Final Rounds

by James Dodson

  “Of course he doesn’t like it!” I shouted back at her, thinking of how desolate I’d feel if my own regular group of buddies and bandits suddenly vanished from my life. “That’s why these clubs I sent him are so important. They’ll help subdue those dangerous young turks!”

  “In that case, maybe you should send them again,” she suggested primly. “I’ll speak to him.”

  I mailed the high-tech super senior wonder clubs to North Carolina the next morning, along with the check; he sent the clubs back to Maine the next week. The only people prospering from this long-distance minuet, I began to realize, were the boys in brown from United Parcel Service.

  “Dear Bo,

  Again, many thanks. I just don’t think these clubs are right for me. Maybe I’m just too sentimentally attached to my old Wilsons. After all, we’ve been down a lot of fairways together. (Ha ha.) I do appreciate you thinking about me, though. When’s your next research trip? Any chance you’ll be coming this way? I’d enjoy a chance to pin your ears back on the course. Love, Dad.”

  Opti the Mystic had spoken. Ha ha.

  I donated the clubs to the church’s summer auction committee, hoping somebody could find use for them.

  —

  The poet Ovid said we give gifts to try and seduce men and the gods.

  Seduction was obviously my game. Deep in my heart, I knew that. With those clubs, I wanted to seduce my father into believing he could still compete in the most difficult and fulfilling game of all. I wanted his game to rediscover its vigor and the golf gods to grant us a bit more time on the links together.

  We had been golf pals for thirty years, ever since he put the club in my hand at about age ten, showed me the Vardon grip, and introduced me to the complicated splendors of the game he loved most. Like Tom Watson, I can remember the day my father invited me to play with him at his club as if it were yesterday. I was thirteen, the age Mark Twain says boys begin to imitate the best and worst traits of their fathers. I barely broke 100.

  Thirteen is the age of manhood in most cultures. My father helped me become a man, and golf showed me the way. But it wasn’t easy. I threw a lot of tantrums in those days. I threw a lot of clubs, too. Early on, I cheated, shaved my scores, ignored rules I found stupid or inconvenient. I didn’t wish to play golf so much as conquer it. As I look back, I don’t know how my father tolerated these volcanic outbursts. I was so impatient and in such a rush to reach the future somewhere down the fairway and finally be good that he would sometimes place a hand on my shoulder to slow my pace and urge me to “relax and enjoy the round. The game ends far too soon, Bo.”

  I didn’t have a clue what he really meant. He was given to pronouncements like that, an adman with a poet’s heart.

  Watching me flail at the game, he once observed, “The peculiar thing about this game—any game really, but this game far more than most—is, the more you fight it, the more it eludes you. Everything contains its opposite. By trying to make something magical happen, you create the opposite effect—you drive the magic away. When you worry about finding the way, you lose the path. Someone said the way to heaven is heaven. A little less is a lot more.”

  He sounded so damn sure about this, I almost hated him for it. Once when I was sulking about a skulled shot, he made me lie down on the golf course. It was so embarrassing—a group of men were back on the tee waiting to hit—but I did it anyway. “What do you feel?” he asked.

  “Really stupid,” I replied, feeling the cool, firm earth beneath my back. It felt good, but I couldn’t or wouldn’t admit that to him.

  “Then tell me what you see.”

  “Nothing. My eyes are closed.”

  “Then open them,” he suggested. “That way, you’ll see everything.”

  I didn’t begin to understand Opti’s little exercises, or his words. Not then, at any rate.

  It is the fashion these days to speak of golf as a kind of religious experience, a doorway to the spiritual side of man, an egress to the eternal. My father was a man of faith, but I don’t think he viewed the golf course as a path to God. He thought golf was a way to celebrate the divinity of life, the here and now, and simply the best way to play. He loved healthy competition and was playful to the core. During the Depression, he’d played semipro baseball and helped guide his high school football team to the state finals. Ironically, he’d made money as a caddy in those days but couldn’t afford to take up the game seriously until he went away to war and discovered the great golf links of England and Scotland.

  For thirty years my father had been the senior southern rep for the world’s largest industrial publishing firm. He’d transformed a sleepy advertising backwater into a thriving multimillion-dollar territory, becoming one of his company’s legends in the process. Both of us knew he would never give all that up and “officially” retire because he found the daily grind so rewarding and fun. To Opti, hard work was a form of play because work involved solving problems, a life view that fit the philosophy of his favorite game like a glove. Golf was the ultimate playful exercise in problem solving. The real joy of playing, he said more than once, was bound up in the mental process required to create solutions to the riddle of any particular golf shot—an unfair break, a horrendous lie in the rough, and so forth. Golf was the greatest challenge because no two golf shots were ever the same. Every situation was unique, every moment “new and pregnant with possibilities”—another of his favorite phrases. In his view, this explained why the best players were almost always imaginative shot-makers—they could see the problem, create the solution, and seize the pleasure of the moment.

  To him, golf was also a character builder that could teach you valuable lessons about yourself, others, and the wide world around you. For that reason, he was a stickler for the rules, a gentle but firm rulebook Elijah. I used to hate this about him, besides all the cornball philosophizing. You marked your ball properly; you fixed dents in the green; you putted in turn; you offered to tend the pin; you congratulated an opponent on a good shot. I sensed he believed these silly courtesies were as essential to the game as oxygen, but I suffocated under their constriction.

  One day I missed a short putt and slammed my putter into the lush surface of the fifteenth green at Green Valley Golf Club, my father’s club. He grew silent, then calmly insisted that I leave the golf course. To add insult to injury, he made me walk straight into the clubhouse, report my crime, and apologize to the head pro. The head pro’s name was Aubrey Apple. He was a large man with a smoldering stump of cigar jammed in a corner of his mouth. A profane legend in Carolina golf circles and a teacher who had sent several fine players into the professional rank, Apple called kids like me “Valley Rats.” When I’d reported my crime, the pro shifted the smoldering stump to the other corner of his mouth. “You’re Brack Dodson’s kid, ain’t cha?” My father’s name was Brax Dodson but it didn’t seem like the right moment to correct him. I merely nodded. “Anybody who beats up my golf greens,” Apple said, “is a little shit. We don’t need any little shits out here.” He then summarily banished me from the golf course for two weeks. This verdict was torture, like a death sentence.

  Eventually, when I calmed down and grew up, golf became much more than a game between my old man and me. It acted as my personal entry hatch to my father’s morally advanced cosmos—a means of seeing who this funky, funny, oddball philosopher really was, and who I needed to become. I know no other game that would have permitted us the opportunity to compete so thoroughly, so joyfully, for so long. The golf course—any golf course, anywhere—became our playground and refuge, the place where we sorted things out or escaped them altogether, debated without rancor, found common ground, discovered joy, suspended grief, competed like crazy, and took each other’s pocket change.

  We played the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and the day Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis. We played the day before I got married, and the day after my son Jack was born. We played through rain, wind, heat, birth, death.
We played on holidays, birthdays, to celebrate nothing and everything, so many rounds in so many places, I couldn’t possibly remember them all. We played some of the best courses in America, and some of the worst cow pastures and goat tracks, too. We discovered that in good company there is no such thing as a bad golf course.

  We preferred to play late in the day, following our shadows in the last of the light, the fairway ahead of us robed in hues of red and gold and very often deserted. You could see the contours of the earth so well then, feel the coolness of approaching night, perhaps witness a sliver of moon rising over the creek poplars. Our routine almost never varied. My father would leave work early, I would ride my bike to the club, with my bag swaying on my back. After the round, he would put my bike in the trunk of his car. Sometimes we would grab dinner at the Boar and Castle on the way home, sit eating our Castle steaks in the rustling grapevine arbor while eavesdropping on the murmurous voices of teenage lovers in the musky foliage around us, or sit in the glowing foxfire of the Buick’s radio, listening to the evening news report. There were race riots going on in Memphis and Miami one summer. A full-blown war was raging in Southeast Asia. Poor people marched on Washington, Bobby Kennedy was shot. A tidal wave of so much news—and yet so far away from us. A couple times, we stayed out on the golf course to look at stars. My father knew the constellations. He showed me Venus, the evening star, Aries the ram, how to find the North Star if I was ever lost in the woods. I never got lost in the woods, but I loved those times and never even knew it. It’s as if I were sleepwalking and he was inviting me to awaken.

  This pattern of play, this communion of being, carried us straight through my college years and into my first reporter’s job at the same newspaper where he’d begun as a copy runner in the early 1930s. For years we would meet at a golf course somewhere, get in nine, sometimes eighteen before dusk. We walked and carried our bags. Later we took carts, to spare his legs. We did this for years up and down the East Coast, in big cities and small towns. We found this a great time to talk. No topic was out of bounds: sex, women, God, career, money. We argued intensely about Nixon’s Cambodian policy, TV evangelists, the fate of the modern novel, orange golf balls. We had epic putting duels on darkened putting greens, in motel rooms, in the lobbies of his business clients.

  Jung said children dream their fathers’ dreams. In those private moments of play, something ordained my future and sealed my fate. As a boy, I dreamed of being either an actor or a classical guitarist; I grew up instead to become a political journalist, a job I worked hard at for a while before having the good fortune to become a golf writer. More important, at several particularly difficult moments in my life, when I drifted away from the game and even seemed to lose sight of my life’s purpose, my old man was always there to shepherd me back to golf, and myself.

  Out of the blue he would call up, make a joke, challenge me to a round. He always said he was going to pin my ears back, though he seldom did. He wasn’t just my best golf pal, but my best friend.

  That’s really something. I see that now. As a father of small children myself, I perhaps know some of what he knew, felt, and understood way back then: that we really get only a few precious moments to connect before the magic vanishes. Not surprisingly, I read my children the same storybooks my father read me. The Just So Stories, Treasure Island, Stuart Little. Their overwhelming favorite, as it was mine—written by a Scotsman to entertain his niece—is about a boy who lives to duel a notorious pirate in Neverland, a lad who refuses to grow up because life outside that magical realm where no one visibly ages or has to eat their veggies is clearly no fun. Only when Peter Pan fails to believe in happy thoughts does he fail to fly.

  The truth is, when my father sent back the new golf clubs, I couldn’t bear to think he and I had played our final rounds together. That’s why I’d tried to bribe both him and the golf gods.

  A child’s belief is so strong, an adult’s so fragile. At forty, I was still my father’s child, and I told myself we had unfinished business in Neverland—somewhere out on the golf course. If we believed that, we could still fly.

  —

  It was not until the next October—far too long to suit my tastes—that we played again. I’d been working hard, traveling a lot, trying to figure out why it was that whenever I was in some glorious, glamorous golf place, I spent so much of my time thinking about home, worrying about my children and my roses, both of which require a lot of hands-on attention.

  Two of my colleagues at Golf Magazine invited me to join them for a round at Pinehurst Number 2, the marvelous Donald Ross course where Opti and I had played many rounds over the years. The course was one of his favorites. I invited my father to join us, and he agreed.

  The day was raw, wet, and cold, and everyone’s game was off, but my father’s was really desolate. He topped balls and missed putts he could once have made with his eyes shut. At one point I was passing a steep fairway bunker when I heard him sheepishly call my name. I turned and saw him asking me for a hand up. I reached and took his hand. It was trembling ever so slightly. My heart almost broke on the spot.

  We attempted to joke off the disaster on the hour drive home. I told Dad those super senior clubs he rejected would have saved his skin, and he said at least nobody died in the train wreck. We rode along for a little while in silence, looking at the slick road and rainy countryside. He seemed as down as I’d ever seen him. Then an idea came to me.

  “Let’s take a trip,” I said.

  “What trip?”

  “The trip we always talked about. The one we never took.”

  He glanced at me and steered Old Blue, his ancient barge-sized Cadillac, around a farmer pulling a hay wagon.

  “Don’t you remember?” I said.

  “Of course. But you go there all the time.”

  “I go there all the time by myself,” I corrected him. “I’ve never been there with you. We’ve got some unfinished business.”

  “I suppose so.” He managed to conceal his enthusiasm for the idea. I hoped his rotten day on the course accounted for this.

  In any event, that’s where it really began, the first step in our final golf journey—a trip to the places where he learned to play golf as a sergeant in the Eighth Army Air Corps during the war. “There” was St. Andrews, the birthplace of the game. Thousands of golfers went there every year. But we hadn’t. It was now or never and almost that simple.

  But nothing is really that simple. I knew not to push my father on the subject. Things were obviously changing fast in his life. Losing his golf pals had merely revealed his mortality. I sensed a powerful urgency in him to tie up loose ends, to finish whatever needed finishing at home and in his life and work.

  We didn’t speak of it again for months. I got on with my own life, telling myself I’d planted a proper seed. What else could I do? I hoped—I even prayed—it would grow.

  —

  Life is weather, someone said. Life is meals—in my case lots of airplane meals. Almost before I realized it, summer had come again to Maine, and the routines of my own family’s life had nudged thoughts of the trip to the back of my mind. Due to the wet spring, my roses had grown into a tumult of blossoms and thorns that badly needed pruning. But on the plus side, and seemingly overnight, my daughter Maggie had learned to swim in a tea-colored lake, while Jack had taken to stalking around the yard making surprisingly Hoganesque swings at pine cones, half-chewed golf balls, and the occasional sleeping golden retriever, with a cut-down seven-iron he mysteriously called his “outside club.”

  The mystery resolved itself when I heard him call his cut-down putter his “inside club.” Of course, I thought. That’s exactly what it is. During telecasts of golf tournaments, you see, I sometimes practiced my putting on the living-room rug, and the kids, bored with further demolishing their rooms and finger painting the dog, occasionally joined in. Jack never lasted long—the game was obviously too sedate for him. Maggie, on the other hand, displayed signs of becoming a pu
tting prodigy, which perhaps explains why she felt compelled to reveal gleefully to her entire kindergarten class that her father had a job “watching golf on TV.” On parents’ night, her teacher leaned forward and confided, “My husband would love to have your job. Do you get to play golf with Jack Norman? Ed adores him.”

  “I’m sorry. Who?” I was pretty sure she meant Greg Norman.

  “The one they call the White Shark.”

  Unfortunately no, I hated to admit to her. I said Maggie mostly got it right. When I wasn’t watching the world’s finest golfers perform in person, I was usually watching them on the tube. I left out the uninteresting part about flying forty thousand miles a year, renting the same tired rental cars, and staying in the same tired hotel rooms as I raced either to conduct an interview or to see a golf resort and then raced home.

  For some reason many airports are located next to golf courses, and frequently that spring and summer, when I was doing that part of my job, I found myself gazing from a plane window at an unmistakable oasis of green, a familiar patchwork of fairways below, idly wondering if my father had completely forgotten about the golf trip I’d proposed. I heard nothing about it from his end. Hope began to fade. Maybe I would offer to take Ed instead.

  Stories about the fiftieth anniversary of the Allied invasion of France began to crop up on the news. Reunions were about to happen, old paratroopers were mustering for a jump in Belgium. Clinton went to Normandy. I went off to California to interview a young tour player somebody said would be the next Nicklaus, which usually guarantees nobody will remember him in another ten years.

  Then one day in early July, the phone rang. It was Opti. We made our usual lighthearted banter about the state of the world and the decline of civilization as we knew it for a few minutes, then he paused and said:

  “Okay. You set the whole thing up, and we’ll go. Let’s shoot for late summer, after all the D-Day hoopla has settled down.”

  “Great,” I said without hesitation, knowing exactly what he was talking about, trying not to sound too pleased. My elation was so strong, I actually felt light-headed and couldn’t have been happier if Greg Norman had called up inviting me to play golf and borrow his yacht for the weekend.