A Gentle Nudge from the Gods

Mysteries abound in the Golf Universe

A quick starter note: One year ago today I was roaming the sunny manicured fairways of historic Pinehurst No. 2 in search of interesting tales for my daily column in the award-winning Open Daily newspaper published by longtime friends at the Pilot Newspaper of Southern Pines. By my rough count this was the eighth U.S. Open I’d covered in my long golf journalism career, and I planned to make it my last major championship, having decided that at age 71, I’d earned the right to hangup my reporter’s notebook and simply enjoy the competition purely as a fan. Only time will tell, I suppose.

In any case, here’s a ditty I wrote several years ago for my Simple Life column in PineStraw, Walter and South Park magazines that celebrates growing “older” in golf. It’s a tribute to my dear friend Harry, who celebrated his 80th birthday not long ago and is still giving chase to Old Man Par.

Happy birthday, Harry.

Art by Gerry O’Neill

NOT LONG AGO, the host of a popular golf radio show asked who I most enjoy playing the game with these days. We were discussing the various golfers and assorted eccentrics I've met, interviewed and written about over a long and winding career.

"These days, I like to play golf with old guys," I said without hesitation, "like my friend Harry." "So, who is Harry?" he asked. Harry, I explained, is a gifted artist and nationally known cartoonist I've known for many years. He has a wry sense of humor, a beautiful tempo in his golf swing and a refreshing take on life.

My pal Harry Blair is in his late 70s, a fellow of true Scottish heritage but deaf in at least one ear, losing bits of his eyesight and battling a rogue sciatic nerve in his left leg that sometimes makes swinging a club difficult.

He was once a splendid single-digit player who now aims for bogey golf, and never gets too rattled by whatever the game gives him. He accepts that bad breaks that happen in golf (as in life itself) and are simply part of this maddening Presbyterian pastime, not worth fretting about, including aging body parts that can no longer propel a golf ball the way they once did so faithfully. Instead, Harry plays for the unadulterated joy of the occasional fine shot, the rare, good break, and the fellowship of his companions that includes a good bit of affectionate needling and laughter. Remarkably, he’s never had an ace, but holds out hope of someday shooting his age, the proverbial goal of every maturing golfer.

Though I'm almost a decade younger than Harry — he jokes that I am a pre-geezer in training — I love playing with him because he is a model of what I hope to be like in the rapidly vanishing years ahead: a man who has loved the game since he was a boy and loves it just as much, though differently, as an old man remembers his first love.

In short, Harry is living proof that the game can grow sweeter as the clock runs down. Golf has been part of his life since he was 10 or 11 years old and an uncle allowed him to pick clubs from a pro shop barrel of used irons. He chose a battle-scarred 7-iron and the full set that went with it. "It was a set of Dalton Hague clubs, really beautiful. I played with them for years bragging that I owned real Dalton Hague signature golf clubs."

He pauses and chuckles. "They turned out to be Walter Hagen clubs that had just been beaten nearly to death. But oh, how I loved those clubs."

We often meet late in the afternoon for nine holes at a beautiful municipal course set on a wide lake out in the country, surrounded by mature hardwood forests with no houses, streets or power lines visible anywhere. We pause to watch the action as shadows lengthen and nature reawakens — deer crossing fairways, shuffling beavers and waterfowl in flight.

We rarely bother to keep a score. We just play, talk, be. Harry's favorite hole is the short par-4 seventh that angles down toward the glimmering lake, with an approach over a wooded cove to an elevated green backdropped by a breathtaking view of the water. He has sketched and painted it several times, aiming to get it just right.

"Isn't this something?" he'll say with a note of quiet wonder, pausing before hitting an approach shot that sometimes lands in the water of the cove, sometimes just feet from the pin. If nothing else, he points out, getting older also makes it easier to laugh in the face of Father Time, remembering that none other than Walter Hagen — aka Dalton Hague — famously quipped "That's the easiest 69 I ever made," upon turning 69.

One autumn afternoon not long ago, as we were watching a spectacular chevron of geese heading south for the winter over the lake from his favorite spot on the course, Harry told me a little golf story that speaks of the game’s surprising wonder and mystery.

Many years ago, after Harry's mom passed away, he honored her final wish that he and his younger sister take her ashes and those of Harry's late father down to a lake in a park at Carolina Beach, where the couple first met and later married. Harry promised he would do that.

His sister was a very busy surgical nurse. Her unpredictable schedule repeatedly delayed their planned journey to the coast, month after month. One afternoon as he was playing golf with a partner who was particularly wild off the tee, something akin to golf magic took place.

He recounts the tale: "I was helping him look for his ball deep in the woods, when I stepped over a downed tree and saw a golf ball sitting on top of a rotting log, almost as if someone had placed it there. I picked it up and tossed it over to my companion. But it wasn't his ball, so he tossed it back. It was a very old ball. When I looked at it, I couldn't believe what I was seeing."

The ball's colorful logo read Carolina Beach. One word was printed on the opposite side — Mom.

"It sent chills down my spine. A day later, I drove my folks' ashes down to Carolina Beach — four hours away — and spread them in the lake at a spot that meant so much to their life together. I felt incredible peace at that moment, like a chapter’s ending."

As he told me this incredible tale, he pulled the very ball from his golf bag and handed it to me.

"I've carried it with me ever since," he explained with a simple Harry-like smile. "This game, this life, is wonderfully unexplainable, isn't it?"

Simple coincidence or a gentle nudge from the golfing universe?

Harry's not sure. And neither am I. But that's part of the wonder of this royal and ancient game, meaning that if you play it long and lovingly enough, wondrous things can happen.

As we played on, hitting occasional nice shots and mishits that will never be recorded, it struck me that there was, as usual, a nice little message in Harry's seventh-hole homily, perfectly timed for a couple "old" friends on a golden afternoon at the end of yet another golf season — one more reason to be thankful for a game I aim to play just like Harry until I either shoot my age or simply fly away like the geese in autumn.