The Final Fore

His name, Forrest von Trapp, didn't augur well for his prospects as a golfer. In fact, von Trapp (no relation btw; he couldn't sing a note, well maybe one, but nobody would call it melodious), was not really much of an athlete. As a child he was a mountaineer, and a promising one at that, to hear him tell it, but once adolescence and a nasty case of acrophobia kicked in, he was grounded, in more ways than one (to really rattle his already fragile golf mind, we'd take him to a new course and tell him there were a lot of elevated tees and greens). His clubs were a mix-n-match "set," his balls fished-out x-outs, and his "trusty" pull cart had two uneven, squeaky wheels. No lie, for his fiftieth birthday a few of us chipped in and bought him a lesson; on his first swing in front of the teaching pro, the pro's video camera broke. Ten minutes later, the pro, still fuming about the video camera that didn't work, suffered a coronary--DDOR: Dead, Dead on the Range.

Despite these (and others, too inane to mention, including an uncanny talent for attracting bees; yes, he was allergic) challenges, von Trapp loved the game of golf. A hack in every sense of the word, somehow Forrest was able to maintain a fairly even keel and enough fives on his scorecard so that you weren't too upset when he ended up being your partner. The only golfer I ever knew who wore a leather-sheathed compass on his belt, and who needed one. Fourteen out of eighteen holes he'd hit his tee shot, disappear from view for ten minutes, then reappear on the green, sink a miraculous putt and proclaim, "Bogey!" What a ballhawk. Unless you dropped one in the drink (and even then, with his extra-long retriever, Forrest resurrected many a thought-gone Top-Flite), you'd never have to worry about losing a ball, as long as Forrest was in your foursome. He was a great organizer of outings and was a walking calculator. Just throw him the scorecard at the end of a round, and within a minute he'd spit out everybody's score and the results of all the various wagers. With anybody else, the moment the guy says, "And you owe me five bucks," is your cue to say, irritatingly, "Lemme see that card." But with Forrest, his word was gold. If he said, "Looks like I got you for twenty, Lou," Lou would duly ask the guy in the pro shop where the ATM was.

But, and you can confirm this with any of us regulars or any stray single who ever was paired up with Forrest for even nine holes, the most distinguishing and most distinguished part of Forrest's game was his penchant for and panache at yelling, "Fore!" His voice, when raised and alerting the entire golf course of a possibly incoming errant shot, was positively operatic, in both volume and drama. When you snuck into the men's room at the turn, there always seemed to be a guy washing his hands, somebody you hadn't seen out on the course, who would say, matter-of-factly, "I hear von Trapp's here today." Now most golfers are a little too proud or etiquette-bound to yell "Fore" the way it should be yelled--loud--but Forrest never suffered such insecurity. Maybe that was because, being at heart such a nice guy, he was terribly insecure about his golfing skills and gravely worried about hurting somebody. And so, a couple dozen times a round, after striking his ball, Forrest von Trapp would cut loose with a tree-rattling "Fore!" It got to the point where the standard joke, told, or, performed, only in Forrest's absence, of course, was to take a practice swing, and immediately upon starting the backswing, break out in a loud, "Fore!" In all my years of golfing I have never seen a hole-in-one, but I have witnessed something much rarer: On July 12, 1994, on the seventh green at Briar Oaks, while Hank Sledge and Dennis Judas were distracted watching Misty, their at-the-time favorite beer cart girl rearrange her forty ouncers, Forrest von Trapp, while attempting a par-saving fifty-footer from the back fringe, somehow shanked his putt, and as the ball veered off line toward the drooling Sledge and Judas, Forrest, on the green, with putter in hand, yelled, "Fore!" Sledge nearly jumped into the greenside bunker; Judas, dazed by it all, turned slowly, watched Forrest's wayward putt trundle past his feet, and asked incredulously, "Did you just yell 'Fore!' on a putt?" Amazing.

Anyway, years later, August 7, 2007, we were playing down our local, The Links at Fox Chase/Glen Run (or what we regulars had shortened, not so affectionately, to, The Patch).  Our usual noon tee time had been pushed back to 12:30, as the course was packed and slow-moving. It was an odd foursome, me, Forrest, our old buddy Sal Overtino, and some stray single we got hooked up with, Fritz, I think his name was, an ex-Marine with the attitude and all the stories. We had to wait on every shot and by the fifth green we were ready to shoot Fritz, who wouldn't stop talking. About the only word any of us got in edgewise was Forrest's ubiquitous Fores!, including an extremely embarrassing one when I bladed a shot out of the bunker on the first and it whizzed over the green toward the second tee. Despite the waiting and all his shouts, Forrest was having the round of his life. After six holes he was just two over. Like most of the holes at the Patch, the seventh is an unimaginative one, a treeless, straight forward par four that runs parallel with the sixteenth (I've made more pars on the seventh from the sixteenth fairway than I've ever made from the seventh). On that day, though, the four of us each hit one down the middle, Fritz and Sal several yards ahead of me and Forrest, which was fine by me, because Sal had to stand next to Fritz and hear all about a boot camp mooning contest, while Forrest and I lingered behind, chatting about pretzels, of all things, as I recall. Then, as we still waited for the group ahead of us to putt out, Forrest happened to look up and across and down the sixteenth fairway to the tee. "Are those guys drunk," he said. I looked up and sure enough, there were four guys on the sixteenth tee all windmilling their arms, not frantically, but with determination. It kind of looked like a round, all of them making the same set of gestures, but in different time. Before I could think of something witty to say, bam! a ball hit Forrest right on the forehead and knocked him down and out cold, just like that. Somehow there was no blood, but there also seemed to be no life left in Forrest. I whipped out my cellphone and quickly called the clubhouse. Long before the ambulance arrived, the four guys from the sixteenth tee had driven their carts over to us, and started to try to explain.

Try to explain, being the operative description. After the ambulance came and carted away Forrest (still alive, we were assured, but not much more, it seemed), and after we let a few groups go through us, and after Fritz huddled with the four golfers from the sixteenth and some scribbling on scorecards, it all became clear. The four were old Navy buddies having a reunion. Seems that the four of them had survived an on-ship explosion thirty-four years before, an explosion that had rendered each of them deaf and dumb. Fritz was crestfallen. "Semaphore, dammit," he moaned. "If I hadn't been going on and on about McAfee's pimpled ass, I would have recognized that those guys, doing all they could, you know, without the ability to shout, were using semaphore signals to tell us 'Fore!'"

Sal and I drank ourselves pretty drunk at the nineteenth (our seventh, as it turned out) hole that day, shaking our heads at the irony of Forrest von Trapp getting beaned by an errant shot from golfers who couldn't shout "Fore!" Sadly, Forrest was never able to appreciate that irony. He survived, but he was pretty feeble, and pretty silly looking, to tell you the truth, with a permanent spot on his forehead, all dimpled and with the offending ball's name half-emblazoned into his forehead, backward. Who ever realized that the first three letters of Titleist are a palindrome?: tiT.

In his sad state, Forrest survived a couple years and took to whittling. I still have a few dozen of the lopsided tees he fashioned for us. Finally, mercifully, he succumbed quietly of a heart attack last April 4, at exactly four p.m., the usual time we would be gathering on the patio and he would be adding up the scores and settling the wagers. God bless you, Forrest. Golf is a little quieter without you, but not nearly as fun.