(Editor’s note: The following was submitted in August 2023 as part of the NYC Midnight 500-Word Fiction Challenge)
When I found Bobby Crampert, he was slumped in a leather club chair, his sun-beaten face drooping from behind a pane of glass.
For five hours I’d waited outside the clubhouse. Pace was always slow at senior events, and rounds long. And so I spent the morning hiding in bushes, dodging players and caddies. All the while, my mind burned with memories only I knew to be true.
Because all the world, it seemed, had been made to forget.
A missed putt, a trophy lost. That’s what grainy video clips now showed. Had they been doctored? I don’t know. Ask any golf fan and they’d tell you the same: Bobby Crampert had choked.
But I knew it hadn’t happened that way. I knew. I wondered if he did too.
An angry voice called to me. It was one of the clubhouse attendants.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Waiting for Mr. Crampert,” I said. I had no reason to lie.
“Sorry, but you can’t be here. Players and staff only.”
“But I—”
“Sir, I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”
I shoved my hands into pockets, pretending to stammer. A moment later, a Titleist 4 golf ball struck the unsuspecting man square between the eyes.
I leapt from the shrubbery, racing for the entrance. A security guard was too slow to stop me and I skidded into the lobby.
“Hey!” Someone was shouting. “Stop right there!”
I didn’t stop. I ran.
A door was flung open, and I burst into the players lounge. And there I saw him. Bobby Crampert, broken and battered after another last-place finish.
“Mr. Crampert, I—”
I hit the floor hard. Two lumbering guards had found me. One of them shouted, and I drove an elbow into his gut. Wriggling free, I rushed the club chair.
And found a 9-iron waiting for me.
I ducked, and the vicious swing clipped one of the guards. Blood and teeth went flying. Bobby Crampert had tried to kill me. Imagine that!
The other guard grabbed me, dragging me away. I’d lost the fight, lost my chance to right a forty-year wrong. And so I shouted the truth.
“Twelve feet, eight inches!”
Bobby Crampert became still, eyes widening.
“What did you just say?”
“Twelve feet, eight inches,” I said. “Downhill, left to right, and breaking towards Cal’s Creek. It always breaks towards the creek.”
The club fell from his hands. He staggered backwards, collapsing into the chair. I breathed deep, staring the man—the rightful winner of the 1983 Tour Championship—dead in the eye.
“I was there, Bobby,” I said. “On the 18th green that Sunday. I saw the putt. Twelve feet, eight inches. Everyone else may have forgotten, but I saw it fall.”
Bobby Crampert’s face crumpled. Tears welled in his eyes.
“For so long…”
His voice cracked in mourning for a career and life and legacy he couldn’t know. And yet, had always known.
“…I thought I was the only one who remembered.”
But he wasn’t.
By Daniel Malone 