By ED TRAVIS
I’ve been playing golf a long time and when asked I often say I started when Harry Truman was President. Depending on the age and education of the questioner, he or she may figure out that means around 1950.
Undoubtedly what attracted me to golf at the beginning was the opportunity to spend time with my dad doing something we both loved. He was an enthusiastic and committed bogey golfer who occasionally could get hot and shoot in the low 80s.
The first time I beat him remains in my memory like it was yesterday. The summer I was 12 we often would play nine holes after he came home from work and one evening the lengthening shadows witnessed me playing like never before.
I think my score was 39 but whatever it was Dad didn’t match it and as we walked off the final green, he said something like, “Nice playing,” or “Good score.” In any event his comment wasn’t effusive, more like a man-to-man acknowledgement simply stated.
I was of course over the moon and couldn’t wait to tell Mother, but Dad continued to be low key.
A few days later a friend of his told me how Saturday morning in the men’s locker room Dad couldn’t keep quiet about being bested by his young son. It said volumes about him and our relationship that I still cherish all these years later.
Sons learn from fathers. That’s what’s supposed to happen, and in my case, I was lucky because Dad was a good teacher and patient almost to a fault.
He introduced me to golf, and we played often and, in the winter, we hit plastic practice balls in off a mat in our garage with Ben Hogan’s “Five Lessons” (which I still have) spread open on the work bench. Remember these were the days before computerized swing analysis or simulators or heat in the garage. Upstate New York winters made for some very cold fingers.
We practiced like this all winter and since winter usually ran from mid-October to April we practiced a lot. In a good year we could start playing the week after the Masters.
Teaching me he never yelled or was overly critical and always seemed interested in my getting better for my sake not his. Hogan, who he had seen play a few times, was his model but I once described Dad’s un-Hogan-like swing as a sway followed by a lunge.
When I was 13 or 14, I was complaining about some swing problem and after looking at my effort he told me he didn’t know what it was I was doing wrong and therefore didn’t know how to fix it. This made me angry at the time but looking back I can see it took a lot of character on his part to admit he didn’t know to a kid much less his son.
That was the end of golf lessons but there was another difficult winter activity we started about that time—contract bridge. Dad was a Bridge Master; a sought-after instructor and he played in many tournaments.
He thought I should learn because back then bridge and golf were seen as beneficial skills in business, so we spent hours sitting around the kitchen table bidding hands. We then progressed to playing the hands and I actually got fairly proficient.
In golf terms I was maybe an 18-handicap bridge player whereas Dad was a plus five but he still liked the mental stimulation of working with me and I loved being able to spend so much time with him.
Happy Father’s Day.
