Introduction to Golf

It began with my very first golf lesson.  My oldest brother, Bob, tried his damn'dest to get me interested in the game. He was a wildass fourteen year old wearing knickers and my old man’s discarded wingtip golf shoes.  He had daydreams of walking up the eighteenth fairway to the cheers of golf crazed enthusiasts.  His delusions ran deep and became dangerous for me.  I was in the wrong place at the worst time.

I was just an innocent four year old running around the yard with short pants and dirty knees chasing the family cat, Hitler.  My brother snatched me up by the seat of my pants as I circled him for the third or fourth time.  “Slow down,” he said, “You are making me dizzy and messing up my backswing.”   Bob had been sentenced to the back yard by mother who told him to pick up every last pear that had fallen from Clem Moor’s tree next door.

Mother never made you go sit in a corner for your misdeeds; she put you to work.  Instead of a rake he chose a rusty old nine iron from the shed and began launching each pear into the surrounding neighborhood. His sweaty brow wrinkled up in frustration as he tried to contain me.  He was my big brother and I thought he was the Lone Ranger, Superman and Robin Hood all rolled up into one. He sat me on his knee to tell me how proud I would be of him as he walked up to the eighteenth green with both hands raised in acknowledgment to the crowd’s appreciation.   

“Why?” I asked, which was the only response you could expect from a four year old getting his head filled with stuff he had no clue about.   

“Because my name is on top of the leader board,” he answered.

“Why?”  

“Because I am the best golfer of them all and because I am leading by fifteen strokes.”  

“Why?”  

“Because I never miss a shot and they all want to see me put on the green jacket”, he answered.

I was bewildered to say the least looking up at him and wondering who he was talking to with his eyes raised to the clouds above.  I had no idea what he was talking about but I was soon to learn, the hard way.  Why do I remember all this so clearly?  It was a “Day In My Life”.

He sat me on the back step and told me not to move.

“Watch me hit these pears over Grimmer’s garage” he said.  “Check out the loft, I can land these babies anywhere I want.”  

He was smacking them left and right and congratulating himself with words I never heard mom or dad use. I understood the word “yeah”. That was easy.  It was just the way teenagers say yes, but I was a little foggy to the meaning of the four letter word he put in front of it.

    
I had to go pee and I told him I was going in the house but he decided to find out if I had any guts first.

“Guts, what are guts” I asked.  

“Suppose you were stuck at the very top a Ferris wheel and you had to take a wicked piss?”  I was learning new terms every day.  The only wicked I ever heard about was a step- mother.  I knew you never wanted to have one of those. 

"Ya mean like a wicked step- mother?”  

“Never mind”, he said. “The point is you have to hold it because if you peed you’d be pissing off a lot of people below you.”   

I picked up a rotting pear and tossed it at our black cat with the funny whiskers.  My brother Bob had a plan but I didn’t know what it was yet.

I was holding my knees together and squirming so much I was wearing a hole in my pants against the cement step. I was getting seriously worried I would wet my pants.

“Gotta go pee,” I said again and reached around for the handle on the back screen door.  Bobby picked me up and sat me down in the grass and told me to gather some more pears into a pile. He said that the exercise would make me forget I had to pee.  

“Good caddies can hold their pee,” he said.  

I learned early in life that my brother delighted in torture.  He could have been a big success in some clandestine organizations that specialize in wrecking minds.

I got busy stockpiling his make believe golf balls as he zeroed in on them one after the other.  Fruit flies and bumble bees were in a frenzy to escape the rapid fire pendulum of his club.  Fruit salad filled the air and Hitler ran under the back porch to save his ass from the Blitzkrieg.

Boredom must have gotten to my brother because he stopped swinging and began rooting through his pockets.  He pulled out a blue golf tee and held it at eye level.  He read me the words Saint Andrew’s but later in life I learned it said Melrose Country Club.  His mind was wandering again to places of exaltation.  He bent down and stuck it in the ground with the care of a gardener planting the world’s rarest rose.   He placed one pear after the other on the tee and sent each one heaven bound.  He was so proud of his golf talents and exclaimed to me that there was nothing he couldn’t do with a nine iron.

“Look" he said, "I’ve used the same tee for a dozen pears already and haven’t broken it!”  

All of a sudden he began telling me a story about some ancient hero who was even better than the Lone Ranger, Super Man and Robin Hood.  I listened without a thought of peeing in my pants. 

Bobby went on with his true story of Mister Tell.  I can still hear him laying the ground work that led me to one of the poorest choices in my hardly got started life.  

He rambled on visualizing himself as the central character with, “His name was William Tell and he was an expert at knocking fruit off of people’s heads.  He used a bow and arrow but I can do the same trick with a nine iron!”  

Then the great life’s lesson of trust began to spew from his sinister lips.  

“Are you my brother?”, he asked.

“Yes, I am.” 

“Do you believe that I will always protect you?”  

“Guess so”, I replied wondering what I had to do now.  

“Alright then, I want you to prove your love, so just trust me, okay?”   

My belly got a little icky inside as he explained how brave I would be to lie down on the ground and let him balance one of these pears on my forehead.   I was never one, even at my age, to sis it up and I was always hungry for Bobby’s praise which later in life became known as “Attaboys”.  I followed his instruction hoping this exercise was going to be restricted to the art of balancing.  

“Now,” he said, “I am going to hit the pear off of your head without touching your scalp.”
 

Without one bit of hesitation he positioned himself to play the pear off his back foot.  He carefully wrapped his fingers, Sammy Snead style, around the smooth, shiny, fruit slicked grip of the nine iron and addressed the pear that was perched on my forehead.
 

Could this really be happening in real life you might ask?  Listen up my friends and please be deadly silent through his backswing.

He drew the club back slowly and then did a wiggle waggle thing with it as he calmed his nerves for the shot. I laid there, eyes closed, on the ground with the feeling of hot salty urine escaping the psychological prison Bobby talked my bladder into only a short time ago.  I was quickly learning that no matter how bad things got in life, they could always get worse.

The fall sky grew cloudy, the birds swallowed their chirps and Hitler silenced the mouse under his paw as the great Bobby Farley went into motion with the shot that was heard around the world or at least it felt that way when the pear flew off my head in perfect synchronization with the divot of flesh from my forehead.

The crimson face of the club was dripping blood as he stood frozen in his follow-through, watching the flight of the pear.  I felt the wetness running into my eye and down my face.  The leaderboard hero standing over me heard my whimper and dropped the club to scoop me up in his arms.  He rushed me into the house calling mother for help.  

“Poor little Joe," he cried, "is hurt.”

“What happened?” mother said as she held my head over the kitchen sink under the tap trying to find the smile the nine iron made above my right eye.   

“I don’t know, said Bobby, "I didn’t even know he was there. He walked up behind me while I was swinging the golf club.”

I wear the scar today, proudly.  It is not really the two inch mark on my head that I’m proud of. It is the bond that has emerged in this family through the expression of golf.  I of course express it quite crudely and have finally figured out that I don’t have to do it anymore to maintain the love of my relatives and friends. I can just stay home, watch the Phillies on my couch and write you all a bleeping story that perhaps someone can read with a little expression. I wish you all big smiles, but not on the dreaded golf ball. 

PS:  Bobby never did come clean to mother about how he almost killed me.   He attributed my story to memory fatigue from the “accidental blow!”  If I could only find that nine iron, the DNA on the front, not the back of the club would prove my story.   Some of the little incidentals in the story may sound like bullshit but being it was a "Day In My Life” and I'm the only surviving character in the story, I’m making it an official Farley Family fact.  No names were changed to protect the innocent, including Hitler the cat!




Comments

[James Dugan]

Priceless story of family and innocense. Somehow things come, like stories when you need them, and I think after all the election buzz and rattle, it is just what my lunch needed.

Why was the cat named Hilter? It has to do with your brother, I know it. I thought the crux of the story was when he lied about the action with you in his arms. This big man of St. Andrews, this golf superstar, like teenagers who think they are invinceable, learn the price of pride. The best and most ironic part is that you would wear the scar of his pride --- a badge he could never forget when he saw you.

The pee part built the suspense and great story telling. I hope to read many more of your stories.

Thanks for the lunch.