Amateur hour.(professional-amateur golf tournaments)

LACONNEX, SWITZERLAND---When I moved to Europe in 1991, I worked for a company that for many years sponsored a professional-amateur golf tournament for charitable causes. This grand tour, with me in tow, visited such hallowed ground as Gleneagles in Scotland and Deauville in Normandy. Although many of my drives remind me of a remark that followed one of Garrison Keillor's tee shots, "That'll teach them not to bring their Cadillacs," I have sometimes found myself in a famous foursome. Several years ago I played with Masters and British Open champion Mark O'Meara, who has the same soft touch with strangers that he has around the green. He was more a caddie than a pro to his amateur partners. He lined up our putts, searched the rough for our errant drives, and hit his own shots seemingly as an afterthought. Only back in the clubhouse did any of us realize that he had shot a course-record 64.

I learned golf as a nine-year-old from the grandfather of my friend Nick Seamon. We honed our game at various Long Island public courses where those who filled out the foursome tucked tees and unfiltered cigarettes behind their ears. When asked today where I play most of my golf, I still answer "Christopher Morley," where a bad approach on the first hole rolls toward the Long Island Expressway.

My clubs were a mixed bag, and I'd never bought a proper set by the time I let my golf go fallow after college. At my first few pro-ams, I played with clubs cadged from pliant caddie masters. I showed up at my third pro-am with a set plucked from the rack at Wholesale Depot in Bangor, Maine. Ever the gentleman, O'Meara greeted me on the practice tee. "I see you have new clubs," he said cheerfully, too polite to add, "I thought Rawlings only made baseball gloves." Certain that my problems off the tee, in this age of titanium, related to the weakness of my capital expenditure program, I handed O'Meara my discount-house driver and then watched a half-dozen range balls disappear over the Scottish horizon, a feat of arms that would ...