“What words?” Smacky asked innocuously.
It was a read-my-lips thing as Thurlene said:
“Bidding war.”
After the agents drifted into the sunset—each guy nodding, frowning, sulking, faintly smiling—Thurlene gazed at the big scoreboard behind the eighteenth green.
“What a lovely sight,” she said.
The final scores of the top ten read:
1. Ginger Clayton
76–73–71–67—287
2. Jan Dunn
72–75–73–70—290
3. Penny Cooper
73–71–74–73—291
4. Marian Hornbuckle
74–74–71–74—293
5. Morgan Pressel
72–77–72–73—294
T5. Paula Creamer
73–74–72–75—294
T5. Natalie Gulbis
75–70–75–74—294
8. Suzy Scott
71–78–72–75—296
T8. Sophie Gustafson
74–74–70–78—296
9. Lorena Ochoa
70–79–73–75—297
Cy Ronack said, “I’ll have one of our photogs shoot it for you…for the scrapbook.”
“That would be great,” Thurlene said.
“I have to go type,” I said.
Thurlene said, “I’ll come in for Ginger’s interview after the presentation ceremony.”
Cy Ronack said, “Here’s your lead, Jack: ‘Outlined against a blue-gray March sky…’”
“That would never work,” I said as I headed for the pressroom. “No sportswriter could make something like that work.”
45
The laptop was open, the cup of coffee within reach, but the muse was taking her own sweet time coming to visit. She does that on occasion.
The other writers nearby were already grinding, going to the whip, or else they were leafing through interview printouts, browsing through record books and media guides, or cussing electricity.
Two-thirds of my piece had been written the first two days in Palm Springs. Two thousand words. All I needed was the top. Around 640 words.
I would write to fit, as usual. They were already closing in the New York office. This was good. You never want to give an SM editor too much time or any choices.
If you do, and you’re out of town, and therefore unable to grab the editor by the necktie and drag him down the hall to a dark corner where you can choke him to death if he’s jacked around with your piece, he’s a mortal lock to lift out anything remotely humorous and possibly even turn it into a story about croquet.
I sipped coffee, yearned for a Marlboro, and thought about putting Ginger’s three wins in a row—topped off by a major—in perspective.
No teenager had ever created such a stir on the tour. And she was joining an elite list of past winners of what I still call the Dinah.
Among others, the past winners included Annika Sorenstam, Juli Inkster, Nancy Lopez, Amy Alcott, Mickey Wright, Kathy Whitworth, and Judy Rankin. Neat crowd to hang out with in the record book.
And there was one more thing. Ginger was eighteen and two months. Which made her the youngest winner of a major in the history of women, ladies, teenage girls, or high school beauty queen homewreckers.
I finally gave up on the muse and went without her, comforting myself with the thought that, what the hell, I wasn’t going for the anthologies here.
The fun part is always typing the byline. It’s generally downhill after that. I wrote:
By Jack Brannon
Put a golf club in the hands of an 18-year-old babe who looks like she’s climbed out of a centerfold and what you have is Ginger Clayton, the greatest thing that’s happened to women’s golf since Mary Queen of Scots picked up a shepherd’s crook and drove a wee stain into a rabbit scrape on the links of Old Bagpipe.
An hour later I was done. Filed. Attached. Sent. Landed.
Ginger was still in the interview area. She was up behind a table and microphone. Up there with a replica of the $500,000 winner’s check and the championship trophy. The trophy looked like a horse’s head sitting on top of the world’s largest can of dog food.
I walked over to catch the rest of Ginger’s interview when Thurlene came out of the area.
She said, “We have to talk when you’re finished writing.”
“I’m finished,” I said.
“Really? That quick?”
“Well, it wasn’t Anna Karenina.”
“Oh, no, not again.”
We moved out onto a terrace off the pressroom. She lit a Capri.
“Jack, do you have to live in New York?”
“I don’t have to,” I said. “We have writers who live other places. But I like living in Manhattan…Why?”
“I would want to live in Palm Beach why? Because you’re there?”
“Yes. Me and Lolita.”
“I can’t afford to live in Palm Beach. I can’t afford to live in New York either, but I’m used to it.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t have to afford an apartment in Palm Beach. Our condo is big. Like, huge.”
“So I do what? I grab my dop kit and my books and CDs and mosey on down?”
“There’s a spare bedroom you could have for your office. The West Palm airport is convenient. The schedules are good. You can go everywhere pretty easily from West Palm to cover your slugs. We could go with you sometimes. You could go with us sometimes. And you’d have your own computer guru. Ginger. She wants you there too.”
“She told you that with her own mouth.”
“Her exact words were ‘Don’t let Jack get away, Mom. If you do, you’ll die too young in a strip mall.’”
“Is this a proposal?”
“We’re in love, right? We should do something about it.”
I said, “Thurlene, two weeks ago your daughter and I were alone and she talked about you. She described you as gorgeous, intelligent, witty, energetic…but especially gorgeous and intelligent. That’s all true. Lord knows, it’s true. And it’s great she recognizes it. But I’ve got to tell you. I’m afraid you might be too much woman for me.”
She put her arms around my neck, drew me closer, and said:
“I can scale back.”
ALSO BY DAN JENKINS
NOVELS
Slim and None
The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist
Rude Behavior
You Gotta Play Hurt
Fast Copy
Life Its Ownself
Baja Oklahoma
Limo (with Bud Shrake)
Dead Solid Perfect
Semi-Tough
NONFICTION
I’ll Tell You One Thing
Fairways and Greens
Bubba Talks
You Call It Sports, but I Say It’s a Jungle Out There
Saturday’s America
The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate
The Best 18 Golf Holes in America
PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY
Copyright © 2008 by D&J Ventures, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Doubleday, an imprint of The Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark and the DD colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jenkins, Dan.
The franchise babe : a novel / by Dan Jenkins. —1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Sportswriters—Fiction. 2. Middle-aged men—Fiction. 3. Women golfers—Fiction. 4. Midlife crisis—Fiction. 5. Golf stori
es. I. Title.
PS3560.E48F73 2008
813'.54—dc22
2007041088
eISBN: 978-0-385-52698-2
v1.0