A Return to the Game

by Linda De Grand

 

I played golf today. One job, one reluctant husband who hates golf, and one back injury had delayed this occasion for several decades.   Now I have available to me a nearby, very small, par three course (South Harbour Golf Links), which is tucked in among a collection of townhouses.  Par three is nice because it gives me a chance to resurrect my game without becoming totally disheartened.  No need for long drives down a 400 yard fairway. Further, the course is quiet enough so that the course managers are quite willing to let me go out as a singleton. I don’t have to feel pressured by being teamed up with long-suffering gentlemen, who have been playing every week-end, maybe every day, of their adult lives. The proximity of the townhouses is also a plus.  No sense that I have to have my pepper spray at the ready because I am by myself on a big lonely course with ominous woods lining the fairways. Oh, and dare I mention, as an Oak Island resident, I can play eighteen holes for eleven dollars!  If there were more prices like that, golf might not be a declining sport.

 

I love it on the course, especially because I feel that I am reconnecting with my father, who had taught me how to play when I was twelve. He waited to teach me until I was tall enough to hold an adult club.  Buying children’s sized clubs would have been a waste of money, of which there wasn’t a lot.  After all, I’d grow.

 

When my dad and I went out together, once I’d grown, I used a hand-me-down set made up of clubs from both my father and mother’s clubs. Our favorite time to play was Sunday afternoons, about 4:00 p.m., after the afternoon sports shows were finished on TV, the heat of the day was over, and the sun was slanting to give everything a golden glow.  In that era, before electric carts, we only played nine holes because of the time of day; but it was always fun, just the right amount of time, just the two of us.

 

My father really loved golf.  As his knees failed, he went from walking and carrying his clubs, to using the now available electric cart, then to just hitting practice balls in the junior high practice football field.  Finally, he couldn’t play at all.  When, in 2003, I had to dispose of his 1990 Ford Thunderbird, I had to take his golf clubs out of the trunk.  Even when he couldn’t use them, he kept the clubs close at hand, maybe awaiting a miracle cure for old age.

 

One day, when he was a reluctant resident of a nursing home, I took him for a ride around his favorite haunts in his hometown, Freeport, Illinois.  The golf course was one of the stops we made.  We sat in the parking lot of the municipal golf course for a while where we had a view of the practice tee.  We watched one persistent soul tee off with ball after ball.  After a while my father said, “He is never going to fix that swing,” and we drove on.

 

My last conversation with my father about golf took place on one of those rare Illinois spring evenings, where the temperature and the light are just right, everything wrapped in a light green gauze and the faintest of breezes promising summer days to come.  My father, in his wheelchair and sweater on the nursing home’s terrace, sniffed the air and said, “I’d sure like to be playing golf tonight.” 

 

Today, as I played, I could hear him saying, “Not such a wide stance, Linda.” “Loosen up your grip on the club.”  There was something about a straight right arm. Or was it left? And also something about how far to go with the back swing.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll remember.