THE LONG-HAIRED COWBOY
In the early 1960s, my Southern California employer – Douglas
Aircraft Company – organized an after-work twilight golf league at a nearby
two-course complex called Fox Hills/Baldwin Hills. As a newcomer to the game, I
had the highest handicap on my four-man team, and each match was a learning
experience for me. Every Thursday evening, I paired up with one of my teammates
and we took on the two highest handicappers from another team.
My golf game from those days does
not deserve description, except to say that it was terrible. I swung and missed
often and, when I managed to hit the ball, the little white dimpled sphere
reacted in one of two ways: either it hopped forward like some crazed rabbit, never
rising more than six inches off the ground or it soared toward the sky in a
left-to-right arc resembling a gigantic banana, often left hiding behind a
palm tree or mired inside shrubbery. My nine-hole scores were comparable to
those achieved every weekend by golfers on the PGA Tour -- for 18 holes. But, I
enjoyed the camaraderie of the game, and I was improving. Mostly, I looked
forward to getting together with my teammates and opponents in the club’s bar
at the end of each round.
Every Thursday evening around
twilight, we sat around a large semicircular bar and relived our adventures on
the golf course. While my friends bragged about their 250-yard drives and
30-foot putts, I generally provided comic relief with stories about my slices
into never-never land, shanks in the fairways, and futile attempts to escape
from sand traps.
One evening about a month into the
season, a guy about my age, dressed in golf clothes like the rest of us but
otherwise quite unlike us in appearance, sat down in the corner of the bar and
ordered a beer. What attracted our stares was the length of his sandy hair.
Close-cropped hair, particularly the crew-cut, was fashionable in 1961. The
visitor defied the mode of the day with tresses nearly reaching his shoulders. He
was alone and, as soon as he emptied his glass and paid the bartender, he
departed. He reappeared the following Thursday as well and left just as
quickly. When he took his customary seat for the third consecutive Thursday, I
walked over to him.
“Hi, my name is Charlie,” I said to
him. “Why don’t you come over and join us?”
“Yeah, hi. My name is Clint,” he
replied. “I’d like that.”
I introduced the handsome, rugged,
soft-spoken guy to my friends, and he sat down on a stool on our side of the
bar. He joined in the banter about our golf rounds, although it turned out that
he played each Thursday afternoon alone and on the other course from the one we
were playing that day. After that evening, Clint joined us at the bar whenever
he encountered us there. During those times, the beer-drinking conversation
never seemed to veer away from golf, and we knew as little about Clint as he
did about us.
One evening, my wife Sue and I were sitting
on the living-room floor of our apartment in Santa Monica
“Holy crap!” I screamed, startling
Sue. “That’s Clint!”
I explained to Sue that the guy
playing Rowdy Yates was the same friendly, long-haired golfer who joined us for
beers most Thursday evenings at Fox Hills. Judging by her questions, I knew
that she had her doubts. The next morning at work, I told my teammates about my
discovery. They too were skeptical, and they looked forward to proving me wrong
by questioning Clint at our next get-together.
As luck would have it – and as if
Clint had had a premonition that his identity had been uncovered – he did not
show up the following Thursday, or a week later, or the week after that. We
never saw him again. The only good news was that my friends no longer doubted
me. They tuned in to “Rawhide,” and they confirmed the fact that our drinking
buddy had, in fact, been Clint Eastwood.
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