🔹 Coming Soon - CCC’s first comic strip presented by our friends at Sole Tigre!

🔹 Congrats to our Comment Contest winner (see below) who voted in last week’s poll, left a comment and won a free sleeve of LA GOLF balls. You could be next!

Dear readers, given our recent run of stories, you might assume a story titled Marked Man is the third installment in a mob trilogy, following BadFellas and Mean Greens. It is not, though what the main character of this story earned himself was, by private club standards, nearly as permanent. This story does not involve an organization, or accomplices, or a body in the trunk of a Cadillac. It simply involves one man, a putter and a trick so small it barely qualifies as a scheme.

At a club we'll call Prestige CC, a member we'll call Mr. Blaine had been a fixture for years, one of those guys you always saw hanging around and whose name you frequently saw near the top of net-event leaderboards. His membership had arrived on the strength of a longtime friend's name, a well-respected member we'll call Mr. Copperfield, the sort of endorsement that opens doors and, as it turned out, closes a fair number of eyes.

Blaine was not, by most accounts, a great putter. Ask anyone who played with him and you'd get a shrug. Steady. Unspectacular. Which made his good scores a little hard to explain. What he had instead was a different kind of sleight of hand, and it wasn't the sort you pick up from three hours a week on the practice green.

A good close-up magician can fool you even when you understand the mechanics, because the trick is not what his hands are doing. It is where he has persuaded you to look. For years, nobody at Prestige CC looked closely enough. His playing partners watched the ball. The man who sponsored him saw only the friend he thought he knew.

Before bending down to mark his ball, Blaine would stick a spare marker to the sole of his putter with a dab of pine tar, enough to carry it to the green, no more. He would draw his partner's attention elsewhere in the same motion, a comment about the wind, anything to keep eyes off his hands.

As he squatted, he pressed the sole of the putter into the turf a foot or so closer to the hole. The hidden marker stayed behind as he lifted the club away, while his free hand mimed placing the real marker behind the ball without ever letting it go. He would scoop up his ball and stand back up, having appeared to do nothing unusual, its position now marked a foot closer to the hole than it had actually been. If he ever sensed too many eyes on him, he simply kept the putter off the ground and marked his ball correctly.

He was not greedy about it. Short putts were out of the question. A four-foot putt that becomes a three-footer draws attention from even the most inattentive playing partners. Long putts were pointless, a stolen foot from forty feet barely changes anything. It was the ten to twenty foot range where the trick paid best, far enough that nobody could say with confidence where the ball had been, close enough that the stolen foot mattered. Steal a foot often enough over a season, and the numbers begin to move.

Eventually there were whispers. Enough people, over enough years, had experienced the same fleeting thought: wait, was that actually where his ball was? Never enough certainty for an accusation, just enough doubt for the whispers to accumulate. So when Blaine entered a regional net championship, officials quietly arranged for a small group to follow his group on the front nine, watching from a distance to see if they could detect anything out of the ordinary.

The first time they saw it, they said nothing, not completely sure of what they had witnessed. Did he really have a ball marker on the base of his putter? A few holes later, they saw it again, the lean, the press, the marker left behind closer to the hole than the ball had actually been. That was enough. Blaine was disqualified on the spot. Officials notified Prestige CC, and from there the fallout moved quickly and without much mercy.

The fallout landed hardest on Copperfield, who had put his own name behind the membership and now had to live with what that endorsement had turned out to mean. There is a particular kind of embarrassment reserved for the person who vouches for someone, the sponsor's name sitting right there in the file next to the disgraced member's, as if to say this guy is a poor judge of character. Blaine was suspended for a year. Copperfield was shamed for life. Every introduction he made afterward carried the unspoken memory of the last man whose character he had guaranteed.

Here is the part that tends to surprise people. Blaine came back, scarlet letter and all, and resumed his golfing life at Prestige CC among the same people who knew exactly what he had done. Some members never quite let it go. Others decided a year was a year and moved on, the way clubs eventually move on from almost everything. But nobody stopped scrutinizing how he marked his ball.

Blaine was diagnosed with cancer not long after his return and died soon afterward, bringing an abrupt end to a golfing life that had already acquired its permanent footnote.

Prestige CC was left with the more durable embarrassment: Blaine had operated in plain sight for years, protected partly by the reputation of the man who brought him through the door. Copperfield's reputation eventually recovered. It just never traveled quite as freely again.

And so, dear readers, the next time someone asks you to sponsor him into your club, choose carefully. He may be the one filling out the application, but your name is going in with his.

Who's most at fault in this story?

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ The thief (34)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ The club's security, who let him walk right in (39)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 The club's management, who wouldn't own it (63)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Max, for trusting a zipper (23)

There were lots of people at fault in Asleep at the Watch, but looks like most of you agreed that the club’s management didn’t handle things very well!

Congrats to our Comment Contest winner Chuck D. (that Chuck D?!) who said, “If you don’t watch your watch, you’ll find out the hard way what time it is.” Nice wordplay Chuck. For your comment you win a sleeve of LA GOLF balls!

And as always, don’t forget to catch up on past stories at ccconfidential.vip - and while you’re at it, tell a friend!

Vacation.

Festivals.

Road trips.

Late nights.

Sprayground has styles built for all of it.

Shop The Drop