Vacations Do Have Their Traps

Every vacation you go on, you hope for three things:

--To take 10 strokes off your handicap.

--To get a tan.

--To get a rest.

Well, one out of three ain’t bad. The tan, I got.

My golf game which you have to know, if it were human, belongs in an iron lung, I gave no break at all to. I went to Jack Nicklaus and told him I opted to play his new course on the island of Kauai, the Kiele on Kalapaki Beach at the Westin Kauai.

“It’ll add 10 strokes to your handicap,” frowned Jack. “It’s for guys who can play a little.”

“Ten shots in my handicap is like a pitcher of water in the ocean,” I told him. “Where’s the first tee?”

Now, I don’t know what Kiele stands for in English but, by the fourth hole, the best guess in the foursome was that it was Hawaiian for gas chamber.

Hawaii is a funny place. They put umbrellas in the drinks and orchids in the eggs. They take the prettiest island landscape in all the world --and make a leper colony out of it. Now, the last thing a poor leper needs is a view. Or a drink with an umbrella in it. But Hawaii’s a place where they take some of the most breathtaking scenery in all the world--and put a hotel on it.

But nowhere is there a more diabolical use of real estate than to take the Pacific Ocean and make a par-5 out of it with no place to lay up. It is widely reported that only five people have ever made the back nine at Kiele. More people have been to the North Pole than the 18th hole.

As if it’s not tough enough, every time you get a good lie, it starts to rain. The drinks aren’t the only things that need umbrellas. But the natives assure you these are just showers. They seldom last more than two days. One old-timer told me they got a place there where it rains more than it does anywhere else in the world.

“I know,” I told him. “And they stuck a pin in it and called it 18. It’s the only hole in the world where you need a driver, a seven-iron, two wedges and a canoe.”

They named one hole--a 459-yard par-4 into the wind--the Rabbit. So, you can imagine what the hole called the Gorilla is like. Something they pulled off the Empire State Building.

I played with Sammy White, the old Red Sox catcher, up in Princeville, and Sammy calls me Shakespeare, in honor of my calling, as in: “Well, Shakespeare, you better tee up another one, as that one’s just passed the Lahaina Roads. Use an old ball if you’ve got one.”

Sammy plays golf with a pith helmet, a big cigar and a smother hook. Sammy once hit a grand slam bottom-of-the-10th home run off Satchel Paige, so it is not too surprising to find him out here, beachcombing out of the company of civilized men. A man who would do that would throw a brick through a Rembrandt. It is reliably reported to be the last ball Sammy hit in fair territory anywhere.

At Kiele, I played with Frank Sullivan, the old Red Sox pitcher and Sammy White’s battery mate. Frank won 18 games one year and might have been a Cy Young candidate if he could ever have gotten Vic Wertz out. As one-time Boston sportswriter Clif Keane used to say, “Even if Frank didn’t let go of the ball, Wertz would have doubled off him.”

Sullivan was a control pitcher on the mound, but he’s lost the strike zone over the years. He hits sliders off the tee now that not even Wertz could get a bat on.

While you’re on vacation, out of touch with the commercial realities, you hope the world will change--for the better. You hope people will stop killing each other, politicians will stop lying, colleges will stop cheating, Mike Tyson will lose a round, and the Cubs will stay up there. You get to be a kind of Pollyanna, listening to all those trade winds and ukulele strings.

I had hoped to come home to find the Clippers had signed Danny Ferry or traded him for an all-world guard, hoped that the Dodgers were in first, the Angels pulling away, that maybe the Raiders got a quarterback, a golf tournament was won by somebody you heard of, that they found that Pete Rose only bet on dog races, maybe we won a Davis Cup or John McEnroe had apologized to the world and Don King got a haircut.

Alas! The world is still a testy par-5 over water with poison ivy in the rough, an alligator in the sand trap and the pin cut over a cliff with the ocean at the bottom. The world is an unplayable lie.

Ferry is not going to play for the Clippers, although I do think he overreacted, signing with Messaggero to play in Rome, Italy. Kansas City probably would have been far enough. But Danny is taking no chances.

The Clippers thought they had won Danny Ferry in the lottery, but you know how those mail lotteries are. Probably had Ed McMahon’s picture on it. That’s all the Clippers do win--lotteries. Games, they haven’t got the hang of.

The Dodgers are trying to win the pennant with a whole bunch of left fielders and not much else. One of our guys finally won a British Open, our first in seven years, but a Brazilian won Indy, so that’s a push.

Maybe I should go back on vacation, give the world another two weeks to shape up. All things considered, I’d rather be back on Kiele, lying six on a par-5 hole and not yet to the dogleg, and Sammy White talking on my backswing, telling me what kind of a pitch he hit off Satchel, which is like Marciano telling you what kind of a punch knocked out Joe Louis or the captain of the Titanic telling you what course hit the iceberg.

Back here in the real world, all kinds of terrible things keep being possible. New York might get in the World Series, for instance. If so, the guy I saw in the airport at Lihue is ready. He had a T-shirt that read: “New York, N.Y., Attitude Capital of the World.”

He didn’t want to go home, either.