Sports, Part I

Growing up, I loved these sports, in order of priority:

1.  Basketball

2.  Swimming

3.  Golf

4. Tennis

33. Fishing

99. Hunting

My dad loved games and sports of all kinds, and he excelled at many of them. He had been an intramural champion in college, and during his military service in WW II, he was assigned as a coach/trainer to soldiers who had been wounded in combat. He loved to watch sports on television (even boxing, for which I did not share his enthusiasm), and he always participated in softball games and pitched horseshoes at church picnics.

My Uncle Jim and my cousins, Harold and Bruce, often encouraged Dad to perform feats of strength—like a one-handed chin-up or push-up. As a scrawny teenager, I marveled at my dad’s physique and athletic prowess, and participated in intense but short-lived weight lifting regimens in hopes of someday matching his impressive biceps and formidable forearms, a goal I never quite achieved.

Basketball might have been number one on my list because I grew up in Kansas, the home of James Naismith, who invented the game. More likely, as with other sports, I liked it because my dad liked it. It was his favorite sport to watch on television, and for as long as I can remember, he and my mom owned season tickets to the Wichita State Wheatshockers home basketball games. On infrequent but glorious occasions, I would be invited to attend a Shocker game, usually when my mom decided not to use her ticket. Going to see a game in person with my dad was the best, but more often I had to settle for watching a Shocker away game or an NBA game on television with him.

Dad worked two jobs and was always busy. I don’t remember him playing games at home with me and my brother much, outside of the occasional game of eight ball once we got our pool table in the basement. But when I got old enough, he did invite me to play golf and tennis with him. It was because of sports we spent time together as father and son.

Golf was the best.

It’s 5:00 a.m. on a summer Monday in Wichita. Dad has just left my room after telling me it’s time to get up and get ready if I want to go with him to play golf, or more accurately, attempt to play golf. I rub my eyes, put on my dark brown, horn-rimmed glasses, and search for my shorts, t-shirt, socks, tennis shoes, and hat.

I help my dad load the golf bags in the trunk of the car, and we head to Sims public golf course, a five-minute drive from our house. I don’t like getting out of bed so early, but Dad’s philosophy is it’s best to play early and beat the heat. We live in Kansas, after all, and from June to August, the temperature is likely to hit 100 degrees by late morning. Besides that, there’s not too many other golfers willing to sacrifice sleep for the cool temperatures, so most Mondays we are the first ones to tee off at the course.

Or wait to tee off. Often we have to pass some time in the clubhouse waiting for the sun to come up so it’s light enough to hit. The other problem with ridiculously early golf games is the dew. Even though it’s dry as a bone during the summer days in Kansas, the early morning fairways and greens of the golf course are wet with dew. This is a beautiful sight as the rising sun highlights the sparkling drops at the tips of the perfectly manicured grass, but it’s not so beautiful for the golfer whose well-struck drive off the first tee sails high in the air but only bounces once or twice before the ball is swallowed up by the sodden blades of grass. 

Putting is even more difficult under these conditions. For the first four or five holes, the greens are so wet you have to wind up like a major league pitcher before whacking your ball toward the hole, only to see it stop two feet short despite your John-Daly-like effort. Then around about the sixth hole, when the sun’s rays have restored the greens to their typical parched condition, you strike your golf ball firmly only to see it scoot past the hole and roll off the green, further from the hole now than before you putted.

As a beginning golfer, I’m more worried about making contact with the ball than with how far it goes. My dad is an excellent driver. He’s learned to channel his considerable muscle into striking the ball so it routinely travels 250 yards down the fairway. And straight as an arrow, the ball usually ending up in the middle of the fairway in ideal position for an approach shot to the green. I, on the other hand, if I’m lucky, strike the ball on my first swing attempt and watch it rise like a blooper between first base and right field and end up 50 yards down the fairway.  By simple mathematics, this means I take five shots to gain the position my dad earned in one. 

Dad is a patient man and never complains that I’m slowing him down too much as he waits for me to catch up. Apparently so are his friends, who are part of our group. The nice thing about golf is that no matter how badly I’m playing, I can look forward to the Pepsi and cherry moon pie my dad will buy me before we start the second nine.

Tennis had these advantages: it was played in the evenings, so I didn’t have to get out of bed at an absurd hour, and it took much less time than the three-four hours required for 18 holes of golf. With my dad, I mostly played doubles, being called in occasionally as a substitute when one of the three regulars he played with were unavailable.

Tennis was also the only sport I was able to letter in during high school. I would have preferred basketball, of course, but I was too short and too slow to make the team once I reached my large public high school. Tennis at our school, on the other hand, was not a popular or in-demand sport. In fact, the school had trouble some years fielding six players for the varsity squad.

This was partly a socio-economic problem. My high school was in a part of the city with a less affluent population. At least in my view, tennis was a rich kids’ sport, so the high schools located in higher income neighborhoods tended to have the best tennis players. The situation worked to my advantage since I was just competent enough to earn the number six spot on the team, thus lettering, in spite of compiling a win-loss record of 0 and 7 in my Junior year and 1 and 6 in my Senior year.

Our coach, Earl Fultz, was the driver’s ed teacher, and he demonstrated a decided lack of interest in the sport of tennis. His chief contributions included providing us with balls for practice and driving us to matches at other schools. I don’t remember that he ever actually coached us. I know he spoke to the team occasionally, but all I can remember is the introduction he used on every occasion: “Now on this thing here, boys,” a line that all the members of the team took delight in repeating, doing our best Earl Fultz imitation, when he wasn’t around. We were largely left to our own devices in practice, the only coaching we received being done by our peers. Thus, our team record was not much better than my individual match record.

Fishing had this in common with golf: my dad liked to rise absurdly early and hit the water before the sun came up.  Mercifully, I only had to endure fishing once every summer when my family made its annual pilgrimage to Mac’s Hidden Cove near Shell Knob, Missouri. On these trips, Dad’s main objective was to go crappie fishing every morning. He loaded an outboard motor in the trunk of our car and rented an aluminum fishing boat from Mac at the motel when we arrived. Each morning he rousted me and my brother out of bed pre-dawn, and we walked down the steep dirt path leading to Table Rock Lake and the boat dock.

I liked walking to the boat dock in the dark. It would have been way too creepy had I been alone, but I wasn’t, so it all seemed kind of adventurous and surreal. Once we arrived at the dock, and stepped onto the wooden planks, we had to be careful to keep our balance as the dock moved up and down with the motion of the water and with our weight as we walked toward the stall where Dad’s rented boat awaited us. We would hop in the boat, Dad would start the motor, then sit in the back of the boat and steer us out into the middle of the lake. “Early morning is the best time to fish, boys,” he would tell me and my brother, “before all the other fishermen stir things up.” Once Dad found just the right spot, he would kill the motor, help us bait our hooks, then we would sit.

On most mornings, experience gave me cause to doubt my dad's maxim about early morning fishing. We were fishing, but in my mind, the sport as we practiced it should have been called Sitting since that was what we were doing mostly. And to me, an active ten-year-old, that was extremely boring.

But then there was the occasional morning when the fish were biting, where my cork, which had only been in the water a few seconds, bobbed once then went down, plunged beneath the still-dark surface of the water, and I fumbled with my pole to find the handle and turn, feeling the tug on the end of my line, knowing the fish was swimming further down with my hook, finally exerting enough pressure to reverse the path of the fish until it broke the surface of the water, and I was able to maneuver the fish into the bottom of our boat. I didn’t like the slimy feel of the fish’s skin or the sharpness of its fins, so Dad would often have to grab it and work the hook out of its mouth before placing it in the wire mesh basket with the rest of our catch.

All these sports—golfing, playing tennis, shooting pool, watching basketball on television—I realize now were not primarily important in and of themselves. They were significant to my childhood because they gave me an excuse to hang out with my dad, and they gave him an excuse to hang out with me.

Had it not been for these sports, I don’t know where the opportunities to converse with my dad, man to man, or, more accurately, man to boy, would have come from. He was not the type of man to sit down for a father-son chat, and he was of a generation of fathers who did not express their emotions openly to their children. Such occasions would have been painful and awkward for us both. But somehow it was easier to talk as you were strolling down a fairway on the golf course, or sitting in a fishing boat shrouded in the pre-dawn darkness, or during the television commercials of a college hoops game. 

Perhaps my dad knew these things, and that’s why he created these opportunities for me. Or maybe he just enjoyed these sports himself and since I was handy, he invited me because he hoped I might enjoy them too. Either way, I’m grateful. I have a much better appreciation of my dad and a stronger love for him because of sports. Plus, I’ve also come to realize that by introducing me to golf and tennis, he gave me the gift of two sports I could play and enjoy for a long time.

The greatest gift he gave me, through sports, was his time and attention. If sports were his love language, then I would listen and learn to speak it. That was infinitely better than getting no father love at all.