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And then, of course, among the non-elite there was your dad and you. Or your neighbor Tommy's dad, and him. Or the four score teams that sign up every summer for the pub-links father-son championship.
It's special, this father-son golf thing. It's worth looking into. And I have, a couple of times, when drifting around the course. "I never pressured the boys," Raymond Floyd told me during a pleasant clubhouse chat one day at Doral. "I never pressured them, but I was happy to see them enjoy the game and want to play more of it, because there are some very good things to be had from golf." Maria Floyd, who was sitting next to her husband on the clubhouse couch that day, leaned across and touched her husband's elbow. "Tell Robert about Live-Your-Life-by-the-Rules-of-the-Game," she said.
Raymond's eyes went wide. Maybe not quite so wide as when he was stalking the green jacket in 1976, or spitting into the wind on the back nine at Shinnecock in the '86 Open, but still plenty wide. "Yes!" said Raymond. "Live Your Life by the Rules of the Game. That's what I've always said to my children, if you Live Your Life by the Rules of the Game you will be a better person. You shoot four, you write four. If you have an infraction, you call it. It's a gentleman's game-gentlemanly. Every other sport, you're not policing yourself, and you are taught to take the best of it. Football-try to hold the other guy. Baseball, 'I know I didn't catch it, but I'm gonna pretend I did.'
"Not golf. You're in the woods, it's a moment of truth, just like the many moments of truth you'll have in life. My boys, from as far back as I can remember, they shoot an 8, they take an 8. Live Your Life by the Rules of the Game and you'll be a good citizen."
Robert Floyd was sitting in during this conversation, and he added: "The most important stuff I've learned from Dad I've learned through golf, and it really does become second nature. It's like with languages-if you're fluent, you speak from memory, not translation. The kind of person you make yourself into on the course becomes who you really are."
Can it really be as significant as all that?
Jim Dodson thinks it can be. Dodson wrote a book about his late father called Final Rounds; there's no swing technique in it, but there are other lessons. "Fathers, sons and golf is a powerful subject," said Dodson when I called him a few years ago at his home in Maine. I was wondering about the topic, and thought he might have something to say. He sure did: "I've got four hundred letters under my desk-from CEOs, doctors, all sorts. And they talk about golf as a connection, a nexus for men who can't in other ways reflect upon their relationship with their fathers. On a golf course they can express, sometimes without speaking, what they can't otherwise express.
"These letters-single-spaced, two or three pages-talk about the great relationship they enjoyed. Or they talk about the relationship that they didn't enjoy, and wish they had enjoyed, and now hope to enjoy with their sons, setting things right."
I told Dodson about Floyd's L-Y-L-B-T-R-O-T-G theory. "That's it! The teaching. It's about communication, and also about life lessons," Dodson said. "It's about following a rule and succeeding within those rules. Jung wrote that women teach their children the nurturing instinct, while girls and boys learn from their fathers how to face the exterior world, how to solve problems, how to behave. So you're learning these lessons on the course, and you're by yourself. It's four hours out there-lonely companionship, very existential-and let's say you take ninety shots, so that's 180 seconds of activity. Three minutes. The rest of the time, you're walking and thinking. Soaking in these lessons.
"I am so haunted by what my father taught me on the golf course. I was playing last week-I played awful, shot 89-and I double-bogeyed this hole. On the next tee, the guy I was playing with said 'Go ahead.' I should have hit fourth with the score I'd made, but I hit second because the guy offered. The reason I screwed the drive up was that my father had taught me, 'You always follow the rules.' You see, if you ignore these lessons, it knocks the world off its axis. My dad said, 'If you tell a lie, you'll remember.' I can't recall if he said that about golf, or just said it."
Dodson helped Arnold Palmer with his memoirs; Palmer selected Dodson after reading Final Rounds-he figured this guy knew something about loving a father who could be demanding, even difficult. "Arnold's father was borderline abusive, but Arnold thinks his father absolutely formed him," Dodson told me. "Once, in the State Amateur, Arnold threw his putter over a tree. On the way home his father said quietly, 'If you ever do that again, you'll never play another round of golf in my presence.' Imagine that? The threat of abandonment. Powerful stuff. Arnold never threw another club."
