The grudge match never materialized. Instead, it was a knock-down, drag-out shouting match in his truck that began with me telling myself not to say anything that I would later regret and then saying a lot that I regretted almost as soon as I said it about how I was down here in Texas trying to help him get back what he’d lost when he was kicked off his university golf team and the least he could do was act a little grateful out on the golf course instead of behaving like a bad apple. “When the Scottish caddies are stuck out on a golf course with a wanker,” I yelled, “they don’t put up with his bullshit.”
At some point I stopped long enough to hear Jack yell back at me, “Why does it always have to be about you! This isn’t about you, man!”
I was shaving the next morning and thinking that I would give almost anything to get back the days when Jack used to climb up onto the bathroom vanity with his make-believe razor made from Legos to shave beside me.
———
It took me another day to finally see that he was right. He was hitting wedges onto the practice green while it all went through my mind. We were here together on this journey, but we had different objectives. I was happy just to be here with him, walking through the fulfillment of an old dream we had shared. That is what mattered most to me. For him, this was the chance to see how good he could be. In all likelihood this would be his best chance, and his last chance, to find out. One of the things he had yelled at me during our shouting match was this: “I hit the middle of every fairway for two rounds, and the best I could do was twelve strokes over par. You don’t get it! That’s pathetic. I start off with a stupid double bogey, and while I’m trying to fight my way back into the match, I’ve got to worry about what you think of me?”
As parents, I think we cross a line where we start needing our kids more than they need us. While I watched him practice, I began to see what he meant. He didn’t need a father to be worrying about out on the golf course. If he was going to play this game better than he had ever played it before and move up the leaderboard as the tour progressed through the winter, he needed me to be a caddie who lived up to the caddies’ code to show up, keep up, and shut up.
I didn’t admit to him that I was wrong until he was driving me to the airport for me to catch my plane to Maine for the Thanksgiving break. We stopped for gas and were waiting in line when a truck loaded with Christmas trees pulled in to the station. “It’s coming on Christmas,” I said.
“It’s ninety degrees,” he said.
I asked him if he remembered the Christmas when he gave money to the old man on the sidewalk.
And I saw him smile. We had a tradition in our family when the kids were little. No matter how poor we were, we always drove into Portland on Christmas Eve just before putting the kids to bed and gave a $100 bill to someone walking the streets who looked down on his luck. Jack had watched his older sisters get out of our car each year, and then, finally, it was his turn. There was an old man sitting on the sidewalk leaning against the corner of a building with his back to us. When Jack tapped him on the shoulder, he turned around, and we saw that he had a full white beard. Jack’s hands flew up into the air. “Look, Daddy!” he exclaimed. “It’s Santa Claus!”
When we pulled up to the Southwest terminal, I said, “I’ve been thinking about what you said to me, and I think you’re right. This isn’t about me. It’s about you playing the best golf you can. So from here on out, you don’t have to be my son on the golf course. You just play golf and I’ll just be your caddie.”
He nodded and said, “Okay, man.”
We shook hands. “I’ll see you in two weeks,” I said. “Have a good Thanksgiving.”
“You too,” he said. “No snow in Toledo. I’ll be playing at Inverness every day.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s good. And thanks for bringing me along on this journey. I mean it.”
“You bet,” he said.