I need to find my defiance somehow. Only defiance can banish the fear. Two weeks ago I was sailing my small boat through a storm. Black skies, wind whistling through the shrouds, every wave breaking into the cockpit, and even though there were eleven ways I could have fucked up, I was calm. Tomorrow in round one of our first event, I need to find that same calm.
Jack is across the room as I write this. I just told him that as far as I’m concerned, he’s a solid enough ball striker to hold his own here. “We’ll soon find out,” he said.
NOVEMBER 3, 2011
Game Day. Jack is sleeping like a bear at 4:00 a.m. I remember when he was little and we would stay at hotels, there always had to be a swimming pool, and he would wake me holding his blue blanket, his swimming trunks always on backward.
At 5:00 a.m., I went downstairs and rode the exercise bike a few miles to get the stiffness out of my knee. Condi Rice was on the TV news trying to justify the Iraq war. I thought of all the dreams that had been shattered there. And the dreams that had turned out to be only lies. I thought of the fathers who had lost sons and daughters there. For what, I do not know.
I woke Jack at his requested hour, 6:45, with news that somehow overnight some good, cold weather had moved in on racing winds. “It will be like Scotland out there today,” I told him. I couldn’t have been happier.
“Sounds good,” he said.
While he took his shower, I counted the clubs in his bag again to be sure that he had taken out the extra putter and the five-wood to meet the fourteen-club limit and that we had plenty of balls. Since awaking, I’d been thinking about what I could say this morning to get us both in the right frame of mind for our first event. I thought back to Scotland during the week of the Open, when I did four days of doubles in a row, most of that time in freezing-cold rain, starting each day by hitchhiking to the Castle Course before dawn with Glen, then marching for ten hours with rainwater sloshing in my shoes. Whenever I felt as if I couldn’t take another five minutes of it, I would say to myself, “It ain’t Normandy.” That might work here, it might place things into perspective, but I feel as if I owe Jack something more personal. Since making my coffee this morning, I have been running through my memory of our recent history, and I can’t remember the last time I praised him for anything. I wonder if it is possible that I am still disappointed in him for failing to win a scholarship. For fathers, it always comes down to fear, I suppose. You’re alone in the world and doing fine, and then before you know it, you’ve got a wife, and kids, and a mortgage, and the fear mounts silently like falling snow. I walked almost a thousand miles that second season in Scotland to get the anger and the fear out of my system, and it was in the past now. But why hadn’t I found some way of telling my son that it was in the past?
And this morning I began to wonder if Jack had put it in his past or if it was going to be waiting for him at the Hearthstone Country Club, on the 1st tee this morning. We bring children into this world, and from time to time they disappoint us, and we have to forgive them and bear no grudges. It has been this way since the beginning of time, and if you can’t accept these terms, you shouldn’t have children. Until this morning it had not occurred to me that our children have to strike terms of their own to get out from underneath the ways they have let us down. And maybe they need our help to do this.
Considering all that, I didn’t think that a reference to Normandy would cut it today. It wasn’t until we were walking onto the practice range to take our place among the other young men lined up there inside their solitary worlds of dreams and doubts, worlds their fathers could no longer inhabit with them, that it came to me. “No matter what happens out here today, Jack,” I said as I stood beside him cleaning the grooves on his irons, “thanks for bringing me along. Of all the cool things I’ve had the chance to do in my life, this is the coolest by far.”
“Okay” was all he said.
———
I watched him take his place on the range, and though he looked as if he belonged there and he seemed at peace with himself, I was thinking about what Colleen had said to me a hundred times across the years: “Why didn’t you encourage him to play a team sport? He was so good at baseball.” Yeah, I thought, baseball would be nice today. A dugout filled with teammates to console him.
I walked off to the men’s room to soak my towel. We had forty minutes. I could picture the first three holes clearly in my mind and the shots we were going to have to execute in order to get off to a solid start. One shot at a time, I said to myself. Driver on number 1 straight into this thirty-knot wind. We’ll be taking a seven-iron to the green instead of the wedges we’d hit in our practice rounds. The change in weather had made it a new game today. On number 2 we had hit three-woods in our practice rounds to the narrow landing area with another 40 yards to spare before the ground fell into a ravine that would be death. Now the wind was going to be behind us on that tee, and I made a note to tell Jack that a three-wood would be far too much club. No more than a five-iron this morning, I wrote in my notebook. On the 3rd hole, a 210-yard par-3, we had hit rescue clubs into the wind in both practice rounds. Today a six-iron would be plenty.
On the putting green Jack looked handsome in his black banker’s trousers he had worn since his sophomore year in high school and royal-blue jacket, the biggest guy out there and a dead ringer for Jack Nicklaus when he first broke onto the tour. I told myself that these other boys, no matter how good they were, would not be our opponents today. In golf, you have no teammates to console you, but you also have no opponents; it’s just you against the golf course. A perfect equation. I closed my eyes for a moment and pictured Jack in his first NCAA tournament in North Carolina, when he was up against many of the top Division I players in the country and he had shot one under par. That was his high point, and as I watched him on the practice green, I was hoping he could remember that. And not that his first tournament had turned out to be his last.
On the 1st tee, the Adams Golf tent was in a heap on the ground, battered by the wind. “Nice and smooth,” I said to Jack as I handed him his driver. He striped it up the middle, a mile out there, but when we got to his ball, we discovered that it had kicked left off a mound and was lying directly behind a tree. “That sucks a little,” he said with a short laugh. We were only 140 yards to the front of the green, but the best we could do was punch a five-iron below the branches of the tree, into the green-side bunker, blast out with a wedge, and two-putt for a bogey. I gave him my standard Scotland line—“We’ll get that stroke back”—and we walked on to the next tee box. Jack played the tee shot on number 2 perfectly, riding the wind 253 yards with a five-iron straight up the middle. He made a solid par there and another solid par on 3, then, as we were walking to the 4th tee box, he said, “This has to be a birdie hole today; with all the wind behind us, we’ll get there in two.”
“It is a birdie hole,” I said. I handed him his driver and watched him hit it dead center, sawing 327 yards off the 502-yard hole. With the wind still right behind us, he knocked an eight-iron the rest of the way, and we were lying four feet off the right side of the green, seventeen feet from the hole in two. The perfect birdie chance we were both hoping for.
Everyone who has ever tried to play golf with some degree of perfection knows that there is a point in every match where you have the chance to set the tone for the round. This was our point. Make a birdie here, and we will be on our way, I thought.
Jack took a couple of practice swings, then settled into the shot. He looked relaxed and confident with his knees flexed, but just before his club struck the ball, he raised his head, and this prevented him from accelerating through the swing, and the club face stuck in the Bermuda grass. The ball moved forward only two feet. I watched his shoulders slump, and then he hurried the next shot and bladed the ball, sending it twenty-five feet past the pin. From there he made a bad putt and then a good one that should have fallen in. Instead of a birdie, we made double bogey.
As we walked to
the next tee, he muttered to himself, “So stupid. So stupid.”
Maybe I should have played the optimist here as I always did with my golfers in Scotland. I almost said something upbeat, but Jack was angry at himself and I felt as if he needed to be angry just then, so I let it go.
On the next hole, a 192-yard par-3, Jack hit a terrific six-iron to twelve feet right of the flag. “We’re all right, Jackie boy,” I said. He was silent all the way to the green. And then he three-putted. I got only a quick look at his eyes, but it was enough for me to see that he was no longer angry. He was scared now. He could feel the despair that Vardon feared, and there was nothing I could do for him. Which really pissed me off. Four years ago a college in Maine invited me to donate all my manuscripts to its library. I turned in forty thousand pages from thirty-four years of writing. Since then maybe another five thousand pages. All those pages, all those words, and there I was standing right beside my son without even a handful of words to make him feel better about what was happening. I heard a dog barking across the fairway, and all I wanted was to be at home with Teddy. How are we going to get through the winter? I thought.
The essence of competitive golf rides on a very narrow rail inside your mind. Either you see each hole as an opportunity to make a birdie and get one hole closer to perfection, or you see each hole as another chance to screw up and fall further behind. We were there after six holes. Jack was buried in a silent, upside-down world for the rest of the round. I stayed beside him and gave him the best I had, but I was no help to him as a caddie or a father.
He hit some wonderful golf shots before we were finished, and on the 16th tee box I finally found these words: “Here’s my take on it, Jack. You look like a professional golfer out here. You have all the shots. And if we learn how to fight, you’ll be fine this winter.”
He listened to me, but he had no reaction.
Fathers whom I know well who had talked with me about this journey told me that no matter what happens on the tour this winter, Jack will always look back fondly on this experience that he and I shared. I hope this is true. I really hope this is true. And that is what I was thinking about when I told Jack that tomorrow in our second round we were going to make five birdies and start fighting our way back. I carried his clubs to the truck while he went to the scorer’s table to sign his card.
I stood by the truck looking up into an empty blue sky, telling myself that we were at the bottom now and that on the ride back to our hotel, or tonight watching sports, I would find some words that would make things better for Jack. A few minutes later, when I watched him walk across the parking lot, there was something wrong with the way he moved. He seemed to be struggling just to walk a straight line to where I was waiting. I called out my father’s words to him: “Tomorrow’s another day, Jackie boy.”
“There is no tomorrow,” he said as he approached.
“What do you mean?”
“We missed the cut.”
“There is no cut,” I said. “Did you know there was a cut?”
“No,” he said. “But when you shoot over 86, you’re cut from the second round. The guy just told me.”
“What did we shoot, Jack?” I asked.
“I shot a 90,” he said, almost yelling at me. “I haven’t shot a 90 since high school. If you play the way I played, you don’t deserve to make the cut. It’s embarrassing, man.”
So we’re not coming back to this place tomorrow, I said to myself as we sped out of the parking lot. Then what the hell are we going to do tomorrow?
I think the only thing that saved us on the ride back to our hotel was Springsteen at full volume singing, “Good night, it’s all right, Jane …”
“I’m going to sit out in the sun and warm up a little,” I said when we got out of the truck, the first words to break our silence. “Are you okay?” I asked him.
“It is what it is,” he said as he walked away.
It is what it is. Those had been his words after his graduation when I tried to start a meaningful conversation with him about his four years of college. It is what it is.
I sat on the curb by the truck, thinking about this and saying to myself: Maybe it is what it is, but we are going to have to find better words than those because saying it is what it is, is not much better than saying, look, I don’t talk with you about important things, okay? We stopped doing that before I was kicked off my golf team. Remember?
No, I thought, we are going to talk. Maybe not now, and maybe not tonight, but sooner or later we’re going to talk. I rolled a cigarette, then sent Colleen a text: “I was prepared to get our asses hauled down here for a while. But today we got our hearts torn out. Sorry. I love you.”
It was all swirling through my head, and when I stood up, I had to lean against the truck to catch my balance. I was talking to myself then, telling myself that Jack has to understand that he hasn’t played golf competitively in three years. He is going to have to learn all over again how to do that. And fast. Because this is misery for both of us. He’s going to end up being haunted by it just as I’ve been haunted by my failures and by never letting my father inside my life when we still had the chance.
I closed my eyes for a moment, and before I opened them, I heard an ambulance racing by on the freeway. I turned and watched the flashing lights. The real world. Someone’s life being ripped apart. I walked on, but when I was climbing the stairs to the second floor, my mind was going all the way back to the days when Colleen was pregnant with our first child. It struck me that when we start out and are waiting for our children to be born, all we ask is please, God, just give us a healthy baby, with all the parts in working order. And then later, when they begin to grow up and start to leave the house, we just pray that the siren in the dead of night will not be for us. But then, as the years pass, we raise the ante. We start asking our children to work hard, to get into good colleges, and to make their lives amount to something that makes sense to us. It goes on and on. But maybe in the end, the only thing that will matter is that we treated our time together as a gift.
When I got to the room, Jack was talking with Jenna on his phone. His voice was low and solemn. I made a call on my phone, talking loudly enough for him to hear, as I spoke with the pro at Cypress Lakes Golf Club, where our next event is being played in three days. “Can we get a practice round in tomorrow?” I asked. “Noon is great. Thanks.”
Midnight. My thoughts at the end of this long day are about something I wrote in my new novel: “When we lose the people we love best in this life, most of the time it is our own fault.”
We are so close to our children when they are small. They tell us everything. We hold them and kiss them whenever we want to, and we cannot imagine that this will ever end. But somehow a space opens between us, and it grows wider each time they turn on the television when we enter the room, or plug themselves into their iPods, or send us a three-word text instead of answering the cell phone we bought for them when we call. It just happens. And after a while, we are grateful when they give us an excuse not to talk because it is easier to fill the silence with music or television or another trip to the mall than to try to find the words.
Tonight Jack broke the silence for both of us after he took a walk just before dark. We hadn’t eaten anything and had just filled two tense hours staring at the talking heads on ESPN as if we were waiting for them to tell us something meaningful.
When I heard Jack opening the door, I was thinking that I would just pretend I was asleep, but as soon as he entered the room, he said, “I’m sorry for being so negative today.”
I sat up straight on the couch. I wanted to jump into his arms and thank him as I had never thanked anyone for anything before in my life. But I was afraid that might scare him away. Instead, I said as calmly as I could, “That’s all right, Jack. But could you sit here and talk with me for a few minutes?”
He looked surprised by this, and when I clicked off the TV, that space of silence between us felt even more intimidating. Fo
r some reason, I thought it best to begin with a confession. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life,” I said. Then I got up and opened a couple of beers and handed him one while I said that our tendency is to believe that our lives are shaped by our achievements and that this is how we will be remembered. But it’s not true. It’s the mistakes that really determine the shape of our lives. The mistakes we make and then how we recover from those mistakes, exactly like a round of golf. There will be mistakes, that is given. The great unknown in a round of golf is whether you will be crushed into despair by your mistakes or whether you will recover. “So we could say that Jack Snyder’s story is how he left home three days after his high school graduation to chase his dream of playing Division I golf and he made the team at the University of Toledo as a walk-on. Or should we say that he was kicked off the team? Both are part of his story. We are here now because of both parts, right? Or maybe not. Maybe we are here because of the mistake you made. You are trying to recover from it. What do you think?”
He considered this for a moment, then said, “I don’t know, man. It is what it is, I guess.”
Not what I was hoping he would say.
“Okay. Look at me and my life,” I said. “There is something I never told you. The greatest mistake of my life. In order to make it clear for you, I have to go back to the beginning when I first met your mother. We fell in love. And when you fall in love, you make a silent pledge that you will do everything possible to help that person reach her dream. Colleen’s dream was to have a family. A big family. Four or five kids. And I was on this path to try to become a writer, to write books that matter in some way and that deprive the world of some of its indifference. That was my battle cry through the ten years I had been writing before I met your mom. She was twenty-one years old; I was already thirty-one. I’d written three novels no one would publish. Dozens of stories. I had no prospects really. In golf terms I was shooting rounds in the upper 80s and telling myself that I was going to make the big tour. Nothing less. In those days there was the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where a new writer could earn an MFA degree and land a college teaching job, a good job for life. The chance to work with young students. I decided I had to go there. It took nine years for me to write something good enough to get in, but eventually there we were in Iowa City. Erin was born my third semester there. Iowa got me my big break, the chance to teach at Colgate University. We had Nell by then, and you were born three weeks before I went there for my interview. Anyway, there we were and it was paradise. I loved my students. We loved the town. We bought our first house on Maple Avenue, five blocks from campus. That first semester I would look out my office window and see your mother with the three of you, playing in the leaves. We spent the winter sledding down the big hill on campus.
Walking with Jack Page 19