dance partner: “Darling, if I got any closer to you, I’d be behind you”?
Let us pause here for a day in the life of the Tigers’ latest hero: Jim Walewander.
Uh, that’s W-a-l-e-w-a-n-d-e-r.
Right. OK. He is a rookie. He has played in 23 big-league games. Here is how he learned he was starting Sunday: Lou Whitaker, the Tigers’ second baseman, came in at noon and said he couldn’t play. Bad back. The game was 90 minutes away. A call went out from Sparky Anderson’s office, a call to arms, a call to destiny. . . .
“GET ME . . . WALEWANDER!”
This is how bad it had gotten for Darnell Coles. He was playing third base and praying the ball would go elsewhere. “Not just once in a while, all the time,” he says, shaking his head. “It was like, don’t hit it to me! Don’t hit it to me! And if you’re gonna hit it to me, then let me just step on the bag for an out. Don’t make me throw it.”
MUIRFIELD, Scotland — He was huddled against the wind with his wife and his baby daughter. They were alone, in front of the clubhouse, a few hundred feet from the 18th green, where, at the moment, the fans chanted wildly for the British Open champion: “ON THE GREEN! ON THE GREEN!” they demanded.
He should have been the hero. But he was not the hero. Paul Azinger kissed his wife’s forehead and looked off beyond the noise, beyond this coastal golf course, beyond the North Sea. He looked off to someplace far away.
MUIRFIELD, Scotland — He was inch-deep in wet sand, swinging in a way that did not fit him at all. One stroke, two strokes. The ball barely moved. Three strokes. Four strokes. The ball curled back into the dent of his footprint. Five strokes. Five strokes? How crazy was this? Arnold Palmer, one of the greatest names in the history of golf, was swinging himself right out of this British Open, without ever leaving the sand trap.
MUIRFIELD, Scotland — He has always had a great face. Thick black hair, dancing eyes, a grin that could open a steel-plated cookie jar. Look at him in a happy moment, he can blind you with brio. Look later, and you may see deeper inside, the poor Mexican kid hustling golf shots, the teenage Marine with the girl’s name tattooed on his arm, the yakking prankster who charmed the sports world in winning six major championships. The years have put creases in that tanned skin now, yet when he laughs, the age vanishes. A great face will do that.
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