THE NASTY CLUB  BY TOM CHIARELLA
    The driving range is a hard and lonely spot. Nobody cares that you’re there. Nobody wants to watch you spank mealy, used-up Top-Flites toward the broad, indifferent nets. You do your work. You scrape it. You take your best shots, and your worst, and they add up to nothing. I work the range twice a week. That says a lot about me.
     One particular day last week, Thursday, I scarred the earth for 20 minutes with my 5-iron. Now, there’s a golf club. The German shepherd of the golf bag — reliable, intelligent, vaguely Nazi-ish in angle and execution. I tried for a steeper descent, a harsher cut at the ball. I wanted the ball up, sought to make it lift itself, drilling down harder and harder with each swing. But I kept going chunky with the divots, then hitting it thin, then suddenly again with the pelts of rug. What the hell? The sky, an angry blue, carried those intense, muscular insects of summer — golf balls and yellow jackets – all around me. The sun blazed.
     Forty balls into the second bucket, I scabbed a 5-iron one more time, then whipped the club at my bag in a gesture so dry and pointless I had to laugh.
     I rested my hand on the tops of my clubs, heads rising from the bag like a sled team – loyal, strong, embarrassingly capable. Who was I to own such things? Pretender. Fool. I knew that I should pull out the wedge, my most reliable weapon: swift, heavy, compact – the candlestick in my own personal game of Club. But my back hurt. I knew, too, that I should probably quit, leave midbucket and give the game up for a while. After all, I had other troubles. Memos were stacking up in my in box, and there were issues with the plumbing in my house.
     “To hell with it,” I said, and with that I pulled out the 1-iron. The polar opposite of the wedge. The toughest stick in the bag. Why not? The jump from the sublime to the impossible is the golfer’s lifeblood. I stood in the moment, about to perform my own yearly dance with hyperbole. I felt that I deserved it, reliably blurring those lines of pleasure and punishment like a cheap fetishist.
     The 1-iron. The 1. The butter knife. The true flat stick is the most hellacious club of them all. Difficult to get the ball off the fairway, almost impossible to get it in the air from any sort of rough. Most people don’t carry the 1-iron – wimps all – preferring instead the gimmick, the high-numbered fairway wood, TriMetaled and fully Alpha Maraged, late-night televisioned into their hearts. “This will save you,” they are told in the infomercial. Everyone wants to be saved, especially on the golf course.
     To the golfer, the 1-iron is legend. There’s the old joke about the 1-iron, the one you’ve heard about Lee Trevino having been hit by lightning yet pressing on. “How will you do it?” he was asked. How will you get out there this time?
“Easy,” Trevino said, “I’ll just use a 1-iron. Even God can’t hit a 1-iron.”
     The club is a simple principle: The maximum reduction of angle in the club head accompanied by a longer shaft to achieve more torque and club speed. Average golfers avoid the 1, opting for fairway woods instead, which tend to channel through trouble like big, slick catfish.
     The geometry of the 1-iron is so completely out of scale that you can’t take it seriously. Still, struck square, the 1-iron sizzles. Forget about it. It takes a low, simple trajectory and then tears away. You must carry the 1-iron. Drill it square, just once, and you’ll start to feel the potential of leverage, the pleasant surprise of your own potential. You carry the 1 the first year to get that feeling maybe three times. It’s easier to use off the tee, as a driving iron, than it is off the fairway. Since it lacks the mass of a 3-wood, it can be a bitch to hit out of a heavy lie. Pros use it to get the low, 240-yard carry into a long par 5. The kind of thing you only dream about. The pros swing it hard, for it is a muscle club. John Daly, the hardest swinger of them all, went so far as to have the “0-iron” custom-made for his bag.
     So, at the range, I concentrated on posture, club speed, the timing of my release, trying to visualize the carry, to encounter some coming trouble in my mind’s eye. Occasionally a passing car honked to interrupt my backswing. I pressed on with the 1.
     At about the moment I grabbed my 1-iron, my neighbor, a tiny little guy named Jack Wilson, a guy who favored a blue zip-up jumpsuit and white cloth sneakers, was having a coronary six miles away on my leafy street, across from my house. I’m told he was planting a bush when it happened.
     Minutes later, my wife was on top of him, laying down the chest compressions, having been summoned the way nurses are in these moments — the way all of us are once in a great while — to do her best to save a fallen man. Someone dialed 911. She worked the chest while another woman blew into Jack’s mouth. She stayed at it until the ambulance arrived, working for 40 minutes before the EMT called it. Soon, a priest was there. At one point, she broke Jack’s ribs. But she ground on. That is her way. She must continue. One way or another, she finishes a job.
     Miles away, I worked to keep my spine straight, my hands together. I am not ashamed of not being there. We all have to be somewhere. I was taking my shot. So was my sweet wife.
     “You feel like a fool,” she told me later, describing what it’s like trying to revive a dead man. We were drinking wine on our porch, looking out at the spot where Jack had died, where he’d leaned against the wall of his house and left a muddy streak as he crumbled. “But you go on.”
     When you learn CPR, she told me, you take a class in the basement of the high school. When you do, you practice on a dummy. You are told to shake the dummy, to shout at it. “Wake up! Are you all right?” you shout at the dummy. You feel like a fool, but you got on. This is a life skill after all; intelligence must not be an issue.
     While she talked, in my sad way, I was thinking about golf, about where I was when she was nobly taking her shot, trying to press life back upon this man, our friend. I could not tell her how I had been practicing for a moment myself, carrying that stinking club all those thousands upon thousands of yards, using my training, concentrating on my mechanics, breathing deeply, pressing, hoping for the best, preparing for the worst. She was teary and sad, shaken that she had broken Jack’s ribs. I poured her some merlot, and I shut up about golf. Sometimes you have to. She was my hero, and analogies have their limits.
     The day will come when you need a 1-iron. You’ll be short off the tee, beneath a juniper, on a slightly downhill lie, on the verge of crumbling, your game folding for lack of a low, hard, 230-yard runner. From that spot, you won’t be able to turn your 3-wood over, and you could never keep the 5 low enough for the overhand. So you’ll reach for the 1-iron. You’ll speak to it, too – urgings, warnings, pleas. You’ve been carrying it for three years now. You’ve used it once. Now is the time. If you’re smart, you’re practiced, retained, recertified.
     It is the oldest, toughest shot. The essential risk, the superior reward. At the range that day, I had taken my hacks slowly, concentrating on keeping my back rigid, my hips square. I was alone with the butter knife, the riskiest club of all. My shots throttled away from me in low, unfamiliar arcs. Occasionally, I dropped a shoulder and chunked it something awful. Then, slowing the takeaway, holding my hips in line, I would crisply snap one on a string. Somewhere, Jack was dying or already dead. I told you this was a Thursday. I told you where I was — alone, like any golfer, isolated, obtuse, oblivious, entirely content in the collision of stillness and motion. I was at the range, banging my 1-iron, doing my work, training to save myself.