Walking with Jack

by Don J. Snyder

  This struck me as a remarkably thoughtful comment. “Well,” I said, “you’re right, Jack, I should have forgiven him, but there were a lot of things that happened—”

  He cut me off. “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “I mean you. You should have asked him to forgive you, man. You killed his wife and ruined his life.”

  I have thought for many years that our lives come down to a collection of moments. After all our planning and trying, there are only a handful of moments that really matter. Some of these moments tell us what we might have been, others what we might still become. Standing there in the darkness, I was sure that this was one of those moments. In all the years I had examined it and dreamed it, I had never seen things between my father and me as clearly as my son had.

  JANUARY 19, 2007

  This morning I was raring to go. It was only twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind was already strong and rising out of the west, but the bright sun lay in gold bands along the fairways when we walked to the 1st tee.

  Jack hit one of his big drives toward the horizon beyond the 1st green, but rather than admire it, he turned his back disdainfully and walked to his bag. Something was wrong. He had barely spoken over his breakfast. I watched him a moment, trying to figure out what it was. He looked handsome in the new black jacket with the Carnoustie emblem that I had bought him.

  I hit a miserable drive on number 4. “Hit another one,” Jack said.

  I had been asking him for lessons for at least five years, and his response was always the same: “I can’t tell you how I hit a golf ball; I just hit it.” But now he was offering instruction, and I accepted it eagerly.

  “The trouble is you’re not releasing your hands at impact. Look, your clubhead is square like it should be, but you’re coming up because you’re not turning your hands over. Your right hand—there, you just did it again. The palm of your right hand is facing up when you swing through the ball. It should be down, turning over. Releasing. Try it again.”

  I hit a perfect drive. And then a perfect five-iron from the fairway. When I saw Jack smile, it made me think just how complicated our relationship was. The son wants to beat the old man, needs to beat him, and it’s a thrill when it happens the first time. It sets off a chain reaction of things the old man is no longer better at than the son. Golf, driving, using the remote control. It goes like that until the son has taken almost everything there is to win, and then he starts to get scared because there’s his father unable to beat him at anything anymore and it hits him that a certain immunity has now been lifted from over his head. His old man has reached a dark turn in the road. And he’s next.

  If I was right about this, then Jack was angry at me for playing so poorly, for making the same mistakes again and again, for giving golf away to him without a fight.

  So I began to fight hard. Fighting to release my hands. I softened my hands on the club, then took it back low just until my wrists had cocked before I started down and through the ball. When I raised my eyes, I saw the ball climbing and then falling from the sky. All right! I thought.

  I fought to par number 8 with the wind mercifully behind us at last. Jack made a brilliant birdie after hitting an eight-iron to within four feet. “Well,” I said, “I’m going to really have to light it up the rest of the way.” Jack was already walking to the tee, a little too victoriously for my taste at that particular moment.

  Which brought us to number 9, End, the short, 307-yard wide-open par-4 that I had birdied on our first time around. I took out my driver, swung easily, and caught a nice roll across some of the only open, flat ground on the course.

  I found my ball in perfect position. Meanwhile, I watched Jack climb into the bushes and hack out his ball with a wasted stroke.

  I ran a seven-iron the rest of the length of the fairway onto the green and made two putts for par to Jack’s bogey.

  That was the end of the front nine. With a double-bogey 7 and a quad 8, I knew my score was high. I added up 48 strokes to Jack’s two-over-par 38. Slaughter. When you’re losing like that, golf can be a hard, hard road of humiliation and despair. Or, occasionally, it can lift you up if you can just manage to hold on.

  And I did. Though it was back into the wind, we both were on the green in two on the 10th hole after hitting safe drives to the right of the deep rough. My drive had come to rest eighty-five yards from the green, right at the edge of the malevolent Kruger pot bunker. It could just as easily have rolled down into it. But my luck had turned. Or I was turning it. I made par. Jack made birdie and was up by another stroke.

  We both parred 11 and 12.

  Number 13, Hole O’Cross (In), bears the stamp of the hideous Coffins bunkers down the left side of the fairway and then the Cat’s Trap and Walkinshaw bunkers farther up the fairway. The best landing area is a narrow path straight over the Coffins.

  We both hit fine tee shots, but I pulled my second shot left into trouble and took another bogey while Jack made par.

  We both parred the long par-5 14 and the par-4 15, and drove our tee shots over the round-killing Principal’s Nose bunkers on 16 and went on to make par there as well.

  So we walked to the most difficult hole on the course, the 460-yard par-4 17th, Road Hole, where so many great golfers have met their demise across the years. To hit a great drive, you have to stand on the tee and hit a line that runs so close to the broad flank of the Old Course Hotel that if the drive is off to the right by four or five yards, you’re going to go right through the windows. There’s no place to hide. You have to go for it. If you play safely left, then you’ll catch the rough down that side, and it will seem like forever to the green. Each time I played this hole four years earlier, I used to say to myself as I stood on the tee, the faint of heart need not apply.

  I did the same today and hit a perfect drive. So did Jack, outdistancing me by eighty or ninety yards. I took out a four-iron for my second shot. I saw Jack up ahead of me waiting. Swing easy, I told myself. Down and through. Down and through.

  It was another shot where I didn’t feel the club strike the ball. Pure. Pure! I watched it climb in the sky, on a path straight for the pin. It landed short of the green and started rolling straight again. Then I lost sight of it in the little gully in front of the green.

  I watched Jack face his Achilles’ heel. The short wedge to a tight green. He swung effortlessly with a smooth turn of the hips, about as handsomely as anyone could hit a golf ball, but from where I was walking, I knew he had given it too much again. I saw his ball hit the green and bounce off the back out across the road.

  From there he made a bogey 5, while I rolled a seven-iron straight up onto the green and right into the cup for a birdie. A birdie on the Road Hole.

  On 18 we both hit straight, deep drives, though without the wind blowing hard to the left from over my right shoulder, I might have flirted with trouble down the right side. Jack hit another wedge with too much behind it and flew his ball past the pin to the back of the green. I left my nine-iron short and watched the ball lose its momentum and die in the Valley of Sin in front of the green. I waited for Jack to make his par. But he three-putted for only the second hole of the day to take a bogey 5. I was doing the math in my head by then, and I knew that if I saved par, I would beat him on the back nine 37 to 38.

  With this in mind I putted out of the Valley of Sin with much too much force, and my ball rolled across the green, passing the pin on its way to stopping four feet in the fringe. It was a terrible shot. Just terrible, but I thought if I could tie my son on the back nine of the Old Course, that would still be something.

  Jack stood on the green about to pull the pin. “Leave it in,” I said to him as I walked to my ball. There were a few people with cameras, watching us now, the only two people left on the course again. I put my putter back in my bag, took out a seven-iron, and hit the ball right into the center of the cup. It made a marvelous sound as it rattled against the iron pin on its way down into the hole.

  We shook h
ands. “You played the last five holes at one under par,” Jack said generously.

  “Thanks,” I told him. It was the first time I’d beaten him at anything in so long I couldn’t recall when it had last happened.

  ———

  Back at the hotel I was settling in to watch soccer with Jack, when he announced that he was going out for a while. “Is everything all right?” I asked.

  “I just want to take a walk,” he said. “I have five months before I graduate.”

  I was certain that he was feeling what it was going to be like to leave everything that was familiar to him. I think he had a sense of what this would be like for him.

  The minute he left the room, I started to miss him. I ran down the back stairs to the lobby and out the front door. I reached the sidewalk just in time to see him disappear around a corner way out ahead of me. Take all the times I’d stood at the window at home watching him drive away, feeling helpless, and worrying if he would make it back safely. And all the times I’d watched his sisters do the same thing. What I felt now was worse. It seemed as if everything I knew was wrong.

  Lying in bed, waiting for Jack to return, I recalled the nightly “knee football” games we used to play before his bedtime when he was little. He was still wearing the pajamas with feet, and I could almost hear the little scuffing sound they made on the floors. If you get that in your life—a little boy in your arms laughing as you tackle him to the floor, and then begging you to do it again, and then pleading with you to lie beside him in his bed until he falls asleep—you don’t have the right to ask for anything more. Even if you end up alone in the end, you’ve lived. You’ve really lived in this world, and you have no right to ask for more. But I had. I was always asking for more.

  JANUARY 20, 2007

  The final day of our trip, and it turned out that I had not lost Jack’s high school ball at Carnoustie. It had slipped inside the lining of my golf bag. I took a butter knife from breakfast to bury the ball on our last round at the Old Course.

  As we walked up the 9th fairway, I told Jack that before we left home, I had spent an afternoon reading my old journals, and I’d found something I had written about him when he was four years old. “It went like this,” I said:

  Tonight I had to scold you for the first time because you had punched Mommy in the nose. When I went into your room later you were curled up in your blankets. How are you, Jack? I asked you. I’m going to die, you said. No, you’re going to live to be as old as Batman. As old as Bruce Wayne? Older. As old as the old man who takes care of him in the bat cave. What’s his name, Daddy? Albert. Yeah. Albert. Because you’re a great boy, Jackie, and it’s just that sometimes the Joker gets inside you and he makes you do bad things. I punched Mommy. No, it was the Joker who punched Mommy. I’m still scared. Why? Because I don’t have any money. Why do you need money? To buy you a present for your birthday. When is your birthday, Daddy? In the summer. Don’t tell anybody what I’m going to get you, okay? Not even Mommy. What are you going to get me? Black undies like Batman wears. He wears black ones? Yep. And they’re going to have a little button on them so when you push it a light will come on so you can see in case you have to get up in the night to go pee. How much money will I need, Daddy?

  “I really said all that?” Jack asked.

  “You did. You used to talk all the time, and I wanted to live forever to hear everything you ever had to say.”

  Standing on the 10th tee, I looked around. “Finding my way to this place,” I said, “is something I’m always going to be thankful for. And now you know how to get here if you ever want to come back.”

  We chose a spot off the 14th tee box along the base of the ancient stone wall that runs between the Old Course and the Eden Course to bury the ball. We both wrote our names on it, and then I handed Jack the knife and turned on the movie camera. He cut out a square of sod. “The past is past now,” I said to him. “You’re going to go as far as you want to go in this great game. And with some luck, someday I am going to caddie for you on your first pro tour.”

  He nodded solemnly, and we shook hands on it.

  We played our way in from there. Another good round for Jack, and he finished with a 75 to my 88. He wanted to get to a hotel at the airport in Edinburgh so we wouldn’t have to face the drive in the morning and risk missing our flight home and his hockey game Monday night.

  I didn’t expect to ever return here and so, on the 18th green, I took one last look around to remember the ground while Jack waited for me to pick up my clubs. And then we started walking away together.

  JANUARY 21, 2007

  Flying home at forty thousand feet. Jack had a movie playing on the little screen attached to his seat, and I thought he was done talking to me. But after a couple of vodka tonics, he wanted to know what else I wrote about him in the journal that chronicled his boyhood.

  “Let me think for a minute,” I said. I had kept a journal for each of my children and I decided a long time ago that I was going to give the journals to them to take with them when they left home. “You were a great eater,” I told him. “There was one morning when you were six months old. We were letting Mommy sleep in, and you and your sisters were in the kitchen, where I was feeding all of you pancakes. You kept eating them as fast as I put them down in front of you. When your mother came downstairs, I said, ‘Look at your little boy wolfing down these pancakes.’ She said, ‘He doesn’t eat solid food yet, Don. Nothing but breast milk.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he sure loves pancakes.’ There was no turning back after that.”

  His smile encouraged me to go on. “That winter when you were five years old and I was working construction, you waited at the door for me to come home each evening. You would take my carpenter’s belt and say, ‘I’ve got a knuckle sandwich with your name on it.’ ”

  I laughed and closed my eyes, recalling how I had hurried home from work each day to see him. “You were a real character,” I said. “I was teaching you to ride a bike when you were four. The safest place was the beach at low tide when the sand was packed hard. The day you finally figured it out, you just rode straight into the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “I remember that day,” he said.

  “We had a lot of good times,” I said. “And look, I’m sorry about all my speeches on this trip. I really should be disqualified from talking so much. I’m going to try to stop making speeches as I grow old.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  He asked me what the highlight of the trip was for me.

  “Finding your ball,” I said. “And seeing you walking those fairways. What about you?”

  “Getting the car back without an accident.”

  “Come on,” I said, “I had it under control.”

  I listened to him laughing at this. I told him that it was good to hear him laugh; we hadn’t had a lot of laughter between us in a long time. “Things slip away,” I said. “It’s no one’s fault. They just do.”

  I asked him if he remembered our days in upstate New York when I was teaching at Colgate University and we would all go sledding down the big hill on campus.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “I never thought those days would end. We spent all winter sledding. I used to love pulling you and your sisters up the hill. I was forty-one, forty-two maybe; I guess it made me feel strong and young, you know? And then one time you wouldn’t let me pull you up the hill. You wanted to climb up yourself. You were all bundled up in your snowsuit and boots, so you could only take these tiny steps. It took you forever to get up the hill, and I kept trying to explain how much better it would be if you just let me pull you to the top because you could save all that time for going down. But you had made up your mind. And you just marched up like a little soldier. That was when I knew.”

  “Knew what?” he asked me.

  “Knew that I wouldn’t have you forever,” I said. “It was that way with your sisters too. There was a moment with each of you when I realized th
e same thing. Part of falling in love with all of you when you were babies was believing that I would have you forever. And then there was a moment when it came clear to me that I wouldn’t. I remember telling your mother how sad it made me feel. I said, ‘He’s starting off now, on his own.’ She didn’t understand. ‘He’s only four years old,’ she said, ‘we’ll have him a lot more years.’ Something like that. But I felt it. And it’s gone so fast, I’ll tell you that, Jack. So damned fast.”

  He didn’t say anything more. I had my eyes closed, and I was dreaming back that sledding hill and him in his powder-blue snowsuit.

  JUNE 18, 2007

  Five months have passed since Carnoustie. A former student of mine from when I was teaching at Colgate for four years in the early 1990s, Jim White, had grown up in Toledo, Ohio, and he had opened a door for Jack to work for the summer at the fabled Inverness golf club, with the goal of trying to make the University of Toledo golf team in the fall as a walk-on.

  Three months after we returned from Scotland, Jack flew to Jim’s home in Columbus to begin a golf trip that few people ever get to take. They played the famous Scioto Country Club, then the world’s greatest golf course, Pine Valley, then Jack Nicklaus’s course at Muirfield Village, and then Inverness, where Nicklaus played his first U.S. Open when he was seventeen years old. The head pro there, David Graf, offered Jack a job for the summer working in the bag room.

  Jim White grew up just a few miles from the course, and while they were in town, he set up a meeting for Jack with the golf coach at the University of Toledo.

  “Day of Days,” Jack wrote to me in an e-mail from there. The coach couldn’t offer Jack a place on his Division I golf team, but he walked him around campus and told him if he was willing to play in some collegiate golf tournaments that summer and managed to hold his own against the Division I players, he would give him a shot.