CHICKENPIE.The starter at Eagle Ridge calls everyone boss.
Not in the way a call center supervisor does it — performative, exhausted, covering twelve people at once. He does it the way a lola uses "anak" for a stranger's child on a jeepney: a small word that is also a small gift. By the time you've handed over your cart key receipt and been told to enjoy your round, you've been "boss"-ed four times, and that word is somehow with you for the next four hours. You carry it onto the first tee like a lucky ball marker.
We were out at 5:50 on a Saturday morning. There's a specific version of Cavite that only exists at that hour — the light hasn't decided yet, the mountains behind General Trias still holding the dark, the fairways showing the dew in silver sheets. I'd driven down from QC the night before and slept in my car for two hours in the parking lot because paying for a hotel room for three hours felt like a bad ratio. You do this for golf. You do it without announcing it.
The Nicklaus Course at Eagle Ridge is the kind of layout that you have to play three or four times before you stop being annoyed by it. The first visit I shot 96 and thought the greens were unfair. The second visit I shot 91 and started to see that the greens weren't unfair — I was just hitting approach shots from the wrong angle. This was my fourth visit. I was here for the 8th hole.
There is a tree on the 8th. A narra, old enough that it's probably on some municipal registry, right center of the fairway at about 230 yards. The hole is a par-4 that appears, from the tee box, to be a simple dogleg with a generous fairway. Then your eyes find the tree. And then you spend the next three minutes of your life having a conversation with yourself about your actual carry distance versus your aspirational carry distance, and which version of yourself is going to be swinging in about forty seconds.
My playing partner that morning was Jay, a veterinarian from Cavite City I'd been paired with at check-in. He had the unhurried quality of someone who has accepted that golf is mostly about waiting — waiting for the group ahead, waiting for the dew to dry off the rough, waiting for your swing to come back after you left it somewhere on the back nine three weeks ago. He hit a three-wood on the 8th that caught the left edge of the tree's canopy and dropped straight down. He watched it fall. Then he said, "That tree," which is, in four syllables, a complete analysis.
I hit a low stinger down the right. It bounced off the cart path, rolled forty yards past where Jay's ball was, and I made par. Standing on the green, though, I felt nothing. Par felt like a technicality. The hole had wanted more from me and I'd denied it. The tree hadn't even had to try.
The back nine at Eagle Ridge has a completely different energy from the front — more exposed, more wind, the mountains visible from almost every tee box. The 14th hole is a long par-5 with a left-bending dogleg and a green guarded by water on two sides. Jay, who'd been playing steady bogey golf since the tree incident, hit a 7-iron from 162 yards that landed eight feet from the pin and held. He made the birdie putt. He did not pump his fist. He picked up his tee and said, "okay," and I understood that this was the maximum celebration he permitted himself.
This is something I've noticed across the Filipino golfers I've played with: a specific form of superstitious modesty around good shots. You acknowledge the birdie with the same affect you'd use for a parking spot that opened up right in front of the mall. Quietly grateful. Not making a production. Because somewhere in the collective memory is every round where the front nine was perfect and the back nine ate you alive, and you learn not to tempt the balance.
By the 17th, Cavite had fully committed to being itself. The sky was the particular blue that only exists in South Luzon — saturated, a little theatrical, as if the mountains behind it are lit from below. I was one-over through sixteen, which I only knew because Jay had been tracking my score in his head and told me at the 17th tee the way you might mention the weather. I double-bogeyed 17. Ball in the water on the approach, penalty drop, three-putt. A seven on a par-5. I took it.
The 18th at Eagle Ridge runs back toward the clubhouse, downhill, quiet. It's a gentle hole and it feels intentional — the course letting you down easy after whatever the 17th did to you. I made a clean bogey. Jay made par. We both signed for scores in the high 80s, which is the score range where you feel like you played well enough to be frustrated that you didn't play better.
We ate tapsilog at the halfway house. Jay told me about the time a runaway cart hit him on the 12th fairway at Royal Marikina. I told him about the monitor lizard at Orchard that ate my Titleist. Golf stories are always more interesting than the golf.
On the way to the parking lot, I passed the starter again. It was almost 11. He was still there.
"Nice round, boss," he said. He didn't know what I shot. He was right anyway.
