Final Rounds Read online

  “We found Final Rounds to be a very special tribute to love—of family, of golf, and of life.”

  —Arnold and Winnie Palmer

  “A glinting, lyrical, heartbreaking, hilarious pilgrimage.”

  —Yankee Magazine

  “You don’t need to be a golfer to enjoy this wonderful book.”

  —The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

  “This story of intergenerational love will appeal to all readers.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “I have never liked golf or understood the people who play it. Now I have an abiding respect for both, just as I understood fly-fishing and fly fishermen after reading A River Runs Through It.”

  —Lee Walburn, Atlanta Magazine

  “Wise, instructive, funny, and utterly enjoyable…Final Rounds is as carefully organized a book as you will find. It is a combination autobiography, biography, travelogue, and painless history of golf.”

  —Portland Times-Herald

  “Final Rounds takes readers on a wonderful journey to some of the most famous golf courses in the world….But like each round of golf, Final Rounds is about much more than the game itself. It is a journey of discovery for a father and a son and for their relationship.”

  —USA Today

  “One cannot help but be moved by the alternately funny and sad, beautifully written elegy to a man and a game.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Powerful and deeply moving.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “There is something here for every reader.”

  —News & Record, Greensboro, NC

  “A unique and touching piece of writing, Final Rounds brought back memories of all the rounds in England and Scotland that I played with my own two sons. It won’t improve your handicap, but it definitely will improve your appreciation of the game.”

  —Mark H. McCormack, founder of IMG and author of What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School

  “Final Rounds is moving proof that golfers don’t think only about their swings. It also demonstrates a point I’ve been trying to make to my wife for several years: a golfing trip to Scotland can be a transcendent act of love.”

  —David Owen, author of My Usual Game

  “James Dodson’s resonant memoir of life with his extraordinary father is a love story in the highest sense of the phrase; a tender and beautiful book.”

  —Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Final Rounds is not just another golf book. Shot through with wisdom and humor and truth, Final Rounds is, in the end, a compelling and ineffably moving book. And an original one.”

  —James Finegan, author of Blessed Greens and Blasted Heaths

  “One does not have to be a golfer to recognize that Final Rounds is a lesson in sheer courage, filial love, determination, and good humor. There is immense drama in an individual’s determination to overcome adversity, to attain a goal, and to realize a dream. This represents the learning experience of the book. So read Final Rounds, and come along on the tour with James and his father.”

  —Jack Lemmon

  “Dodson’s skillful renderings of Scotland’s charm, golf’s many and varied lessons and his love for his admirable father make his memoir well-crafted, engaging and meaningful.”

  —The Plain Dealer, Cleveland

  “What comes through Dodson’s book, besides a touching portrait of an enviable father-son relationship, is the life lesson available from golf for those who pay attention….Dodson’s book has captured much of what it is to be a golfer, a son and a father.”

  —Winston-Salem Journal

  This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  FINAL ROUNDS

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published in November 1996

  Bantam trade paperback edition / November 1997

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1996 by James Dodson

  Book design by Donna Sinisgalli, adapted for ebook

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-21916 No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  ISBN 9780553375640

  Ebook ISBN 9781101969496

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1745 Broadway, New York, New York.

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue: A Father’s Voice

  One: Opti the Mystic

  Two: The Road Hole

  Three: A Sunday in London

  Four: Putt Like a Kid

  Five: The Road to Lytham

  Six: Lady Sunshine

  Seven: Return of the Slammer

  Eight: All the Lovely Wee Places

  Nine: The Game Within Us

  Ten: Mystery of the Hole

  Eleven: Haunted Ground

  Twelve: La Forêt de l’Amour

  Thirteen: Dust to Dust

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Thus is the earth at once a desert and a paradise, rich in secret hidden gardens, gardens inaccessible, but to which the craft leads us ever back, one day or another. Life may scatter us and keep us apart; it may even prevent us from thinking very often of one another; but we know that our comrades are somewhere “Out there”—where, one can hardly say—silent, forgotten, but deeply faithful And when our path crosses theirs, they greet us with such manifest joy, shake us so gaily by the shoulders! Indeed we are accustomed to waiting.

  —ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, WIND, SAND AND STARS

  It is nothing new or original to say that golf is played one stroke at a time. But it took me many years to realize it.

  —BOBBY JONES

  PROLOGUE

  A Father’s Voice

  Toward the end of the afternoon, Tom Watson sits in his office talking to a golf writer. The golf season has just ended. The golf writer is me. We have been talking for almost two hours. There is a thin skin of ice on the pond in the park across the street. Traffic is a muted sigh in the winter shadows of Kansas City. Christmas presents for his children are stacked neatly in a shopping bag at his feet. Watsons wariness of the press is famous, but he has been relaxed and generous, talking about the Ryder Cup team he will soon lead to Britain, about his life, career, children, heroes, even making self-deprecating jokes about his well-publicized putting woes. This pleases me, confirms my best hopes. Watson is forty-three, five years my senior, the best golfer of my generation, now a lion in winter. In my former life as a political journalist, it would have been deemed grossly unprofessional to admit I am my subject’s fan. But golf, unlike politics, as Alister Mackenzie is supposed to have once said, is at least an honest game. I am Watson’s fan because he played with such honesty and heart during his golden days, and because of how he conducts himself now that the glory has faded and his game seems almost mortal

  Sometimes during these conversations, I find myself unexpectedly wondering with pleasure how I got here. For me, a kid who tagged after his golf heroes and was lucky enough to grow up and be able to sit and ta
lk with them, it’s a dream job and a question rooted perhaps as much in philosophy as journalism. All philosophy begins in wonder, and the wonder of what Watson suddenly, intimately reveals of himself in our conversation is both thought-provoking and surprising. I ask if he can identify the worst moment of his career, and he responds by telling me about once rushing out of the locker room at the World Series of Golf, brushing off a boy seeking his autograph. The boy’s father followed him and tapped him on the back.

  “He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘I just want to tell you, Mr. Watson, what an asshole I think you are. My son was really a fan of yours.’ ” Watson shakes his head. “I couldn’t believe it—how badly I felt, I mean.” He falls silent, pursing his lower lip. Somewhere outside the building I can hear Christmas music playing, a slurry rendition of “Jingle Bells” fading away. There are writers around who would love to challenge Tom Watson’s sincerity on this, question how such a trivial moment could possibly compare, say, to his heartbreaking loss to Seve Ballesteros at the ’84 British Open at St. Andrews. A wayward two-iron shot at the infamous Road Hole cost him a record-tying sixth Open title and made the fiery Spaniard the new darling of the British masses. For a second or two, Watson stares at the running tape recorder, then shakes his head again. “I still feel bad about it,” he says simply.

  The thing is, I believe him. Watson could not believe what he says he believes—namely, that golf represents the most honorable of games—and feel otherwise. So I flip the coin—best to part on a cheerful note—and ask him for the best moment of his golf life, certain he will either say his famous shot-making duel against Nicklaus at Turnberry in ’77 or his “miracle” chip-in at Pebble Beach in ’82 to win the U.S. Open. “It’s funny,” he says, pausing again, “the greatest thrill I had may have been the day my father invited me to join him and a couple of his regular golf buddies at his club. I was so excited, really aching to show him what I could do. I guess I was maybe eleven or twelve.” Watson, the former Stanford psychology student, studies me with those eyes that always look as if he’s been out walking in a linksland wind. “Even now I think about that. It was a very powerful moment. My father means so much to me. I can always hear his voice in my head, telling me to keep my head still or make a good swing. I don’t know if I ever felt that way again, you know?” He smiles somewhat wistfully, revealing the boyish gaps in his teeth. Turning off the tape recorder, I admit that I know what he means because I hear my father’s voice, too.

  Almost every day of my life.

  ONE

  Opti the Mystic

  That Christmas, I sent my father a new set of golf clubs.

  I was sure he’d love them. After all, they were ultralight and graphite-shafted, designed to put zip back into a faltering swing, the latest thing in “super senior” equipment technology. My father’s Wilson Staffs were almost as old as me, heavy blades meant for a man half his age and twice his strength.

  He sent them back to me two weeks later. The box was barely opened but a pleasant note was attached, addressed to Bo, his nickname for me. “Thanks for your thoughtful gesture, Bo. These are mighty handsome clubs, but I don’t think they’re for me. I have a good idea, though. Since these are so light and easy to swing, why not keep them for Maggie and Jack to use? I’d be honored to buy them their first clubs. I’ve enclosed a check. Love, Dad.”

  The check was for a thousand dollars. He’d clearly missed the point of my thoughtful gesture. I called my mother to see if perhaps her husband had recently been beaned on the golf course or simply forgotten that his grandchildren were only three and four, respectively, more interested in making music with a purple dinosaur than divots in the yard. When I explained the situation to her, she laughed and said, “Well, sweetie, bear with him. Just between you and me, I think your father may be a little down in the dumps. Although with him, as you know, it’s never easy to tell.”

  She was right. My old man was the original Silver Lining Guy, a man who could have taught the entire Hemlock Society the power of positive thinking. As a teenager I dubbed him, not entirely kindly, Opti the Mystic because of his relentless good cheer, his imperturbable knack of seeing any problem or crisis as “an opportunity for growth,” and his embarrassing habits of kissing strange babies in grocery stores, always smiling at strangers, and quoting somebody like Aristotle or Emerson when you least expected it, usually in the presence of my impressionable high school dates.

  Among Opti’s more unfortunate personality traits, in my view at the time, was that he appeared utterly immune to social embarrassment and almost went out of his way to expose his crazy optimism to strangers. One time he picked me up from a guitar lesson with a startling occupant in his car: a drunk in a Santa suit. He’d found the man wandering aimlessly around the parking lot of his office building with a bottle of wine under a wing, muttering about shooting himself for the holidays.

  Only Opti would have rescued a suicidal Santa and attempted to cheer him up. We took the man to the Irving Park Delicatessen, and Dad bought him a hot meal. The man poured out his tale of woe to us—he was dead broke and his wife thought he was a bum and his girlfriend was pregnant again. But after the spiel he calmed down and sobered up and even appeared to feel slightly better for having gotten his problems off his chest. We dropped him off in front of his dingy crackerbox house on the east side of town, and Dad discreetly slipped him a fifty-dollar bill and asked him to buy something nice for his wife.

  Perhaps it was a foolish gesture, a hopeless charity. The man’s social worker, if he had one, would no doubt have said it was money burned. The guy was just going to go buy more wine and drink himself into oblivion and maybe even shoot himself after all.

  I still don’t know. What I do know is that as he left our car, the man reached over and grabbed the arm of my jacket with a surprisingly firm grip and looked at me with his bloodshot eyes. “Your father’s a real southern gentleman, kid,” he growled. “I hope you fuckin’ know that. Merry Christmas.”

  I knew Opti was a southern gentleman because people told me this my whole life—school chums who thought my old man was cool, girlfriends who thought him amusing and gallant, parents who needlessly reminded me how lucky I was to have a dad like that. In Mrs. Moon’s English class I couldn’t read Geoff Chaucer’s line about the noble knight en route to Canterbury with the other pilgrims—“a gentle, parfit knight”—or hear the voice of Dickens’s Old Fezziwig exhorting his employees and neighbors to come join the Christmas dance, without thinking of Opti, my sappy old man.

  I knew of plenty of small acts of kindness Opti had quietly perpetrated over the years—funds he sent to crackpot relatives whom the rest of the family ignored, employees he’d helped through hard times, strangers whose cars he’d hauled from ditches, dogs he’d fetched from interstate medians. But on the downside, it sometimes annoyed me to have people think I had such a saint for a dad, a human Hallmark card for a father.

  If Opti, after all this time, was now finally “in the dumps” even a little bit, as my mother described it, this qualified as big news. My first thought was that it must be his health. After all, his advertising business was thriving, his golf handicap was holding steady at 22. Pointing out that Cicero learned Greek in his seventies and Socrates took up playing the lyre in his dotage, Dad liked to say he would indeed someday consider retiring, when and if he finally got old. But even he had to accept that he couldn’t live forever.

  It was easy to forget that Dad was pushing eighty and facing, medically speaking, a situation that would have wilted the spirits of a man half his age: a daily injection of insulin and the unpleasant aftereffects of a radical colostomy, now almost a decade old, as well as a poorly done trim job on his prostate that left him wearing a pair of unwieldy collection bags strapped to his thighs the way some undercover cops pack a .38. He also suffered from a deteriorating cataract condition that caused his left eye to drift in and out of focus. His knees were weak, and his hearing was going. Typically, he never
even mentioned these problems, and if we mentioned them, he merely laughed off our concerns.

  “So what’s wrong?” I asked my mother. I was afraid she was going to tell me he’d fallen off the roof while cleaning out the gutters and damaged his excellent shoulder turn. Perhaps he ruined his remaining good eye for lining up putts by blowing up the gas grill in his face.

  “He lost his golf group.”

  I thought about what she said. “You must be joking,” I finally replied.

  “I wish.”

  This explained a lot. Dad dearly loved his longtime Saturday morning golf group—Bill, Alex, Richard, and sometimes an old Chapel Hill friend named Bob Tilden. They fussed and squabbled at each other like old married folk and could find more ways to take each other’s pocket change than a convention of Times Square pickpockets. But they were clearly addicted to each other’s intimate sporting companionship in the best way available to fully grown, heterosexual, registered Republican southern males. I once tried to explain the allure of this mysterious exclusive male phenomenon to my nongolfing Yankee-born spouse, pointing out that its high-minded origins probably date back to ancient Greece, where lonely sports widows used to call it agape, an even higher and purer manifestation of the spiritual passion, say, than Arnold feels for Winnie Palmer. My nongolfing spouse only shook her head at the mystery of men.

  It turned out that Bill Mims, Dad’s best friend and primary golf nemesis, had developed a heart condition that allowed him to play only on warm mornings, and Alex the Scotsman had retired and moved to the south of France with his wife, Andrée. Richard had somehow just “lost interest in playing” when the others gave up the game, which left only Dad, the senior swordsman of the group, to try and soldier along the links on a regular basis.

  “He’s taken to playing with younger men,” Mom reported in a carefully lowered voice, as though Opti might be listening in the other room. “But I honestly don’t think he likes it.”