I tried on the prima ballerina’s tutu before her final scene in Swan Lake.

I kicked a few field goals on the Super Bowl turf before the before the teams came out of the locker room. I ran the bases at Fenway Park before Game Seven of the World Series…

Finding the right metaphor for what I really did a half hour before the final round of the 1999 British Open is a little tricky, but the inspiration for my almost criminal trespass upon the eighteenth hole at Carnoustie is easy to explain. I grew up reading a wonderful writer named George Plimpton, who at some point must have asked himself: How to make the reader feel the sting of a hook to the ribs? What would best convey the chaos swirling around the quarterback as he drops back to pass? Plimpton decided to research very directly. The tall, thin, vaguely athletic Harvard grad sparred with Ray Robinson and Archie Moore; took a few snaps at QB for the Lions in an intra-squad game; and played baseball, bridge, tennis, golf, and hockey with professionals. The resultant books, such as Bogey Man and Paper Lion, are still worth reading.

I Plimptoned my British Open book, Royal and Ancient, as much as I could, partly by residing during the tournament with John Philp, Carnoustie’s embattled superintendent. Then I took the participatory journalism thing a step further. Philp invited me to observe as he and two stiff-as-a-board gents from the R and A cut the cups for the final round. He suggested I bring a putter; that would be a treat, I thought, to putt for fun where the best golfers in the world would soon be putting for glory and money. As I noticed after an evening of drinking Scottish beer, I didn’t have a putter, so I brought the only club I had, an 8.2 degree Callaway driver given to me by Clark Dennis, a pro who had failed to qualify for the tournament. But the Royal and Ancient men, in ties and crisp shirts even at 6 am, plainly did not want me to putt with a driver or anything else.

By the final hole of the final day of the painstaking ritual of choosing targets, I could see that Paul O’Connor, Philp’s assistant, felt, as I wrote, “a joyous madness. He commandeers the forgotten club, the briefcase with the balls inside, and the writer chap. O’Connor skids to a stop at the eighteenth tee, puts a ball on a peg, and cuts the air with a few ferocious practice swings. But the ball seems not to understand the violence the club intends…

“I take the driver from the crazy Irishman because a dare is a dare and the law is 300 yards away. I look down at the teed ball and notice that the hangover is still a category five. Then I look up toward the putative target and discover with alarm that there is no fairway…My two tee shots duplicate Paul’s—a pathetic grounder into the burn and a girly-man flare toward the right rough and the ditch.”

This adventure informed my writing about what happened later that day, when with a three-shot lead with one hole to play, Jean Van de Velde managed not to win. I’d bent the rules to breaking with my escapade but I think I got the best version of an amazing story. Yeah, I’d do it again.

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