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" Ah, Brandy, Misty, and Amanda, come out and sit on the veranda. Come down near Tunica, Mississippi, to celebrate the final round of the Harrah&amp;#039;s Casino Classic, a piece of the professional golf tour sponsored by Hooters, the internationally renowned restaurant chain that employs them in its Memphis franchise. Decked out in the chain&amp;#039;s internationally renowned corporate uniform of barely epidermal tank tops and orange hot pants, they caused quite a stir out on the veranda, did Brandy, Misty, and Amanda. They&amp;#039;d missed the previous week when a soaking tropical rain drowned the River Bend Links, which winds through the cotton fields and alongside the levees, an adjunct of the casinos that light up the heart of the Mississippi Delta with fungal neon, like some sort of Area 51 for the mud-flap gambling set. The tournament schedule foundered almost immediately, and the golfers played only fifty-four of the scheduled seventy-two holes, mainly in front of themselves, tournament officials, and the odd Harley-Davidson T-shirt gone missing from the craps tables. The only sign throughout most of the tournament of the sponsoring corporation was the bug-eyed owl that festooned every flagstick, the bug-eyed owl being the second most familiar trademark of Hooters of America, Inc.  Like the sun, the sponsor&amp;#039;s three field representatives came out only on Sunday, for championship day, when golfers in the Hooters Tour contested one another for the right to have a $15,000 check handed to them on the veranda by Brandy, Misty, and Amanda. A quintet of players had finished tied at the end of the truncated competition, and now here they came down the first playoff hole--all five together, all five, uh, abreast. They played the eighteenth hole twice, and two of the players fell away. Which left three: Jason Caron from Massachusetts; Chad Wellhausen from Mississippi; and David Howser, who&amp;#039;d driven down from Memphis in his 1980 Blue Bird Wanderlodge, the wood-grained rolling condominium that he and his wife and their boxer dog had taken almost sixty thousand miles around the country since buying it two years ago. It ran very well, except when it didn&amp;#039;t. Now the Wanderlodge was parked in the lot along the tenth fairway, and all around it were the trailers, trucks, and recreational vehicles of other people who had come here to gamble on other games. Gypsy dreamers, all of them, even the Howsers--perhaps especially them. David Howser knocked his tee shot straight down the middle of the eighteenth fairway for the fourth time that day. He and his wife, Ashleigh--on the Hooters Tour, almost every caddie is a wife or a girlfriend--walked up along the rolling landscape. Night was beginning to fall over the cotton fields and over the levees, but not over the casinos, where night simply settles for a draw against the garish neon. David addressed his ball and smacked it up toward the green, up toward the clubhouse, up toward the big $15,000 cardboard check, and way up toward where sat the sponsor&amp;#039;s representatives, sirens of the misty isles where cold beer and hot pants do make a man a king. Way up toward the veranda, where sat Brandy, Misty, and Amanda. Walk out through the casinos and remember there once was real blood-stakes gambling here, in the jukes and the roadhouses, where people waved knives instead of platinum cards. The casinos technically are not in Tunica. They are in Robinsonville, where the great bluesman Robert Johnson once lived, and a couple hours&amp;#039; drive from where he died in a dispute that did not involve the $9.95 all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. Down on the floor, a band is murdering the old local music, and remember as you walk by that if these grayboys had played those songs that way fifty years ago, nobody ever would&amp;#039;ve found the bodies. Walk out into the hot Mississippi morning and remember that there was once illicit sex here, the genuine furtive kind, under the Jim Crow radar, not at all as safe and removed as the kind of sex that sells crab legs and blackened fish at chain restaurants all across America. Walk over to the golf course, a tight, neat place carved out of the cotton fields, and remember that professional golf was born in places as small as this, but not as neat. It came from sweaty men in shirts without logos, betting money they did not have on shots they could not hit, as raffish a passel of cutthroats as the old blues guys ever were. There was Jimmy Demaret, who won three Masters despite the fact that all indications point to him not sleeping at all in the 1950s. There was Sam Snead, who titled the first chapter of his autobiography &amp;quot;Peckerwood Kid,&amp;quot; meeting legendary hustler Titanic Thompson back in the 1930s, on a day when Thompson had so many side bets going on that Snead&amp;#039;s head spun, and learning so well that he formulated a life&amp;#039;s rule out of the experience: &amp;quot;Never bet with strangers until they become friends.&amp;quot;  The battered old courses were their roadhouses. The old clubhouses were their jukes, smelling of moldy towels, with linoleum floors scarred by hundreds of cigarette burns and fluorescent lights buzzing above the card game in the corner. They came out of places like that, and they shook golf free of the country clubs. But the people in the country clubs fought back. They always do. They put the names of their companies on the hats that the sweaty guys came to wear. They opened their country clubs to the sweaty old guys, and pretty soon the sweaty old guys gave way to a generation as far removed from the scarred linoleum and fluorescent lights as the House of Blues is from Junior Kimbrough&amp;#039;s old joint.  The people in the country clubs bought up every last scrap of the old, weird America, to borrow Greil Marcus&amp;#039;s vast and useful phrase. And now golf, even at its roots, even at its most primitive, starveling level, has a corporation to sponsor it, and that corporation uses sex to sell its seafood, a sailor&amp;#039;s whispers transformed in- to a salesman&amp;#039;s beery boasts. And the corporation drops a tournament into a place where gambling sings soprano now, where it has buffet breakfasts, forgotten lounge comedians, and valet parking. Walk all the way out, however, and look at the people who play in the tournament, and you can catch just a glimpse of what used to be, like the lights of a juke amid the distant trees, where the glare of the neon doesn&amp;#039;t reach. Maybe we&amp;#039;ll all be saved from manufactured jackpot redemption. Maybe there&amp;#039;s enough left of the old unshaven dreams. And maybe, just maybe, the presiding image of America as the millennium crashes down doesn&amp;#039;t have to be a three-hundred-pound woman with oxygen tubes up her nose stuffing coins into the nickel slots at 2:00 a.m., wearing a T-shirt that reads, jesus solves my problems. Slight, with a bit of a slouch to his walk, David Howser has overachieved at his sport ever since his father moved the family into the home along the course at Colonial, near Memphis. &amp;quot;When David was ten years old,&amp;quot; recalls his father, John, a prominent Memphis neurosurgeon, &amp;quot;he&amp;#039;d go out on the practice tee and hit balls for two hours.&amp;quot; One day, after a bad round, David laid his clubs down on the ground and cried. &amp;quot;That was the proudest day of my life,&amp;quot; John Howser explains. &amp;quot;He was crying because he couldn&amp;#039;t hit shots that nobody could hit. I knew I had a winner then.&amp;quot; David moved on to the University of Arizona, where he played his way into a scholarship. He also met and married Ashleigh, a bright and funny art-history major from the University of Memphis. After they were married, in January 1997, David and Ashleigh decided to go out on the Hooters Tour together. They put the Wanderlodge on the road, bouncing from Puppy Creek to Boonville, from the Delta Pontiac Performers Classic to the Jackaroo Steakhouse and Sauce Classic, from Missouri to Indiana by way of Florida and South Carolina. The Hooters Tour began in 1988 as the United States Golf Tournament. Three years later, a real estate magnate named Rick Jordan financed it, but Jordan lasted only two years. Hooters took over the sponsorship in 1993. One of the first things the company did was bump the total purse for each tournament up to $100,000, which is a considerable temptation for those players unable to land a spot on the Nike Tour, the official gateway to the Big Tour itself. Hooters is a strange, suspended existence. Its tournaments in fact are a more accurate miniature of the PGA Tour than the Nike tournaments are. Hooters golfers play seventy-two-hole tournaments. There are leader boards. Yet they know that to win on the Hooters Tour means to have a chance to have a chance at the Nike Tour, which is a chance to have a chance at the biggest payoff of all. Hope&amp;#039;s equations can be the most inexorable. That&amp;#039;s why casinos and professional golf survive.  &amp;quot;How long have I been out here?&amp;quot; says Hooters Tour member Zoran Zorkic, who, for four straight years, has missed the final stage of the PGA&amp;#039;s qualifying school by a single shot. &amp;quot;Too long.&amp;quot; David&amp;#039;s father agreed to sponsor him on the tour. (Most of the Hooters players have individual sponsors.) &amp;quot;My dad was adamant about that,&amp;quot; explains David. &amp;quot;That way, I could bypass a lot of the frustration you get by asking people to pay your way. Anybody I&amp;#039;d have asked would&amp;#039;ve been friends of my family, and that would&amp;#039;ve gotten complicated, too.&amp;quot; David and Ashleigh looked for a way to cut their expenses. Most of the golfers drove between tournaments, and the Howsers decided they&amp;#039;d save on motels and food. They set about looking for a motor home and found one at an estate sale in Union, Mississippi. (As is his wont, David methodically researched motor homes and found that the Blue Bird is known as the Cadillac of the form.) They bought it immediately, and the three of them--David, Ashleigh, and their boxer, Samson--took off for the open highway. And then they broke down. A lot. &amp;quot;It was in great shape to look at. We haven&amp;#039;t done anything to the cosmetics of it,&amp;quot; David explains. &amp;quot;But we&amp;#039;ve replaced the transmission, and the refrigerator, the air conditioner, the water pump, the engine-block heater, and it goes on and on.&amp;quot; Their honeymoon was enlivened when the pumps froze and, when they got to a campground outside Oklahoma City and hooked up the water, the pipes exploded. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m keeping a scrapbook,&amp;quot; explains Ashleigh. In the middle of the 1997 tour, they set out for a tournament in Sikeston, Missouri. Riding along with them was Casey Martin, who would become famous the following year for riding a golf cart in the U.-S. Open because of a rare circulatory disease that affected his legs. Martin is one of the Hooters Tour&amp;#039;s most successful alumni. But after his ride in the Wanderlodge, Martin is lucky he lived long enough to become controversial. &amp;quot;First thing that happened,&amp;quot; David recalls, &amp;quot;is that we had an infestation of mice or rats that dropped a lot of feces and urine down under the driver&amp;#039;s chair. So it gets to smelling terrible, and I open a vent, and it lets this odor back, and Casey almost falls off the couch.&amp;quot; Later, Martin was nearly asphyxiated by fumes from the Wanderlodge&amp;#039;s toilet tank and nearly drowned when a clamp came off a water-pump hose. When they finally got to Sikeston, Martin fairly leaped from the Wanderlodge. &amp;quot;Ashleigh,&amp;quot; he said, presumably over one shoulder as he fled, &amp;quot;you&amp;#039;re my hero.&amp;quot; By Sikeston in June of that year, David&amp;#039;s game had gone sour, and he told Ashleigh that he was going to quit playing competitively if he didn&amp;#039;t improve. The way he was playing didn&amp;#039;t justify the expenses of keeping the Wanderlodge running. Just then, however, he had a chance to work with David Leadbetter, the famous swing doctor, near Orlando. David and Ashleigh dropped the Wanderlodge off near Blue Bird world headquarters, in Fort Valley, Georgia, and went down to see him. They picked it up six weeks later, en route to Dallas and David&amp;#039;s first tournament in six weeks. Brimming with confidence, the Howsers took the Wanderlodge back out on the road. It broke down along Highway 80, outside of Selma, Alabama. &amp;quot;We were stuck there for fifteen hours,&amp;quot; says Ashleigh. Three weeks earlier, the police had run a sweep of the local crack dealers, so tensions were still running high. Two mechanics came out to help, and when a car slowed approaching the Wanderlodge, the mechanics stepped into the Howsers&amp;#039; headlight beams so that the driver of the car could see their guns. &amp;quot;They told us that if anybody came knocking, not to wait, just to shoot through the door,&amp;quot; David recalls. They didn&amp;#039;t get to Dallas until four in the morning the day before the tournament started. Exhausted, David went out and shot 21-under, and then lost in a three-way playoff. Since then, he has been one of the fifteen or twenty players who can actually make a living on the Hooters Tour. This year, through the midseason break, David How-ser has won $26,779.50. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll never stop as long as I keep improving,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I believe that I have what it takes to be a player on the PGA Tour. I mean, the good thing about golf is I don&amp;#039;t have to worry about what somebody thinks of me. It&amp;#039;s just my scores. I mean, you can win your way through.&amp;quot; However, the Howsers are taking the Wanderlodge off the road. Someday, when they have children, they are going to tell them all the stories, and even that long night on Highway 80 is going to shine in the telling. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m going to miss it,&amp;quot; says Ashleigh. &amp;quot;Of course I am. We have stories that we can tell for the rest of our lives. It&amp;#039;s the freedom you have with it that I liked. That is, when things were going well.&amp;quot; The final straw came last winter, when they were driving back from a session with Jim Flick, David&amp;#039;s regular coach, in Arizona, and they were planning to spend Christmas with David&amp;#039;s brother in Fort Worth. The Wanderlodge developed a vacuum leak and died outside of Odessa, and the Howsers ate Christmas Eve dinner--pinto beans and grilled cheese sandwiches--at the Warfield Truck Terminal. Christmas at the truck stop. Can you hear the old song ringing in the story, drifting out of time, old as sin and whiskey, light as the night breezes that dance along the levee? Far out on the fairway, you can see their heads fall. David Howser has struck his approach shot fat, and it drops into a bunker short of the eighteenth green. Ashleigh&amp;#039;s head drops first. You can see the bob of her ponytail. Then David&amp;#039;s head drops out of his follow-through, and the two of them walk through the spreading twilight up toward the clubhouse. John Howser is sitting inside. He doesn&amp;#039;t want to watch. But David recovers. He nestles a lovely pitch about eleven feet past the hole. Chad Wellhausen also has played the hole to par. Jason Caron, however, bumps in a birdie putt from the fringe and wins the tournament. A bit dazed by it all, Caron comes up to the veranda to get his big cardboard check, and he poses, blushing, with Brandy, Misty, and Amanda.  David Howser misses the scene. He walks back through the descending evening and into the parking lot where the Wanderlodge is parked. All around him, people are flying out of their campers and recreational vehicles, marching in determined procession toward the casinos, every bit as inexorable as the children in Village of the Damned. David opens the door to the Wanderlodge, and Samson jumps out, begging to be walked. It has been a frustrating day for David--pure, torturous golf. Four times, putts that would have won him the tournament either lipped out of the cup or stopped a half turn short of it, those slivers of an inch all the difference between the $15,000 winner&amp;#039;s check and the $5,205 second-place money that David brought back to the Wanderlodge. &amp;quot;It would&amp;#039;ve been easier if I&amp;#039;d been putting badly,&amp;quot; he says as Ashleigh and Samson go off through the lot. &amp;quot;But I wasn&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot;  All around him, the people march off to take carefully calibrated chances, to walk gingerly through a country of manicured risk, and David Howser has his life riding on a ball that stops one roll short of the money that is, in fact, two stops short of the big money. It is a life of scrap and danger, a life of guns in the night in a very strange place, and pinto beans for Christmas Eve dinner. The Wanderlodge seems then as if it&amp;#039;s rolled out of a lost dimension, out of an older America, ringing with the old levee moans and the cries of the gamblers playing for blood stakes in places where they didn&amp;#039;t have valet parking. A time machine, almost, bringing the old unshaven dreams forward across a modern landscape of unoriginal sin. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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