White Fang and the Golden Bear

by Joe Wessel

  Junior clubs weren’t easily available. No problem. Tinkerer to the rescue! Dad took my measurements, then used a hacksaw to saw off a few of his old clubs to fit me. That labor of love produced my first set of clubs. With a driver, a pitching wedge, a seven-iron, and a putter in tow, I’d play tirelessly. Man, I loved those clubs! Playing golf made me happy. I’d hit plastic balls in the front yard or putt on the carpet in the house. Putting with Dad on the putting green was what I liked best.

  One day while I was hitting a ball in the front yard, my older sister, Margie, tried to steal the ball. I hurried my swing and … yep, you guessed it! I don’t know where the ball went, but she came away with eight stitches. Thank goodness the blow struck her forehead and not her eye or her teeth.

  By the time I turned eight, I could play golf well enough to tackle the par-3 course. Dad taught me what he could. Like most people trying to help their kids learn the game, he wanted me to have a proper stance and grip, because that’s what he had been taught. He also had a putting quirk that he used for many years, one that I imitated when I was young, because I thought, That’s how you’re supposed to do it. While preparing to putt, he would position the putter head in front of the ball, then move the head behind the ball—something he might do several times before finally putting. I’m pretty sure he copied Jack Nicklaus.

  Ultimately, Dad had the wisdom to understand he wasn’t the right person to teach his son how to play golf. Babe Hart, the club’s professional, assumed that role.

  Hart had spent a little time on the PGA Tour. He looked as though he’d played football, standing tree-like, a big, solid oak. When he hit the ball, it disappeared like Dad’s drives, only farther. Babe Hart amazed me.

  The driving range sat across the street from the East Course. Hart used to land his single-engine Cessna right there on the driving range, and you could see it from the eighteenth tee.

  Tournaments were held at the club every summer, including the “Skipper Chuck” tournament.

  “The Skipper Chuck Show” aired weekday mornings in South Florida. Chuck Zink served as the producer and announcer for the children’s TV show. Zink also played “Skipper Chuck,” the show’s main character. The show had an unprecedented twenty-two-year run, so Zink became a local celebrity. He certainly ranked as a bigger deal to me than Jackie Gleason. Later, I found out that Zink had been progressive where desegregation was concerned. He lost the show’s major sponsor, Royal Castle, because he’d refused to segregate on the show. Ironically, a fledgling company known as Burger King took over the spot and soared.

  The Skipper Chuck par-3 tournaments operated like First Tee does today, affording kids an opportunity to grow their interest in golf.

  While participating in one of those Skipper Chuck tournaments, I played a hole that required me to carry a lake to reach a pin set approximately 140 yards away—a daunting task for an eight-year-old. I made solid contact, cleared the lake, and landed the ball on the green. The ball hit the pin. I thought I’d made a hole in one! That further sparked my interest for the game.

  When you’re a kid, the prospect of driving a golf cart brought more excitement than swinging the club. One time, I rode along with Dad, and he let me move the cart. Man, I felt like big stuff. I’d been instructed to move the cart from alongside the green that he and his foursome were playing to the next tee box. That brief trip didn’t go well. I turned the cart against an embankment, and the cart began to tip. I’d never seen that group of men move so fast. Fortunately, they caught the cart before it could flip. That scared me to death.

  Neither golf nor tennis came easily. Initially, I didn’t see a lot of success in either sport. That’s probably why I eventually gravitated to team sports and left behind golf before again picking up the sport years later.

  Being “The Music Man” made Dad the creative one in our family. Yet he loved every sport, just not basketball. Ironically, my mother excelled in basketball, and she loved the sport he gruffly referred to as “roundball.”

  Thankfully, Dad never took issue with “The Music Man’s” son becoming a jock. I played baseball, basketball, and football around the clock.

  He’d pushed Margie into music and had been adamant in directing her to learn to play the piano. Then he browbeat her with his heavy-handedness, stressing the importance of the classics, the scales, and other things. They would have knock-down, drag-out fights about her practicing, or lack thereof.

  When I’d see the piano teacher come to the house to teach my sister, I knew sparks could fly at any minute. His name was Hollis Walsh, and he fit the mold for the stereotypical piano teacher. Round-rim glasses. Semibald. A thin mustache. A detached master, much like my father. I didn’t want any part of that. Thank goodness Dad didn’t push me in that direction. Yet as an adult, it is one of my great wishes that I could sit down and play the piano like my Grandma Wessel.

  Why did Dad jam music down Margie’s throat and not mine? I don’t know, he never said. It could have been a gender thing, or perhaps the fact that she had started the lessons, and he believed that if you started something, you had to finish what you started. You do a job, you take care of the details, and you pick up after yourself. In deference to that thinking, I wanted to play the guitar, and I took a few lessons before I got frustrated and quit. Dad never said a word about me quitting. I can still play a few chords. Every now and then, I’ll grab the guitar and play a little bit. But I never read music. The only thing I’ve kept is the love of Broadway and singing, and being around Broadway shows and Broadway tunes. Knowing my dad like I did, I think he chose not to force music on me, because he’d seen how the pursuit went with my sister. No doubt he made the right call, as active as I was with sports.

  Later, after I had my own kids, I’d tease Dad that I understood what he’d been trying to accomplish. I acknowledged the frustration your children can cause you. Such as when they leave something out and walk right by it instead of putting it away. Those types of things.

  Dad wasn’t an absentee father, yet he missed a lot of my games. My mother rarely missed any of them. If Dad wasn’t singing on the weekend, he might try to be at my game, but he didn’t get the same fulfillment that my mom did from watching my sisters and me play. That just wasn’t ingrained in him. Still, it meant the world to me whenever he did show. If I hit a home run, or my team won, he’d give me a wink or nod his head. Those simple gestures were all I needed. It didn’t have to be words.

  We became friends with the kids of my parents’ friends. We spent a lot of time at the pool at the Country Club of Miami. That’s where I first was introduced to diving off the board. The club had a high dive. You don’t see those at country clubs anymore. Nobody had insurance concerns back then, and we didn’t live in such a litigious society.

  There were three diving boards—a 3-meter springboard, and two lower boards alongside it. I’d try and do one-and-a-halves and backflips. Twice I hit my head on the board and got stitches. I dislocated my thumb doing a one-and-a-half reverse dive in competition. You had to be fearless to be a diver.

  That experience at the Country Club of Miami led to a lifelong appreciation for diving.

  When we later moved to North Miami, I became a diver in the eighth and ninth grades at the YMCA next to our house. I dived competitively for two years.

  My parents had lived in a new subdivision in Carol City when I was born. Now called Miami Gardens, it’s the northern end of Dade County, located four to five miles from where the Miami Dolphins trained in their early years and where I attended high school.

  The houses in our neighborhood were similar—all were single-floor and small, but they were different enough not to be classified as track housing. Our three-bedroom house had a hallway, a Florida room, a kitchen, a carport, jalousie windows, and no central air. We had a wall unit in the Florida room and a unit in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Eventually, we all got wall units. The yard had orange and grapefruit trees and two large mango trees. Later, I took my kids to visit th
at house when they were ten and twelve. The first words out of their mouth were “Wow, that’s dirty and awfully small.” Neighborhoods and perspective change with time.

  Our house stood on a corner lot where four streets merged. They weren’t busy streets, though. In fact, the neighborhood felt like a sports complex.

  We’d play stickball and all kinds of other games we’d invent at different locales around the neighborhood. We’d use the little fence across the street from our house to aim at when we played home run ball. You’d get certain points if you hit the ball into the neighbor’s backyard. Sometimes we’d play football at the Methodist school down the street or at a field about three blocks away. When the grass on the field got too long, we’d cut a big enough patch on which we could play football. Shoes were used for boundaries. Kind of like our own “Field of Dreams” minus the cornfield.

  Kids lived at most every house in the neighborhood. That made for some great pickup games. We might have ten or fifteen kids depending on the day. Kids would knock on our door trying to get Margie to play. They wouldn’t even ask me. Margie could play every sport well. We had some good games even though the ages could vary greatly.

  While Dad had an aversion to “roundball,” his disdain for the sport didn’t prevent him from fixing us up with a dual goal in our driveway. He rigged it so we could turn the goal into an eight-foot-high goal or a regulation ten-foot-high goal.

  When the day’s end approached and dinnertime arrived, my mother would ring her black bell like the schoolteacher she was. We had to be home in the next five or ten minutes, or we were in trouble. That’s the way you communicated long before cell phones.

  When I was in eighth grade in 1975, we moved to a 1 ½-acre house on Mitchell Lake in North Miami. It was a tropical paradise with a private street that was lined with coconut palm trees. The two large trees in the Japanese garden gave us kids a great swing rope and platform to jump into the water. The property had Florida oak, poinciana, mango, avocado, and frangipani trees. The previous owner of the house left behind an orchid nursery, which pleased Dad, who assumed control, diligently tending to all the different strands of orchids, along with the staghorn ferns. All this created lots of opportunities for me, my sisters, and others to help Dad take care of the grounds. Although we were involved with many activities and sports, Dad’s rule was the chores had to be finished first before we embarked on our sports.

  CHAPTER 7

  Alcoholics Anonymous

  DAD MADE A VISIT TO the doctor in 1973. I didn’t completely understand the magnitude at that time. Only later would I comprehend what happened and the changes that he made afterward.

  The doctor told him he had a liver disease, and he needed to stop drinking or die.

  According to a lot of research, genetics can play a role in alcoholism. It’s not just your environment. When you have that gene, you either suppress it or give in and become an alcoholic.

  I’ve heard that my grandfather had been an alcoholic. He drank and smoked. That’s what his generation did. Saloons served as meeting places, just like in the Westerns. Locals went there to socialize. That was a different time, of course, when kids often started drinking at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. Thus, my grandfather might have contributed to that predisposition in the family chain.

  After receiving the doctor’s diagnosis, Dad tried to stop drinking on his own. He couldn’t do it. Finally, in 1975, he started going to Alcoholics Anonymous. He embraced wholeheartedly what the organization fed him. To my knowledge, he never touched alcohol after that and even became a staunch AA leader in South Florida for thirty-five years. Helping others became an admirable by-product of Dad joining the AA family, but he wouldn’t just give help to people without some action on their part. He felt strongly about that.

  Dad held firm to the belief that you should try to help people out of hardships and assist them in transitioning into society. In other words, try and lead them toward becoming self-reliant so they can help themselves. Helping people without action on their part, to where they became reliant on the handout, crippled them in Dad’s eyes. He lived his adult life trying to help those people he encountered who were less fortunate and needed that hand up, not out.

  We had so many people come to the house who were complete strangers. Dad would bring them over to help in the yard or to help with any number of tasks, such as assisting in our addition to the house.

  Dad’s work projects weren’t exclusive to wayward souls from AA, either. If you spent the night at our house, you were fair game to become part of a work party.

  On one occasion during my freshman year of high school in the fall of 1975, Jimmy Metz came over and spent the night at my house. The following day brought dark skies and light showers. That didn’t stop Dad, who got us out of bed and put us to work trimming an oak tree that was leaning over the lake. All day long, we chopped and carried limbs out to the front. After that, Jimmy went to school and told everybody, “Mr. Wessel’s crazy, you don’t want to spend the night over there. He just wants to put you to work!”

  Jimmy never stayed over again. I couldn’t blame him.

  Because I had been younger when Dad got sober, I wasn’t as tuned into how sobriety affected him, until, as an adult, I started to reflect on that time. It was then that I began to realize that when Dad drank, he’d been emotional, quick-tempered, and had mood swings. I never saw him be abusive, but I do believe there were difficulties, arguments, and fights that probably would not have taken place had he not been drinking.

  Avoiding the alcohol journey would have taken an exceptional effort on his part given his circumstances, like hanging with older guys when he entered the Navy at fifteen. Chasing women and drinking alcohol, no doubt, had to be a priority for the sailors who were on the ship with him.

  What I always found admirable, though, was his discipline and courage. The serenity prayer that was adopted by AA and other twelve-step programs became Dad’s mantra for how he lived his life—with acceptance of that for which he had no control and bravery to work on what he could change, along with constant prayer to have the wisdom to distinguish between the two. I am sure it was especially difficult on golf trips or just a weekend round with his golfing buddies. His 19th hole didn’t include his having an alcoholic beverage. I’m so proud of my father’s discipline and courage over the years facing this disease, even when around others who drank.

  CHAPTER 8

  Hanging with the Miami Dolphins

  MY PARENTS WERE ADAMANT ABOUT being polite and engaging with others. They believed that you never knew when someone would come into your life. When that happens, connections are created that can change or create other connections that can/will influence your life. For me and my life, Dorothy Shula, the wife of Hall of Fame football coach Don Shula, became the connection that opened the door for me. Not only did she enable me to experience up close and personal the Miami Dolphins of the 1970s and the 1980s, but so much of my life, including my entrée to football, I can trace back to her connection to my mother.

  Hialeah Miami Lakes High School opened its doors in 1971. Mom worked there as the assistant principal for guidance. The Wessel family’s personal connection to the Dolphins began the day Dorothy Shula walked into Mom’s office.

  Dorothy asked Mom for her opinion: would she send her kids to Miami Lakes? Mom told her she would send them to the Catholic High School, Pace High.

  The Shulas ended up sending their first son, David, to Pace High. And through that first meeting, Mom and Dorothy began to play cards together, forming a relationship that lasted until Dorothy died of cancer in 1991.

  Thus, Mom’s ability to engage with people and make them feel welcome laid the groundwork for my future in football as a player and a coach.

  Don Shula played for the Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Colts, and Washington Redskins. He became head coach of the Colts, then moved on to the Miami Dolphins, where he coached the 17–0 team in 1972.

  As for Dad, he had been
a Dolphins season-ticket holder from the beginning, when they were an expansion team in the old AFL. I started to attend games with him during the 1970 season, when I was eight.

  Going to those games would be quite an affair. Our drive to the Orange Bowl would take us about thirty minutes. Dad and his friends packed their trunks with coolers filled with food and beverages so we could tailgate. The adults would sit around shooting the bull before the game while the kids threw around the football on a grass parking lot outside the Orange Bowl end zone.

  Once inside the historic venue, I enjoyed many memorable Dolphins moments sitting next to Dad.

  Dad went to New Orleans when the Dolphins made their first Super Bowl appearance in 1972. They got smoked, 24–3, by the Dallas Cowboys at Tulane Stadium.

  When they won the Super Bowl the next season, they beat the Redskins 14–7 at the Los Angeles Coliseum on January 14, 1973. That proved to be a big day in my neighborhood. Everybody went out into the street to celebrate the win.

  Along with Shula, Howard Schnellenberger joined the Dolphins’ coaching staff in 1970. His wife, Beverlee, also asked Mom for advice about schools. She joined the card group, which included Betty Jane Arnsparger, wife of Dolphins coach Bill Arnsparger. Through my mother’s connection, I met one of the Schnellenbergers’ sons, Stu, in 1975, and we became friends, teammates on the high school football team, and workout partners.

  Mom’s friendship with Beverlee and Dorothy grew. As a Dolphins fan, Dad enjoyed that connection, as well.