“So it’s spring of my first year, and an old friend of mine from Iowa had become an editor at Harper’s Magazine, and he was willing to come to campus and talk with my students. It was great. We had a class where he went over my students’ work, and then we all had dinner together. The next day I was heading down the hallway in Lawrence Hall to my office when the head of the writing department, the fellow who had hired me, stopped me and said, ‘I hear you had an editor from Harper’s Magazine here.’
“I began telling him how much it had meant to my students, and he stopped me and said, ‘You brought an editor from Harper’s Magazine to campus and you didn’t introduce him to me? What are you trying to do, cut me out of an important contact in New York?’
“He said it and then just turned and walked away. I remember standing in my office at the window, lighting a cigarette, and trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. Then I went to his office. I knocked on his door, and when I opened it, he looked up at me from behind his desk, and he said, ‘As hard as I worked to bring you here, I will now work to send you on your way.’
“I still remember those exact words. I tried to reason with him, but he dismissed me. ‘Why are you still standing there?’ he said. ‘Don’t you have any work to do?’
“So I started walking back to my office to try to think. Only I didn’t get all the way back. I couldn’t even breathe. I was thinking, Okay, just let it go. It will all disappear in time, and everything will be all right. But I had been listening to a lot of Springsteen in those days, and there was this one song with the lyric about how we grow up and we keep our silence and hope that it passes for honor. I turned around and went back to his office and threw open the door and I said, ‘From now on, I’m going to think of you as nothing more than a fat asshole.’ I slammed the door and that was it.
“He was my boss. He was the big deal in the English department. I had three more years on my contract, but when my vote for tenure came up, he killed me. And during the last year, when I was applying for teaching jobs at other colleges, he blackballed me. I remember we were out in the parking lot one afternoon and he smiled at me and said, ‘I heard from Cornell today. I’m telling them everything I know about you.’
“ ‘Fuck you,’ I said.
“I never told your mother about this when it happened that spring. We had just moved into our first house, and she was pregnant with Cara. When summer came around, we were back in Maine, and my closest friend at Colgate came to visit with his family. John Hubbard was the photographer there. You don’t remember him, but he was a really great guy who took all the pictures of the university. He only saw what was beautiful about the place. The students, and the magnificent campus. He and I were out in my sailboat, just the two of us, and when I told him the story about what had happened—I’ll always remember this—he just bowed his head. I said, ‘John, will I be able to survive this?’ He shook his head and said no.
“So I knew. It was tough. You were almost four years old when we left Colgate. I applied to over a hundred jobs and never even got invited for an interview. They were jobs teaching writing, and there was no way they weren’t going to call Colgate and speak with the head of the writing department. I was cooked and I knew it.
“So then we were broke. Worse than broke. We had you and your three sisters, and I couldn’t pay for our heating oil. It was winter, and I took the only job I could find, working as a laborer at a construction site down the shore where they were building a mansion house. I kept a journal and wrote a book about it.”
“The Cliff Walk,” he said.
“Yep. It was your mother who came up with the title. The next thing I know, the book is under contract with Little, Brown and we’re all going to New York to celebrate. You remember?”
“Of course. I got my Yankees hat.”
“Then I’m on Oprah. Then Disney buys the film rights, and we’re off to Ireland for the summer. That book opened the doors for me to live a writing life. I wrote five books and a movie in the next seven years. The movie enabled me to help your grandfather get into the assisted-living place, which was great for a while. You know, before he got too sick. But the reason I’m telling you this is that for the last twenty years I’ve regretted that I didn’t keep my mouth shut at Colgate, because when I turned around in the hallway and walked back to that asshole’s office and told him what I thought of him, I placed in jeopardy your mother’s dream and the life we were building together. I always thought that she and I would get to grow old on a college campus. You know, shuffling through the leaves with Colleen to go see a football game on a Saturday afternoon. It would have been a wonderful life for us. But now I see that this great mistake also gave me something I never could have even dreamed of in those days. It gave me the chance to be here with you. I let you down today. In the first place, as your caddie, I should have known that there was a cut line. That was inexcusable. And when you gave up on yourself after we pissed away our first chance for birdie, I should have found some way to keep you in the game.”
Somehow all those words opened a paved highway through the silence, and Jack seemed very relaxed now when he began telling me his take on what had happened. “I was really pissed off,” he said. “There was nothing you could have said.”
“Well,” I told him, “it’s okay to be pissed off out there. And I wasn’t going to try to sugarcoat what had just happened.”
“I needed that birdie. I mean, hell, I started off with a stupid bogey, then fought back for two pars. And here’s the first par-5, and I busted the drive and hit the second shot to twenty feet.”
“Seventeen feet.”
“Whatever, man. And I’ve hit all my wedges in both practice rounds, and then I chunk it.”
“It happens.”
“But it shouldn’t have happened.”
“You picked up your head.”
“I know that.”
“So, you made a mistake, and it cost us the birdie that we needed.”
“It was a swing of three strokes. I should have made birdie and pulled back to even par there.”
“Yeah, I know that, but why did you give up?”
“Because it was over. I’m realistic about golf. I knew it was over.”
“We were three over par, Jack. Three over par after four holes. If we fight like hell and make pars on the rest of the holes, we finish the round at the top of the leaderboard. Right where we want to be.”
“I guess so. I guess you’re right.”
“No, me being right doesn’t mean anything. It’s just like you saying, ‘It is what it is.’ We have to figure out how to work together out here, or it’s going to be pure misery for both of us. Tell me what you expected when you stepped onto the 1st tee this morning.”
“I expect to shoot par or better.”
“Okay. And I believe you have the skill to shoot par or better. And if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t tell you. I’ll never lie to you. So we’re on the same page. That’s good. So, how do you want to proceed?”
He was still looking right at me and thinking now, I could tell.
“I need to be pissed off out there when I do something stupid,” he said.
“Okay, you can be,” I said. “That’s fine by me.”
He thought a little longer and then said, “I don’t know, man.”
I heard the discouragement in his voice, and at that moment I didn’t want him to be discouraged. Hell, we were talking with each other again for the first time in so long. “Let’s watch the football game, and we’ll figure it out tomorrow,” I said. “Is that okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said.
When the game was over and the lights were out, I found a few last words, which I spoke to Jack through the darkness. “I’ve always thought that you are going to make a great coach someday when your playing career is over,” I began. “And it would be nice to be able to say to your players, ‘I played on a pro tour one winter in Texas and I was terrific.’ But it will be more
meaningful to your players if you say, ‘I played on a pro tour one winter in Texas, and even when I got slaughtered on the golf course, I never gave up. I kept fighting back, right to the last shot.’ And, Jack, when I think of your college golf career, all I ever think about is you down in North Carolina, playing in your first big tournament against the best players in the country from all the universities that wouldn’t give you a chance. You were playing so well, then you had one bad hole and lost the first round. You remember. You walked past me on your way to the 1st tee to start the second round, and you said, ‘I don’t have a shot left, Daddy.’ But somehow you fought back. You shot one under par in that round.”
“I was lucky,” he said.
“No, it wasn’t luck. You fought back hard that day. And from that moment until right now, I have believed that you can fight back from anywhere. That is all I will ever be thinking here this winter, no matter what happens. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
“Good night, Jack.”
“Thanks.”
NOVEMBER 4, 2011
No sleep really last night. But progress has been made with the father-son stuff. I feel so relieved that we were able to talk. The space between us didn’t feel so wide this morning. And the ride to Cypress Lakes Golf Club was different too. Jack still drove way too fast like everyone else, and I couldn’t bear to look up from the blinking blue dot on his iPhone showing us where we were, but we were talking for a change. Not about golf, but about other things. His old high school buddies back home. His sisters. Colleen. It was nice. I think we were both relaxed in each other’s company for the first time since he left home after high school. It made me wonder if all we really need to close the space between us is time together.
I watched him on the range going rhythmically through his practice like a wheel rolling on its track, using his electronic scope to check his distances so he knew exactly how far he hit each club when he swung smooth, and then when he really went after it. I had already written these distances down in my notebook the first day we practiced together, and I would keep those numbers fixed inside my mind unless he told me he wanted to amend them.
All along the courses in St. Andrews you find these tiny white flowers, like miniature daisies, each petal tinged with pink, and whenever I was really missing Colleen, I would pick them and mail them home to her in matchboxes. When I wandered over to the practice green to roll a few balls to judge the speed, to my surprise I found the same daisies growing here, only tinged with purple. I knelt down and picked some and put them in my pocket while I thought through our game plan for this round. We had agreed to play the course today as if we were in competition, keeping track of every shot, and I was hoping we would make hash of one hole early, take a triple bogey or worse, and then fight our way back from there. I believed that our battle existed only inside Jack’s mind, in those five inches between his ears that the immortal Bobby Jones had spoken about so often. But I was wrong. Today we also have a golf course to battle. This was a real golf course that made Hearthstone look like a picnic. Here we had water lining both sides of the fairways, narrow landing areas from the tee boxes, deep bunkers and trees, blind shots over tall mounds, and 460-yard par-4s, all set on an open plain where, if the wind came up, there was nothing to knock it down. Okay, I said to myself, we’re going to have to hit golf shots today, and when we finish our round, I’m going to work Jack like Rocky Balboa on his short wedges and putts.
We had a tall order ahead of us, I thought, a true test of golf. But right from the first drive, which Jack ripped 330 yards up the middle, it was easy for him. He played an almost flawless round, landing fifteen greens in regulation and hitting three perfect wedge shots to inside four feet on the other three. And not a single three-putt green. We were in trouble only twice, and after making bogey both times, he came back and birdied the next hole. And it was easy for him. I watched closely. He putted like a pro and finished the practice round in one under par.
It struck me all afternoon that maybe Jack was being handicapped by his natural talent at this game. Maybe when you have so much natural talent, you feel as if you shouldn’t have to fight, that every round should be a stroll in Elysium. Let the less talented golfers get their trousers muddy while they scrap and fight their way around a golf course. I had known writers like this from the beginning of my career, writers so talented and brilliant that they could not even begin to endure the rejection and humiliation and so they gave up and walked away.
NOVEMBER 6, 2011
I am doing laundry now while Jack is off at the range, and I am wondering if anyone who is at least forty years old can ever walk into a Laundromat without finding part of his history waiting there. There was a long stretch of time in my twenties, eight years in fact, when no one would publish a word I wrote and I would carry my wash into the Laundromat and think that maybe I would know I had achieved some success as a writer and as a man when I was finally no longer doing my wash in a stranger’s machines.
And I remember after our first baby was born when I loved going to the Laundromat and then hanging out everything on the line and measuring my daughter’s growth by the size of the undershirts and socks. Those were the days when Colleen believed in me so profoundly that she would have followed me anywhere in the world with her babies. When we lived five miles outside the village of Rathdrum in Ireland and I walked those miles into town with the dirty laundry and then back with everything clean and neatly folded, I always felt that I had accomplished something meaningful and that my life was amounting to something.
Today, the whole time I watched the clothes turning in the big dryer, I thought about Jack out at the practice range alone. His first time alone since we arrived. Fear rose through me as I worried about him driving around Houston without me. And then a gradual calm as I folded his clothes, realizing that these are the clothes that fit a man.
NOVEMBER 7, 2011
Game Day. Awake at 3:00 a.m., I suppose the most difficult thing we ever face as parents is seeing our children in pain and not being able to make the pain go away as we were always able to do when they were small. We are not prepared for this. I don’t want Jack to be in pain again today out on the golf course. I don’t want him to feel embarrassed the way he was in our first tournament. What can I say to him after he makes his first poor shot today? How can I help him not feel embarrassed by that poor shot? How can I help him believe deep inside that he has the skill to follow that poor shot with a good shot? How can I help him believe that he has just as much right to be playing here on this tour as the other players from the celebrated golf schools who may finish at the top of the leaderboard in these events week after week?
What is the battle here, the real battle at the center of this thing?
In a real battle the thing is not just to stay alive. The thing is not to be a coward. These are the questions I am taking with me to the golf course.
I need to find some way to persuade Jack that his only battle today is to fight as hard as he can for each individual shot, one shot after another, no matter what occurs, and never to give up, even for a moment. If he does this, then he cannot lose.
We arrived at Cypress Lakes at 9:00 for our 10:10 tee time. While Jack went up to the range, I went into the men’s room to wet my towel. I was just inside the door when I got hit at both ends. Throwing up and diarrhea. I was honestly sick enough to bow out of this round. In Scotland in two seasons, no matter how I felt, I never called in sick a single day. It was a point of honor among all the caddies there. You show up. Period. This is supposed to be fun, people have told me. But I cannot help thinking that we came down here to play our first professional tour and we shot a 90 in our first event and didn’t make the cut. That was four days ago. If we do this again, it is going to be very difficult to keep going. We just have to get over the hump by shooting a respectable round today. I am secretly hoping for a round in the 70s. Seven over par.
Here we go.
Hole 1. A 368-yard par-4.
A great drive with the three-wood. Wind behind us. Three hundred and thirty yards. We have only 70 yards left to the hole. Fifty-six-degree wedge, comes up forty feet short. Three putts. Bogey. Jack is pissed off at himself already.
One over after one.
———
Hole 2. A big 557-yard par-5.
The wind behind us. Jack hits three-wood, 345 yards. Two hundred and twelve left. He wants to go for it with his four-iron, over water. I am scared to death. I would like to lay up and take our chances for a birdie from our third shot. I say nothing except “Finish the stroke.”
Walking with Jack Page 20
