Here is to bad golf and good fathers
By Kevin Van Valkenburg
Tiger Woods once said that his favorite childhood memory was probably the first time he beat his father, Earl, in a round of golf. Woods was 11 years old, and not surprisingly, he never lost to his old man again. But he also never forgot the magic of that day.
I can relate. Sort of.
It's easy for golfers to get sentimental on Father's Day. The final round of the U.S. Open is always scheduled to take place on the Sunday that coincides with the holiday, and there is almost always a tearful exchange between a father and a son -- or a father and his children -- just off the 18th green. It might feel manipulative if it wasn't so consistently moving. When Northern Ireland's Graeme McDowell won the U.S. Open last year at Pebble Beach, his dad ran onto the green and hugged his son's face in the way that Irish fathers often do, and in his exuberance, the elder McDowell kept shouting in his wonderful Irish brogue: "You're some kid! You're SOME kid!" The air suddenly got dusty in my house, as they say. My eyes, for some reason, were watering.
Other than baseball, golf seems to be the one sport where it's OK to be a little maudlin and wax poetic when telling stories about the family patriarch. But my favorite rounds I've played with my father over the years don't make me misty-eyed or wistful.
Instead, they tend to make me laugh.
My father has passed on many things to me in life. Genetically, I have his thick calves and his broad shoulders, as well as his his square chin with a divot in the center. We have the same muscular forearms and a stocky, athletic build that makes us awkward at times, yet capable of rare moments of grace. When I look at pictures of him in his early 20s, wearing the same style of thick black glasses I wear now, I sometimes feel as if I'm looking at a time machine. That's me -- joining ROTC, contemplating law school, believing I can change the world -- not him. We are different in many, many ways, but occasionally, I can hear the cadence of his voice in my own, and I can now fully understand why my sister would ask me to call our high school attendance line, and pretend to be my dad excusing her absence, when she wanted to ditch class. I reluctantly admit my father and I even have similar sneezes, a barbaric yawp that sounds a lot like someone handed a yodeler a stick of dynamite just as he was about to belt out a tune.
But I also seem to have inherited his tragic golf game, a flaw in our DNA I would never forgive him for if it hadn't produced so many ridiculous moments over the years I now cherish. We are hackers, he and I. We're swashbuckling, big-swinging, blue collar scramblers. We can't keep our left elbow straight or our head perfectly still, and for every booming drive we smash toward the horizon, there is a trail of shanks and topped worm-burners that likely preceded it. A card with 18 bogeys on it would be worn like a badge of honor in our household.
As such, my favorite memory of the two of us on a golf course is not the first time I beat him, but instead an occasion that involves a random act of tragicomedy that could never be duplicated, even with a thousand second takes.
Many years ago, while standing in the 15th fairway at our home course in Missoula, Mont., I watched my father attempt to hit a punch seven iron out of a light rough. It was a cool, summer day in Montana, but a light rain had chased nearly all the other golfers off the course, and so we were taking our time, enjoying a rare vacation day together. His shot was a clean strike, but its low, laser-straight trajectory sent it directly at a sapling maybe 15 yards in front of him, a sapling with few branches that could not have been more than six inches wide.
I remember the look of utter dismay on his face when the ball hit square in the middle of the tree trunk came bouncing back in his direction. My father -- who I believe had a decent round going at the time -- swung his golf club in frustration, in the style one might swing a cricket bat, and to his surprise (as well as my own), he connected with the moving Titleist. He struck it square, somehow right on the face of the club, and had it continued on the same trajectory unabated, I believe in my heart of hearts, it would have landed softly on the green.
Alas, the ball hit the very same sampling -- dead center, again -- propelling the ball back at him once more. It came to rest less than six inches from its original lie. As he sheepishly nudged it with his foot back to its original position and said, "Um ... re-do," I doubled over in laughter. If we're going to be technical about it, this is actually a four-stroke violation/series of events. One stroke for the original hit, a two-stroke penalty for hitting the ball while it was still moving (Rule 14-5), and a stroke penalty for moving a ball at rest with your foot (Rule 18-2a).
He's had other memorable golf course follies, too. He once snapped the head off his driver by accidentally teeing up too close to tee marker. (I had to fish the club head out of a shallow pond.) On the day of my wedding, we played an early-morning round near Baltimore where he borrowed my new driver on the back nine, nearly whiffed on his drive off the 17th tee (the ball went less that two inches) and then cracked my club when he tried to thump the ground in frustration but instead accidentally whacked the golf ball. ("I'll buy you a new driver as long as you don't tell your mother what I did," he grumbled as I looked on in mock horror.)
But the story of the sapling is by far my favorite. Two years ago, we played another round on the same course, just the two of us. My daughter was still a few months from being born, and my own impending fatherhood was on both of our minds. We've grown better about talking about big things in recent years, a development that makes me happier than he'll probably ever understand. I asked him if he had any fatherhood advice, and he told me what he could, sharing the kind of wisdom every father wishes he'd received once. But at the same time, I knew he understood that every man's path is ultimately his own.
"Buy your kid a basketball hoop," he said. "You'll be fine at all the other stuff."
When we walked up the 15th fairway, and past his infamous tree, I noticed that it looked a little bigger that year. Someday, it will be as thick and as sturdy as any tree on the course, and I'll tell my daughter about her grandfather and his accidental flash of sheer athletic brilliance.
But in that moment, I started to chuckle, and so did he. Neither of us had to say a word. He knew what I was thinking. And his laugh sounded a lot like mine.
in Today's Special
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Comments
Write a book, man. You are too good for the Sun.
Posted by: yo | June 20, 2011 9:59 AM