It happened this way.
We’re sitting in the sports book at Caesars Palace with a sheet that boasted the complete list of golfers playing in the Masters in our hands. And the odds of them winning.
It’s Monday night and it’s halftime of the national championship basketball game between North Carolina and Villanova. I’d like to tell you I took Villanova on the halftime bet of minus 1 and under 80 for the total points scored, but I didn’t.
In this group of gamblers, our interest had already spun forward to the Masters that would begin in 72 hours and hoping some lightning bolt would come out of the sky and help us pick the winner.
Defending champion Jordan Spieth was the favorite at 13 to 2. The year he won, Spieth was 10 to 1, and the kind of steal that only comes by once in a while in golf. To bet against somebody who had gone second and first his opening two trips around Augusta National seemed dumb. Spieth was like the closest thing to Dead. Solid. Perfect.
Sitting here at this week’s Lotte Championship, thinking back on this missed opportunity is still painful. I’ve told no one about it, not even my wife. But as we were sifting through the names and weighing all the options, I noticed one who had the same last name as the first girl I dated in high school 46 years ago.
It’s not a common name, and the golfer who had it didn’t pronounce it the same way, but it was one of those coincidences that happen in the movies where everybody in the theater knows what’s coming next.
“How about this guy?” I pointed to the sheet and noted the odds were long and the golfer was only known to those who play fantasy golf. He’s a C guy in Yahoo fantasy golf leagues. Not someone you choose to win The Masters.
“This guy has the same last name as my first girlfriend,” I said to a group really not interested in my high school love life. I thought of the famous line in the Stephen King novel “The Green Mile.” My name is John Coffey: like the drink, only not spelled the same.
This golfer was 150 to 1. I was thinking, if I put a thousand dollars on this guy, I’d win $150,000. I was imagining what it would be like to walk up to the window with that winning ticket. Watching them Countin Benjamins with Durty Bo Dean providing the soundtrack.
“Hey, Paul, who are you taking?”
I popped up out of my reverie, about to tell them about this nobody I had in mind, but I’m a sports writer, not a soothsayer, so I played it safe. “I’m putting a hundred on Spieth.” It worked well last year. Let’s go with a winner.
About halfway through the back nine on Sunday, I was starting to feel a little queasy, kind of sick to my stomach as I watched Spieth drop down the leaderboard. It wasn’t so much the hundred I was about to lose or the $650 I would have won had Spieth finished it off.
I was thinking of my old girlfriend, Judy Willett, who had a French pronunciation with the accent on the second syllable. But buddy, it was spelled the same as Danny Willett, who was a couple of shots away from winning the green jacket as he walked up the 18th fairway, me, about 75 yards directly to his left.
When I got back to my desk to prepare my column and online breaking news story, Countin Benjamins popped into my brain. Eventual winner Danny Willett was about to count a whole pile of them. But me … not so much.
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Paul Arnett is the sports
editor of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
Paul Arnett is the sports editor of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
