Ace! The Golf King's Reconquest novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Four Inches
On camera the defending champion bets a groundskeeper he cannot hit the 14th green; Holt does it to four inches, gets fired anyway, and learns Bryn paid his qualifier entry before he swung.
The camera operator said the shot needed more green behind the champion, so Holt Brannigan moved his mower.
It was the 14th hole at Marsh Point, a Monday morning in late October, and the Palmetto Classic was ten days away.
Holt had been cutting the collar around this green since five a.m.
Now a television crew stood on the tee with their lights on, and Calvin Stratford stood in front of them.
Calvin was the defending champion, thirty-five, tanned and smiling, with his sponsor's name stitched on his chest and his cap and his glove.
"This hole is special to me," he told the reporter.
"Two years ago the best player I ever saw walked off it with a four-shot lead."
"He left his bag on the grass, and I won the title by default."
"Honestly, we all felt for the guy."
The reporter asked where that player was now.
Calvin turned around and found Holt by the bunker, leaning on a rake with his daughter on his hip.
"There he is," Calvin said warmly. "Holt Brannigan, everybody. Three-time winner, still working the course."
The lights swung toward Holt.
Poppy had been awake since four and was wearing yellow rain boots and a pair of ear defenders.
She was twenty-three months old and she did not like the lights.
She put her face in his neck.
Holt did not say anything.
Calvin came down the slope toward him with the crew trailing behind.
"Come on, Holt. Let's give them something."
"Three thousand dollars, cash, from my bag."
"You hit this green from the tee and it's yours."
Holt looked at the green.
It was a hundred and ninety-two yards over a tidal creek, with one bunker on the front left and a flag cut tight behind it.
Nobody on the grounds crew had seen him swing a club in front of anyone in two years.
"And if I miss?" he asked.
Calvin smiled for the camera.
"You tell the people at home what you told your wife's family that day."
"You say it out loud. 'I quit.'"
Somebody in the crew laughed.
Holt felt his face go hot under his hat.
He thought about the cottage rent that came out of his check.
He thought about the hospital bill from two Novembers ago, which had eaten the savings and then the car.
He owed three thousand one hundred dollars.
He thought about his daughter's face against his neck.
"Give me a club," he said.
Calvin's caddie pulled a five-iron out of the bag and held it out, grip first.
Holt took it left-handed.
It felt like a stranger's hand in his.
Bryn Sanderlin was already there.
She had come over from the maintenance barn with her boots still wet and her jaw set, and she said nothing at all.
She held out her arms for Poppy.
Holt passed his daughter across.
Poppy grabbed a fistful of Bryn's black hair and said, "Bee," and went quiet.
Holt walked to the tee.
The crew spread out around him, and a hundred members' wives on the clubhouse terrace stopped talking.
He put the ball down.
His hands were shaking, so he stood still until they weren't.
He thought of nothing, the way Amos had taught him when he was fourteen.
He swung.
The sound was the one he remembered, a clean small crack.
The ball rose over the creek and hung against the white sky.
It came down on the front of the green, took one hop and rolled toward the flag.
It rolled past the bunker and curled left and stopped.
It was four inches from the cup.
For one second nobody made a sound.
Then the grounds crew, a dozen men and women in green polos, began to shout.
Calvin's smile stayed where it was.
He reached into his bag and counted out thirty hundred-dollar bills.
He put them in Holt's palm one at a time.
"Beautiful," he said, loud enough for the microphone.
Then he leaned in so only Holt could hear.
"You should've stayed in the dirt, buddy."
"Brannigan."
The general manager of Marsh Point was walking down the cart path, red in the face.
He was a man in a navy blazer who had never once spoken to Holt by name.
"A sponsor's event, with a sponsor's guest, on club property, and you take his money," he said. "You're done."
"It was his bet," Bryn said.
"And you're out of the grounds cottage by Sunday," the general manager said to Holt, as if Bryn had not spoken.
Holt stood on the 14th tee with three thousand dollars in his hand and no job.
He took Poppy back from Bryn and walked to the parking lot.
Bryn caught up with him at her green utility truck.
She did not say she was sorry.
She held up her phone.
It showed a receipt from the Tour for an eight-hundred-dollar entry fee to next Monday's Palmetto Classic qualifier.
The name on it was his.
The time stamp said 6:02 a.m., four hours before he picked up the club.
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