AI-X offers a series of ruminations on the personnel, the shamelessly Spartan provisions and accommodations, the eternal expanses of time with absolutely nothing planned, and perhaps even the grueling events themselves.
Ever the historian, my goal to unearth the loamy golf history of Gordon was, again and again, thwarted by endless hazards, unverifiable stories full of odd twists and dead ends, photos now so faded as to render them empirically useless (one for example, although non-golf, looms in the loam as my favorite to date: a 3 inch square black and white of a young man—slender, lean, athletic; Gordon likes the word “chiseled”—in a baseball uniform, caught at the peak of his wind-up, left knee as high as his head…). No fucking way that’s our Gordon, but I digress.
There just did not appear to be a way to divine his golfing past. Then one day, after weeks of sifting through all known and extant sources, I stumbled upon these gems.
In manifestly authentic diary entries, two of Gordon’s contemporaries each refer to the day they met and first played with Bauer. The first of these two giants of the game, Francis Ouimet, winner of the U.S. Open in 1913, wrote in an entry dated June 11, 1909: “Neither Harry nor I were particularly eager to play with this stranger, who approached us haltingly—god, his outfit was atrocious: more colors than me Grandma’s quilt, both elbows shot through his shirt, hair unkempt, bottle of Coca-Cola in one hand and a handle of Captain Morgan’s in the other—and explained he was ‘looking for a game.’ Looking for a game are you Gordon? After four holes I suggested Parcheesi.”
It’s all about the gravitas of primary sources. And so, in addition and on the same day, this entry, by a another titan of the sport, the legendary six-time winner of the Open Championship himself, Harry Vardon, who would go on for years drinking with Gordon, but remained resolutely unwilling to ever try golf with him again. Vardon writes of that same day in June of 1909, “Francis never did like Gordon—a French-Irish vs. German-Scot deal, I think—but, if not the cut of his pants, at least I liked the cut of his jib, and I figured, ‘easy money.’ So, after the fourth hole, Francis refused to walk anywhere near Gordon and I thusly spent the next three hours in the presence of unspeakable genius—unbridled talent, no, not in golf, but rather in drinking. At the turn, he left briefly, only to return with yet another bottle of, I think it was scotch…I remember nothing at all of the back nine, other than knowing I had met someone with a rather prodigious capacity for drink, one who obviously understood the secrets of longevity and bliss; in short, a friend for life.”
So the champion of AI-I, Gordon Bauer, inexplicably still in search of a game, will again defy logic and return to Orlando on March 8-12, 2012, very near the site of his still hotly-debated victory in the Inaugural AI, MetroWest, now rendered unplayable since the archaeological dig began in 2000. Under enormous pressure from, among others, the scientific community, golf historians and the local AA Chapter, MetroWest ceded the land so that the enormous commercial imperative could be met for anything even resembling a relic of Bauer; it is now demonstrable on eBay, that a mere half of a broken tee once used by Gordon is going for—if you can believe this--$300.00. If the tee still has a “Stan” reference anywhere on it, the price quadruples. Anyone who can claim to have a signed scorecard from that fateful day in 1997 when Gordon, sensing doom, vanished from the course with only nine holes to play, in full denial of the charge being put on by this very reporter to overtake his narrow two-shot lead, might fetch an amount estimated as high as six figures from well-heeled collectors for that now iconic souvenir.
In the course of my research on Gordon, I had occasion to interview my son Nicholas, himself a “participant” (read: hostage)in AI-II. Here is a transcript of just a small part of the uncensored conversation:
“…well, first of all, I couldn’t fucking believe that my mother MADE me come along on this deal. It had to ruin your {my} fun, just totally ruin it for you. I had no desire to: one, play golf at all; two, do so with my Old Man and his occasionally humorous but totally warped friends; and three, what I really wanted to be doing was lying on the couch in my house watching college hoops on TV—I mean, the March Madness thing was underway and instead I end up looking for tee shots that Gordon hit, which, not one of us saw leave the tee much less land…it was fucking nuts.” Nick continued, “But I did see one thing that I can never forget much less explain. It was Falcon’s Fire, I think, Gordon and me riding together, you and Mitch together, and, imagine this, one of Gordon’s titanic and somewhat wayward drives had left the fairway, if not the premises. We looked and looked. You guys drove over, we all looked…and we’re about to call off the search when we hear Gordon bellow, ‘I got it’, as if he were under a fucking pop-up instead of looking for a battered Titleist, and, well, you should have seen this lie. The ball was sitting free, but in a well formed by the confluence of dense roots from a massive pine tree just a few yards behind the ball. In front of him, about fifteen yards ahead, was a copse of young trees, thickly knotted together, seemingly impenetrable. Sensing his disappointment and allowing for the near century’s difference in our ages, I commiserated that he had no option and reached back for a wedge so he could punch out to the fairway. It was a short five par, about 485 or so; he could get there in three anyway. And Gordon says, and I’ll never forget this: ‘Driver please Nick’. So he lines up, with a driver now, OK? And, aiming straight into the trees, narrowly missing on his backswing the big pine behind him, he flails as hard as I had ever seen a man swing a golf club, and the fucking ball came right out of the well, screamed straight through a non-existent opening in the trees, and rolled for about fifteen minutes to within ten yards of the green. He nonchalantly bumped a seven iron to three feet and made birdie. The most incredible shot I have ever seen and most likely ever will see—in person, on TV, in my dreams. You can’t make this shit up.”
Nor should I add, would you want to.
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