By Ben Shaw
I don’t remember the last time I played golf with my dad. Not because it was so long ago, but because we had played so many times, it’s one of those things that you don’t know until you don’t know.
It has now been five years. I do remember the last round that I played while my dad was alive.
I played it with my Dad’s friends: his golf friends, who were probably his closest friends in the last years of his life. My dad was lying on a rented bed at the wrong end of his bedroom, just a flip wedge from the first fairway of the golf course. My dad had joined as a junior member around the time I was born (1979). He probably never lived more than five miles from the club, but in the last year of his life, he had moved right next door — his front porch had a view across the fence into the first fairway.
On this day, in late 2016, my dad was lying in bed under hospice care a few hundred yards from the clubhouse. During one of my turns sitting with him, I asked if “the guys” were playing and if he thought that I could jump in with them for a few holes. I felt extremely vulnerable, interjecting myself into their game; although I had played with them many times, I had always been there as Jumbo’s middle son. Of the Shaw boys, I was the preacher-golfer, not the lawyer-golfer, or lawyer-non-golfer. In terms of betting odds and handicaps, I would be a second choice to the lawyer-golfer. The lawyer-non-golfer typically only played in a family foursome, not with “the big group.”
I liked to play with my dad at his course, because he paid for my losses and gave me both of our winnings — but also because I could tell that he was proud of me when I played well, and because he recognized me when I played poorly. Whenever I hit into the trees left of the bunkers on No. 3 (after a birdie on the first and a par on No. 2), he would say, “Well…I know, get in, you’re OK there.” I can remember a time that my dad paused a few seconds after I got in the cart like he was trying to say something. After pausing a moment, like he couldn’t something clever enough to say, he finally said (of me and my brothers), “You boys have great short games!”
This wasn’t always true, but sometimes I became Séve when I played nervous on really tight lies in perfectly manicured spaces in front of strangers. I know that goes against everything we all know about golf. I liked to play with my dad because I liked to surprise him.
My parents divorced when I was 7. I spent plenty of time with my Dad, but we rarely lived in the same city. He drove four hours each way to see every one of my high school football games; we played golf and went to baseball games and talked about some stuff. I liked playing golf with my Dad because he was “Jumbo” (derived from Jimbo). He was part of this big group of men who cussed and drank beer and smoked and hit almost every fairway and could get up and down and could pass $100 bills across the table afterwards. My dad did none of those things (besides the $100s). You could still smoke inside in the men’s locker room grill long after it wasn’t okay anywhere else, and indoor smoke is a nostalgic pungency that still arrests me. Until the day that my dad died when I was 38, I never felt more like a boy and more like a man than when I was there at the club with my dad. My Dad didn’t drink beer or smoke; he hardly used any foul language (less than his preacher-golfer son), but he was Jumbo. He loved stories, and he loved being right there.
When I slipped into the mix just before my last round of his life, one of his buddies (understanding some of why I was there) pulled me aside and said, “You know, I stopped using the phrase ‘larger than life’ when I got to know your dad. I think that it uniquely applies to him.” There was a sincerity in this guy’s voice that touched me. Things were going to feel different without Jumbo.
So there I was, playing in “the big group” and feeling all alone — as out place there as these same men felt when they were sitting in his bedroom with him across the street. Each of them had come by a number of times over the past few weeks. In the five years prior to this, both of my wife’s parents had passed away from cancer, they each died peacefully in the presence of their children, both less than 24 hours after beginning in-home hospice care. My Dad spent 27 days with hospice care, significantly exceeding the doctors’ projections. The medical professionals warned us that we would have to pay close attention because, “Jim seems like ‘a people person.’” In other words, he would suffer if there weren’t people around to be with him, but he would also tend to overdo it, entertaining visitors beyond his own exhaustion. Jumbo could overdo it. Not with drink or drugs, but with just about anything else.
As I followed the line of carts from the range, up the little hill behind nine green and just between the starter’s station and the first tee box, I thought, “This is a mistake, I should be over there with Dad.” The thought returned probably a half-dozen times while I was on the course. But ultimately, I knew that he was happy that I was out there. “Just go over there and tell them that you want to play, they’ll take care of it,” he had told me with a smile, his eyes closed.
Jumbo (known as Señor to his grandchildren) during a range sesh with the author’s oldest son (age 3).
As I made my way around the course in a cart by myself, I wished that he was there with me. I wanted him to tell me not to try to carve a 3-wood underneath the pin oaks — “Just bump it out there in the fairway and play it safe.” I, of course, would not — just as he would not have played it safe when he was a younger man. Every turn brought back a new memory. Somehow, it made me glad that he was not with me for this round. I was able to think about how he would recall my brother hitting driver to four feet on the par-4 second hole “the way the tour pros take it over that tree.” I remembered the times he would raise his fist in triumph after a good shot, refusing to lower it until his companions acknowledged it.
My dad hobbled when he walked. He had started college as a 6-foot-4, 175-pound track athlete (high hurdles), but in the years after law school, he gradually morphed into a 6-foot-3 hobbler at various weights north of 250 for most of his professional life. He had both knees replaced at least once, he had a few spinal disk procedures. And he always complained of what he called a “burrowing tumor” in his right shoulder. The shoulder issue was self-diagnosed and not an actual medical condition, but it flared up often when he needed an explanation for a lackluster performance off the tee.
But Jumbo would play golf. His swing wasn’t good. It looked like it hurt. It certainly did hurt. He made sounds like it hurt. When he was particularly hindered by some ailment, he wouldn’t even walk up to the green if his ball was within four feet of the hole. His putting stroke was choppy and spinny (a spectacular curiosity to those of us with dads who could putt well despite everything we had ever understood about rolling the ball in a straight line). If it stopped close enough to the hole he would simply say, “Kick that back.” He loved words. I have no doubt that his golf vernacular was borrowed or inherited from others, but he seemed to make it his own. “The catbird seat,” “Position A,” or just “Woooooooooo” when he hit it where he wanted; “in jail,” “in Shaw’s woods,” or “nowhere” when he didn’t. If he lipped out or carded a score fraught with near-misses, he would say, “I really could-a-been-somebody today.” When he would stand on the first tee, he would announce, “This is my breakout day.” There was something about the way that my dad communicated on the golf course that was unique and special to me. Even if all of those phrases belonged to someone else, they seemed uniquely his.
My dad loved golf. He loved everything about it. He loved playing with great players, knowing that he was incapable of reaching their level. If he made a nine, he wrote down a nine. He once tore his pants while teeing a ball at Spyglass (maybe it was Pebble Beach) on a trip with his friends; he famously just played on, without much more than a loin cloth. He took “lessons” from his best friends; I don’t mean a few pointers on the range, I mean he would actually schedule sessions and submit to their mentorship for months on end — in part, I think, to get better, and in part because he just liked having appointments with his buddies. He borrowed from and loaned money to them. He got their kids or their wives’ nephews out of trouble when they were in trouble (he was a criminal attorney for 39 years). He liked being part of other people’s lives. That was hard for me, because of all the notable times that he had not been a part of my life. One of the reasons that I liked being at the golf course was that people would tell me how much they liked my dad, and they would always tell me how often he told stories about us, his sons.
I once called my dad on behalf of a friend, to see if he would arrange for Greg to play golf at his course. It was the historic type of place that you wanted to play if you came to town, and my dad loved to have guests. When Greg came to town, my dad hosted him on the course for the full four hours — riding along in his own cart, making conversation. It wasn’t until the 16th green that Greg realized that my dad had just recently had surgery for prostate cancer and was still equipped with all the trappings of the procedure. He felt so bad for having made my dad go out there. I assured him, “You did not make my dad do anything. He wouldn’t have rather been doing anything else, besides possibly playing.” And if memory serves, he did play again within a few days. It didn’t matter to my dad if his driver went 130 or 230, he would play. It didn’t matter if every joint in his body creaked and hurt, he would play. And apparently, even when he had a post-surgical catheter, it was a last-minute scratch.
During my last round while my dad was alive, he was never more than a few hundred yards away from me. But I felt alone, sad — and yet glad to be alone. I knew that I might never play this course again, I knew that I might never see many of these men again. But I also knew that I needed to go out there and feel all that I needed to feel. I needed to play the course without him. I needed to lose my breath a little when I thought about how I had lipped out on No. 9 to open with a personal best front side when I was 15 (23 years prior). That summer day, I was hitting towering iron shots that my developing body was affording me in ways that I had never felt. I was using a set of shiny Hogan irons that had been in his locker. We were playing with two men that I did not know, one of whom was a part-owner of a pro sports team and the other was a zero handicap. I was petrified, but I outplayed my dad and was asked by the others in our group if I planned on playing golf in college (I didn’t even play in high school). When I packed up to go back home (where my mom lived), Dad insisted that I take those irons with me. I felt so proud that he was so proud.
I don’t remember what I shot for my last round of his life. By the time I got to the 16th, if not earlier, I had gotten pretty tired. There is an extra layer of emotion that covers you like a fog while you are watching a loved one suffer. It saps more energy from you than you realize. I didn’t go into the men’s grill. I hadn’t been in any of the bets, and I didn’t want anything to drink. I parked the cart and returned Dad’s clubs to the bag room, realizing that the next time they came out of there would be to collect them with his other personal effects. In his locker was a bunch of loose change and tees, a bag full of balls that forecaddies collected for him — because he would play any brand, after marking them with huge random splotches of Sharpie ink. He called this mark the “red badge of courage” (or blue or purple or whatever color he had handy)
My dad passed away on a chilly afternoon in late December, finally succumbing to melanoma that had worked its way throughout his body (including a tumor in his right shoulder, he was happy to point out). During his last days, we talked quite a bit. I held his hand (something neither of us probably would have expected). We laughed some. He ate less and less, weighed less and less. Friends from his past stopped by to visit and tell stories — hilarious stories, heartwarming stories, forgotten stories. My Dad loved words, and he loved stories. Due to the conspicuous disconnect between my life and his, he almost never gave me advice, even when I teed it up for him. But as early as I can remember, even when my brothers and I were all still small enough to ride four-wide with him in his single-cab pickup truck, he would tell us, “Work on your delivery. It will always be important for you to be able to tell a story, or a joke. Delivery is everything.” I think about that all the time. I don’t know if I do it well or not, and my recounting of him here may not be the best example, but I hope that my Dad knows that I liked getting advice from him. I hope that my sons will enjoy playing golf with me, even if they don’t enjoy it anywhere else. And I hope we will have good stories to tell.
Ben Shaw is a pastor at Christ Community Church (PCA) in St. Francisville, Louisiana. He has too many golf clubs in his garage and has never shot under par, despite quite a few close calls. He can be reached at Benshaw12@gmail.com.
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