Final Rounds

by James Dodson

  One night in Tampa several years ago I was having dinner with Paul Azinger and his father Ralph. Azinger was finishing a year in which he’d won his first three tournaments. His star seemed so bright. When Ralph excused himself and left the table for a moment, Azinger leaned across the table and said to me: “That man is the reason I’m here. The way he thinks. The way he lives. We haven’t always seen eye to eye, but you know what? Someday I hope I can show the world I’m half as courageous as he is.”

  Eight years later, when Azinger’s cancer blew a hole in his life, he did. He withdrew from the tour for months, underwent aggressive treatment, and came back with a deeper appreciation of his gift in his life.

  On my first working interview for Golf Magazine, I stood on the practice range at Sea Island Golf Club watching Davis Love III hit moon shots to the back of the range. I’d never seen a more powerful swing, a swing he learned from his father Davis Love, Jr., a protégé of Harvey Penick and one of the most respected teachers of the game. Perhaps no modern rookie had a finer pedigree or more promise than Davis Three. Two days before he was born in 1964, his father nearly won the Masters.

  “When I was about eight or nine,” Davis explained later, as we walked together back from the range, “I went to my father and told him I wanted to be a professional golfer. The thing is, he never pushed the game on me. I wanted to do it because of him. He said if I really wanted to do that, he would help me do it. We started out. He would show me things and write it all down. He would give me these yellow-legal-pad notes with his thoughts about what I should do. It drove me kind of crazy at times, all those notes, but there’s no question in my mind that my father’s love and faith brought me here.”

  —

  Life separates us too soon. That’s what my father had said on the road to Scotland.

  In the days following Opti’s funeral, as I got back to the busy routines of my own work and family life, I thought perhaps my father and I had luckily escaped this fate. Perhaps we hadn’t been separated too soon. After all, we’d had forty years to be together, two and a half decades to play as golf pals, and the golf trip of a lifetime to finish up the day. As far back as I could remember, there wasn’t a moment when I doubted my father’s love, a moment when he failed to express his love or help me when I asked for it.

  This was far more than most men get, I told myself. We’d gone the full distance, finished the round, and said what needed saying. After a life rich with memories—just the kind of life Aunt Augusta would have admired—my father had died a peaceful death at the same age as Buddha, seeing in the afterlife, perhaps, a beloved pasture from his childhood or—who knows?—a beautiful golf course waiting with an open first tee.

  For a while, these things sustained me and gave me strength. Life got back to normal. In many respects it even got better. For our tenth anniversary my wife gave me a beautiful concert-quality classical guitar, and I played my first recital in twenty years for my daughter’s first-grade class—Bach. Lennon and McCartney. All the big guys. Near the end, one small-fry with Coke-bottle spectacles looked up and asked if I “knew anything really good.” I played a few Barney tunes and brought down the house.

  For that same anniversary, I sent my overworked working wife to one of the most exclusive health spas in the world. You could have made two trips around Scotland for what it cost her to be fed gerbilsized portions of inedible vegetarian goo for five straight days, force-marched into the hills by an aerobics lunatic, water-cannoned on the bum, and therapeutically pounded upon by muscular people with suspicious foreign accents. It was her idea of heaven.

  The spring that tentatively showed itself in Carolina finally crept north to Maine. My club traditionally opens around the time of the Masters golf tournament. After the long layoff, I went out with my regular pals, the hockey coach and the college sports director, and shot 75 in my very first outing, as if I could do it any day in my sleep. They haggled about what they saw new in my game. But then, Terry and Sid use any excuse to haggle with each other on the golf course.

  Sid essayed that I was striking the ball better. Terry was sure it was my putting. As usual, I opted to stay out of the debate.

  My game was slightly different. I had a new set of clubs and I’d gone back to a traditional heel-shafted blade putter like the one I’d used as a kid—and I was also trying once again to lead with the left hand and putt like a kid. It seemed to be making more balls mysteriously roll into the hole. I explained this to Sid and Terry. Terry said he thought I was also more relaxed on the golf course than he’d seen me in quite a while. Ever the coach, he said my “game head” was “really where it should be. You don’t seem to be rushing the shots as much.”

  “You’re crazy, Terry,” Sid snapped happily at him. “It’s his new irons. Anybody can see that.”

  We toddled off down the fairway of a brand-new season with them arguing like old times. It felt good.

  The truth is, you love and hate to see a regular golf pal start to play a whole lot better, and if you’re the player who’s striking the ball better, you never want to examine these things too closely. My scores began to inch down scarily. I began to regularly shoot in the mid-to-high 70s and made a quick trip to England in which I fired rounds 73, 72, 71 on three pretty good tracks and scored eagles on consecutive days. Like Bobby Jones, I considered walking away from the game while I was hot.

  Back home, a couple of the old stags up on the club’s grill deck predicted I might actually be a factor in the club championship, come summer. Winning the club championship would have been a great way to say good-bye to Opti, I told myself, and then I realized we’d already said good-bye in the best way possible and I really had nothing more to prove.

  Writer Peter Dobereiner once described golf as life’s greatest pretend drama. Had I really found some missing element of my game, or was it just one of those mysterious things that happen only in a pretend drama like golf?

  I was still trying to figure that out on Masters Sunday, when my daughter and son surprised me by asking to go play golf. I wanted to stay home and watch the Masters finish because (a) it’s my job and I get paid princely sums to do it, and (b) two players I greatly admire, Davis Love and Ben Crenshaw, were neck and neck coming down the stretch.

  Instead, I took my kids to the golf course. It was late afternoon when we got there, but the air was unseasonably warm and inviting for early April in Maine. Not surprisingly, not many players were about. Jack saw the gas carts sitting by the clubhouse and begged to take one, and Maggie quickly joined the beggar’s chorus. They politely endured my Sophoclean lecture on “The Virtues of Walking in Golf,” then pleaded shamelessly again for a riding cart. Dickie, the assistant pro, agreed to let us take one but demanded we stick to the back nine, which was drier.

  We drove to the tenth tee. I love the back nine at my club. It’s the original nine of the club, which was laid out the same year as Murdo Macpherson’s magnificent Machrie.

  I struck a decent drive off ten and agreed to let Jack drive the cart for the first hole. He popped onto the seat, jammed down the accelerator, and nearly tossed both his sister and me out onto the ground. We careened wildly for a moment or two until I could get a hand clamped safely onto the steering wheel. Jack grinned at me. “I love golf,” he declared. And then, a few yards farther along, he added: “When does hockey begin again, Dad?”

  For years I’d hoped I might raise the next Tom Watson or Johnny Miller. Perhaps the next Bobby Orr was really more like it.

  If only to humor his old man, though, Jack took his “inside club” up onto the tenth green and putted out the first hole, then picked up his ball and scampered back to preserve his driver’s rights behind the wheel. Maggie made a nice little chip shot from off the fringe that rolled to within ten feet of the cup. I congratulated her. She picked up her putter and walked over to her ball, looked once at the hole, then rapped a ball that nearly went into the cup. I congratulated her again. We high-fived and went to the next hole.
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  As we played, a couple things kept crowding into my head, distracting me from the pleasure of the moment. I was naturally wondering about the Masters, a tournament everybody in the golf world expected Davis Love to win someday. A few days before, Harvey Penick, Ben Crenshaw’s longtime teacher and Love’s own father’s mentor, had passed away in Austin. I knew emotions were running very high down in Augusta, Georgia, that afternoon. I only hoped my video recorder was properly running, too.

  I was also troubled by a dream I’d just had. In it, I’d forgotten the sound of my own father’s voice. I woke up in a fierce sweat and realized I’d been weeping. Unable to go back to sleep, I sat in a chair by the window, struck by the powerful reality that I would never again be able simply to pick up the phone and call my father and hear him laugh and say he was going to pin my ears back. I remember sitting in that chair thinking I was no longer a son. Bob had lost Bing.

  It was grief pouring forth, though it took me a while to fully recognize and accept that. Sometime after the dream, at the suggestion of a friend, I actually went and sat in a quiet upstairs room with a friendly family sociologist named Herman, a fellow southerner who shared my passion for the frozen North. We talked for several weeks about childhood, marriage, and fathers. We talked about Kristin and golf, guitars and politics, death and St. Andrews. We talked about how mothers give us life and fathers help define us. He helped me see that a man is never finished being a son—and he never leaves the influence of his father’s life behind. In some ways, he helped me see that it is more difficult to say good-bye to a great father than a poor one.

  During our last session he said, “Before we wind this up, I’d like to come back to your father.”

  “Really?” I said. “Wasn’t that the point of all this exercise—to neatly dispose of him forever?”

  Herman smiled. “He probably would have preferred it that way. It strikes me that he gave you something very useful, but you may not even be aware of it yet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A gift for letting go. He showed you the value of accepting life and the importance of letting it go. When it’s time, you’ll do it. You’ll hear his voice again.”

  Somewhere a couple blocks away, the Congregational church bell was tolling the noon hour. We stood and shook hands. Herman suggested I think of making some final act of closure that Opti would have appreciated.

  I thanked Herman for his help. I still couldn’t hear my father’s voice, but I walked out feeling better.

  —

  None of this was apparent to me on that unnaturally warm Masters Sunday with my kids, though. The pain of the dream was still too fresh. And yet something happened that had Opti’s invisible hands all over it.

  We played a couple holes and skipped a couple holes. Jack seemed to be confusing golf with formula car racing. Maggie, on the other hand, dropped several lengthy putts that had her glowing and me beaming. I told her she reminded me of her grandfather, “the putting machine,” and said she might be the next Glenna Vare.

  “Who’s that?” she demanded.

  “I’ll tell you sometime.”

  Something about the fine afternoon and being away from the world with my kids began to soothe me. Maybe it was the angle of the light or the riding cart and the general emptiness of the course that seemed to recall that wonderful day at Muirfield with my father and Archie Baird.

  Something amazing, at any rate, happened, when Maggie and I walked off the sixteenth green to where Jack the chauffeur sat impatiently with his lead foot poised over the accelerator. We climbed aboard, and he nudged me gently in the ribs. He smiled up at me and suggested that I scoot over. I asked him why, thinking maybe I was cramping his driving style.

  “For Granddaddy,” he answered matter-of-factly.

  I looked at him.

  “What?”

  “For Granddaddy,” he repeated calmly. “He’s riding with us.”

  I stared at my five-year-old son, unable to speak for a moment. Then his sister let out one of her infectious belly laughs, and I laughed, too.

  “Jack’s such a goof,” she said.

  “Do you believe Granddaddy’s riding with us?” I asked her.

  She looked at Jack and then at me and then grinned. A child’s belief is so strong, you can almost feel it. She was missing four teeth.

  “Sure,” she replied, as if that much should be obvious even to a dolt like me. “And you know what else?”

  “What?”

  “You sound like Granddaddy. Especially when you sneeze.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Slipping my arms around both my children, I felt a powerful stinging in my eyes. I couldn’t yet hear my father’s voice, but I could hear his words. Long ago on a golf course that was no longer there, he’d told me to open my eyes and see the glory of the world. The way to heaven, he said, is heaven.

  At that same moment about twelve hundred miles away, Ben Crenshaw was doubling over as his tears of joy flowed. He’d won his second Masters, beating Davis Love by two strokes in a finish that, under the circumstances, seemed heaven-sent. Love’s effort had been nothing short of heroic, too. Only three players in history had played better than his 275 total. Their names were Hogan, Nicklaus, and Floyd.

  I confess I wasn’t thinking about the powerful events happening down in Georgia, though. I was thinking about…well, finally, nothing but this. It felt wonderful.

  “Okay, pal,” I said. “Let ’er rip.”

  And with that, we careened wildly down the fairway.

  —

  Life, Thoreau said, is a great circle sailing.

  Three months after my father’s death, I found myself once again hurrying down from the Scores to the Old Course with my golf bag slung on my back. I was back in the Old Grey Toon to gather material for an essay about the upcoming Open championship, talking with people like Fred Lockhart and the Links Trust Management about the passions and politics of locals in the birthplace of the game.

  I decided to go out late so I could loiter on the course, and the starter was kind enough to match me up with the final group of the day, an unlikely trio of lively Australians. One of them was dressed like Crocodile Dundee, complete with rolled-up jeans and working boots. Another was a budding golf writer named Paul. The third was a physician on vacation with his wife. Amazingly, none of the Aussies had ever met until arriving at the Old Course. Golf makes us members of the same big nation.

  As we teed up under the starter’s watchful eye, Crocodile Dundee leaned over and admitted to me that he hadn’t been on a golf course in ten years; he’d lied about his handicap to get on the Old Course. “Hope I don’t top the bloody thing,” he said.

  I assured him if he did, it would be okay. Topping a ball on the first tee of the Old Course was one of golf’s greatest traditions. It was the widest fairway and toughest opening shot in all of golf. Ex-presidents routinely topped balls here. So did pros. Ditto us mortals. There was something special in the air here, I said, that made topping your drive a rewarding experience. Also, the hole is mercifully short.

  “Right,” Crocodile said. “But what if I miss it completely, mate?”

  He didn’t. We both played an amusingly erratic round, firing shots all over the place. Paul the golf writer played best, going out to the Eden estuary in 41 before blistering the home march with a succession of brilliant birdies and pars. I settled in to play my usual humdrum Old Course game, a par here, a triple bogey there, trying not to think too much about what was coming up. Snead’s 75 would have to fall another day.

  As we approached the Road Hole bunker on the seventeenth hole, I pulled a small blue velvet satchel out of my golf bag and began undoing the silken cords. The others watched solemnly. I’d warned them what was coming—my real reason for playing in the final group of the day. “You guys look like the three other horsemen of the Apocalypse,” I said to them. “Please show a little proper disrespect.” I told them my old man had
said golf is a game that made you smile. “So please smile, damnit.”

  As they smiled, I slowly scattered my father’s cremated ashes around the Road Hole bunker and dumped some into the sand itself.

  Lacking Opti’s gift of prophecy, I couldn’t have known then that in a few weeks’ time Arnold Palmer would pause on the little stone bridge over Swilcan Burn and wave good-bye to his faithful army, marking his final appearance at the British Open. Likewise, nobody could have fathomed that big John Daly would make a miraculous shot from the depths of that same Road Hole bunker that was even more remarkable than my old man’s—allowing Wild Thing to win the 124th British Open and burying a number of his own ghosts in the process. I would think of Freddie Jupp and imagine her glee.

  No, I couldn’t have known of these wondrous things to come. Nor even guessed at them.

  All I knew was that a circle in my life had finally been completed, and perhaps, as I felt that day with my kids on Masters Sunday, another larger one began.

  My new Aussie mates and I finished the Road Hole with bogeys and walked to the eighteenth tee. I don’t remember a lot of talking. The darkness had caught up to us. We teed up and finished the hole and shook hands. I can’t for the life of me remember what I scored on the hole because I either decided not to or forgot to write it down. In any case, I was definitely in NATO.

  I walked slowly up the Scores, with a mind that was remarkably at ease for the first time in a very long time. Then I decided to walk back and just look at the Old Course in the darkness.

  Halfway down the hill, a boy passed headed the other way, a fellow late finisher. He was maybe eleven or twelve, hurrying home to dinner with his head bent and his bag on his back. He looked up as we passed, his clubs softly clicking. I thought of myself headed home from Green Valley. I thought of Jack maybe someday playing here with his old man.

  “Did you shoot a good one?” I asked.

  “Not so good, sir,” he admitted. “Me driver’s a wee bit off.”