The Club

Chapter 14 - New Year's

There are New Year celebrations and there are new year celebrations. Canberra hosts the one without the capital letters. That might be a little unfair. New Year’s is fairly quaint in the capital city. I made the obligatory trip home at Christmas but by the time I had pressed the flesh with every friend and relative I was in a hurry to get back to town. Since Cloudy would be off to Melbourne over New Year’s Eve, I felt obligated to get back in time for his departure, absence, and subsequent 3-day hangover.

The Club closed at 7pm on New Year’s Eve, and a few fellows from the New Year’s Eve comp were gathering at the Casino to ring in the New Year. I had promised to make an appearance. Actually I was looking forward to it; I had never been to the Casino in Canberra and a relaxing evening of low stakes poker seemed to be a good end to the year.

I rode my bicycle to the course and called a taxi to take me downtown. When I called, the dispatcher gave me no confidence that the vehicle could actually find our golf course and, as I had no desire to stand out front for an hour watching for the taxi, I told them to have the driver call or text me when he arrived. It took a while, but it eventually happened around 9 pm.

I was the last man on the premises when the car arrived. I hopped in the front seat and the taxi man drove me downtown. Canberra does get hot in the summer but there is no humidity so as soon as the sun goes down it still gets cool. The taxi driver decided to use the cool 18 degree temperature as an excuse to crank the heat in his vehicle. It was nowhere near necessary.

We headed over Lake Burley Griffin and towards the downtown core. The drive would normally take 15 minutes but tonight we could easily make it in 10. Canberra is a ghost town over the holidays. No self-respecting politician or government official would be caught dead in town over the break, and no civil servant or education department bureaucrat could be seen for miles around. For most, it was time to head for the coast.

The taxi driver dropped me off at the address which corresponded to the casino but I could not locate it anywhere. Rather than inquire with the driver who undoubtedly would have nothing constructive to say I decided to set forth on foot. There was a sign on the road that illuminated the word “Casino” but there was no grand entrance.  I wandered around for about 10 minutes trying to find the crowd that would be streaming into the New Year’s party but I couldn’t find a soul. I finally took a chance on the nearest door to the sign and found I was in a hotel lobby. I took a left turn down the hall and all of a sudden I was in a carpeted room that was about as quiet as the National Library on a Sunday afternoon. It was a dark room with a dozen poker machines and a horse race showing on a small-screen television. I asked a man in a uniform if he could point me in the direction of the casino, but apparently I was already there. A few minutes later I had found my “party” and settled in for a quiet night. Around 10:30, as the band was beginning to set up, I excused myself and headed over to the video roulette station. I figured if I put $50 into the machine and bet enough high odds proxies I could probably play until midnight without much interruption. However, as fate would have it, just when I wanted a long drawn-out game, I hit my mark on four consecutive bets and my initial $50 investment had grown to just over $600 in 15 minutes. This left me with an interesting dilemma. Do I continue to play and give back all my winnings in the next hour, or do I head back home and pocket the winnings? I took a glance back at my mates and another at the polka band and decided that $600 was a successful enough night and headed out the door. I was able to get a cab in short order and headed back to my apartment. After all, the New Year’s Day comp would be on in about 9 hours and I’d need to be sharp.

As the summer wore on, the talk at the club turned to pennants. Pennants are an inter-club match-play series for important bragging rights amongst the 10 clubs in the region. Our club had not had a decent A-grade pennant team for quite some time and this year would be no exception. In fact there was not enough interest in having a team, for two reasons: firstly, our best entry would fall woefully short of the standard and, secondly, our American refugee, Mister Greene, put his name on the list and no one could stomach playing with him over 8 consecutive weekends. This year everyone was holding out hope for our junior squad. Tom, Dick, Lorna, and Harry were working very hard on their games over January.  It was inspiring to see them out there on the hottest of days. I stole as many moments as I could to work with them. Each of the juniors had unique issues to work on, so I usually instructed them one by one rather than as a small group. Although Lorna was officially our team’s number 4 player, she was really the best of the bunch. I could not remember when one of the boys had beaten her in their practice rounds, and if she had played more comps on the weekends instead of practicing I have no doubt her handicap would have been 0. The only scandalous issue in having Lorna play on the junior team was that it excluded her from the women’s pennant team, but given that the average age of women’s entry was 58, by insisting that she play junior I was doing Lorna a huge favour. There were only 5 clubs participating in junior pennants and so the season would be short – 4 weeks ending in a grand finale between the top two squads; therefore Lorna could join the women’s team at the end of the season if she were so inclined.

With only a week before our first match, I pointed out to a few members of the Board that our junior pennant team did not even have matching shirts. Of course I let Cloudy know this omission, assuming that we could pull a few of last year’s shirts from the inventory and set the juniors up for their first match. Cloudy was unsympathetic.

I arrived at the course to meet the junior development squad the day before our first pennant match. The four of them were on the practice green when one of the older gentlemen came over to me and informed me that an anonymous donor had purchased matching shirts, hats and golf bags for the juniors, and in each new golf bag were a dozen golf balls. It was easily a thousand dollar donation to the team. When I shared the loot with the team members they were blown away. It was like Christmas morning.  It wasn’t long after that that the rumour mill began to swirl and it was commonly understood that Cloudy had outfitted the team. However, because I was aware of every piece of inventory that came and went from the club, I knew that the items did not come from our pro shop. Of course, Cloudy was a master at assuming the credit for good deeds and did nothing to disabuse members of the notion that he was the big-hearted benefactor. He even said, “You’re Welcome”, when thanked. As I left that night, Harry the Hair asked me if I needed to borrow his van for tomorrow. It was a generous olive branch and I was grateful for the offer, but we would be using Dick’s family’s SUV for the trip tomorrow. So I declined with sincere appreciation for the offer.

As I headed home for the evening the four junior players were still practicing their putting even as twilight approached. Lorna intercepted me on my way to my car.

“Edward,” she called. “Do we have a fifth member for our team, just in case one of is sick or can’t attend one of the Pennant matches?” she asked.

“Yes we do, Lorna,” I stated. “Jimmy McGarell is playing in the sub-junior group and is ready to pitch in if needed,” I offered.

“Oh, okay. That’s great. I was just hoping that we had a little backup,” Lorna said. “I should have known you would have thought of everything,” she concluded.

“Are you getting nervous?” I asked.

“Getting nervous? I’m always nervous,” she said.

Somehow I knew that was a lie. Lorna never got nervous or if she did it seemed to only make her steadier when the chips were down. I also knew that Lorna chose her words carefully, and by asking me if there were an alternate for the team I couldn’t help but think it was her way of telling me that there was something afoot. I placed the conversation in my memory bank.