So by 2009, I learned that I had an eighteen-year-old with Down syndrome with a fierce competitive streak. At one point he even asked me how to spell “competitive.” Who knew this personality trait was in the cards? Even Jamie himself was unaware of it until he entered adolescence. It feeds his sense of self-esteem, it helps to keep him in shape, and it affords him some pride in his accomplishments. What’s not to like?
But how is one to walk that line—whether one is disabled or hyperabled—between legitimate pride and satisfaction, and obnoxious, overweening hubris? Between a sincere desire to improve oneself and a brittle, bitter determination to defeat other people? One day after track and field practice, after Jamie spent some minutes enumerating all the people he had beaten, I had to remind him that although he runs well, he is not the fastest runner in his group, and that the real challenge lies in learning how to be competitive while being gracious when you run up against a better athlete. Need I add that this is a challenge many athletes fail to meet? I always said, in my days as a hockey player, that I would rather lose by one than win by ten—even though I played on many teams that won by ten or more. A one-goal game is more exciting because every loose puck matters, and one team is trying desperately to put every loose puck in the net, whereas in a tie game teams tend to play cautiously, trying not to make a game-deciding mistake, and in the closing minutes of a blowout nobody cares about anything. And then there is the gambit in which the trailing team pulls its goalie in the final minute for an extra skater. I have been on both sides of one-goal games, many times, and I really do enjoy them more than blowouts. But sometimes it is very hard to lose. Now Jamie knows that too, because we are talking about serious competition here.
Nobody likes hearing golf stories except for other golfers, so I will try to keep this narrative of Jamie’s development as a sportsman as short as possible.
I began playing golf at thirteen on the municipal courses of Queens. In the late 1970s, if you were under eighteen and went through the trouble of getting a golf permit from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, you could play any course in the city for a dollar. I know that almost everywhere in the world, golf is associated with country clubs and business deals and reactionary politics and plaid pants. But not in Queens.
So I became reasonably good at the game, and by “reasonably good” I mean horribly erratic but capable of parring five or six holes in a row when the golf gods smiled upon me. I played from 1975 to 1978, then not in college or for the first couple years of graduate school, then again from 1985 to 1991, then not after Jamie was born. But in 1997, a friend invited me to resume playing as his on-again, off-again partner, and by the following year, when Jamie was six, I would sometimes bring him along with me when I played solo—both for his sake and for Janet’s. He rode in the cart, we sang songs, and I got in some golf while he got some fresh air. The course we played, Iron Horse in east central Illinois, did not charge us for Jamie’s presence. When we moved to Penn State, in contrast, the university golf courses informed us that Jamie could join me on the course only if I paid a fifteen-dollar “rider’s fee.” Since Jamie was not playing the course, and since the golf carts seat two people, the Penn State golf course was effectively charging him fifteen dollars to breathe their air. So we decided we would take our business someplace else—thirty-five miles down the road, to Belles Springs golf course. Penn State’s clubhouse is very fancy, suggestive of country clubs and business deals. Belles Springs’ clubhouse is a Quonset hut, and the management was completely cool with Jamie.
Sometimes, if the club permitted it, I would let him putt; by the time he was fourteen, he was ready to hit a few balls of his own, usually from the shallow rough (I didn’t want him chopping up the fairways). Eventually, he got to the point where he could play his own ball from tee to green, so long as he remembered to take a half-swing. The golf swing involves some of the most convoluted bodily motions in sports, and Jamie couldn’t control the club if he took a full backswing (and he still can’t). But when he “found his spot” and controlled his swing, he could send the ball flying. And as every golfer knows (and every non-golfer couldn’t care less about), there is nothing quite like the thwack of a well-struck ball. Especially when your father exclaims, after you have struck the ball well and sent it flying over a hundred and fifty yards straight down the middle, “Holy cow”—in such a way as to betray the fact that he almost said holy shit.
Back at Iron Horse, there was a moment when a seven-year-old Jamie took it into his head to stand on the side edge of the cart, bouncing on it in a way that made me think he might just be capable of toppling it over on himself. That was not quite a loud-voice moment, but I did tell him in no uncertain terms never to do that again. Ten years later, Jamie was capable of driving the cart himself, though I quickly learned that he did not know how to brake, so I braked for him and took the wheel, and we won’t try that experiment again. But most important, as Jamie improved as a golfer, a crucial aspect of his character emerged. I know, it is a horrible cliché: sports build character. As clichés go, it is even worse than “giving 110 percent” and “leaving it all on the field,” because it is the tiresome mantra of youth leagues in every sport. In Jamie’s case, golf did not build character; rather, the game revealed something about the kind of person he is. And this was—and is—a very good thing.
James Lyon Bérubé is the only golfer, since the invention of the game by bored Scottish shepherds in the late medieval era, who does not get frustrated. He will hit ten weak shots in a row, shanks or hooks or skulled 7-irons that roll haplessly for a handful of yards, and then thwack, he will lace an 8-iron to the green from 110 yards out, pin high and 15 feet from the hole, just like that. He will not mutter or grumble about the ten clunkers; he will, instead, chortle with glee at the perfectly struck ball. Only once, since we began playing together in 2007, have I seen him become dejected. He had every reason to be: five holes into a nine-hole round, after an hour of plugging away, neither of us had hit a single decent golf shot. That was the day I had to draw on his lessons in tang soo do (which we will get to in a moment): you have to have indomitable spirit. It’s not just a question of accentuating the positive, eliminating the negative, and determining not to mess with Mister In-Between. It is something deeper, something indelible about who Jamie has become: He does not get aggravated when he does not hit the ball well. He does not get down on himself. He simply finds his spot and lives for the next well-hit ball.
We don’t keep score, and there are many mulligans (do-overs, for you non-golfers). Fortunately, because Jamie plays quickly, we never hold up the people behind us. This consideration kept me from making tee times with Jamie during crowded hours, and for some years I tried to make sure we could play alone. But when we do find ourselves in a makeshift foursome with strangers, I explain on the first tee that Jamie will play from the front tees, will take mulligans, and will play at a good pace. The people who have played with Jamie have discovered what I have discovered: he is genial and enthusiastic, cheerful about the game, and (gasp) capable of getting a couple of legitimate bogeys along the way.
After one especially memorable round in 2008, we came into the tiny clubhouse of Mingo Springs golf course in Rangeley, Maine, to have a couple of those scary bright-pink New England hot dogs. The course pro, himself a gentil et sympathique jeune homme, casually asked how we did; I reported that I shot a 41 for nine holes, five over par, and that Jamie had had three bogeys. The pro did a double-take. “Really?” he asked, wide-eyed. I assumed he was not surprised by my reasonably decent 41, so I replied, “Seriously. He bogeyed 10, 12, and 14. For real.” The tenth and twelfth holes were short, easy par threes; on both of them, Jamie reached the green from the tee and three-putted. On 14, a short par 4, it took him a drive and three 4-irons to reach the fringe of the green, and as I parked the cart at a safe distance from the green and told him to wait for me before playing his ball, he went right ahead anyway and played his ball . . . and holed
a fifty-foot putt. (We walked it off to get the distance. Jamie always insists that I do this when he hits a long one. Like every other golfer, he wants to tell non-golfers, especially his mother, just how impressive his best shots are.) He has gotten a couple dozen pars here and there, and even one birdie: after hitting a perfect tee shot on the 14th hole at Belles Springs, a long, downhill par three, he faced a twenty-footer for his two. He struck a decent putt with about the right speed—he can have astonishingly soft hands around the green—but it was a bit off line. Still, I do believe the USGA Rules of Golf permit a father to place his foot in the line of the putt in order to deflect his child’s slightly errant ball into the cup, if the putt is for birdie. I don’t have my copy of the rule book within reach right now, but I think I’m remembering this one word for word. (Actually, Jamie once hit a real birdie putt, in a “scramble” event in which foursomes play whichever ball is in the best position. One guy in our foursome got us onto the fairway, I got us onto the green, and Jamie canned a snaking eight-footer on an undulating green. And there was much rejoicing.)
But though Jamie’s skill as a golfer is surprising and thrilling to Jamie, and to me, ultimately, it’s not the point. To make the point, I have to go back to the guy who invited me to play with him in 1997, the guy who was responsible for reviving my interest in the game. He was and is a much better golfer than I am, but he was 180 degrees from Jamie as a playing partner. For the most part, we would both bogey holes: he would hit a perfect drive and good approach shot, chip onto the green, and lip out a six-foot putt; I would drive into the trees and hack an iron into no-man’s-land, then float a pitching wedge over various obstacles onto the green and two-putt. He was deeply offended that my 5 and his 5 were both 5s, even though he had played the game properly and I had scrambled out of regions unknown even to Seve Ballesteros. He played slowly, deliberating endlessly over every shot: one morning we were the first group to tee off at 7 a.m., and we came into the clubhouse after eighteen holes at 11:30. I remember this because the club pro glared at us when we arrived, looking pointedly at the clock and asking, “Were you two the first group out?” Our slow play insured that every single group behind us, for the rest of the day, would have rounds four hours long or longer. By contrast, if Jamie and I have no one in front of us, we play eighteen in a crisp, clean three and a half hours.
At Belles Springs, we played often enough—perhaps ten or fifteen times in a summer—for Jamie to become recognizable to the staff. One elderly greenskeeper actually became weepy at the idea that Jamie was a regular. As Jamie and I pulled up to the first tee, he asked incredulously whether Jamie was going to play, and when I replied, “Oh yes, he comes here often, and plays from the red tees,” he got visibly misty. And as the pro shop got cooler and cooler with Jamie, I realized after seeing a couple of curiously low numbers on my monthly credit card statement that they were not charging him to play. I was deeply ambivalent about this. It was so, so sweet of them to let Jamie play for free. The contrast with Penn State, where they wanted to charge him just for riding in the cart, could not have been more stark. But still. Once I realized that Jamie had been given a play-Belles-Springs-for-free card, I insisted to the pro shop that he was playing the course tee to green like everybody else, and should pay greens fees like everybody else. Jamie agreed.
With a proviso: part of our pre-game routine at Belles Springs involved Jamie putting on the practice green while I paid up and loaded the cart with our bags. Then I would hit the practice green for five or ten minutes while Jamie went into the snack shop and bought himself a Gatorade and a Slim Jim. I would give him five bucks, and he would come back with the change. That routine lasted until the year we played Belles Springs after Jamie had learned how to use his debit card. One humid summer day in 2013, I finished my practice putts and drove the cart to the first tee as Jamie emerged from the clubhouse with his Gatorade and Slim Jim—even though I had not given him any money. “Wait a minute, Jamie,” I said. “How did you pay for those? You don’t have any dollars.” (Jamie refers to cash as “dollars,” which makes sense enough for me.)
“In Clinton County you don’t have to,” he replied. I had a funny feeling that wasn’t true, though I was charmed that Jamie had decided that the snacks-for-free policy was a county-wide phenomenon.
“Wait right here,” I said, dashing into the clubhouse. The snack bar was closed, and all snack transactions were being handled at the bar by a middle-aged woman whose charming bartending demeanor was a nineteenth-hole version of the Do you want more coffee with that, honey? roadside-diner waitress.
I hailed her with “Uh, hi.” She recognized me as Jamie’s father. We nodded. “I’m sorry to bother you, but was my son just in here trying to buy Gatorade and a Slim Jim?”
“Oh, we don’t take debit cards,” she replied. “It’s perfectly all right. He’s fine.”
“Thank you,” I said, slightly flustered. “That’s very kind. But really, I insist.” I forked over all of the $3.50 they were willing to forgo on Jamie’s behalf.
And it was very kind, as was the pro shop guy’s decision not to charge Jamie to play. But really, if the point of this little experiment in inclusive cultural politics is to show that Jamie can participate in social and recreational activities like everybody else, then surely Jamie should participate in social and recreational activities like everybody else. I love the fact that the staff at the Belles Springs golf course welcomes Jamie. And even though I don’t want Jamie to be inspirational, I was touched by the greenskeeper who was touched by the thought that Jamie could make his own way around the course. And amused that the bartender would give him a wink and a free Gatorade and Slim Jim. I don’t think they were treating him as a charity case; I think they were treating him as a friend, a special friend. But in social situations like this, I’d prefer that Jamie not be “special.” I’d prefer that he be ordinary. Just another golfer. A regular. Like every other golfer, he should pay for his round and pay for his snacks. Even if, unlike every other golfer, he does not get frustrated with the game.
From 2006 to 2010, Jamie took tang soo do classes at the local YMCA, under the direction of Master Terry Summers. From 2002 to about 2008, he took “therapeutic” horseback-riding lessons at a local farm, under the auspices of Easter Seals. Each of these activities enhanced his coordination and his self-confidence, and each of them involved what might have been serious injuries.
The horseback-riding adventure is a mystery to me, because I had nothing to do with it. I am horribly allergic to horses, having had a near-death experience in a stable at the age of twenty. It is ridiculous how sensitive I am: it is as if merely looking at pictures of horses can cause my alveoli to shut down. So Janet took Jamie to riding lessons, where we quickly learned that he had no sense whatsoever about how to guide a horse, no idea what to do with the reins. Undaunted, Janet attached strings to a swivel chair in my study and had Jamie practice pulling one string and then the another, labeling them “right” and “left.” Within weeks, Jamie got the hang of it; within months he had learned how to use his feet to signal a horse as well. He could ease a horse into a trot, which was as fast as the kids were allowed to go, and he was very pleased with himself. I saw him ride exactly twice, once from a distance, once from inside the family car. He looked great. He and Janet got riding helmets and developed a protocol for their weekend visits to the farm.
Riding gave Jamie a better sense of coordination and proprioception; it also taught him how to groom and care for horses. Jamie quickly became adept at the pre-riding and post-riding rituals, and about the process by which one establishes rapport with a large, powerful animal. Jamie was fearless and sensitive; the horses liked him. But finally, the thing we feared might happen happened: Jamie fell off his horse. There were other horses and riders in the ring at the time, so quite apart from the fall itself, this was potentially dangerous. But Jamie, being Jamie, immediately sprang to his feet and cried out, “Ta-DA!”—much to everyone’s delight and relief.
And yet another cliché came to life: yep, when you fall off a horse, the best thing to do is to get right back on.
Tang soo do was Jamie’s idea, no doubt part of his lifelong desire to be like Nick. From the start, Master Summers was completely comfortable with having a student with a disability, but it quickly became apparent that Jamie didn’t have the coordination to execute some of the basic moves, and many of the various commands confused him. So, deep sigh, I agreed to sign up for the class as well and help him learn the ways of the martial arts.
This was not something I wanted to do, but it was so obviously necessary that I didn’t hesitate. We began as white belts in August 2006, becoming members of the World Tang Soo Do Association, taking tests and getting certificates and reading the student manual. We learned the seven tenets of Tang Soo Do: integrity, concentration, perseverance, respect and obedience, self-control, humility, and indomitable spirit. (The last of these comes in handy when you have not hit a decent golf shot in over an hour, as I mentioned above. And all of them have their uses: more than once, when Jamie refused to get ready for bed or take a shower or clean up his room, I reminded him of the respect and obedience part. Though I did so with humility and self-control.) By December, Jamie had gotten a “most improved” award; over the next few years, he consistently scored 6s and 7s in his pretests (good to very good), except in the “overall attitude” category, where he was always a perfect 10.
What’s really striking about Jamie’s overall attitude, and his indomitable spirit, is that in one of the very first sessions he and I participated in, he dislocated his right knee while trying to do a back kick. Neither of us ever managed to do very convincing back kicks, and for Jamie, the combination of the turn-pivot-leg thrust proved to be a serious challenge. That night in September 2006, as we made our way up and down the gym floor doing back kicks, Jamie wiped out, losing his balance and hitting the hardwood with a thud. That was alarming enough, but when he looked at me, his face pallid and stricken with pain, and whispered, “My knee,” I rolled up his pant leg and found that his patella had shifted to the side of his leg. I can’t begin to imagine how painful that was. The class stopped dead. Other students began to gather around. Panicked, I popped the patella back into place and helped Jamie to his feet; he couldn’t put any weight on the leg, so I half-carried him off the floor while someone ran to get an ice pack.
Life as Jamie Knows It Page 15