The Cost of These Dreams
Page 39
THE TURN
Three months later, I got the call. I was in Pittsburgh for a Chelsea–AS Roma soccer game. Mama was crying. They’d run some tests, and the results were in.
“It’s cancer,” she sobbed.
Two months later, he felt bad and went to the hospital. The doctors weren’t too worried. Mama and Daddy asked, “Do we need to call the boys?” Love is a strange thing—you go from a fraternity dance to the altar of a church to a cold hospital room, asking: Is one of us about to die? The doctors said no.
They were wrong.
As I sat in Kansas City, watching the movie Miracle, my father passed away. It was only a few days away from our return fishing trip. My mom didn’t want to tell me until I got back to Mississippi, so she made what had to be the toughest phone call of her life. After watching her husband of 34 years take his final breath, she called me and said it didn’t look good and that I needed to bring a suit. I refused to pack funeral clothes, holding out hope.
The next morning, I landed in Memphis and took the escalator down to the baggage claim. I saw my brother, William, at the bottom. I smiled and waved. He just shook his head. At that moment, my mother stepped out from behind a sign. I knew.
“Your sweet daddy died,” she said.
I dropped my suitcase and cell phone. Someone got them, I guess. The next moments are fragments. A parking garage, a silent car, relatives, pats, looks away, driving, buildings, thirst, I’m really thirsty, could someone please get me some damn water, traffic, interstate on-ramp, off-ramp, driving. I could only get out one question.
“Was he scared?” I asked.
Mama shook her head no.
The funeral week was a blur. When we picked out his favorite Zegna sport coat, I went into his bathroom, holding those Masters credentials in my hands. I took them out, slipping them into the jacket pocket. If there was an Augusta National in heaven, I wanted him to get in.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I said to the air. “You didn’t get to go.”
Seven months later, I was back at Augusta. It was a hard week. I wore a pair of his shoes around the course, trying to walk it for him. I wrote a column about it for my newspaper and, as I’m doing now, tried to find some closure. Then, I believed my grief ended with the catharsis of the last paragraph. I was naive, as I found when I returned to Augusta in the coming years, finding my pain stronger each time.
Exactly a year after he died, my family gathered at home. We had a baby tree, grown from an acorn that came from the sturdy oaks in Ole Miss’s legendary Grove, where Daddy spent so many happy afternoons. We gathered at the spot where he’d sat, where he’d made his peace, and we dug a small hole, filling it in with the roots of the sapling and potting soil. I carefully patted down the earth around the stalk. Then it was done.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Outside, rain poured down, soaking the tender roots. It rained an inch, then two, then more. The creek rose. I worried about my daddy’s tree, so I went to stand guard. Soaked, cold, shivering, I stood by the tree, protecting it as I’d been unable to protect him.
I stared out past the canebrake and the brick wall and the creek. The sky was black. I wondered if Daddy was looking down on me, watching me, seeing my successes and failures. I wondered if he was proud of me. I wondered if there was a way I could still ask questions and he could still give me answers. I’d always counted on him for the answers.
“Daddy,” I said aloud, “are you out there?”
I waited, but I heard no answer, just the shattering windows of water falling from the sky.
AMEN CORNER
Maybe I’ll find those answers out here, at this place he loved so much. Is that crazy? Nothing seems crazy to me anymore. The grass shines like polished green mirrors. The flowers explode with a rainbow of shrapnel: pinks, purples, whites, yellows. Mostly, though, I see the fathers and sons, like the Livelys from Charleston, West Virginia, sitting in front of me, watching the par-3 tournament. For 15 years, he’d entered the lottery for practice-round tickets. This year, he won, and he took his two sons out of school for a day. I wanted that to be us.
Down by Ike’s Pond, television reporter Jim Gray interviews players as they leave the course. He asks what I’m working on, and when I tell him, he nods, pointing to a white-haired man sitting in the sun by the water. It’s Jerry Gray, his father, and for 16 years, he’s come with his famous son to Augusta. “It’s the only week we spend together all year,” Jim tells me, and, again, I’m jealous. It doesn’t seem fair. Sometimes, a boy needs a daddy.
I just got married about a year ago, and I knew he’d have loved to stand up at the front of that church. In a way, he was: In the pocket of my tuxedo, I carried his yellow LIVESTRONG bracelet and, as Sonia started down the aisle, I rubbed it once, just to let him know, if he was watching, that he might be gone but he wasn’t forgotten.
I just bought my first house, and I knew he’d know whether I wanted a 15-year balloon. What’s a good interest rate? How do I pick a neighborhood? What is PMI?
I’m thinking of starting a family of my own someday, and I want to know how to be a good daddy. What should I let my son do? What should I tell him about crossing the street? About sex? How do you remove a splinter without making him cry? How to make him love you more than life itself? I know he’d know the answers, especially to the last one.
So I’ve been looking. I try to find messages, things he might have left behind to lead me down the right path. I know he thought like that. For months after his death, my mother found flashlights in every room of the house. Big ones, small ones, medium-sized ones, all with fresh batteries. Then she realized: He’d put them there for when he was gone, in case she got scared in the dark, all alone.
Every now and then, I’ll discover something prescient. I have the note he left me when I visited him for what turned out to be the last time. There is a quote: “To influence people, appeal to their dreams and aspirations, not just their needs.” He wrote in blue ink: WWT, Jr, We are so glad to have you home for a few days. Love, Daddy.
Or the prayer he read at his last Thanksgiving, when we all still believed. Maybe he knew differently, for he wrote, to himself at the bottom: “What a great prayer for all of us this Thanksgiving day, and for all the tomorrows none of us can take for granted.”
But those small whispers and nudges are rare, so I try to find bits of wisdom and the comfort of his presence in the places he loved. I eat at the Mayflower Café in Jackson, Mississippi, I stay at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C., and now, I’ve come here, to this wonderful, ageless cathedral, walking up and down the perfectly manicured fairways, hoping to find a father. I walk up No. 10, crossing 15 near the grandstand, working back and forth through the pines, making my way toward Amen Corner. He first told me about it. The most amazing place in golf, he’d say reverently. Maybe he’ll be here. Maybe he knows his son is lost.
I climb the bleachers, find a spot to sit alone. As I did standing on that rainy night by the small tree, I try to talk to him. There are things I need to ask. How do you be a father? Are you proud of me?
“Daddy,” I whisper, “are you out there?”
Something amazing happens. Understand that I don’t believe in stuff like this and am certain it is a coincidence . . . but, as the words are leaving my mouth, from across the course, a roar rises from the gallery, breaking the silence, the voices collecting into throaty applause, moving through the pines until it fades away, silence returning to Amen Corner.
THE 18TH GREEN
Golfers come and go. As the sun warms my face, Jim and Jerry Gray climb the bleachers. They watch a few groups move through and, as they walk away, Jim carefully holds the rope up so his father can slip beneath it. It’s a touching moment, something a good son should do for his dad.
Watching this, I realize something. Although I relate to Jim, I also hope that someday, my boy will do the same for me. It�
�s the way with fathers and sons. The hole in your chest after losing your daddy never gets filled. You don’t get a new father. You become one yourself, and my transition from son to father is nearing completion.
I walk back. As the clubhouse gets bigger on the horizon, I see a dad and his boy standing near the 10th fairway. Both are wearing golf clothes. I see myself in that father, hoping he can mold his boy as his own daddy molded him.
It occurs to me that all my questions have already been answered. I’ve been shown how to be a daddy. I just need to throw passes a little long so he’ll have to dive. I need to make sure he doesn’t lose his stuffed animal, and I need to take him fishing, and I need to make him promise not to tell Mama. I need to make sure he knows that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar and that if it feels wrong, it is. I need to watch The Guns of Navarone with him. And I need him to lie next to me, on our tumbuckets, as I explain about a golf tournament in April in Georgia, about Amen Corner and Jack Nicklaus and I need to tell little Walter Wright Thompson III that his grandfather was a great, great man.
The clubhouse is in front of me now, and I have one final task. Once I bought my daddy shirts and windbreakers. On this afternoon, I have something different in mind. I hurry into the cavernous golf shop, past the framed posters and women’s clothes to the back of the store. This is unfamiliar territory. I search the wall for the things I want, and I ask the clerk to take them down.
I buy a tiny green Masters onesie; then I pick out a small knit golf shirt, for a toddler. I have one just like it, so, someday in the next few years, when I finally become a father myself and continue this timeless cycle, my son (daughter) can have a connection to this place that’s meant so much to me.
At the counter, the woman takes off the tags. When she sees the cute little clothes, she coos. Her words make me hopeful.
“Oh,” she gushes, “good daddy!”
APRIL 2007
Acknowledgments
Although all these stories have my byline on them, none of them are individual efforts. There is the essential work of editors—Jay Lovinger, Paul Kix, and Rachel Ullrich edited the specific stories included in this book, but there have been so many others—and of fact-checkers and other writers who helped talk me through my thoughts and the story arc. The Michael Jordan story that appears in this book is the product of an ESPN process, to be sure, but also of the night that a bunch of friends who are Washington Post reporters gathered at the Tune Inn on Capitol Hill after I’d finished my reporting but before I went home to write. That night I talked through the story arc with them, and because they’re all pros, the questions they asked and even the looks on their faces helped me understand what I needed to do when I got home. My favorite recent memory is a big lunch at Smith & Wollensky in New York with a table of writers. Those are the moments that recharge the batteries, refill the tank, whatever metaphor you want to use. I leave those gatherings feeling almost reborn. It’s funny. A writing life can be lonely, but to me it has been dominated by deep friendships and rivalries. I’ve been pushed to get better because I didn’t want to be left behind, or because there were people getting praise who I felt I was better than, or because I wanted to hold up my end of the chain in a talented, world-beating staff. There are many reasons people try to be great in this business. Every story stands alone when published, but it doesn’t stand alone from the writer’s perspective. There are an endless list of influences and motivations that mix and blur into something like a philosophy, and I’m not sure how to properly thank something so personal and hard to explain. This book doesn’t exist, and my career doesn’t exist, without friends and enemies and brothers and sisters and mentors and the endless stories that I admired and feared and longed to equal and maybe even best. I thank all of you. You know who you are.
That said . . .
None of this happens without Mama and Daddy. They raised me with curiosity, confidence, and empathy, the three most important traits in my line of work, and their belief carried me when I wanted to try to be the very best at something. I’ve written about my father a lot, but I want to say something about my mama here. She is the most selfless, kind person I have ever met. The way she handled losing my father—focusing on her two boys, who had lost a father, even while she had lost the rock and anchor of her own life—is remarkable only when viewed by people who don’t know her. She does everything with the people she loves first and foremost in her mind, lessons she learned from her own parents, who were both truly good people. Mama can hang with Hollywood directors and rock stars just as easily as she can sit with her Sunday lunch crew at Abe’s. She is truly the best person I know, and in many ways, I feel as though I succeed because she prays for me, and she’s got a lot of points built up with the Big Man. (God, not Clarence Clemons.)
None of this happens without Willie being such a devoted brother and for being such a good Japan running partner. You are the smartest person I know, and so quick to master a skill, whether video game designing or cooking or blacksmithing. Seeing the world through your eyes always makes me laugh, smile, and, in the end, feel smarter.
None of this happens without Sonia, who believes in my dreams and has made them her own, who is my first and best editor and sounding board, who is fun and funny, who is smart and kind, who is beautiful and can hang at my family Thanksgiving or in the second row at a Dead show, who is just as weird as I am but hides it better, who I am confident will be the last face I ever see in this world, which is a morbid, strange, and yet comforting thought.
None of this happens without Wallace, who has allowed me to see through the matrix and understand what matters and what doesn’t. I feel as though I will always strive to be, and fall short of being, the person she sees when she smiles at me. I am actually sad for her to realize I’m just as flawed and confused as everyone else. Right now, she sees the absolute best in me, and that makes me want to truly live up to that ideal.
None of this happens without Seth Wickersham. I don’t know where to begin. We met on the Mizzou football beat and have remained friends and brothers ever since. You help me keep the promises we made all those years ago—these drums and these guitars, you know—and the best part of my journey has been watching you take yours. I love the end of a night when there’s a Maker’s Mark and a Black Label on ice in crystal glasses and there is an unspoken, silent toast that sums up worlds of ambition and striving and work and relief and joy. I love those toasts. Thank you. For everything.
None of this happens without Jay Lovinger, my first editor at ESPN, who took a newspaper reporter and turned him into someone who, at the very least, passes for literary enough that some book editors decided to publish a collection. He saw a me that I didn’t see, and he helped shape me in the image of so many other great writers he edited through the years. Several years ago, when I switched to the incredible Paul Kix, I never really told Jay how much he’d meant to me or my career or my life. He came into my life around the time my father died, and he filled that void for me. I love you, Jay (and Gay and Wendy and Woo).
None of this happens without Scott Moyers, book editing ninja, adopted Ole Miss Rebels fan. For real, it doesn’t happen at all without his faith. Thank you, Scott.
And . . . David Black David Black David Black. The best agent in the world and a dear friend and fellow warrior.
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Index
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.
ABC’s Wide World of Sports, 180
Abel, Eric, 264, 268, 270–74, 277, 280–88
Alabama Crimson Tide, 152
Alcor (cryonics company), 273, 278–79
Ali, Muhammad
life after boxing, 113
in Miami, 93
and Singer’s autograph collection, 87–91
Allen, Briana, 241
Allen, Ray, 330
All Saints Cemetery, 323–24
All Souls’ Day, 321
Ambrose, Margaret, 242
Amen Corner, 358, 359
Americans with Disabilities Act, 210
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), 190, 199, 246–48, 262–63
Anderson, Antonio, 244–45
Arellano, Cintia, 119, 125
Armstrong, Lance, 353
Armstrong, Louis, 204–5, 209, 220, 244, 251
Arostegui, Andy, 104–5
Associated Press, 55, 62, 64–65, 88
Atlanta Braves, 147
“Atlantic City” (song), 248
AT&T National, 311
Auburn University, 74
Audubon Place, 236–37
Augusta National Golf Club, 350, 354, 356–57, 359–60. See also The Masters
B3 Consulting, 235
Back of Town, 211, 226
“Baiano” (Jose Lindemar Jesus), 30–33, 34
Banks, Sonny, 112
Barnett, Ross, 43–49, 53, 60, 70–71, 76
Barra, Allen, 142–43
Basie, Count, 93
Battle of Gettysburg, 45, 50
Bayou St. John, New Orleans, 202
Beau Jack (Sidney Walker), 92
Becate, Chief, 244–45
Begay, Notah, 293–94
Belfield, Eric, 253–55
Belfield, Eunice, 253–54
Bensel, Greg, 214
Benson, Gayle, 217–19, 236–38
Benson, Renee, 219–20, 223
Benson, Tom, 213–20, 223, 236–38, 244–46