Now, I don’t like to mention my family in things I write, but I have to say that it was through the eyes of Erika that, after a long week at Pine Needles, I went from feeling tired to feeling fresh.
Having been out here all week in my role as reporter for The Pilot, I witnessed a lot of things, but the only thing I really thought about was deadline time.
Get something written, get it in to the office, and go home to get ready for the next day. Same old same-old. Being a so-called sports editor, I zoomed in on the competition.
But the week wasn’t just about golfing competition. It was also about children, families, and women’s health. It was exhibitions with Mia Hamm and Patty Berg, free hats and lunch, not to mention reserved front-row seats for kids.
After seeing so many parents and their children enjoying the championship, I began to feel guilty about not bringing my daughter, who had been begging to attend.
I finally got her there early Sunday morning. After wandering around the first tee and the 18th green for a while, I asked her what she thought.
“I can’t believe how many birds are around here,” she said. She wasn’t talking in golf terms; she was talking in simple wonder. I guess I had seen the birds all week, but I hadn’t really noticed.
It got me thinking about the things I had seen, and I’m not talking about wonderful golf swings (even though I saw plenty of them), or the imaginative play around the Donald Ross greens.
Just things, things you notice, but don’t really appreciate.
Things like:
- Peggy Kirk Bell, pulling up in her vintage Cadillac to the main entrance at the Pine Needles lodge during Friday’s deluge, getting out and asking Kathy Prickett to park the car for her. Prickett did, getting drenched in the process. Then Prickett, public relations director for the local Convention and Visitors Bureaj, got drenched again when she had to go back and turn the lights off.
- Annika Sorenstam coming out with her parents shortly after Bell arrived. She politely asked the driver of a van parked under the covering if her parents could get a ride back to where they were staying. I couldn’t hear what was said, but a smiling Annika said, “That’s OK.” She and her parents waited for another ride. No prima donna tantrum, no “Do you know who I am?” Just a smile and OK.
- The little blond boy hanging around the 18th green asking golfer after golfer to give him their glove as they walked off after finishing their rounds. Several golfers did.
- Brenda Corrie Kuehn becoming a media darling despite her protests that she might be too nervous to deal with the slew of reporters that awaited her after her first round. Some of the first words out of her mouth — “I know, I know. Hey, let’s talk to the pregnant golfer” — quickly established who was in charge of the interview: Kuehn.
- Watching Morgan Pressel talk to the press after her first round and realizing that the person fighting back tears was really just a 13-year-old girl — only two years older than my Erika.
- Bumping into the guy on the Sunday before the Open who said his goal was to get an autograph from every golfer in the field. Meeting him again on final round Sunday and finding out he was just 12 names short.
The more I thought, the more I remembered. Many, many little things. Things like watching a woman change a baby’s diaper on the grass behind the practice green and, at the same time, a volunteer stopping a cart to give a ride to an older woman who was struggling to get past the crowd at that green.
And the more I thought, I realized that I had noticed the birds — I just needed my daughter around to help me appreciate them.
