Harold Briggs kept his hand on my shoulder, and in front of the whole foursome he said, clearly, “Blake, this man is Vernon Pettis. He built Pettis Carts from a garage in Tempe. Last month he sold it to my company for nine million four hundred thousand dollars, and I have the honor to be the new owner of every cart on this course. He asked me not to say anything. I will not stay quiet any longer.” The putter of Blake slipped from his fingers and rang against the green. I am Vernon Pettis, seventy nine years old, and I took off the caddie bib and folded it over the flag stick.
The three other men in the foursome, two bankers and a retired surgeon, stared first at me, then at the sweating young man in the pink golf shirt. The surgeon cleared his throat. “Blake,” he said, “you told us all day that Harold would cover your tab. You told us your father in law was a hired caddie you had picked up at the grill.” Another banker turned slowly toward the clubhouse. A mourning dove cooed from a palo verde tree beyond the green, and the desert heat shimmered above the fairway.
Blake looked at me with a stricken face, the look of a boy caught stealing from the collection plate. “Pop,” he whispered, “I can explain.” Harold Briggs lifted his hand. “Blake, I think you should explain it to your wife,” he said, quite gently. “She is coming up the path with your daughter.” I turned my head. Melissa was climbing the slope of the eighteenth fairway in a white sundress, with our granddaughter by the hand, and her face, even at that distance, showed that she had heard enough from the clubhouse porch.
A caddie bib worn through eighteen holes gave one golf cart builder the length of a round to bring his son in law back to the truth in Scottsdale.
I gave my terms right there on the green, with my daughter standing beside me. “Blake, I am not going to humiliate you, and I am not going to let you drown either. Here is how it goes. I will pay the club what you owe, one time only, and your membership ends today. You will give Melissa every credit card and every betting slip you own. You will go to counseling, and Harold will decide whether there is a place for you at the company. And tomorrow you will drive your wife and your daughter to breakfast, and you will tell them the truth.”
Blake sank onto the edge of the green and put his head in his hands, and the carefully gelled hair came apart in his fingers. “Pop, I owe the club thirty eight thousand dollars,” he said. “I owe a man in Gilbert twenty two more. It was a bet on the Open, and then the other bets, and I put everything on the account and told myself I would catch up with my commission. I thought if Harold saw me as a big spender, he would promote me.” He looked at his wife. “Melissa, I am so sorry.”
But shame sometimes dresses as terror. Blake scrambled up, snatched the small leather ledger of bets from the bag of the retired surgeon, where he had been tracking the wagers of the day, and sprinted down the cart path toward the parking lot. He got thirty yards. Then a line of white golf carts came sweeping around the hedge, four abreast, and drew up across the path in a perfect wall. At the wheels sat the old mechanics of Pettis Carts, grinning, whom I had called that morning from the clubhouse. At the end of the row, Harold had parked his own.
Blake stopped in the middle of the cart path with the ledger held over his head and a long row of white carts blocking him in the hot afternoon light, the desert hills rising purple behind the clubhouse. Old Ramon, the chief mechanic, who had been with me since 1975, switched off his motor and spoke in his gravelly voice. “Young man, we built every one of those carts with these hands. You can outrun a lot of things, but you cannot outrun forty carts.” The mechanics laughed softly. Blake lowered the ledger. His shoulders began to shake.
The consequences were fair and slow. I paid the club in full the next morning, and Blake resigned his membership by letter. He began the Tuesday meetings in Mesa that week, and Melissa went with him to the first one and sat in the car. Harold Briggs kept him on at the company on a short leash, with a new supervisor and a pay cut, and a monthly check with a counselor. The man in Gilbert was paid by my lawyer, who insisted that Blake sign a letter confirming that the debt was closed.
In the name of my wife Joyce, who passed in 2023, I started the Joyce Pettis Fund. It pays for adaptive golf carts for veterans and people with disabilities who still love the game and for caddie scholarships for young people from working families, in Maricopa, Pinal and Gila counties. In the first year we donated thirty seven adaptive carts and sent twenty two caddies to college. One was an eighteen year old from Apache Junction who had carried bags every summer since fourteen, and who sat in his first lecture hall in a pressed shirt, grinning.
On a cool November morning, a year later, I stood on the first tee of a public course in Mesa, wearing a plain golf shirt and a battered straw hat, with Blake beside me in a caddie bib that he had asked to borrow. Melissa and our granddaughter waited by the cart. Blake slung my bag over his shoulder, carefully, as if it held eggs. “Pop,” he said, “I am going to carry it every hole. I want you to watch me do it right.” I teed up the ball and took a practice swing. “Son,” I said, “just do not talk.”
