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photo by Sam Jones

T I Golf
By Turk Pipkin

Willie Nelson, at the age of sixty-seven, may have discovered the secret of eternal happiness.   After being offered a mulligan on the first tee at Pedernales Golf Club — the course he owns in Austin, Texas — he tosses back the provisional pellet.  “Thanks, but I’ve hit so many bad shots, I don’t care anymore.”

Willie moves down the first fairway the same way he walks through life.  Undeterred by bad breaks or questionable decisions, he’s happy to be here, enjoying the moment but eager to take that next swing, to keep moving, to be as he so succinctly captured in his song — “On the Road Again.” 

His palls call this place Willie World, an eight hundred-acre complex comprised of a daily fee golf course, recording studio, sprawling cypress log cabin with a thirty-mile view of the Texas Hill Country and his very own Western movie town called Luck, Texas.  “If you ain’t here,” Willie says, “you’re out of Luck.” 

The typical Willie game at Pedernales covers from twenty-seven to forty-five holes (occasionally more), with a constantly rotating group of between five and fifteen golfers scattering balls in all directions, making outrageous best that will never be paid and often claiming whatever ball they find as their own. 

“I’ve noticed,” says Willie, who drives a gas cart that could get a speeding ticket on the open road, “That the man with the fastest cart usually wins.”

Willie’s pro at Pedernales is Larry Trader.  Since the day they first saw the course, he and Willie have taken on all comers in marathon matches for big time bragging rights.  

“Our finest day was when Willie and I scrambled against Trevino,” Trader relates as the course’s pet peacock fans its tail nearby.  “Lee shot a six under thirty on his own ball, and we had to shoot twenty-nine to beat him.”  “The secret of golf is picking your partner,” says Willie, before a crucial addendum:  “and winning nine and eighteen.”

“Understand this,” says Darrell Royall, the former University of Texas football coach.  “Willie doesn’t care about the score.  He just wants to play golf.  And nothing’s going to keep him from it.  In the dead of winter, he used to play Pedernales in his Mercedes because it had the best heater.”

Willie has never bothered to keep a handicap, but he proudly relates that his lifetime low round is a seventy-six.

On the sixteenth at Pedernales, Willie smacks a tee shot into the left woods.  “That needs a good kick!” says Ray Benson, leader of the Texas swing band Asleep at the Wheel. 

“It’ll get one,” Willie says, a nanosecond before the ball takes a rocket ricochet into the middle of the fairway.

The assembled gaze at him in awe.  Two holes later, on eighteen, with the sun sinking below the horizon and a dozen accumulated skins on the line, Willie eyes a twenty-foot putt to win them all.  Putting one-handed (as he often does, perhaps as much to unnerve his opponents as to smooth his stroke), he center-cuts the hole to win.

“The one-armed bandit got us again,” yowls Benson.

“Nine and eighteen,” Willie says with a wink and a smile and the knowing wisdom of a guy who can truly appreciate his moment.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2009 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Magazines, Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.