The Longest Putt

A long putt at the eighteenth on a steeply sloping green was needed to save the match. It seemed an impossible task. P J Balcombe was squatting down uncomfortably, examining the undulating path that led from his ball just on the edge of the green to the distant hole.

'Flag in or out, PJ?,' shouted his partner in the four-ball.

'Out!' exclaimed PJ Balcombe, decisively. The use of his initials pleased him, because he had been known as "PJ" when he held an important job in the Ministry. His wife had died a few weeks previously and he had decided that a walk to the golf club might ease his pain. Once in the club house friends had had persuaded him to join them on the course.

He squinted towards the hole, assessing a meandering, thirty-five feet path over a squashed dandelion leaf that had escaped the green-keeper's eagle eye, along a smooth patch of flattened grass and then down a long, winding, descending track leading towards a cavity that seemed from this distance no bigger than a thimble.

His first impulse was to mentally calculate how to direct the ball towards its remote destination. Suddenly, however, he remembered that Dorothy, his wife had advised him to rely on his natural instincts. The advice, seeming to come from another world, ordered him to swung his putter with confident abandon.

Time paused as the ball rolled along the green sward, tumbling a little as it encountered bruised grass and swerving around the steep borrow. As it progressed along its path, PJ Balcombe recalled being in a hotel, watching as his new bride emerged from the bathroom, her eyes shining with a mixture of delight and shyness. It was a picture of radiant happiness he had carried in his mind throughout many years of marriage.

The ball continued towards the hole, lurching a little occasionally, its speed abating at first and then accelerating as it encountered the downwards slope. Nobody meanwhile noticed that PJ had pitched forward and lay motionless, a dazed smile on his face. The ball finally trickled into the hole, eliciting a congratulatory chorus of "Nice putt!" from the other three golfers.

In a pub after his funeral, one of his fellow golfers remarked philosophically: 'Well, at least he died happy, sinking his longest putt ever.'

'Did he know it had gone in, or did he died beforehand?' someone asked.

'The moment he hit that ball he knew with absolute certainty where it was going and, what's more, where he was going.'

They all drank to that thought, feeling that an important truth had just been expressed.