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By Root 539 0

PGA Tour he’d won two tournaments in nine months, which inspired Golf Digest to run a cover story entitled, “GROUS, AS IN LOOSE.” He’d come out of Linwood, Texas, by way of Austin, a big smiling kid with personality and a long game his peers called how itzer-in-a-can. “Like a bouncer in a strip club” was how Fuzzy Zoeller described him, 230 malleable pounds on a six-three frame and an ample, full-bodied face to match, along with blond hair cut in floppy surfer-boy bangs. What impressed him most about being on Tour? “All the free stuff,” Sonny replied, “I can’t get over all the great free stuff they give us.” Balls, clubs, bags, clothes, the whole kit; he didn’t mention the free-flowing, practically gratis booze, nor the women who hung around the practice green in every town, auditioning for the players in hair-trigger halters and the kind of shorts that make men sweat. He was dreaming those first few years on Tour, lulled by success and the sexual buzz; by the time he woke up and realized that he was going to have to grind to make it, his slide had already dropped him off the money list.

Everybody had to grind. Nicklaus, Watson, Norman, nobody could coast—once he understood how bloody the competition was, it scared him, the lightning strikes of his rookie wins. Those trophies gradually morphed into weights around his neck, but at this, the quiet-desperation stage of his life, they were his meal ticket, an automatic entrée into every joke tournament and corporate junket in search of anything resembling a marquee name. Myanmar, his agent said, what they used to call Burma, down in the heat-rash crotch of the world. Not the most politically correct place you’ll ever see, they were on everybody’s shit list for human rights and most of the world’s heroin was grown there. It was your classic Third World basket case, complete with drug mafias, warlords, mind-bending poverty, and a regime that made the Chinese look carefree, plus a genuine martyr-saint they kept under house arrest, that sexy lady who won the Nobel Peace Prize—whatshername? On the other hand the generals who ran the country were nuts for golf. After thirty years of incoherent isolation they were building resorts and courses by the dozen, leveraging the sport into hard foreign ex- change. Now they were holding a tournament to boost the off-brand national image, but there was a problem: who in their right mind wanted to come? American pros of a certain stature were offered all expenses paid, plus a ten-thousand-dollar guarantee, plus a shot at the sixty-thousand-dollar first prize against what promised to be enticingly tepid competition.

“Do not talk politics,” said the agent.

“It’s cool,” said Sonny, who hadn’t voted since the Dukakis tank episode.

“Just get in, play your game, and get out. I’ve got you a spot in the Ozarks Open in two weeks.”

Sonny stepped off the plane in Rangoon—Yangon in the official, post-imperialist nomenclature—got a whiff of the dense alluvial air, and thought: home? No, he was about as far as he could get from Linwood and the ditchwater funk of the gulf coast, but Rangoon’s scruffy urban mass had a small-town feel, its streets shot through with a rural ethic. The smog harbored startling hits of orchids and manure. Rusting corrugated roofs and moss-streaked stucco seemed to mediate a timeless, more organic state of mind. Roosters could be heard at all hours of the day, and even rush hour lacked world-class conviction, a tinny whirr and chutter that teased his ear like the plinking of thousands of pinball machines.

From the generic swank of his hotel room he could watch Chinese junks gliding by on the river, a wonder surpassed only by the locals themselves, slender, graceful people with cashew-colored skin and hair that flashed midnight blue in the sun. And here was another wonder: they didn’t hate him! Poor people who bought their cigarettes by one’s and two’s, and yet they didn’t hold their hardship against him, this loud, lumbering, pink-skinned American whose sheer unsubtlety made the natives cringe and giggle. At Shwedagon Paya he