The fairways became silver rivers of moonlight. The bunkers were craters of absolute shadow. And the rough… the rough breathed.
I teed up the black gutty. It looked like a clot of night. My first swing was a prayer. The ball vanished.
Chip was to play the tee shot. He stood over the ball, swaying. The bell on the far green gave a single, lonely ding .
It hadn’t moved. But now it was facing the other way . As if something had read its dimples.
The designation wasn't a model number or a serial code. It was a dare. A legend whispered in the damp, linseed-oil-scented gloom of the North Berwick Golf Club’s caddie shack.
We stood on the tenth tee, a windswept hummock overlooking a chasm called “Hell’s Kettle.” The last smear of orange bled out of the sky. Then the 54th minute hit.
I felt the hair on my neck rise.
“Hurley Purley Foursome,” old Jock McTavish would grunt, tapping ash from his pipe. “That’s no a game. It’s a reckoning.”
We had made the green.
We searched on hands and knees, thistles stabbing our palms. Chip found it nestled in a fox’s footprint. He played our second shot. The brassie clanked off a buried rock. The ball screamed sideways into the gorse.