A young boy in a green hat stood on his tiptoes, jabbing his head up and down, trying to see under the arms or through the legs of the forest of men around him. The crowd around the practice green at Augusta National on Wednesday was five-deep all the way around, and the kid in the green hat just wanted one thing — to see Phil Mickelson at the Masters.
Noticing the angst on his son’s face, a tall man lifted him up and placed him on his shoulders. Now, the boy in the green hat was watching Phil putt ball after ball toward a hole. They stayed that way, transfixed on Mickelson’s putting motion for three or four minutes until a security guard informed the man his son couldn’t sit there. He was obstructing the view of some patrons.
“But he can sit up here,” the guard said, pointing to the side of the green just under the security rope. From frustratingly being unable to see to having a front-row seat, the young boy was on his way to a day he’d likely never forget. His father watched proudly, forgetting Mickelson for a while.
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EXPERIENCING ‘A TRADITION’
If there’s one thing the Masters means to me it’s fathers and sons. It’s not just a golf course or a tournament. It’s not just about a green jacket or a sea of azaleas. It’s an event that makes the entire golf world stop and watch, most of the time with a dad or a son. If you love golf, you love everything about the Masters. You love Amen Corner. You love watching the players skip balls across the pond on 16. You love looking down the chute at 18. You love the shaky knees of first-timers on No. 1. You love the crow’s nest and the lore and the ghosts of golfers’ past.
I’d been twice before, taking in the sites, sounds and play from Monday through Sunday in both 2004 and 2005. The two years I was there, I watched Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus walk away. I watched Mickelson break his majors drought, and I watched Tiger Woods become Tiger Woods again, chipping in on 16 and storming back to steal one from Chris DiMarco. Both times, I excitedly relayed my experiences over a phone to my Dad, who was sitting at home watching on television. He was proud I was there, and — at least unbeknownst to me — never even considered that I was there and he wasn’t, even though he played regularly, loved the game and taught me how to love the game.
Both times I was there, as much fun as I was having and as in awe as I was, there was a hollow feeling. My Dad wouldn’t be there without me, no way. Even though I was working, I was there without him. It was a weird feeling. When you experience some of sports’ greatest stages, it doesn’t feel right to not share them with the person you know would enjoy them the most. Especially not sharing them with someone who has made it a point to share some of his proudest and favorite moments with you; not sharing them with the man who’d make a special trip home from school to pick you up so you could catch the bus to watch him coach a middle school basketball game; not sharing them with a man who spent countless hours playing catch in the front yard so you could become an all-star first baseman in little league; not with a man who always tells you something to calm your competitiveness and frustrations on the golf course and makes you realize that golf is fun, not work. I wanted to experience the Masters again, but I wanted company.
I wanted to take my Dad to Augusta.
A DREAM COME TRUE
After three years of trying to get tickets, I finally backed into a pair of practice round tickets for Wednesday this year. No, it’s not the final round, and it’s not even the opening day, but that didn’t matter. Dad just wanted to see the course more than anything. He wanted to enjoy the beauty, hear the whispers of Bobby Jones through the trees, watch players hit some of the shots they’d hit during the tournament. He just wanted to be there.
We arrived and made it through the gates at about 9 a.m. I don’t think the smile left his face or mine all day. God blessed us with a 77-degree day under immaculate sunshine. Though Phil and Tiger didn’t step on the course, we watched them on the range and putting green. We followed around Sergio Garcia, Luke Donald, Camillo Villegas, Ernie Els, Lee Westwood, Stuart Appleby and Vijay Singh. We even got to see Padraig Harrington, Steve Stricker, Zach Johnson and Jim Furyk take some shots.
Also something special: We followed Jack Nicklaus a good portion of the day, playing with fellow former champions Gary Player and Bernhard Langer. So, we got to watch the greatest golfer of Dad’s heyday, and enjoy seeing a legend on a legendary course. It was perfect. Everything I’d hoped it would be was surpassed, and after such a tumultuous last few months, it was just the getaway needed.
A FORGETFUL YEAR
It’s almost surreal looking back at the last year. Sometimes in life, when you remember moments, they become milestones. You do things sometimes and realize that you had no idea what you were doing when you were doing it. You didn’t know it then, but it was all part of God’s plan.
Let me get that part out of the way. I’m a proud Christian, thanks to the Good Lord deciding not to give up on me. He came to me on a cold February morning two years ago, and I wrestled with Him most of the day before finally giving in. I’m far, far, far from where I need to be or who I need to be, but He still listens and He still cares. He takes care of me and my family, and looking back through difficult times, I know His hand is leading.
One of those milestone times in the past year that just gives me chills now was when I read the greatest story I’d ever seen, written last spring by ESPN’s Wright Thompson about the Masters. The story made me hurt and cry and laugh and thank God, and it impacted me so much that I gave a copy to my Dad along with his Father’s Day present.
The story is about how Wright’s dad loved Augusta, and about how Wright always wanted to take his dad there. He’d gotten tickets for the next year when his Dad got cancer, and before they could go together, Wright’s Dad passed away. This story was a portrait of the purest love imaginable, and I wanted my perfectly healthy Dad to know that he meant that much to me. Wright’s words about his departed father were the words that I simply couldn’t write to my alive-and-well Dad. They were everything I wanted to say but was too proud to say.
Little did I know that a month later, we’d find out that my own Dad had colon cancer, and we had a yearlong fight on our hands. Thinking now about giving my healthy Dad that story and how God knew what we’d be facing just makes me shake my head.
Thankfully, Wright’s story and my story don’t end the same way. Wednesday’s trip to Augusta was a celebration of my Dad’s recovery. He’s finished with the precautionary six-month round of chemo, and he’ll have a full body scan in the next month or so to make sure it’s all gone, but every indication is that it is gone. We believe that it is, and we trust that it is.
That’s why Wednesday meant so much. I stood there and watched Dad get excited staring out over Amen Corner, and the feeling crossed my mind that “This won’t be our last time here together.” Immediately, I thanked God for the gifts He has given to us. Some people — a lot of people — don’t get to give the gifts they want to to the ones they love. Either they don’t have the time or the money or the good fortune to ever make it a reality. My gift that I’ve always wanted to give my Dad cost me $72.00, and although getting tickets to the Masters are next to impossible, the opportunity presented itself to get them from a friend this year, and I was able to provide for my Dad the first of many days to remember.
There haven’t been many of those lately for me, I must admit. After beating Dad’s cancer, we turned our sites toward the joy of starting a family. Following some difficulty, my strong and beautiful wife and me were finally pregnant. We got the great news that my sister was pregnant about a month later, and we’d planned on having our babies together and raising them together and moving on from the darkness of 2007 in our family.
It hasn’t worked out quite the way it does in fairy tales, however.
We lost our precious baby, finding out nearly at 14 weeks. We found out on Feb. 18, miscarried a week later, and since then, the fog of sadness and questions has set in. Though we have good days and bad days, the feelings of that terrible day at the doctor’s office creep back far too often.
The Lord doesn’t ask us to understand His will, just to accept it. He has given me way too much to ever doubt that He knows what He’s doing, but I’m not going to lie, these past 10 months have been tough. I don’t know how much more I can handle, and I hope I don’t ever have to know. But we’re going to keep trying, hopefully we’ll have a baby again in a couple of months, and we’re going to just wait for my sister’s baby and love it until it can’t stand it and be excited about it along with them and my Mom and Dad. But there is sadness still. There will probably always be.
A NEW BEGINNING
Wednesday was the start to the happy times, I believe. Walking down the fairway at No. 10, I thought about that and I marked it in my head. “This day will be one of those milestone moments a year from now,” I told myself. “This is the beginning of getting over all this.”
Later that day as the players had left Augusta National and the mowers were preparing the course for the start of the tournament the next day, we walked back toward the clubhouse and the end of our memory. We stopped by the merchandise tent to buy shirts and hats.
As I walked out of the gates, I pulled on my brand new green Masters hat and started the journey back to Dad’s truck for the six-hour trip home.
I smiled and thought of that kid in the green hat, sitting on his Dad’s shoulders, how excited and how happy he was to be right there, at that exact moment, sharing that time with his best friend. At that moment, I thought that only age separated us.
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