Be-Leaving Las Vegas

by Jack Sheehan

I was asked the other day to recall my favorite moment on a golf course. The closest I could get was a four-way tie. There was witnessing my father make two holes-in-one; scoring a double eagle in an alternate-shot format with my 6-year-old son J.P. in a Southern Nevada Parent-Junior tournament; and playing 27 holes with former President George Bush at Shadow Creek on a perfect March day a week before I got married in 1995.

Forget course records and winning college tournaments or regional amateur events. When my last brain cell registers the flat-line beeping of the heart monitor and I float down that blinding white tunnel into the arms of deceased loved ones and lost pets, those are the golfing memories I’ll take with me. I only hope the fairways are hard up there and the greens soft, and angels wearing Victoria’s Secret are serving margaritas from the beverage cart on every hole.

But when I’m asked about my lowest moment on a golf course, there’s no call for a tiebreaker. It occurred on a morning in late May 1977, as I was innocently hitting range balls at a course then called Sahara Nevada Country Club (now Las Vegas National).

Shortly before, I had stopped at the bank to close out my meager savings account and was a day away from heading back to Spokane, Wash., for a month of tournament golf. I had a total of 722 bucks in my pocket: six Cecils, six Jacksons, two singles. I won’t apologize for my poverty. I was a single guy employed in a noble profession, teaching English composition and literature to underclassmen at UNLV, and earning about three bucks an hour, slightly less than the change girl at the Golden Goose downtown. Although I was poor, back then I could stretch a dollar tighter than Joan Rivers’ cheeks, so no one was adversely affected by my destitution. Broke, dumb and happy was my station in life.

Anyway, as I lifted my clubs out of the trunk, I noticed a guy dressed in all black who seemed to be fixing a broken rear-view mirror on the passenger side of his car about two rows over from where I’d parked. He caught my attention because no one else was in the lot, and he was using a long metal-ruler-type object. I didn’t connect the dots until later. The rogue had clearly been breaking into a car as I drove up, so when I glanced over he pretended to be repairing the mirror. (20-20 hindsight can be so aggravating.)

Because the guy looked shady, it occurred to me that I didn’t want to have all my cash stuffed in my pocket in case he decided on a quick holdup. I would need only two dollars to hit a large bucket of balls (think we’ve had inflation in the golf business?), so after I’d taken a few steps toward the clubhouse I did an incredibly stupid thing. I returned to the car, took seven hundred and twenty dollars out of my pocket, and locked it in the jockey box of my beatup Ford Granada. And all this while the suspicious looking guy was hawking me out of the corner of his eye.

I merrily spent the next hour or two working on hitting high fades that would work well in the lush conditions of the Pacific Northwest. But the minute I got to back my car and unlocked it, I had a sick feeling. I reached over to the glove box and noticed it was unlocked. When I pushed the button and it flipped open the money was gone. I then looked at the side window and there were fingerprint smudges all over it. My net worth had suddenly plunged to zero. That’s gross zero and net zero, for those of you keeping score at home. I didn’t even have gas money for the long drive north.

I called the police and a lethargic cop came out and dusted the car for prints. I filled out a report, but the officer provided little hope. “That money is probably on a dice table right now,” he said, “or it’s turned into powder and is up the guy’s nose.”

About six other cars were burglarized in the same parking lot that summer before the Sahara course officials decided to post a security guard.

I was able to borrow enough money from a relative to get up north. Once there, I recklessly bankrolled a blackjack tournament at a golf course in Kellogg, Idaho, with money I didn’t have and had no way of getting had I tapped out. But I had been in Vegas long enough to know that the odds are always with the house. Sure enough, I won $2,000 in three days off the unsophisticated gamblers who liked to split face cards, and I was back on my feet.

Looking back on over four decades of golf, I’ve hit my share of terrible shots. But that’s the only time I put up a triple-bogey a parking lot. FG