A Dead Man’s Bag

Will was my best friend for 25 years, and it always felt like I’d hit the buddy jackpot. He was wickedly funny in an old-school, ribald fashion, but also worldly and entertaining. The guy knew as much about roasting a perfect chicken (which he often did) as he knew about the best place in Manhattan for a 3 a.m. breakfast after a night of carousing in the early 1990s (which was the late, great Brasserie in Midtown).

He was whip-smart and never missed a chance to call me out on my bullshit. Before we called cool people “rock stars,” Will was a rock star. A mutual female friend always referred to him as “the world’s most charming man.”

He was stylish and generous, too. He once casually handed me a vintage Omega Speedmaster, the iconic timepiece astronauts brought to the moon. “This watch needs to be worn,” he said. “You should keep it—and wear it.”

We discovered golf together, and in our unfettered, unmarried days we played endless rounds from dawn to dusk, roaming from the Bronx to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom to the Scottish Highlands. We often played 36 holes or more. Those were the salad days. They were so long that by sunset we were punchy; three-putts no longer stung, the jokes were funnier, the secrets spilled out.

After he died of cancer at 50, I was more than a little lost. Grief is a process, and I was processing slowly, if at all. A few months after his death, Will’s wife reached out and asked if I wanted his golf bag and clubs. Of course I did.

As I puttered in my Los Angeles garage, waiting for the bag to arrive from Connecticut, I realized I was in suspense. What secrets would I uncover? A Ziploc bag of our favorite Arturo Fuente 8-5-8 cigars, dry but still worth smoking? A Dunhill lighter? A ball marker from Cypress Point, where he once played in the member-guest? Country club matchbooks with phone numbers scribbled on them in haste? (A pretty waitress or a potential business deal: No one will ever know.) Or just scorecards that brought the old times rushing back?

And yet, as well as I knew him, I still wasn’t ready for what I found.

When the package finally arrived, I tore it open to find the bag and clubs I knew nearly as well as my own. It was a lightweight navy Titleist stand bag with the familiar witch-on-a-broomstick logo of his club, Stanwich, stitched into the side. Inside was a mismatched set of Ping and Cleveland metalwoods. The Ben Hogan Apex irons. His Scotty Cameron putter (sweet!). And, of course, the comical collection of six (six!) Cleveland wedges, from 46 degrees to 64. (Sixty-four degrees? Really?) I was immediately transported back to the memorable summer when Will all but quit his publishing job to practice his short game until his hands bled. He got down to a 9, if memory serves, and our golf group mocked him for his dedication and the way he paced off every shot inside 100 yards. 

The bag’s pockets brought the first surprise: the balls. Yes, there were a few Pro V1s; you would expect nothing less from a guy who got married in a custom-made Brioni tuxedo. But there was a flood of Wilsons, too. More than a dozen. Wilsons? 

I puzzled that one out. Wilson makes a soft ball that compresses easily for slower swing speeds. Will was weakened by his progressive illness the last few times he played, and it would be just like him to switch balls to gain an advantage.

He never flinched in the face of stage 4 cancer, and I could imagine him calling the Wilsons “my ball-cancer balls.” The cancer was prostate, not testicular, but he knew how to stretch for a laugh. He would have said it several times, angling for a bigger reaction each time.

Then came the usual assortment of golf detritus. An embossed-leather cigar case. Ball markers and divot-repair tools from courses famous and not. A crusty towel from my hometown course, St. Johnsbury Country Club in Vermont, site of many annual buddy trips and my favorite course on the planet.

But what I found in the felt-lined, zippered side pocket knocked me back. In with some old coins were two big handfuls, 30 or so, of wooden tees. And not a single one was whole. They were all stubs, all broken—dozens of dirty tee tops with jagged edges.

A menagerie of random little broken tees. You could hold them in your hand like pebbles. Like the Wilsons, the tees felt out of place—like spotting a rusty bracelet in a display case at Tiffany’s.

I tried to work through it. If you’re not hitting driver, you don’t need a full-length tee. An inch-long broken tee works for every other club in the bag. So did he keep them for par 3s? Maybe he thought tossing one away on the course would be littering. That wouldn’t have shocked me, but still, most of us don’t hoard busted tees.

Yet Will did, to the end. There was something earthy about that stash of fragments. Something old and practical and humble. Something more lasting than what’s new at the pro shop. It was almost as if he had purposely left some sod in the pocket. It felt like there was still some life in it.

The first time I carried Will’s bag, I took one of my sons to Roosevelt, a woodsy nine-holer in a corner of Griffith Park in Los Angeles, just down the hill from the Griffith Observatory. It was a spooky early morning, with long shadows creeping everywhere.

When we came to the second hole, where the tee box is enclosed by a little cathedral of pines, it was misty and dark. Up in the fairway, in the morning sun, three coyotes lingered. One looked me dead in the eye and held my gaze. The hair on my neck stood up. Shit, Will was right there.

This was seven years ago. I gave the Scotty Cameron putter to my older son. He recently rolled in five birdies with it on the way to a nifty 68. My younger son—Will’s godson—carries that old Hogan 4-iron; he uses it as his driving iron.

And the broken tees? I kept them all. Those are mine.