Rough

By David Larson

'Rough' is the story of Samantha Alexander, an accomplished LPGA golfer trying to break away from her domineering father with the help of a new found love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329523692

Book preview

Rough

ROUGH

BY David Larson

Chapter 1

It was the summer she turned twelve. She wanted to be anywhere but where she was, with her father on the driving range. They had been there for hours, she’d lost count. After breakfast, they had run the 2.1 mile route, the green route. She dreaded the green route, the easy route, the baby route as he derisively called it, because it meant he had more strenuous plans for the rest of her day.

The afternoon was a scorcher. The mercury had climbed above 95 and the humidity sucked the air from her lungs. The starched shirts of the country-club employees were positively limp, as were the potted plants dotting the snack-bar patio, the tall shrubs surrounding the greens, the lush waste areas with wild, wiry grass ready to catch an errant ball, and the hanging vines that decorated the clubhouse. The range was empty of everyone but Samantha, her father, and Judge Wilson.

James Wilson, a kindly older gentleman, had been a judge for 37 years, Samantha had once overheard him say. Now retired, he spent his days on the course and seemed to thrive when the weather was the furthest from the air-conditioned courtrooms where he had spent most of his life: The hottest days in summer, the windiest in fall, the coldest in the winter and the rainiest in spring. All told, the three of them had braved a lot of harsh weather in close, if meditative, proximity, and she would always remember his kindness on this particular day.

When Sam was on the range, her father alternated from standing directly across from her to standing behind her. This day he was standing across from her. He wanted her to keep her head perfectly still throughout her swing, and rested the handle of a club on her head reminding her to hold position as she hit shot after shot after shot.

She had suffered a little stomach bug the day before and into the night, and had not been able to keep anything down. Even that morning she had eaten only a piece of dry toast. The lack of food and sleep made her legs feel like jelly, and soon she was unable to keep her body from rising and falling as she continued swinging.

Each time her head moved from the spot where her father held the club, he would pop her on the head with it. As her head began to move on every swing, the pops got harder. After a while, he had rotated the ends of the club; instead of the soft grip end, it was the bottom of a 6-iron hanging over her head.

Soon she was crying, silent tears falling down her cheeks, his voice echoing in her ears, too loud for the empty green.

"You think this is hot? We’ve been here less than two hours. Do you know how long the rounds last on the tour? Five or more. Do you think you will never have a bad night before a tour round? You will. You will have to fight through it. Only quitters quit, and I did not raise you to be a quitter. I will not have you be a quitter."

Her hair, which she tied back in a ponytail during workouts, had begun to loosen and fall down the sides of her face. With each swing she blew the hair out of her face, which made her father angrier. He continued to pop her on the head, swing after swing, breath after breath, harder and harder, until her equilibrium began to waver, until through the hair and sweat and tears and pain she couldn’t focus on the ball. The world seemed pixelated, colorless, like an old black-and-white movie. Her vision narrowed to a shadowy point, in the center of which a new dimpled ball appeared on the tee.

Stop blowing the hair out of your face. You need to concentrate on the ball, not your hair. Quit acting like such a girl. Focus.

She continued to swing, he continued to pound her head, but she couldn’t not blow the hair out of her face. As she sweated and her head moved and he popped her, more and more hair escaped from her hairband to stick to her wet face. Finally he marched over to her bag. She thought maybe it was time to go home, urgently wished it so. But instead he pulled out a small pair of scissors kept there to clip tags from clothing, stray threads, to trim blistered skin from her hands or heels. He restrained her head with one large palm and ripped the rubber band from her ponytail with the other, tearing her hair and making her cry out, and as he bent down to her eye level she tried to pull back from his too-close face, a mask of fury. He lifted the scissors and cut the hair covering her eyes, slashed it in a line across her forehead.

Now pick up that club and swing.

She did what she was told, sensing her father move into in his usual spot behind her, but she was crying harder now, and after she took her swing, she instinctively touched the top of her head. The tips of her white golf gloves came away red with blood.

It seemed to go on forever, she was never sure how long it really lasted. The only thing she was sure of is when it ended.

Don’t you think she might be ready to call it a day, Mr. Alexander? The kind voice of Judge Wilson, behind them. Her father whirled around so fast, club still in hand, that he almost hit the judge with it.

What business of it is yours? This is my child and I will be the judge of when she is finished, today and any other day you might have an opinion.

Well, the judge said, it’s hot as forty hells out here, and she doesn’t look good. A person can get heatstroke on a day like this if they aren’t careful.

He moved past her father and took her by the arm, resting two of his fingers on the inside of her wrist and looking closely at the top of her head.

Irregular heartbeat and a thready pulse, symptoms of heatstroke. The judge crouched down in front of Sam, took both of her hands in his, and said to her, Let’s get you to the shade, girly, and a glass of nice cold water.

Her father cursed, Dammit, Wilson, take your hands off my daughter. She’s fine, I know her much better than you. She is trying to get out of practice, and we simply aren’t finished.

The judge continued to walk her towards the inviting shade of the clubhouse, speaking gently, asking if she thought a cold towel might make her feel better. She gladly followed his lead, resting on his arm. She could smell the hair gel from the men’s locker room on him, reminding her of her mother’s father, long since passed.

Her father caught up to them, grabbed her shoulder, and ripped her around to face him.

Sam, if you go with this man you will regret it, get back to the range, now.

The judge looked her father up and down and said, evenly, Mr. Alexander, take your hands off her right now. Your daughter or not, she is going to take some shade and water. And if I have to argue with you about it any further, I will call my friend James Brooks, head of child social services in this county, and I will ask him to make looking into the raising of this child, and whether your custody is in her best interest, the focus of his day. I think he will, not because he clerked for me when I was on the federal bench, and not because I got him his first job after that, but because everyone that knows me knows that I never ask for a favor unless I have a very good reason. I have seen you bully this young woman, I have seen you bully the staff, I have seen you bully the other members of this club, but you, sir, are not going to bully me. Now come with me, Samantha.

She had felt her father’s eyes boring into her as she walked away and wondered, not for the first time and certainly not the last, whether her father, sadly enough her mother, or anyone else besides the judge at this moment in this world, really had her best interests at heart.

Her father left her with the judge that day. She watched through the tall windows in the clubhouse as he left the club like he was headed to douse a fire, and then waited until her mother came and picked her up. After thanking the judge for looking out after Sam while Ray had to take care of a sudden business issue, missing the judge’s knowing look, Sam’s mother helped her into their late-model SUV.

Kim Alexander commented on Sam’s bangs and asked if her father had taken her to get her hair cut. There was a stylist at the club, and Samantha’s sisters sometimes got their hair cut there.

No, he cut it himself. She replied in a low voice, gazing out the window.

Goodness, I didn’t know he could cut hair.

"He only cut this part," Samantha choked out, grabbing at the short hair over her forehead.

Why’d he do that, Samantha? Her mother asked, sounding truly concerned, and Samantha realized that her father had probably said nothing about what had happened on the range. She saw a door open, ever so briefly, and tried to push through it as quickly as she could.

"Because he was angry, Mom, and he hurt me when he did it. He had been hitting me on top of the head with a club when I couldn’t keep my head still. You know I was sick last night, and really tired, then he got mad when I was blowing the hair out of my face, so he grabbed my pony and yanked it out, and pulled some hair with it, then cut my hair, without asking me, into bangs. My head really hurts."

Samantha paused, preparing herself for what she was about to say, tears rolling down her cheeks.

I don’t think I want to play golf any more. I just seem to make him mad, even when I’m trying as hard as I can.

He’s very proud of you Sam, very, very proud. He is helping you to fulfill your dream, your potential, to be a professional golfer. He is very dedicated to that goal of yours, even if sometimes he goes a little too far.

A tear slid from Sam’s left eye down her cheek, hanging on the edge there, until it finally fell, landing on the leather seat.

I’ll try to talk to him, okay, Sweetie? Sam’s mom said, and turned the SUV in the direction of McDonald’s, a real treat, and rare. Ray read about all the latest diets the tour players, men and women, were on. He rode her mother to prepare those restrictive recipes, even though he demanded something entirely different for himself, so her mother ended up cooking two full meals for the family.

Sam understood the detour was her mom’s way of apologizing. But this day McDonald’s held no joy for Sam. She knew that her window of opportunity was closed. Whether her mother talked to her father or not, she could hear the temerity in her mother’s voice, it meant that her mother already knew what her father was going to say, that her mother already knew there was nothing anyone could do to change his mind. Samantha would never see the judge again. There would be nothing but golf. She was fully alone, at the mercy of her father, with no shield from her mother, or anyone else for that matter, and no one to commiserate with but herself. She felt herself on an endless march toward an abyss, toward decisions that no pre-teen should have to make.

When they got home, she went straight to her room, took off her clothes, and locked herself in the bathroom. She sat on the edge of the bathtub and thought about her future, as much as any twelve-year-old can, full of disappointment with her mother. She envisioned a never-ending life with her father, and in that future saw nothing but a void, nothing but living by his rules, nothing of her own, even her thoughts. It was a future so bleak that it caused her physical pain, cramps in her gut. Would living be worth enduring the mental torture, could it someday be worth it?

She focused in on the simple cabin-hook lock on the bathroom door, spare and powerful. Then she dropped her gaze to the blue veins in her wrist. She stood, removing a plain razor blade from the cabinet. In her small pink hand, its shiny steel flashed silver in the warm lights of her childhood bathroom, pressing against her warm pulsing flesh, poised over a bathtub full of water. Maybe she was too young to understand that life is very long and changes will inevitably come. She could only see one future. That she could understand.

She stood at the edge of that abyss for a long time, until the water had become cold, and in the end she chose life, but with a condition. She made herself a promise that day. At some point she would rely on her self, and if necessary, only herself. At some point she would leave him, and if necessary, them, behind. If it was golf that took her there, if it was golf that gave her the ability to escape, she would follow that trail, she would chase that rabbit, she would become the best, and when that hate had bubbled up to the top, hot and molten and hidden for so long, and the despair had grown too great, when misery had again become her name, she would make a decision, and either her relationship with her father would suffer the same fate as a once-dormant volcano, blown away for good, or she would stand beside another pool of water, hot then cool, and use the blade, and cut.

Chapter 2

Most of the other players on tour, if asked to describe Samantha Alexander, would answer that she was reserved, straightforward, by the book, close to the vest. These players would have chosen their words out of sympathy at her apparent inability to be happy. Others, seeing her as purely an opponent, an obstacle, would describe her as brooding, cold, calculating, detached. Win or lose, her demeanor remained the same, professional to a fault. She was the pride of the LPGA.

After a sparkling, vigorous, and rapid amateur career culminating in the women’s amateur title three years straight, Sam went pro just before she turned 17, that first year playing on sponsors’ invites, her father on the bag. She began collecting top tens and was a runner-up twice, easily earning her full-tour status. Sports Illustrated touted her as the next great American phenom. Her sophomore year on tour she broke the world top ten and stayed there for the rest of the season. But she hadn’t won.

The world-ranking exposure that made her an ongoing topic of conversation by tourney commentators and golf-channel talking heads also created sponsorship opportunities that made her exponentially more money than she would ever win on tour. But the money was not enough for that man on her bag, Ray Alexander.

Sam didn’t listen to the commentators, but her father did, and a common topic was whether keeping him at caddie was a reason, if not the reason, she had not won. Ray was an average golfer at best, and the media in general agreed that she needed someone with more experience at the highest level: someone who had played or caddied at most tour stops, and knew everything there was to know about the major courses.

Her father could only get that kind of experience by continuing to caddy for her; the commentators debated whether her talent would hold out in the interim, or be wasted. That is, if he was even capable of learning them to the extent necessary to be a top-rate caddie.

Sam Alexander was not interested in what the media had to say, did not even pay attention to it, but Ray was a prideful man, and these comments stung. He wanted her to be the best. He wanted to have made her the best. So, although he would always blame the back problems that had developed during his time in the military as the reason he quit caddying for her, he soon found a replacement who had looped for the best on the men’s and women’s tours.

That third season she started to win, and soon, it seemed like she couldn’t lose. The media crowed that they had been right all along, that her dad had been holding her back. What they didn’t know was that if she didn’t win, her father would be back on the bag, and she would give everything she could to prevent that from happening, including unearthing a newfound ability inside herself. It was their stinging criticism of Ray Alexander during rain-delay fillers, and Ray’s resulting absence from her side at every tour stop, that would one day give Samantha Alexander the opportunity she needed.

That third year on tour, Sam announced her reign by decimating everyone in the Kraft Nabisco, snatching the LPGA Championship, placing top ten in the other majors, and taking four more tourneys at regular tour stops.

Over the next two years she racked up win after win, including major titles, twice more at the Kraft, another at the LPGA Championship and a lovely Ladies Open trophy from the old course at St. Andrews. The only thing missing from her growing collection was the U.S. Open, and as she headed into her fifth year, many thought she would win her first at Shoal Creek. Jack Nicklaus had