Twenty-three years ago this spring, my dad and I hooked up for a casual round of golf in Pinehurst that changed — and possibly even saved — my young, ambitious skin.
I realize how melodramatic that sounds, so let me quickly emphasize that it wasn’t the quality of the golf that proved the agent of my salvation. It was the conversation that followed a fairly dismal round.
To begin with, I’ve long maintained that among golf’s leading virtues is its social intimacy, the opportunity the game affords us to converse on whatever level feels appropriate to the moment and maybe even get to the heart of the matter.
For my father and me, ever since my early teenage years when he began periodically bringing me to the Sandhills from Greensboro to absorb golf’s finer traditions in a setting he felt was unrivaled for dignity and natural sporting splendor, the game was always more than a game to us. It was a means of staying connected.
One Latin meaning of the word “crisis” is the “need to make a decision,” and that certainly sums up my state of mind that spring of 1983.
For seven years I’d been senior writer of the oldest Sunday magazine in the nation, working at a famous newspaper in Atlanta that purported to “Cover Dixie Like the Dew.”
After years of traipsing on and off airplanes with presidential candidates, investigating crime and profiling celebrities of one sort or another, that day we hooked up in Pinehurst, I’d finally earned my big break — a job interview with an editor at The Washington Post.
For the son of an itinerant Southern newspaperman, a kid who started as wireboy at The Greensboro Daily News and wound up holding the same job title that Margaret Mitchell had had for a time in Atlanta, it didn’t get much better than that.
Or did it?
An Impulsive Round of Golf
Truth told, driven by some misguided projection of myself into the literary firmament of the Fourth Estate — this was, after all, the height of Woodward and Bernstein — my chest ached from late nights of writing and incessant worry about measuring up with my equally driven colleagues.
Purely for the sake of beating them, I had forfeited anything remotely resembling leisure-time activity, including and especially my boyhood love of golf, and hadn’t taken more than three days off in a row during my entire time in Atlanta.
When a close friend at The Post assured me that, assuming I got offered the job, due to the intensity of competition among staff reporters, the two things I would need to get straight off the bat were, in approximate order of importance, “a good literary agent and an even better psychotherapist,” I felt some inward part of me quailing.
So, for no other reason than this, while making the trip north to that all-important interview, I phoned up my dad in Greensboro and whimsically proposed we meet in Pinehurst — site of my happiest childhood days beyond the old golf course in the Gate City that was presently being fashioned into an executive parkway — for a round of golf at either No. 2 or Mid Pines, the first place I ever completed 18 holes on a championship golf course. (I asked him to retrieve my old clubs from my bedroom closet and bring them along.)
Funnily enough, as I recall, Miz Bell’s beautiful Mid Pines course was clogged with a corporate outing and No. 2 was wide open and almost empty of players that afternoon.
In any case, our golf — mine, at least — was utterly forgettable. But afterwards, my old man and I sat together on what’s now called the Ross Porch at the resort and had a beer and discussed my shot at the big time in journalism’s fast lanes.
I confided to him the heretical notion that I wasn’t sure I wanted to work at the house of Woodward and Bernstein after all. In fact, I added, I was damn weary of chasing crime bosses and ambitious politicians and almost wishing I could have my old first job back at The Daily News — the one where I was just turned loose in a rattling staff Ford to roam the back woods of the Piedmont and southern Sandhills to collect “people” stories for the Sunday feature section.
‘Can’t Afford Not To’
Being a product of this state’s good earth, with a family tree whose roots extend all the way back to the founding of the Colony, including an illustrious ancestor who first surveyed the modern boundary lines of at least a dozen major counties in this part of the state — possibly even Moore County’s — I evidently had an ear for the things locals said and the way they said it.
Something must have come out of this backroads apprenticeship, because in due course it led to the big gig down in Atlanta, complete with sleepless nights and constant heartburn.
“I’m thinking of giving up writing and going back to college for a master’s degree,” I more or less blurted out to my old man on the Ross Porch that warm summer afternoon. Teaching English lit, after all, had always held tremendous appeal and been my avowed goal after college.
“Maybe you just need to go back to your old journalism,” he said, “write about the small things of life — the things you seem to enjoy most, by the way.”
I remember laughing at such a notion. One of the things I loved most, of course, was golf. But, for nearly a decade, I’d carefully constructed my professional resume and even collected a number of awards on hard-hitting investigative journalism. I couldn’t imagine anybody in his right mind hiring me to write about golf.
“I don’t think I can afford to,” I said, and made the aforementioned cold, pragmatic points about resumes.
My father smiled and sipped his beer, watching the afternoon slowly expire over the empty contours of Mr. Ross’ masterpiece in the pines. In a little while, we were meeting my mother over at the Pine Crest Inn for one of their Southern-style feeds.
“Maybe,” he said quietly. “But on the other hand, maybe you can’t afford not to.”
Thomas Wolfe Was Wrong
So.
Here it is two decades after that conversation, and I’ve come home to try and prove that Thomas Wolfe was dead, slap wrong when he bitterly advised from a haze of too much fame and alcohol that no native son can ever hope to return to the place that made him and find any trace of the boyhood paradise he imagined he lost or simply left behind.
In my case, for what it’s worth, common sense somehow prevailed over uncommon ambition. I heeded my father’s simple advice and skipped Washington and a psychotherapist in favor of writing about subjects I really loved and raising a family and building a flower garden on a pretty hilltop near the coast of Maine — a place, I might add, that somehow always reminds me of my Carolina childhood.
In short, it was a career decision that eventually led me to my childhood hero, Arnold Palmer, and a host of amazing people both in and out of the world of golf who made my job a constant source of pleasure and enlightenment.
It also let me sleep at night and sometimes even embark on an actual family vacation.
With all due respect to Brother Wolfe, whose main problem in life may have been that he beat the dust of old Catawba off his shoes too soon and foolishly never came home to reconnect with the only true happiness he’d ever known:
As my late Grandmother Taylor from up in Wake County used to say, life is nothing but one great big circle — meaning, I suppose, that if we’re both lucky and smart, we eventually wind up back where we began, minding the soil of our own beginnings and somehow beginning anew.
As both flower gardener and golf nut, I find this image of family renewal one that powerfully resonates. A garden, after all, keeps its memory by following the seasons.
A golf round is simply an opportunity to begin again and maybe this time find your game.
All of this helps explain why, just over a year or so ago, after talking about such intimate family things during a dinner talk to sponsors of the U.S. Open in Pinehurst, I was most pleased to meet David Woronoff, The Pilot’s innovative and enthusiastic young publisher.
He hails from a distinguished clan of North Carolina newspaper folk and was probably only conceived at the time of the salad days of Woodward and Bernstein. But, in any case, and perhaps minus the wise counsel of his talented editor, Steve Bouser — David rather rashly proposed the idea that I come live in town here for a time to help cover the 2005 United States Open Championship and get back in touch with my lost inner golf child and reconnect with my newspaper roots.
Nothing could give me more pleasure than the chance to come home for a while and pick up where I left off, roaming the back roads and main streets of my beloved home state, gathering tales and chronicling life in one of the more civilized crossroads of American life.
If my garden in Maine suffers a bit from my absence, so be it. My roots are here. And they need some careful tending.
Jim Dodson can be contacted at jasdodson@earthlink.net.
