It Would Be Novel if Baker-Finch Wins It

For the Sunday book-review supplement:

LEADER OF THE OPEN

Another Ian Baker-Finch Mystery

By Roy L. Birkdale

(One For History Books, 90,000)

He couldn’t help it that his name sounded like a British spy’s. And it wasn’t his fault that women flirted with him shamelessly, or that the good Lord gave him good looks, or that jealous boyfriends in pubs caught their companions giving him the eye, then rushed over to the innocent Australian’s table and smashed him in the face, which is why he now wears eyeglasses to work.

None of that was on Ian Baker-Finch’s mind this day, anyway. The only adventure occupying his attention was the assignment at hand, amid the thistle and gorse and yellow scrub of northern England, where the laws of chance tantalized him with the prospect of pocketing 90,000 pounds of the queen’s currency while the web of intrigue waited to ensnare and exasperate him again, as it had before.

Poor Baker-Finch. He sat on a grassy knoll, dandling his two-year-old daughter, Hayley, who was happy finally to be sharing part of his Saturday afternoon. Ian laughed as a television interviewer turned a microphone momentarily away from her father’s face and passed it in front of Hayley’s, wondering if perhaps she would goo an adorable word or two. Instead, she stuck out her tongue at the microphone and licked it.

Daddy laughed. It had been a good day. As a professional golfer, any day above ground and below par certainly qualified as a good day, and Baker-Finch was definitely both. In the morning, he was little more than a drop-dead handsome, 30-year-old farm boy from the pastures beyond Brisbane who occasionally won a tournament or two. By nightfall, he was the heroic figure who had shot 64 at Royal Birkdale, where no such puny number had been posted before.

Now he had a license to kill. Everything was in place for Baker-Finch to win the most cherished prize in international golf, the British Open, the game’s Holy Grail. Alas, he had been in this position previously. Wasn’t it only one year ago that Baker-Finch did the very same thing, scoring 64 at storied St. Andrews to take the Open lead with one day to play? And wasn’t he also the third-round leader seven years ago, in his first Open, at least until Ian triple-bogeyed the opening hole?

Ah, he remembered it well. Maybe too well. Remembered being “a 23-year-old who’d never had much of a lesson or a tuition” that instructed him what to do in such a suspenseful situation. Remembered being “just a kid with starry eyes.”

Now he called himself tougher, stronger, more prepared. The past few years had made him that way. Baker-Finch studied the way others handled their fortune and growing fame. He overlooked the looks that women gave him and obliged their odd requests, as when they suddenly yanked up their shirts or skirts and pleaded with him to autograph previously hidden portions of their anatomy. Once upon a time, he stammered and declined. After a while, he smiled and signed.

He said: “Sure, I’m aware of my looks, because everyone makes me aware of it. It gets to be a bit much when you bend over to line up a putt and a lady whistles.”

Oh, that Baker-Finch, the life he leads. More than a million dollars he earned simply by playing golf for the past 18 months alone, and, better still, there were a wife and adorable daughter with whom to share it and a new house in Florida in which to enjoy it. How far he had come from the one-gas-pump hamlet of Peachester where he and his parents had scratched out a living from the Australian soil, growing avocados and hatching chickens.

He had taken some hard knocks, principally the one from the green-eyed galoot who had wrongly assumed that Baker-Finch had been ogling his girlfriend, when in fact it had been exactly the opposite. The punch left him spitting up teeth and blood and did enough damage to his eye that corrective lenses became permanently necessary, at least if he intended to discern a golf tee from a twig.

In time he became one of the leaders in his field, yet stranded on the fringe, nearly there but not quite, searching for the one ultimate score that would separate him from the workaday 69-to-65ers of his chosen profession. A weekend in the English countryside had delivered him to the brink. Baker-Finch wondered what happened next.