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T
he Past is never really dead. It’s not even Past.
-William Faulkner
Jimmy Dunne remembers. As we sit in the clubhouse at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, overlooking the “finest course in the world,” he remembers in detail, and he has much to remember. Most of his memories are joyful, and some, as with many lives fully realized, some are tragic beyond comprehension. He shares the joyful generously, and the sadness more guardedly.
Jimmy Dunne remembers being 16 years old when, along with his buddy Chris Quackenbush, with whom he was then an enterprising young house painter, he played his first round at Shinnecock. The boys were unaccompanied guests, playing an afternoon round nearly 40 years ago; a round that would set in motion a four-decade love affair between Dunne and Shinnecock. And in those 40 years, the young house painter would raise himself from painting houses in the Hamptons to owning them, from being an awestruck young guest playing an afternoon round to being a fully grown man with teen-aged sons of his own, a Shinnecock member himself.
Dunne remembers standing on the 18th green, where a conversation transpired between he and “Quack” that echoes through the years, rolling out of Dunne today the way the Toomey/Flynn masterpiece rolls first away from, and then back to, the Stanford White shingled cottage that is the Shinnecock clubhouse. Both the story and the course flow effortlessly through time, and both share a particular melancholy, a sense of time and events that are unrecoverable, but whose shadows remain, an always present reminder of the past as being present, too.
The young house painters played a game in addition to golf, one in which they would take turns estimating bids on potential painting jobs. When Dunne was asked what he would charge to paint the Shinnecock clubhouse, he immediately asked his friend if playing the course would be factored into the bid. Seeing the stars in his friend’s eyes, Quack told Dunne that he would take care of the bid on this one.
Dunne came off the course that day and declared that Shinnecock was the “greatest course in the world,” to which the more pragmatic Quack replied, “Jimmy, what do you know about great golf courses, you’re 16 and you’ve played about 10 places.” Forty years and a long, complex lifetime later, a lifetime that has included having played most, if not all the great courses, Dunne’s opinion is unchanged.
So when Jimmy Dunne teed it up on a hot Friday afternoon this past July, he was in memory of a place not altogether dissimilar to where he and his friend, Chris Quackenbush, had been all those years ago. “It was a beautiful Thursday afternoon, it was a magical day.” He recalled. Little did Dunne know that on Friday, July 9, 2010 there was still more magic in the hills at Shinnecock.
Dunne had brought a friend, and was this day playing in the company of the club’s president and vice-president, Messrs. Bob Murphy and Jim Ferrer. A match was drawn, and in consideration of the group’s collective handicaps, it was decided that Dunne, a four, would move forward from the red tees and join the others on the “men’s” tees. He marked his ball, pegged it in the ground, drove it down the middle and the afternoon four-ball was under way.
The group was accompanied by Lenny Bummolo, assistant caddy-master and 22-year veteran of the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club. In those 22 years, Bummolo has grown certain that he has pretty much seen it all. And in fact, he pretty much has. He has carried regularly for Dunne for years, and was on his bag when Dunne had won the championship with Quackenbush back in 2000. Lenny carried for the famous as well as the near famous, having toted the bag for the likes of Michelson, and he was on the bag when Ray Floyd set the course record, firing a six under 64 back in ’96. But nothing could have prepared Bummolo, or perhaps anyone, for what was about to transpire that hot July afternoon.
Dunne is a curious combination of confidence and self-effacement. Confidence is a necessary component in competitive golf, and equally necessary in the high-stakes world of investment banking, where, working 20-plus years alongside his childhood friend, Chris Quackenbush, Dunne had carved a name for himself as a hard-nosed type. Today, Dunne seems to have retained the competitive fire, but has, by painful experience, also incorporated a readiness to deflect attention, an eagerness to share accomplishment.
He reports a handicap of four, but adds quickly that he plays his best in competition, that under tournament conditions, unlike players at many levels, he plays to his number. There is no real competition today, not beyond a minor Nassau between friends, so no one thinks too much when Dunne makes a birdie three at Pump House, and follows with another at the par five Montauk. A final front side birdie at number eight, and Dunne’s team was three and one in the match, with Dunne making the turn at three under.
All great golf courses have memorable stretches of holes, sections of the course where matches are won and men’s spirits are broken. Think of Amen Corner at Augusta, The Bear Trap at PGA National, or the closing three par four’s at Winged Foot, with each hole averaging over 450 yards.
There is no name for 10 through 12 at Shinnecock, but this is the heart of the beast. No one wins a match or posts a low number without successfully navigating the unremitting winds of eastern Long Island, the rolling terrain of these particular fairways, the undulating lightning of these greens. When Club President Murphy turned to Ferrer to remark that Dunne had “a pretty good round going” he could not have anticipated what he was about to witness.
A solid four at the difficult 10th brought the group to the slightly elevated tee on the uphill par three 11th, in Jimmy Dunne’s mind, “the greatest par three in the world. It’s such a critical hole. You can go into it two down in a match, hit it on the green, and if your opponent doesn’t, you’re even. If you go in two up and hit it on, the match can be over. It’s sacred ground.”
If it wasn’t sacred before Dunne selected eight iron from 147 (on strong caddy advice against his initial choice of a seven), it was certainly consecrated after Dunne struck the ball, and moments later the stunned foursome heard the sound of the ball striking the pin. The group on the nearby 12th tee had never so much as looked up. “It probably kicked into the bunker” was Dunne’s Irish assessment of the likely outcome.
The foursome headed first down, then up the hills that give shape to 11 then past the bunkers that give it its teeth, and finally onto the pitched, undulating green that gives it its bite. There they saw a ball mark at the cup’s edge, and it was there, as Dunne peered into the hole, that a sense of the sacred swept over him. There it was, staring back up at him from inside the cup: the “Q”, the single letter with which Dunne had marked his ball that day and everyday since September 11, 2001, the day his lifelong friend, Chris Quackenbush, had been killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, facing up.
Lost that day along with Quackenbush had been some 65 other members of the firm of Sandler O’Neill, but no one’s presence loomed larger in that moment than Chris Quackenbush’s. Dunne’s best friend was once again part of one of his finest moments, and was here again, in one of their favorite places.
Dunne likes to say that he was very emotional on the inside, but not showing it on the out, as the group made its way to 12 tee. Incredibly this is confirmed by Jim Ferrer who knew his partner in the match well enough to stop him at address, and to settle him down with a word of encouragement to “get with it.”
“I wasn’t there,” says Dunne. “I was thinking about all kinds of things.” After stepping away, the ensuing drive was near perfect, and it set up a crisp iron into the green, where Dunne followed with his best putt of the day, an 18-foot, right to left, across the green slider, that broke a good foot and a half before it found “the middle of the middle of the cup.”
It was on the walk up the hill to 13 that Dunne, a numbers man, first started to do the math. “Let’s see, three under on the front, and then I had the eagle that’s five birdie, here six 70 less six, that’s 64, and that’s what Billy shot.” Dunne was here thinking of the course record holder from 1962, Billy Edwards, who is coincidentally an old and dear friend of Dunne’s, and whose son was among those tragically killed at Sandler O’Neill on 9/11.
Momentarily lost to the moment, Dunne knocked it left on 13, but then struck a brilliant six from the rough, running it up the way the old timers designed it to be played, and made the remaining 8 feet for a seven under three. The group grew a little quieter.
Two more pars on 14 and 15 brought Dunne to the par five 16th with rare opportunity in sight. He struck a third shot wedge over a greenside bunker and set up a nearly unmissable 5-footer for birdie. It was the only poor putt he would strike all day, and the number remained at seven under.
An 18-footer traveled 17 feet on 17. On the Home hole, the day’s 13th drive was in a fairway, and it was followed by Dunne’s hitting the last of every green in regulation. Two putts later, a record of 48 years’ standing had fallen.
Golf both is, and has been, a game that continues, in spite of the withering forces of currency, to cherish its past. Preservation of memory is an integral part of not only the greatest game’s dedication to the past, but also to the game as it is played in every moment of the present. Not only does the player rely on unconscious muscle memory in order to reproduce the much cherished repeatable swing, but also on active and analytic memory, to recapture confidence from shots well struck in the past, and caution, from misplayed strokes that have resulted in unpleasant lies and harrowing numbers.
Memory is then both a clear companion and a shadowy lurker, a comforting consort and a discomforting enigma.
In a game where there is no room on the scorecard for a story, the story almost always transcends the number. Jimmy Dunne’s number on that hot July afternoon stood at 63—a number that is likely to stand on Shinnecock’s clubhouse wall for a long time to come.
But, as always, the card will only tell part of the story, the rest to be preserved in memory. Memories of a friendship forged over Shinnecock’s rolling green hills, a friendship shattered by seemingly inconsolable loss, and memories of a moment of triumph, shared with a friend who will never truly be gone.
Not as long as Jimmy Dunne remembers.
