{"id":412,"date":"2010-10-29T22:03:46","date_gmt":"2010-10-30T03:03:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnstrawn.com\/?p=412"},"modified":"2010-10-29T22:08:35","modified_gmt":"2010-10-30T03:08:35","slug":"golf-books-i-love-final-rounds-by-james-dodson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/golf\/personalities\/412\/golf-books-i-love-final-rounds-by-james-dodson","title":{"rendered":"Golf Books I Love: “Final Rounds” by James Dodson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Though lots of new books about golf are published every year, not many are worth reading, and even fewer endure.\u00a0\u00a0 In more than thirty years of reading about golf, I’ve run into only a handful of books I would like by my bedside if I had only a few months of reading left.\u00a0\u00a0 This is the first in a series of reviews of the golf books I believe are the best of the genre.\u00a0\u00a0 These are the books I recommend to friends, especially to people who are puzzled by golf’s attraction to all of us who are addicted to the game.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jim Dodson<\/p><\/div>James Dodson <\/a>didn’t rest on his laurels after publishing “Final Rounds.”\u00a0 He wrote a best-selling biography of Ben Hogan and ghosted Arnold Palmer’s autobiography.\u00a0 He wrote more books\u00a0about golf, too, including his latest, “A Son of the Game,” which takes him back to North Carolina and in way full circle from the journey begun in “Final Rounds.”<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Final Rounds<\/em> tells the parallel stories of a father’s love for his son and the son’s gratitude for the emotional security and genial guidance bestowed by this marvelous dad. \u00a0James Dodson grew up in North Carolina, where Braxton Dodson, a salesman whose outlook and attitude were so wondrously sunny that his boy called him \u201cOpti the Mystic,\u201d or \u201cOpti\u201d for short, taught him, among other things, how to play golf.<\/p>\n

Opti, as a wise parent, knew that giving his boy orders wouldn’t get him very far, so his standard retort, when Jim asked for advice, was, \u201cWhat do you<\/em> really want to do?\u201d When he was in graduate school, Jim’s girlfriend was murdered. Not long afterward, he reluctantly took a newspaper job, but quit after a few months. His editor asked, \u201cwhy?\u201d Jim had to go to Scotland, he said, to see the golf courses.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody except my father,\u201d he writes, \u201cthought it was the right thing to do.\u201d \u00a0Opti gave him a ride to the airport, a new watch, and a thousand bucks.\u00a0 Reading Graham Greene novels and lugging his golf clubs, Dodson \u201croamed around the continent for nearly three weeks,\u201d then headed for St. Andrews, the Scottish town where the game of golf was born.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’d finally seen the famous Old Course,\u201d he writes, \u201cbut to me it looked like just any other golf course in the rain, and I felt no desire even to play it. \u00a0My little pilgrimage was a bust because I was still as sad as the day I’d left home. I remember wanting to weep, but I couldn’t even be bothered to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back home, he settled on the journalist’s life.\u00a0 He interviewed senators and presidents.\u00a0 Then he came out into the light as a golf writer. \u00a0(Sometimes, he says, he tells people he sells coffins, so he won’t have to answer the inevitable question, “What is Jack Nicklaus really like?”) \u00a0<\/p>\n

He married a college professor and moved to Maine, and had two children of his own, while Opti, as he approached his ninth decade, kept working, “a sales legend in his company.” When Opti fell terminally ill, but before his symptoms completely disabled him, father and son set off on a sentimental golfing journey to the British Isles. Dodson writes beautifully about this experience, which is the narrative heart of Final Rounds<\/em>.\u00a0 Maneuvering between past and present, Dodson weaves golf lore, family history,and personal reflections into the larger tale.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/a>Opti, it turns out, spent a couple of years in England during WWII. When a B-24 crashed into a school in the town of Feckleton, Army sergeant Braxton Dodson was among the first on the scene.\u00a0 \u201cThe plane had gone right through the school,” Opti recalled. \u00a0\u201cIt set half the town on fire. I just remember\u2026starting to pull away pieces of things … and all those precious little kids inside … buried alive or killed by the explosion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dodson speculates that this horrific experience, which he’d never heard Opti speak about, shaped his father’s optimism.\u00a0 \u201cNo matter what he shoots,\u201d Opti’s golfing companions told Dodson, \u201cyour old man never seems to have a bad day on a golf course.\u201d \u00a0If you’ve seen thirty-eight children incinerated, missing a putt can’t be regarded as a very bad experience.<\/p>\n

While the trajectory of Final Rounds<\/em> arcs towards a funeral, it is not a sad book. \u00a0Opti deserved this tribute, earned by filling his life with kindness and generosity.<\/p>\n

As the culmination of their pilgrimage, father and son arrive in St. Andrews, but by then Opti is fading.\u00a0 Because he won’t jump the ballot–the daily drawing that determines who’s going to play–even though Jim the golf writer has pull and could probably arrange it, Opti and Jim must make do with a stroll over the Old Course late one evening. They swing imaginary clubs at imaginary balls, and “play” the inward half–the back nine.<\/p>\n

“We walked to the eighteenth tee, struck fine drives into the darkness,” Dodson writes. “For weeks I’d been so fearful of this moment. I wasn’t the least bit sad now. ”<\/p>\n

Final Rounds<\/em> is a sentimental book, but not maudlin. Golf summons strong feelings, because it’s capricious and demanding and sociable all at once, and provides the arena where private fears and public ghosts may intersect. The spirits of Old Tom Morris and Bobby Jones hang around St. Andrews, and in the years to come, the shadow of Opti will drape the Road Hole bunker on the Old Course, where his ashes lie. Jim Dodson has done his dad proud.<\/p>\n

James Dodson, Final Rounds: A Father, A Son, The Golf Journey of a Lifetime<\/em>.\u00a0 Random House Paperback, $16.00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though lots of new books about golf are published every year, not many are worth reading, and even fewer endure.\u00a0\u00a0… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":413,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,9,18,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","category-golf","category-lifestyle","category-personalities"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2010\/10\/finalrounds1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":421,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions\/421"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}