Page 22 of Iron

“Nothing’s going on.” I hit the ball harder than I meant to, watch it sail dead straight into the wind, further than it should carry. “I’m playing a major. This is what preparation looks like.”

Stephen doesn’t argue, which feels worse than if he had.

I spend the next three days exactly like that. Up before dawn, out on the course until dark, walking every yard of Royal Links’s dunes and pot bunkers like the tournament depends on knowing every blade of grass personally. It’s not a bad strategy. My practice rounds are sharp, focused, and better than they’ve been all season. If throwing myself entirely into golf is a way of not thinking about TJ Harrington, at least it’s productive.

It works, mostly, during the day. The nights are worse. I don’t go out to a gay bar only to turn guys down. I don’t hit a bathhouse to get off. Just me in the shower, alone, green eyes staring up at me as I splatter the tile floor.

I catch myself more than once pulling up the Tour app before I remember there’s no TJ leaderboard to check this week. He’s somewhere else entirely, probably a lesser event, grinding out status the slow way while I’m here at Links in the rain, and the absence of him on any screen I check feels as empty as it is.

I don’t text him. I start and delete exactly as often as I did the week before, which is to say, daily. I do exactly nothing about it. At least I’m consistent.

The tournament itself goes well by any objective measure. I make the cut comfortably. I post a respectable third round on Saturday. I’m in genuine contention heading into Sunday for the first time in two years, the kind of position that used to be the only thing I cared about. I am moving on autopilot.

Standing on the seventeenth tee Sunday afternoon with a share of the top ten still very much alive, I am thinking about a par three in Colorado and a kid with green eyes and a nervous, brilliant swing.

I birdie seventeen anyway. Whatever else is broken in my head this week, at least my golf swing still knows what it’s doing without me.

I finish tied for sixth. My best major finish in three years.

Stephen claps me on the shoulder, walking off the eighteenth, genuinely pleased, the kind of pride he doesn’t hand out for free. “There’s the golf I know. Whatever you did this week, keep doing it.”

“Yeah,” I say, watching the leaderboard scroll past names that aren’t the one I’m looking for. “Maybe.”

I don’t tell him that the golf isn’t the thing that’s working. It’s just the only thing loud enough to drown out everything else for four hours at a time.

21

TJ

Miles Ferry Tour stops in July don’t come with grandstands. No packed galleries, no TV trucks, no PA announcer using my father’s name for a crowd of thousands. Just a modest clubhouse, and a few hundred spectators trailing the leaders. And me, trying to prove that Illinois wasn’t a fluke on a stage nobody outside professional golf has ever heard of. The Fourth.

Dad got me the start here off the John Bell finish, made a few calls, and I told myself I was fine with that, that this is exactly the grind I’m supposed to be doing, exactly the path Stephen’s been drilling into me since day one. Play the numbers. Respect the process. Boring wins tournaments.

It doesn’t feel boring. It feels like purgatory. Perpetual torment without moving on.

Caleb’s on the bag again since Stephen’s back with Gavin this week. I try not to think too hard about what that means, both of them across an ocean at a golf course I’ll probably never get invited to play until I’ve earned it the slow way, the way Gavin did twenty years ago.

“You’re doing the thing again,” Caleb says on the range Wednesday, not looking up from my yardage book. “The staring-into-space thing.”

“I’m not staring into space.”

“You’ve been holding that same club for like ninety seconds.”

I look down. He’s right. I set the club back in the bag and grab a different one, annoyed mostly at myself.

The tournament itself goes fine, which is a strange word to use for something that used to be the entire dream. I make the cut, finish somewhere respectably mid-pack, nothing that gets written about, nothing that moves the needle on my career one way or the other. Solid. Forgettable. Exactly the kind of week in Texas that’s supposed to build a foundation. Brick by unglamorous brick and it just feels like standing still while somewhere across an ocean, Gavin’s name keeps climbing a leaderboard I can’t stop checking.

Tied for sixth. His best major finish in three years, some golf commentator says on a stream I definitely shouldn’t be watching from a Miles Ferry Tour hotel room at midnight.

“You’re doing it right now,” Caleb says from the other bed, not even glancing over from his phone. “The staring thing. At your laptop this time.”

“I’m just checking scores.”

“Uh, huh. Whose scores.”

I close the laptop. It doesn’t actually make the ache in my chest go away, but at least it stops giving Caleb ammunition.

“He’s playing incredible golf,” I say, more to myself than to him. “Tied for sixth. In a major.” I roll onto my side. “And I’m out here grinding for status on a tour nobody cares about.”