by James Dodson
A little while later, Dad said, “You know what I’d really like, Jim? I’d like to crawl in bed with your mother.”
“You got it.”
I woke up my mother and carried my father to their bed. Switching off the light, I heard my mother planting soft kisses on her husband’s face. Her voice had a girlish cant. “You scoot over here, hon, and let’s snuggle, just you and me. There now. Warm enough?” His reply possessed more strength than I had heard or seen for days. “Yes. Thanks. Delighted to be in bed with you.”
“My goodness, sweetie, you need a shave.”
The next day, he asked me to give him a shave.
I shaved my father with his own safety razor, slipping glances at his eyes. His pale gray eyes were even paler, farther away. They made me think of Gorky’s description of the dying Tolstoy: He listens attentively as though recalling something which he has forgotten, or as though for something new and unknown.
Afterward, while he slept, I went out to see a man who gave hot-air balloon rides for weddings, anniversaries, and other “special occasions,” it turned out, except dying. He couldn’t believe I wanted to take my dying father up in a hot-air balloon. There were insurance considerations.
“I’ll pay you twice your normal fee, sign a waiver, whatever’s necessary,” I pressed him. “Just a few minutes up in the air. You, my father, my mother, and a little bottle of good French wine.” Something new and unknown.
He thought about it, chewing his lip. Then he consulted a schedule log, shrugged, and said he was booked until April. He smiled apologetically. He said he might be able to do something for me in April.
—
Buddhists and Native American people believe the way a person dies tells the story of how he lived. To them, dying is a living art, the beginning of further passage to something new and unknown.
For a change, I tried not to think too much about the future, what was going to happen to my mother after my father was gone, how our lives would change, how I would feel. As a child, my greatest unspoken fear was that my father would somehow just disappear. I don’t know where this illogical terror came from. He never gave me the slightest reason to believe it might happen. As I grew from boy to man and then to middle-aged man with children of his own, he was always there.
Now, as my father slipped away, I simply could not imagine a world without him in it. As long as your father is alive, someone said, you will always be a son.
My father’s younger brothers arrived. First Jim, then Bob, then Ben. They sat with my aging aunts on the den couch and talked about the trials of their own grown families while my mother, alternately smiling and hiding out in the kitchen, went slowly out of her mind. The television played throughout, a mindless electronic treacle of Regis and Kathie Lee, soaps, Jenny Jones, weight-loss infomercials, Murphy Brown retreads. As more people arrived and the conversation swelled to a dull roar, the local noon news came on, reporting that a local high school star quarterback had been arrested for participating in a drive-by shooting. There was a chance of sleet in the forecast. The ACC tournament, just getting under way, had brought record crowds to town.
My uncle Jim glanced at me. He and I were the only two in the room watching the news, wondering about the outside world. Jim was my favorite uncle, perhaps because he favored my father, his older brother, in so many ways. They were closest in age and eerily similar in worldview and temperament. I thought of Jim as Opti, Jr. He had been the best man at my parents’ wedding. He came over and sat beside me on the couch. News of the gangbanger quarterback reminded him that he and Dad had played on the same high school football team and even dated some of the same girls and had fallen in love with flying at about the same time as teenagers. “The thing about your dad,” he said, smiling wistfully, “was he was always so interested in everything around him…” and then Jim’s words simply stopped. His eyes filled with emotion. He couldn’t finish the sentence.
I patted his knee. He patted mine and then got up and disappeared into my old bedroom to sit and talk with his sleeping brother. He came back a while later, wiping his eyes.
My uncle Bob was of sterner stuff, a devout Southern Baptist, a forest ranger who believed in original sin. He was a good and kind man, though very different from my father in the way he looked at the world and considered his frail fellow creatures. Pulling me aside, with his arm around my shoulders, Bob asked me in all seriousness if I thought my father “had a right relationship with Jesus.”
His unexpected question made me think of Dad on our trip to Scotland, burrowed into his Bible and doggedly searching for some perfect nugget of Scripture for his men’s Bible class. I smiled at Bob, slipped my arm around his back, and replied that I thought Dad and Jesus would get along just fine, but Jesus had better steer clear of the putting green with Opti the Mystic if he knew what was good for him. Otherwise, I said, Jesus would be buying supper.
Bob laughed nervously at my little irreverence. He said I had a “sly sense of humor” just like my father.
I thanked him.
My uncle Ben, the family baby, was standing nearby listening. He laughed at this exchange, looking a little like an aging Robert Kennedy, all big front teeth and curly thin hair. He and my aunt Bernice were childless. Their dog Goldie was waiting in the car. Though Ben had once taken me flying over Miami in his plane, he was the uncle I really didn’t know.
They meant so well—the waiting uncles and the visiting neighbors who came by with thoughtful casseroles no one had the appetite to touch and sat for an eternity and made friendly chitchat and asked if I still played the guitar and wanted to know the details of my career and my own growing family and what it was like to live in Maine in the winter. One plump elderly friend of my mother’s who had blue-rinsed hair and a voice like a Portland harbor foghorn sat talking about all the PGA Tour stars she’d met at the GGO over the years. As she rambled on, my mind slipped back to the tranquil golden glade at Compiegne. At that moment I wished like the dickens my father could have been with me there—and then realized he had been.
“So what’s he really like?” the woman demanded, batting her lushly overpainted eyelashes at me.
“Who?” I asked from the edge of La Forêt de l’Amour.
“Jack Nicklaus.”
“I haven’t a clue,” I said, adding: “I sell coffins.”
“What?” She gave me a horrified look.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was just an old joke. It seems to work for a friend of mine.” I told her Jack Nicklaus was great. Everything you expect the oft-called player of the century to be—even if I personally ranked him somewhere after Bobby Jones and Sam Snead. I smiled at her, hoping she would just go away like the fog.
The truth was, with all due respect, I wanted them all to go away and leave us alone. Death is so exhausting. I began to look forward to the lonely overnight cable vigils with my father and brother. Next to the daytime crowd, the nighttime crowd—with their miracle car-wax finishes and mail-order prosthetic limb discounts—seemed almost tolerable.
We watched an old Jeff Chandler western together, followed by an infomercial for Hollywood psychics, followed by Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz peddling a video golf instruction series, followed by mud wrestling live from a Houston bar! By then, my brother Dick was asleep in the other easy chair. I knew this was hitting him very hard. He had just gone through a difficult divorce and was working hard to keep my father’s business together.
My father finally dozed off, too. I carried him to bed, and he opened his eyes. “What are you doing here?” he asked, surprised.
“Putting you in your bed.”
“I don’t want to be in this bed.”
“I know. But you need to rest, and I’m supposed to make sure you get some.”
He asked me why I was being so mean to him.
“I’m not being mean,” I said. “I love you.”
“Why don’t you go paint the house,” he suggested.
“Okay. What color shall
I paint it?”
“Carolina blue.”
I smiled. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” A loyal Tar Heel to the end. I sat on the edge of the bed until he was asleep, mulling it over.
The next day, a Friday, Carolina got knocked out in the ACC basketball tournament. I decided not to break the news to Opti. Besides, his mind was already somewhere new and unknown. Certain mystics believe that a calm meditative state as death approaches is the closest a human being can get to true enlightenment. When my father asked me where we were, I explained we were still inside our house on Dogwood Drive.
“No,” he said with great conviction, “There’s Uncle Jimmy’s gate.” He was smiling at the wall but seeing a gate in his grandfather’s pasture.
I looked at the wall and said, “Oh, yeah. How ’bout that?” He asked me for some water, and I brought it. Taking a sip, he said, “That’s good spring water. We have an excellent well, don’t we?”
“The best,” I agreed.
That night the heavy rain turned to sleet, glass shards bouncing off the mullioned windows. Around midnight, Dad sat up and pulled out his catheter, I replaced it, and he yanked it out again. “Stop that, please,” I said. “Did you paint the house yet?” he asked, giving the line another tug. His strength surprised me. My brother arrived, and we more or less held him in place until the hospice technician arrived with a strong sedative.
“I don’t think it’s the physical pain that’s bothering him,” Dick observed. “I think he just wants to get up and roam around a final time.”
He was right, of course. Dad’s indefatigable will was putting up a final heroic struggle even as his physical strength ebbed away.
I sat with a finger plugged into a hole in my father’s abdomen, waiting for the suppository pain-killer to melt, listening to the sleet ricochet off the windows. I noticed his lips were making little pursing movements. He was finally calm again. “What are you doing?” I asked, not really expecting an answer. He replied with a peaceful whisper: “Kissing the babies.”
Other people arrived, pastors, neighbors bringing more covered dishes, people I recognized from my childhood, and a steady procession of people I’d never met before who acted as if my father had been their best friend. A woman smelling intensely of Giorgio explained my father had once fixed her flat tire right in the parking lot of the Harris Teeter supermarket and they’d become “grocery store buddies” after that. “Him and me had a regular little thing going,” she said, giving me a wink.
The Tracy kids came, all grown up now—Mimi, Pam, Bobby, and his wife Claire. We talked about good times at Sedgefield and remembered how we’d tagged after Palmer and Snead and how Mimi’s boyfriends had seemed to all drive littered sports cars and how Pam had once drunk paint. I told them how vast their house had seemed to me as a child, but how modest as a man—almost as if time had shrunk it. Mimi, a senior flight attendant for Delta, explained that she’d recently gone up to the house and knocked on the door and been given a tour by the nice man who lived there now. “Afterward,” she said, “I just bawled my eyes out.”
Bill Mims and Bob Tilden, Dad’s oldest golf pals, dropped by. They seemed pleased to hear that Dad had thought of them one day at Turnberry. Bob confirmed the funny story about nearly killing himself with a driver, then went in to say good-bye to my father.
“Are you aware,” Mims said to me, leaning close as he waited, “that your dad invented a famous golf shot? It’s true. It’s called the Oh Shit shot. Unfortunately, he could only do it when I was his playing partner.” Bill squeezed my shoulder and smiled at me and stepped into Dad’s bedroom. He came out blinking and wiping his eyes.
That night, a rainswept Sunday, Dad opened his eyes and looked at me. I was surprised by his sudden alertness.
“Hey, Opti,” I said.
“I was just thinking about something. You should take Jack and Maggie to Shinnecock instead of me. They would love that.”
“We’ll see.”
“Good.” He nodded, closed his eyes, and then opened them again as if he’d remembered something.
“Is that rain?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll be fine in the morning. Go kiss your wife.”
I assured him I wasn’t worried. I said I would kiss my wife. These were the last words I heard my father say.
—
Several hours later, on a sunny March morning after days of soaking rain, I saw Mr. Andy, my father’s gardener, who was from Cambodia, park his little truck out front. I walked out to tell him my father had died overnight.
Mr. Andy’s English was no better than my French, but with tears welling above his tanned angular cheeks, he began telling me how my father and mother had given his family clothes and other things when they first resettled in America. He hugged me, then marched off to speak to my mother before running the aerator over the front yard.
Cars began pulling up on the street again, uncles were coming back, more casseroles and strangers arriving. My mother, after weeks of almost dazed inactivity, now sprang into management overdrive mode, bustling about the house with renewed Germanic energy. I was glad to see it—but I was nearly flayed.
I simply got in Old Blue and left. It was, as Dad had said it would be, a fine day in Carolina. I drove to a golf discount shop on Battleground Avenue and carried my father’s old Wilson irons inside and asked the clerk if he could regrip them for me. He said he could have them for me by noon. Then I called my oldest friend, Pat McDaid. I’d avoided seeing Pat the entire time I’d been home, but I wanted to see him now.
Moreover, I wanted to play him in a golf match.
He picked me up, and we drove to a public course called Longview. It was not a good course—basically what we used to call a “goat farm,” with fairways full of wild onions and roundtop greens you could practice your chipping on. But thanks to the crowds in town for the ACC tournament, all the better courses were booked solid. Longview could have been Augusta National for all I noticed or cared.
Pat’s an excellent player who thrives on trying to beat me in any game. Our sports rivalry spanned thirty years. It started on the basketball court behind his father’s house (a block from mine) when we were ten, spread to touch football games in the street, and somehow wound up on the golf course. For years I thrashed his brains out in golf. Then he started practicing and getting better. One day a few years ago he sank a miraculous ninety-foot downhill left-to-right breaker to beat me, a la Opti the Mystic, and fell to the ground laughing insanely. After that, our matches were forever too close to call. He was a brilliant Irishman full of blarney, and I dearly loved him.
I don’t have a clue who won our match the day my father died. Pat swears he doesn’t either. His own father was dying, and we talked about that and other things, I guess, though neither of us can recall what was said. The sun was warm, the grass was new, spring had come. It was a tolerable day, and Pat was a tolerable opponent, and that, under the circumstances, supplied all that I could reasonably have desired in the way of entertainment.
THIRTEEN
Dust to Dust
Thinking of his father, Curtis Strange broke down and wept when he won the U.S. Open.
On summer evenings as a child, Larry Mize used to practice chip shots in the front yard with his father, aiming to hit a narrow spot on the grass—eerily presaging the low chip shot he struck from an impossible lie many years later, to snatch a playoff victory in the Masters from Greg Norman.
Tom Watson sometimes heard his father’s voice urging him to keep his head still during putts, while Nicklaus’s father, an Ohio pharmacist, drilled into his son the importance of relentlessly practicing. Payne Stewart has two majors under his belt, but the tournament that means the most to him, he’ll tell you, is his first win at Quad Cities in 1982—because his father Bill, who died of cancer a short time later, was there to witness it. Mark O’Meara is on record as saying his happiest moment on a golf course came when he won Pebble Be
ach with his father as an amateur playing partner. With Peter Jacobsen, golf was a family afffair. “Everybody played and competed with everybody else,” he recalls. “Gosh, it was fun.” Guy Boros’s late father Julius put the club in his son’s hand at about age ten, telling him simply “to always have fun.” Guy was leading a tournament in Texas when he learned his father had collapsed and died of a heart attack. Guy played on, as his father would have wanted, holding back tears. He failed to win the tournament but made a lot of admirers.
Ben Crenshaw’s father Charlie, an Austin lawyer, took Ben to see Harvey Penick when Ben was six. Penick told Ben to “go knock the ball around just to see if you like it.” He did. “I regard that time as the nicest time of my life,” Crenshaw once told me.
It is surprising, over the years, how often the mention of a parent has worked its way into my interviews with the world’s greatest players. Every player’s story was different, but somewhere in the narrative a parent seemed to play the critical role of bringing the child to the game. The stories of sons and daughters who followed their fathers into the game are as commonplace and compelling as the game itself—the Palmers, the Nicklauses, the Watsons, the Floyds, the Stocktons, the Loves.
Glenna Vare followed her dad to the golf course one summer morning in Providence, picking up an old spoon and giving it a swing. Her first drive, at age eleven, flew a hundred yards. Her father saw something and encouraged it. LPGA Hall of Famer Joanne Carner’s father did odd jobs around a country club just so his daughter could follow her dream of being a great amateur player; she became a legend in the process. Ditto Patty Berg, Louise Suggs, Betsy Rawls—a supportive parent brought them to the golf course and said just play. Nancy Lopez, Betsy King, and Beth Daniel tell similar tales. Patty Sheehan’s papa Bobo used to help lay out a makeshift course for his sons and daughter to play on around the family house in Vermont, and all these years later he can still be seen tagging faithfully after his daughter’s large, admiring galleries.