Some people say golf is the hardest sport to master. Some say it isn’t a sport at all. It’s like cilantro that way; folks seem to have strong opinions about it. Almost from their infancies, Steve Andreini loved the game and Beau Anderson didn’t.

Golf is what brought those boys together. Golf and the alphabet. They were the same age and attended the same school so they were always being lined up or seated together. But they got to know each other when they started caddying at the country club in 1961. Steve had already been playing for six years; his prosperous father got him the caddying job so he could be even more immersed in the game. Beau on the other hand worked for money. He’d been established for several years as the local boy most able to retrieve lost golf balls; each week he sold at least a bucket back to the pro shop. The head pro noticed and promoted Beau to the regular income of summer and weekend caddying.

Working on the course didn’t change the boys’ attitudes. Steve continued to love the game, but his improvement came with practice and maturity rather than from carrying clubs and associating with the members. He agreed with Beau that most of the golfers were jerks regardless of the size of their tips.

Beau kept recovering and reselling golf balls. He liked money and disliked golf. He and Steve became acquainted while waiting at the pro shop for work or while attending a group around the course. By the time the boys returned to school they were good friends.

They arrived for their first day of junior high together. Steve’s parents drove him from their luxurious, unincorporated, golfcourse-abutting neighborhood to Beau’s small tract house in the middle of a ten-year-old subdivision a block away from the school. Steve’s mother tried to get a kiss from her seventh grader but Beau walked out of his front door at that moment and saved his friend from the sentimental demonstration. The boys greeted each other with a “hey” and an upward toss of the head. That movement would make their hair fly in a few more years when boys began to have hair, but on that September day in 1961 Steve’s dark Brylcreemed waves stayed where they were supposed to stay, and Beau’s blonde crewcut didn’t have anywhere to go. The boys stood together beside a large bird-of-paradise plant and waved to the Andreinis as they drove away. Then Beau and Steve walked the block to school.

They entered their junior high campus two twelve-year-olds, and they matriculated three terms later as new people in a new world. Beau was still taller and thinner than Steve. Steve was still handsomer than Beau, and they were still good friends, but they had body hair and baser voices, and the world had been shrunk by assassinations and transistors and expanded by new music. Steve was interested in girls, attractive, and dating. Beau was interested in girls, gawky, and not.

They still caddied. Steve’s golf game had about hit its peak but he didn’t know that yet; he continued to fantasize about a future as a famous pro. It irked him that Beau who hated the game had developed a wondrous putt; Steve had the better grip, the superior eyesight, and nearly a decade of experience, but Beau was almost always able to sink the ball if it was within fifteen feet of the cup. “It’s a brain thing,” Beau used to say (in another three or four years it would be called a “head thing”). “It’s not about my eyes and arms as much as it’s about visualizing where the ball will go. I don’t know, Steve, but I can almost do it better with my eyes shut than open…” Beau tried to describe the sideways concentration that occurred for him, but Steve couldn’t grasp it. He got irritated. He worked on his grip, his stance, and his measurements, but he didn’t putt as well as Beau.

Steve had the advantages over his friend in almost all other aspects of their lives. He was better looking, better shaped, generally more popular. He got better grades but that was largely because he didn’t argue with the texts and tests; Beau spent a lot of time talking back. Steve had more attention and money from his parents. Beau did about as well at baseball as Steve did at football, but Steve’s sport was far more glamorous. Steve had girlfriends.

At first, Beau’s experiences with girls all derived from Steve. There was always at least one with a crush on him, and she’d come around with a girlfriend or two to watch Steve play or talk to him. Beau got to know the girlfriends. That socializing led to nighttime meetings on the golf course. It was a popular spot for the area kids; they found privacy around the lagoon-like water traps and freedom on the greens. They understood the perils of the automated sprinklers that would rise from the ground in concert and circle-soak to the zzhup zzhup zzhup of their movement. Sometimes the kids would find the course already invaded by a herd of ruminants – horses from the livery stable or a group of mule deer or once even a dozen cows from a pasture three miles away.