The Boy Behind The Tree

MY FATHER and I were on the third tee at Wildwood Golf Course when a boy in a red golf shirt stepped from behind an oak tree next to the ball washer. “Mind if I join you?” he asked.

He was about my age, fifteen, although there was a toughness about him — the squint in his eyes, the wiry muscles in his neck and forearms — that I associated with older boys. He no doubt rode his uncle’s motorcycle, even though he was too young to have a license, and had access to drugs and girls. I was jealous of him immediately.

My father waved the boy onto the tee and said, “I had a birdie on number two. Tell me you beat it, and you’re either lying or you’ve got a tour card in your pocket.”

The boy smiled, not in the smug way I did in response to my father’s attempts at humor, but with genuine amusement. His teeth were crooked enough to give him a rough appearance but not so crooked as to make him look like a hillbilly. (I’d been wearing braces for two years.)

“I had a par,” the boy said. “I was putting for birdie, but a leaf got in the way. Stopped my ball an inch short.”

“You sure it wasn’t Bigfoot who did it?” my father asked.

The boy’s laugh sounded like a backfiring engine. I could tell he and my father were going to be friends. And I was right: Over the next sixteen holes, my father told Jack — we learned his name on the fifth fairway — all the golf jokes he’d told me at least twice, but this time they received an enthusiastic reception. When Jack told his own, raunchier, jokes, my father laughed at every one of them.

Wildwood was the only course in our hometown of Sherman, Ohio, that didn’t require golfers to use carts, which is why my father liked it. He needed the exercise, he said, because of his blood pressure and his cholesterol level and his indulgence in the occasional cigarette. After we’d played a round, my father and I would stop for a Coke and a hot dog in the clubhouse — a far-from-heart-friendly snack, it’s true, but my father always said we’d “earned it” — and I would catch him up on my life.

My parents were divorced, and I saw my father only once every month. His construction company had grown so large that he devoted most of his daylight hours to it. But he’d once had the time to assistant-coach football and baseball at the high school where I was now a sophomore. In his fantasies, he had a son who played quarterback in the fall and shortstop in the spring, with scholarship offers pouring in from colleges across the country.

I believe these fantasies started when I was in the womb. The year I turned five, he signed me up for every sports camp open to boys my age. Although I didn’t mind throwing or kicking a football, I dreaded being tackled. Wherever the action was on the field, I stayed as far from it as I could, as if I might catch a disease. I liked baseball even less, afraid of getting beaned by a pitch or hit by a line drive. Coaches were happy to let me sit on the bench, and I was happy to be safe from harm and humiliation. Even so, my father came to every game and was sometimes rewarded by my appearance in the fourth quarter or the ninth inning of a lopsided matchup. He called me a “late bloomer.” 

When I was in the eighth grade and my sister was a senior in high school, our father and mother announced they were divorcing. During the “Year of Acrimony,” as my sister came to call it, our parents seemed to forget about us. My sister applied to colleges out west and got accepted by the University of Arizona. Meanwhile I severed all my connections to athletics, even though I knew I risked widening the divide between my father and me. Turning in my last uniform was like handing over a prison outfit. In the fall I joined the chess club and the drama club and was appointed secretary of the English club — an unprecedented honor for a ninth-grader.

My father, who was forty-four, set up bachelor’s quarters in an apartment complex on the edge of Party Town, the student-dominated section of Sherman, and attached himself to a red-haired hardware-store employee named Sierra. But he hadn’t given up on making his son an athlete. He had a new plan for me: golf.

“In golf, you don’t have to be afraid of the ball,” he said. “In fact, the ball should be afraid of you.”

But I was no better at golf than I was at any other sport, and I looked forward to the end of a round as if it were the end of a school day.

So when my father allowed Jack, whom I disliked at first glance, to play with us in our first round of the year, it gave me one more reason to hate the game. Although Jack’s golf bag looked like a hobo’s sack and his clubs appeared to be made of bamboo, he proved himself a good golfer — no, an excellent golfer. No matter that Jack’s way with words was to English what McDonald’s is to fine dining, he hit shots my father whistled at the way construction workers whistle at women.

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