Golf Dads : Fathers, Sons, and the Greatest Game

by Sampson, Curt

• ISBN13: 9780618812486
• ISBN10: 0618812482
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-09
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

The interplay between fathers and sons has long been one of golf's most essential and enigmatic relationships. In Golf Dads, the best-selling writer and former touring professional Curt Sampson brings to life ten remarkable stories of golfers, their fathers, and the game that brings them together. The stories feature well-known subjects such as Michelle Wie, Ben Hogan, Lee Trevino, and David Feherty, as well as some surprises, such as six-year-old phenom A.J. Beechler--not yet known to the world. "This is a book about fathers," Sampson writes, "using golf as a wedge to pry open a few insights." We get up close with the embarrassing Byung Wook Wie and his talented daughter at a PGA Tour event in Pennsylvania; travel to the Mexican jungle for bogeys and butterflies with a club pro bearing his father's ashes in a black Hogan shag bag; journey to San Francisco for transplant surgery for a golf pro father from his golf pro son; feel the wonder and weight of fathering a six-year-old golfing sensation whose future is too bright to see clearly. For fans of James Dodson's Final Rounds, Golf Dads is sure to resonate with anyone who has been handed a worn club by his father or who has watched his child swing a stick at a rock and marveled at the possibilities.

Author Biography

CURT SAMPSON was inspired to write this book by the death of his own golf dad in 2005. He is the author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestsellers Hogan and The Masters. He is also a regular contributor to Sports Illustrated.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Rebirth Day	p. 19
Daddy Caddie	p. 39
$227.05	p. 59
Ulstermen	p. 79
Forty-inch Driver	p. 95
Cross-handed	p. 116
Far	p. 139
Don't Hit This Club Unless You've Got Five Hundred Dollars	p. 157
Our Father	p. 177
Back to the MARIPOSAS	p. 195
Acknowledgments	p. 207
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

1 REBIRTH DAY Rick, Curtis, Kevin, and Ryan Rhoads A brown two-door 1970 Buick Le Sabre sped south on I-5, tracing the spine of California. Behind the wheel sat Rick, a slight man wearing contacts beneath his sunglasses. Beside him, Joan, his pretty, dark-haired wife, divided her attention between the road ahead and the hubbub in the back seat. Actually, the car had no back seat; it had been torn out in favor of a playpen, which Rick had bolted to the floor. Inside the padded enclosure, among blankets, teddy bears, an Etch-a-Sketch, a Slinky, and a handful of GI Joes, Curtis and Kevin Rhoads gibbered and played and drooled and slept. They were ages four and two, respectively. It was 1974. "We had a two-bedroom apartment in Woodland [a Sacramento suburb] where you could always hear trains going by," recalls Curtis. "We were there some and on the road a lot. I know it seems a quaint thing now, but the tour and the car were our life and our lifestyle." When Curtis fell off a jungle gym and gashed open his forehead, Joan rushed him to a hospital. Somewhere. Neither of them remembers where between the Andy Williams San Diego Open in January and the San Antonio Texas Open in November this occurred. A quick trip to the ER and twelve stitches in your child's cabeza was merely business as usual for what sportswriters used to call "golfing nomads." Cars with clubs in the trunk virtually defined the tour for the first fifty years of its existence. Roads still ruled-not jets-when Rhoads played in the '70s. Caravans formed on Sunday nights for the long haul from, for instance, the parking lot at Silly Willow Country Club in central Mississippi to hotels near the next event in Tallahassee. The following Sunday night the convoy snaked north to Philadelphia; then, a week later, west to Chicago, and on and on into the future like a runaway train. As ever, golf pros carried tools for minor repairs and learned to handle blowouts and highway hypnosis and bad food and all the other hazards of life on a concrete strip. The cars had to be big, so partly to fulfill the wheelbase requirement and partly to finance her husband's rookie year, Joan sold her treasured white Pontiac Firebird. "That car had some guts," Rick says with as mile and a touch of remembered regret. The newlyweds missed the way the 'Bird pinned your spine to the seat, but one bland Buick was all they needed or could afford. "One time he left me in Tucson," Joan says. Rick was feeling flush enough, or fatigued enough, to fly to Miami for the next tournament. "He said 'just follow Ken Fulton.'Well, Ken Fulton liked to go eighty-five, and he didn't like to stop. I was like this the whole way." Joan extends her arms and widens her eyes, the frozen pose she held for two solid days across seven states. But on their usual, less frantic cross-country drives, when the kids were napping or playing with GI Joe, the couple had time to think and to talk. Joan looked at the farms and fields rushing past and wondered why fate had surrounded her with males all her life. She had five brothers, no sisters. Now two sons and a husband, with another baby boy in her future. A schoolteacher and a nongolfer, she often posed blunt questions. "Why did you miss that putt on eighteen?" she'd ask. "Why did you hit it in the water on twelve?" Admits Rick, "I never had an adequate answer." As the odometer spun, Rick mused aloud, and in his head, about the future. As good as he was-and he knew he could really play this game- his position on the tour remained tenuous. Like his brother Ron before him, he'd attended USC on a golf scholarship, and twice was named All- Am