{"id":30,"date":"2010-05-10T12:02:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-10T19:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgpnolan.com\/?p=30"},"modified":"2011-05-01T14:12:26","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T21:12:26","slug":"keeping-score","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/about-the-gameessays\/30\/keeping-score","title":{"rendered":"Keeping Score"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n

I have a file \u2014 loosely speaking — labeled \u201cGolf Stuff.\u201d \u00a0It\u2019s an old, out-at-the-elbows shoebox, struggling to hold a warren of magazine clips, logo balls, tees, and ball markers.\u00a0 Most particularly, though, it\u2019s my scorecard library, wealthy with the short stories I write to myself in a hieroglyphics of numerals, dots, checks and circles.<\/p>\n

These cards are the few culled from the many.\u00a0 Some I save simply because they name the most luminous stars in golf\u2019s galaxy: The Old Course at St. Andrews, Shinnecock Hills, The Sand Hills, Royal County Down.\u00a0 Others are simply the reportage of rounds played well, outside my norms. \u00a0The shoebox holds few photos.\u00a0 Most are curiosities; a foursome of strangers, me among them, lined up shoulder to shoulder, drivers at parade rest, just prior to an outing of some sort.\u00a0 A picture of the lighthouse at Turnberry with me as the requisite prop.\u00a0 A football team-style shot of the entire field at an alumni outing.<\/p>\n

I have, though, one prize set of pictures, of my own making: my father and my son, each on a knee, flagstick behind them, putters in hand.\u00a0 Same green, same angle as best I could manage it, three years running.\u00a0 Neither boy nor man is smiling self-consciously or mugging for the camera, and so the photographs are perfect.\u00a0 My father looks no older from year to year, but the boy grows broader across the shoulders and his face takes on the lineaments I recognize today. \u00a0Time did its work of slendering the baby fat in his cheeks. The resonance of the photos\u2014why among all the golf pictures and all the family pictures I own these mean so much\u2014 is in how they capture at a glance a bond between the generations.<\/p>\n

My father and I did not always see eye to eye. \u00a0He was a child of The Great Depression and World War II. \u00a0I come from Woodstock and Watergate. \u00a0Will\u2019s cultural touchstones are, well, yet to be identified.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure he\u2019ll eventually text them to me.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t remember exactly when my father and I called a generational truce and began playing golf together.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think we ever did.\u00a0 Or needed to.\u00a0 He played, I played, we played together, it got to be fun, and then it got to be much more: it got to be time well spent.\u00a0 When Will turned five or so, he began traipsing along with us.\u00a0 As he got a bit older, he began to fiddle with our clubs, and then to swat his own way around. We were a threesome, three generations, and our families never gathered without our sticks in the trunk and a piece of time set aside for golf.\u00a0 It became ritual.<\/p>\n

Will was not on the golf course with us the autumn afternoon my father died.\u00a0 We were playing with a friend of my father\u2019s, and, to complete the foursome, a single we\u2019d never met, who in the shambles of that day I would remember little of.<\/p>\n

I recall the afternoon in snatches.\u00a0 I remember that when my father fell, the abandonment of every effort to remain upright was instantaneous and complete.\u00a0 I remember other golfers rushing over to help. \u00a0I remember how long, how horribly long, it seemed to me, it took for the ambulance to wail its arrival and complete its hopeless careening across fairways and along service roads.\u00a0 I remember the shirt being cut away, the paddles, the ride to the hospital.\u00a0 I remember thinking, incongruously, that I would never again see my father apply his flaring whip of a signature.\u00a0 I remember arriving home and saying to the boy, who was standing alone in the center hall\u2019s late-day shadows, \u201cWill, he\u2019s gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

That happened in October, when the weather here in the Northeast restlessly shakes away the green of summer and begins to grow its winter teeth. The end of the golf season often comes abruptly.\u00a0 Sometimes the weather runs fine one week, and the next bears no resemblance to it.\u00a0 The marsh grasses grow brittle and chatter in a new, cutting wind, the clouds trade their ivory billows for a look sleek and steely gray, and the season is over.\u00a0 That was one of those years.<\/p>\n

Over the long, slow-moving months of winter, I wondered if I could ever play there again.\u00a0 The question was complicated by affection: as a writer, my first big golf feature had been written about that course.\u00a0 And as a player, it had fascinated me from the start.\u00a0 Working along the breezy hilltop breast of treeless farmland gone fallow years ago, the architect had fashioned a weathery, links-like layout, bunkered it ingeniously, and created a puzzle that I grew to appreciate more the more I played it.<\/p>\n

Its future in my life seemed to offer no middle ground: to play was either sacrament or sacrilege.<\/p>\n

In early April, when the desire to play trumps good sense, I decided I had to go back.\u00a0 It happened that I played alone my first time out.\u00a0 When I arrived at the sixth tee I stood in the box an extra few moments, waiting for something.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know what.\u00a0 A transformation. A shot of insight. \u00a0Enlightenment. \u00a0But everything was adamantly unchanged: I could easily see the short line of old crabapples, the tail of the service road, and further out, flapping as if to draw my attention away from it all, the blue flag.\u00a0 That was all.\u00a0 I hit, played the hole in the humming quiet of the breeze, and moved on.<\/p>\n

It was not until full summer that I got out with Will.\u00a0 We\u2019d never played there before; the forced carries and many bunkers were simply more than he could have handled when he was younger.\u00a0 But he had grown, and even without playing much he\u2019d developed a swing that could get him where he needed to go.\u00a0 When we got to six tee I told him that was the hole on which his grandfather had died.\u00a0 He nodded, nothing more, and together we looked down the fairway.\u00a0 Another season had brought along another world: the fescue was running thick and blond along the fairway borders.\u00a0 The turf was intensely green.\u00a0 In the crease of a marshy wetland, redwing blackbirds squatted on wavering cattails and darning needles drew silver streaks across the air.<\/p>\n

Will and I have always had a deal. \u00a0If we walk, I take care of the grill; we ride and he\u2019s on his own nickel afterwards.\u00a0 We had walked that day, and so I was cleaning my shoes and hunting up my billfold preparatory to going inside when someone approached me, excused himself, and said that while he wasn\u2019t sure, he thought he had played with me once.\u00a0 I said it was possible; I often started off alone and picked up partners along the way.<\/p>\n

He hesitated a long moment and said: \u201cDid your father have a heart attack on this course last year?\u201d<\/p>\n

I stuffed the scorecard and the pencil into my pocket and put out my hand.\u00a0 \u201cYou were our single.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t sure I had you right,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cI didn\u2019t want to, you know, ask.\u00a0 And be wrong, or out of line with it.\u00a0 It\u2019s not my business.\u00a0 But I remembered your clubs \u2014 Hogans \u2014 because not many people play them, and that made me pretty much sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d I said, \u201cI\u2019ve always felt it was your business.\u00a0 And I\u2019ve always felt bad for you.\u00a0 You didn\u2019t sign up for what you got that afternoon.\u00a0 Don\u2019t get me wrong on this \u2014 it\u2019s just something I wonder about when I put myself in your place.\u00a0 Did you finish the round?\u201d<\/p>\n

He hesitated again.\u00a0 Then he said:\u00a0 \u201cFunny thing.\u00a0 You know, it just seemed to be such a big decision.\u00a0 My clubs were sitting right where I dropped them.\u00a0 The ball was lying on the green.\u00a0 You were all gone.\u00a0 Everything was weirdly normal.\u00a0 I was going to walk off.\u00a0 And then I changed my mind.\u00a0 I finished the round.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t really play it. \u00a0I kind of marched through it.\u00a0 Eighteen was like a finish line.\u201d<\/p>\n

I said: \u201cI\u2019ve always hoped you did.\u00a0 It\u2019s strange.\u00a0 Where else do you have someone die in the middle of what you\u2019re doing, and then go back to what you were doing once the hubbub is over?\u00a0 And have it be the right thing to do.\u00a0 Just a strange game.\u201d<\/p>\n

I said nothing more out loud, but I knew that like our single, I too had finished that October round. \u00a0It just took me longer.\u00a0 Until a day when my son and I, walking that golf course, together affirmed that the generations prepare to hand down the things they need to hand down not though formal ceremonies, but simply by completing what needs to be completed. \u00a0And so a day I wouldn\u2019t wish on anyone moved golf a shade closer to the heart of life.\u00a0 My time playing with Will is more prized.\u00a0 He\u2019s got a little brother coming along, and I look forward to that.\u00a0 When I play alone, roaming around the immense, undisciplined beauty of the old farmland, I commune with the old man\u2019s spirit.\u00a0 It\u2019s all good.<\/p>\n

So the shoebox fattened.\u00a0 A course you\u2019ve never heard of.\u00a0 Numbers that wouldn\u2019t turn your head.\u00a0 But there is more than one way to keep score, and because there is, that summer afternoon\u2019s card is one that I am keeping.<\/p>\n

TheAPosition say that keeping score easier when you use a golf course directory<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a file \u2014 loosely speaking — labeled \u201cGolf Stuff.\u201d \u00a0It\u2019s an old, out-at-the-elbows shoebox, struggling to hold a… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":33,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1245],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-about-the-gameessays"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/22\/2010\/04\/DadWill.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":306,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/306"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}