My best memory of my father hitting a golf ball, was on a Wisconsin golf course. My parents had bought a little cabin on Elkhart Lake, a small, mile-wide fisherman’s haven, filled with sailboats and tourists escaping Chicago’s summer heat. When us kids went to camp, mom and dad would travel up for a few weeks to swim in the restorative spring-fed waters, play a bit of golf and generally get away from the medical pressures they were both under. My father was an average but consummate student of golf. He read up on the latest pro tips, practiced his swing with wiffle balls in the front yard, (see podcast Living in the Land of Zoysia, 2023), and believed in his mind that Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus were his besties.
One day when the moon was still up and the sun was thinking about it, my father showed up at camp to take me out for nine holes on the links on a local golf course called Quit-Qui- Oc, an Indian name, the derivation of which literally means, “Waste of Time.” To this day, generations of locals around Elkhart Lake vehemently object to this translation, preferring to bath the local tourist atmosphere with terms of golf endearment, such as “scenic, charming, and leisurely.”
I did not want to go and reluctantly climbed into the car, because I knew I was being abducted as hired help, except that I would be paid by regular doses of my father’s wisdom, which boiled down to advice about getting a ball to go into a hole I couldn’t see some three hundred yards away. There may be a lot of wisdom a father could impart about life to his nine-year-old son, but none of that, not one ounce, in my opinion, comes from the game of golf. This is unfortunate and disappointing because there was nothing more important to my father than for me to learn the game, and to love it with all my heart and soul. That love included cleaning his clubs, scrubbing the dirt from his spiked shoes, and the worst part, dragging his sack of golf clubs around the course. Golf was a religion to my father, not just a game, but an immersion of the soul, the proverbial 19th hole of spiritual enlightenment where one could witness God’s creation which to my father was our earth sliced into long green pieces, not the ones we have come to know from the book of Genesis, but something called fairways, run ways of manicured grass, referred to originally by David in Psalm 23 as “green pastures.” On the other hand, I saw the golf course more as the valley of death.
Still, we headed out, my father and I, stopping and starting, my dad flailing away, and me with his forty-five various clubs slung over my shoulders along the course at Quit-Qui-Oc Golf Course. For me, it would be three hours of punishment, walking over hill and dale carrying a sixty-five-pound bag of clanging clubs, each with a different purpose, but none of them one bit necessary from my point of view.
And by the way, I’m not alone in my opinion. The indigenous Indians from that area of Wisconsin called the Kettle Moraine, the Potawatomi, never used more than one kind of club for anything and got along just fine. Quit-Qui-Oc, which you’ll remember means “waste of time,” was itself a subtle warning to keep life simple, to use a minimum number of clubs in life.
As my father and I wandered aimlessly across the Wisconsin landscape, I longed for the day when golfers would invent a club that could be used for everything, a club that could be used for every golf shot imaginable whether your golf ball had been shanked, sliced or lost in a crawdad hole. Naturally, one would need to throw in a putter for good measure, but with a minimum of golf clubs, carrying around a heavy golf bag could be eliminated entirely.
By the way, for those of you unfamiliar with golf, a putter is essentially a bent metal rod, that was originally sold at Lowes for twenty bucks as a tool for cleaning out your gutter in the Spring. Now you can pick one up at Golf Pro for just under three hundred dollars, with an additional thirty-five dollar for the gutter adaptor.
Thus, instead of being weighted down, I began to imagine myself exploring the terrain, an intrepid explorer like Daniel Boone carrying one club over my shoulder like Daniel carried his rifle, looking rather powerful and rugged – a frontiersman and a force to be reckoned with, building forts in the wilderness, wrestling bears with my bare hands, and taking the occasional picture for the history books.
Moving across the frontier, there were times when my father was striking the ball with unusual ferocity, staying out of the sand traps and getting plenty of fluids. On those occasions, he would let me take a swing at a practice ball. For reasons I will never understand, those opportunities came on holes that were about a mile long, holes where any sense of distance or perspective was completely lost. As a result, when I whiffed the ball and it dribbled out twelve feet into a lake, the shot seemed even more miserable and farther away than when I began. Considering that the ball was now twenty feet underwater, in my dad’s eyes, the ball had actually travelled backwards.
“Awwww, that’s too bad,” Dad would say, apologetically, “maybe you’ll do better next time,” which was to say he might give me another chance next year when the golf course opened again in the Spring. These were the times when it was important for me to be able to escape psychologically, and simply sling my imaginary rifle over my shoulder and return to my imaginary status as Daniel Boone.
One afternoon however, we had come over a series of blue-green rolling hills, perfectly manicured like in the Garden of Eden, surrounded on both sides by rows of wispy pines, a picture straight from the Wisconsin Bureau of Tourism, complete with red barns off in the distance, black and white-spotted heifers mooing in nearby paddocks, along with the obligatory amber fields of grain. I think there was, actually a purple mountain in the background above the fruited plain and so forth, but it may just have been a Stuckey’s billboard off the highway.
Anyway, being in a particularly benevolent mood on this outing, my father let me take a rare second shot, and he teed up my golf ball in the middle of a small grove of trees, where my shot would not be seen by anyone when I made my usual shank. He placed the ball high up on a tuft of grass where it could have a fighting chance of rising into the air and then proceeded to give me a long tutorial on his secret triple overlapping grip, the one that later made my fingers grow sideways and caused me to have an unfortunate series of surgeries in my forties and fifties and sixties.
I don’t remember the exact nature of my swing, but when you are a kid and think you are holding a rifle, it would not have looked quite right from a golfer’s perspective. Somehow, I must have done enough right with my swing to connect with the ball, because I hit it as clean a s a whistle and the ball took off like a speeding bullet. The smooth arc it created was only matched by the distance it was covering creating a line that was straight down and across the fairway one hundred and fifty yards, clearing the fence of a local cattel farm, where it hit a horse square in the butt.
It was one of the most exciting moments of my life. I was witnessing my role as a frontiersman play out in real time, which is to say I had found some purpose to this game of golf beyond my wild west fantasies.
The horse had a completely different reaction and reared up like when the Lone Ranger yells “Hi-O Silver!” and bolted forth as if it had been shot out of the gate at the Triple Crown. My father and I stood with our mouths wide open, and any compliment I might have received from him for my miraculous shot was lost on an image of a terrified horse running like a bat out of hell, straight as an arrow and disappearing beyond the horizon of a picture-perfect postcard of a Wisconsin landscape.
For me, seeing my father bent over hysterically laughing changed my view of the game of golf forever. When we recovered and caught our wind, and stood upright, I picked up his clubs to move on to the next fairway, and remarkably, his bag of clubs seemed lighter. I felt they had a purpose now, and that each club was worthy. I began to take in the subtleties of the golf course as I looked ahead, and the strategies involved in each golf shot. I forgot about my Daniel Boone rifle and let go of the wild horses that were running away in my head. I knew my father was going to give me another shot at this game after all, maybe not today but soon, and it would, at least in my dad’s eyes, always be well struck.
(Posthumous note: My father died last week on April 15th.)