Oliver Twist Hits the Links

Oliver Twist Hits the Links From Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Golf Book

They call it golf because all of the other four-letter words were taken.
~Raymond Floyd

The last round of golf I ever played was hardly better than my first, thirty years prior. Both were an orgy of whiffs, skulls, chunks, grounders and four-putts. I could blame it on having never taken a lesson, or on an absence of athletic prowess that's almost worthy of medical study, or the fact that I've been bullied through equipment convenience into playing right-handed clubs even though I'm a southpaw. But the truth is that the roots of my golfing life were poisoned beyond recovery long before I ever swung a club.

My golf-addict father, who returned on summer weekends to our hometown from his job in faraway Toronto, always promptly fled the bosom of his family at eight in the morning on both Saturdays and Sundays. I was eleven years old when he first invited me to be his caddy. An invitation from my father, as is the case with some fathers, was indistinguishable from a command.

"Golf" often conjures a Cheever-ish country club setting, but this tale requires a step down to a humbler spread. My father, an underpaid civil servant with six kids and finances so strapped that he couldn't afford a car, was actually a charter member of our nine-hole course that charged just three dollars a round. Like most of my father's interests, golf excluded family participation. If anything, it served as the perfect escape from his ill-fitting paternal role. The golf course was one place he could be certain we'd never be, as home was one place we could equally be certain he'd never be.

Back then, before the popularity of carts, the serious golfer required a caddy much in the same vein the serious boulevardier required spats. Why my father chose me over someone else's kid, I'll never know, but I wonder if the reason dealt with something more than just saving a few precious coins. Maybe he thought commandeering me to lug his bag around while following at a respectful distance represented a wholesome dad-and-lad outing. Or perhaps it was all about healthy outdoor exercise for a growing boy. Or possibly about introducing me to a nobler pastime I would embrace myself in due time.

Even little kids can have big egos. Seldom enamored of serving somebody else's needs and whims for four or five hours at a stretch, and particularly not while staying mute and invisible, to me caddying was a humiliating erasure of self, like being paid not to exist. Plus I had two older, stronger, more pliant brothers my father could easily have nominated. The implicit sadism of his choosing me did not go unrecorded in my book of grudges. At eleven I didn't want to collect stamps, I didn't want to dance ballet and I didn't want to caddy.
My father was a jock in his youth, and so far as I could tell, this defined his life in high school and afterward. He'd been a pretty good semi-pro catcher, as well as the county badminton champ. Entering his forties, golf offered him a last living link with competitive sport.

The luminary golfer of the time was Byron Nelson, a name I knew because it freakishly packed Lord Byron and Admiral Nelson into the same place at the same time. Other than this I was perfectly ignorant of the game. But, despite this ignorance, I could sense the change in barometric pressure when my father sliced or hooked or otherwise botched a shot. There would be this pregnant moment of perfect quiet, as just before the Big Bang, and then would come his acting out the drama of the good man betrayed by the cosmos. Disbelief, rage, expression of rage in the form of an inanimate steel club suddenly lurched with every erg of energy the betrayed can summon against the betrayer — which in these cases was the sum total of gravity, time and space, rotation of the earth and astrophysics. I was far too junior, and in my station too humble, to open my mouth. A wisecrack would ensure the town's only recorded filicide.

My father had a graceful swing and usually belled tee shots like home runs. Alas, he was also a man living on the edge of his nerves, even in repose. He was easily frustrated by life's little insults, each of which he took as personal: a cat underfoot, a lardy waiter, a lipped putt. It was like my father had been born without a filter to absorb and dampen shocks to his system.

Faced with an errant golf shot, the poor bastard had no choice but to explode. And it wasn't the club spiraling up into the blue or the expletives that seemed to keep it aloft, so much as the lingering aftermath that truly roiled my guts. For the next two or three holes after an outburst, nobody in the group would feel free to speak or even look at the smoldering ogre who used to be "Dad." He would retreat into a silence that was more powerful than even the loudest noise, nursing his fractured pride while boiling at Fate's inexplicable treachery in breaking the agreement to exempt him from all mortal pain. Eventually he would wrestle his demons enough to return to the game, but it took something out of everyone in vicinity, and this glimpse of the sulfurous being within served to redouble my already entrenched terror of crossing him. Or even merely approaching him.

My self-pity reached its climax after the day's play. I would rest my sore haunches on the bumper of a car in the parking lot, too timid to go and ask for a Coke while he and his pals lingered over Molsons in the clubhouse. (The 19th hole was always the longest of them all.) When my father appeared he was weary, as well as a little tipsy. Our short drives home in the borrowed government Plymouth were never chatty. I was too relieved at gaining my freedom for this last withholding of intimate communication to irk me. And I was also too grateful for getting back my freedom to ask for any money I was owed for my services. More often than not, the money never was forthcoming.

I don't remember exactly when or why my caddying career petered out. My father kept on playing for the rest of his (tragically short) life, but after about age fifteen I was no longer required to be a part of it. By then we'd moved to the city. He'd risen in the world and joined a posh club, where perhaps it would have been seen as déclassé to dragoon your own kid as your caddy.

In retrospect, that abiding resentment at lugging a bag of clubs over several hilly miles, in a pursuit that had nothing to do with me, does seem a mite hysterical. It wasn't slavery, for god's sake. I suffered no lasting harm. Only decades afterward did I grasp the truth; my caddying agonies weren't and never had been about golf at all. It was an effort without reward as chopping rocks in a Georgia chain gang — and without the one particular reward that would have made it worthwhile.

Because not even there, in his personal, private world, at play on his beloved golf course within a club-length's touch, did my father and I draw one inch closer, even manage to connect. Such a chance for sustained proximity to that all-powerful figure was pitifully rare away from the golf course. And indeed, no other such opportunity would ever be granted again.

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