by Michael Griffith

The silver cup resides in the understairs closet, amid other bric-a-brac: stained and time-warped racquets; a grocery sack filled with rope and twine; a host of half-sprung umbrellas we just might, in a pinch, bring out of retirement someday. There, on the high shelf to the right, next to a broken turntable trussed in its cord. The engraving is tarnished but still readable: The William Allan Craig Sportsmanship Award, 1979.

If you removed its bouquet of once-used paint stirrers and polished the silver, the cup might gleam impressively. But trophies lie.

Twenty-five years ago I was a fourteen-year-old golfer with mediocre skills and an aversion to practice. I was lucky enough to have unlimited access to a course, so I played often enough to have nudged my handicap down to ten. But I had no grand ambitions in golf. I was all too well aware of my limitations, physical and temperamental, and they weren’t the kind that might one day suddenly vanish.

There was in those days—played in 1979 at Indigo, near Daytona Beach—an autumn tournament that served as the culmination of the regional junior tour. This “World Series” was an invitation-only event; to earn a spot, a player had to finish in his age-group’s top fifteen in one of a handful of summer events. Although not a particularly lofty standard, it wasn’t an easy one for me. Still, after a couple of close calls, I finally slipped into the field on my last chance.

And wonder of wonders—I played well on the opening day, shot 81 and found myself in the terra incognita of the top ten. When we arrived for the annual awards banquet that evening, I was feeling cocky. I hadn’t brought up the rear as usual, hadn’t embarrassed myself; tonight I was one of the guys, not a mascot or hanger-on. After dinner, when the tour director—a pouch-faced fifty-year-old with a weird mop-top perm, a cross between Raggedy Andy and Charles Osgood—began his encomium to the winner of this year’s Sportsmanship Award, I wondered what kind of choirboy would win such a thing. The director invoked all the familiar pieties: etiquette is the measure of the man, far more important than anything one does with his clubs, blah blah blah blah. Sure, I thought, sportsmanship: a consolation prize for losers who shot a bundle (in this case, anything over 81) and then had to hunt up some solace or silver lining.

I was savoring my after-dinner smugness when the tour director’s tale turned vaguely familiar, then a little less vaguely so, and I glanced up to find that my disbelief was being echoed, across the table, by that of my hometown friend Richard. As Raggedy Osgood rattled on about a pint-sized paragon who’d nearly cost himself a spot in the World Series by calling a penalty on himself—on the next-to-last hole of the next-to-last event, for an infraction no one else saw (and one that turned out in the end not to even merit a penalty)—I watched Richard’s mouth fall open, his eyes grow wide. By the time the prizegiver paused and swiveled toward us to speak the recipient’s name, Richard had pushed back from the table and planted his palms on his temples. Froth (or was it the remnant of a butter mint?) had collected at the corners of his mouth, and he looked like an Izod-and-madras-slacks version of The Scream.

In sixth grade, I was pressed into service on our high-school golf team. This wasn’t because I’d demonstrated any special ability, to be sure; ours was a small school, and after a couple of graduation losses there was no one else to step in, so a classmate and I joined the two holdover juniors. My friend Rion was far more skilled and confident than I was—good enough that he often played number one, to the mild chagrin and embarrassment of our older teammates. By contrast, I was in over my head on and off the course, so I absorbed the ribbing Rion was immune to by virtue of his skill and his cool. The upperclassmen—and who could blame them?—ruthlessly mimicked the high-pitched “Oh-oh-oh noooo” I bleated out every time (and the times were legion) I hit a snap hook or a worm burner or a chili-dip. At practice, I’d nearly rip off my left foot with a smother-hook into a hedge, and before my club even finished its arc I’d have wailed it out. Two seconds behind me, my teammates came in like backup Chipmunks, in perfect unison.

I think what discomfited them most was my innocence. There was no mistaking the genuine shock and disappointment in my voice; no matter how many times I flubbed or foozled or duffed a shot, each fresh failure took me by surprise. Eventually—by the end of that first season, I’d guess—I had no choice but to harden up.

So I discovered the face-saving myth almost every bad player eventually embraces: I couldn’t be to blame. Clearly there was a conspiracy against me, and everyone and everything was in on it. Fickle winds, treacherous branches, sneaky swales or hollows; cart paths, tee markers, sprinkler heads, passing evil squirrels. My ball was a traitor, and out of round; my clubs paid me no mind. The little medallions on the backs of my irons taunted me with the profile of an imperturbable little bantam who had no need for excuses. Benedict Hogan.

The upshot is that—too early—I came to understand that golf would always be, for me, in large part about futility and shame. For a time, I responded to this awful knowledge by becoming a teenage hothead. Here, at last, I discovered a genuine artistry. I became a prodigy of club-throwing: gorgeous, end-over-end tosses, always accompanied by the singularly lovely sound a thrown club makes, that faint helicopterish whoop-whoop-whoop. It wasn’t long, either, before I became a virtuoso of laments that went well beyond my childish yelping Oh-oh-oh nooooo.

This isn’t to say that I scorned or ignored the rules of etiquette and good sportsmanship. In time, most of my combustion went internal. I now rarely flung clubs or screamed curses in tournaments or matches. In competition, I tended to belong to the mutter-and-implode school.

Like almost everything else in adolescence, golf was for me a private, furtive death-struggle, but one with a semblance, at least, of fellowship and politesse. I liked the idea that this was an intensely private experience, but one with a social element. If one was going to submit to the Dantesque tortures of stubbing chips and spasming three-footers, there was at least some consolation in suffering alongside like-minded hubrists and fools—fools you bore no ill will. If adulthood was going to turn out to be about treating people courteously while dying inside—and it was surely looking that way—this seemed like excellent training. I would interrupt another bout of self-loathing and fury to hold a pin or grimly “Nice ball” someone; I would pause over my preparations for another chunked wedge shot to toss my fellow competitor his perfect palm-sized divot and an insincere compliment. This was character-building, if by character-building one meant “soul-destroying.” And one did.

To me then, etiquette was about inconspicuousness: play fast, follow the rules, and observe—in a resolutely unshowy way—the courtesies.

I learned to keep my anguish private—no clubs whirligigged while a playing partner was putting, no wedge buried up to its hosel in the fringe when I scuffed a chip. To me, etiquette was about maintaining a safe distance between inner turmoil and outward manners. In those days the chief element of golf for me was masochism, and it isn’t right to drag others into one’s self-torture.

Which brings me back to 1979 and my mistake in that year’s penultimate qualifying tournament. I’d been on the verge of a top-fifteen finish. I’d played pretty solid golf for much of the closing round, but by the time I reached the seventeenth hole, I’d become unglued: double bogeys at two of the last three, and a once-promising round was quickly degenerating into another graceless, hopeless 85. On seventeen I hit a decent approach shot that hung up in the collar, no more than thirty feet from the hole but in grass heavy enough to require a chip instead of a putt. A drought had baked out the fairways, and we were playing the ball up, so I found a tuft of grass as plush as a ringbearer’s pillow, set my ball atop it, and stepped back to watch a fellow competitor lag one from the back fringe. This guy was what we called a luckbox: a hapless player prone to chip-ins, impossible recoveries, acts of an inexplicably benevolent God. A few holes earlier, on a long dogleg left, he’d bored a rope hook through a thick copse of pines and, miraculously, hit none of them. The shot was forty yards off line, had to avoid a hundred trunks, but somehow his ball bounded unscathed through the woods and back to the fairway, a flip wedge away. The jerk had held his finish for all this time; his club was still high, his right shoetip pointed into the ground. He spun the driver, pumped a fist, and said without a trace of irony, “I always like to cut a little bit off here.”

So when his sixty-footer on seventeen hit the pin hard enough to splinter it and yet, in defiance of physics, lodged between the stick and the edge of the hole, I was livid. I could barely see as I waited for Luckbox to jostle his ball into the bottom of the cup and retrieve it. When that little drama was completed—he was one of those guys who actorishly plucks at his pants leg before bending to snatch the ball—I settled into my stance, quivering with fury. And my ball teetered on its zoysia throne and toppled.

I immediately called a penalty on myself. Since I had not grounded my club or caused the ball to move, it was not actually a violation of the rules, but I really did think it was, and besides, I deserved to suffer for the double bogeys, for my playing partner’s preposterous series of breaks, and for my (barely overmastered) impulse to rear back and bellow, “You’ll get yours, idiot! Luck never lasts!” Even with the penalty removed I ended up with 87 and missed the qualifying standard by a shot.

If I’d ever thought of the penalty incident again—and I can’t swear that I had, once I eked into the World Series field—I would have written it off as a combination of ignorance (this was embarrassing for me, as an enthusiastic reader of the rulebook), the usual self-hatred, and an annoyance that the Luckbox’s smugness wasn’t being punished as quickly or decisively as I would have liked; golf seemed pretty keen on protecting me from vanity, so why did he keep getting a pass? But now, at the banquet, I saw that my penalty call had been marked down by the One Great Scorer—or at any rate by the woman notching strokes for my group—as How I Played the Game. I was Gallant to everyone else’s Goofus; I was Honest Abe, trudging miles to return a penny to its rightful owner, Sir Walter laying his overcoat over a mud puddle, Dudley Doright untying a damsel from the tracks. And here was the tour director, beckoning me forward amid a thunderous ovation, with Richard’s google eyes and spit-flecked lips as my sendoff.

I have a photo of the presentation that night. I’m a gawky, foal-like kid, 5'11" and 125 pounds; my flare-leg pants pool at my shoes as if the experience has shrunk me by six inches. In the picture, it seems clear that I saw myself exactly as Richard did—as an impostor. On my face is a stunned and furtive look; for my violation of my first rule of sportsmanship, I was being declared Sportsman of the Year. I’d committed an unpardonable sin against etiquette—had dragged into the public sphere what should have been private, had committed a conspicuous act of martyrdom. I’d been caught at it. The next question—the one so clearly legible in my face and in my weak, tentative, scared grip on the William Allan Craig Sportsmanship Award—was this:

When will I be punished?

“The greatest lesson we learn from golf etiquette is humility,” writes Mr. Golf in his introduction to the online “Etiquette Confessional,” a little corner of cyberspace where the golfing guilty can go to be shriven of their sins. But I understood as I accepted the trophy that humility would not be enough to expiate this sin. Golf is, as many have noted, both harsh and just, and it would exact a premium now. Golf wouldn’t settle for a belated modesty; it had to have humiliation.

You’ll get yours, idiot!

The next day the Gallant Good Boy shot a cool 92, and griped and grimaced and glowered all the way around. Character, meet Destiny. I deserved every shot of it.