First Golfing Memories

When I was growing up, there was a set of golf clubs in the basement. There was a steel-shafted wood of come kind, and several irons with wooden shafts. I don’t really remember much more than that, but I do remember that they fascinated me.

They belonged to my father (they had, too, my mother was tennis player, and a good one), but he never played. He must have played when he was younger, but like so many men do, when his family started, along with that and his job and his avocations, there was no time for golf. But the clubs were there.

There was a heavy canvas shag bag, too, along with a few of the old-style balls that had dimple patterns that ran at right angles to each other, very orderly.

When I got my first set of clubs, the one that I liked the most was the 9-iron. Maybe it was the shape of the numeral on the sole of the club (an early fascination with typography that continues to this day), I don’t know. The other clubs were golf clubs, but my 9-iron was Golf. I had a dozen Wilson golf balls, Jim Ferrier model. Later I became a big Maxfli fan, because their ball logo was a colored dot with a circle around it. I went for the green-dot versions in a big way. Even today, I mark my golf ball with one green dot.

I had a book, too, called Play It Pro, Golf from Beginner to Winner, put out by Wilson Sporting Goods. It’s a slim paperback, only 66 pages long, that takes you through equipment, how to swing, chip, putt, get out of sand, and so forth, along with a bit on professional golf. I still have the book, and there is a chart in the back where you could enter your scores. My first time breaking 100 is marked on that chart, when I was trying out for the high school golf team at about age 15.

I took group lessons when I was nine or ten, at a driving range that had a par 3 course attached. I thought it was really easy. The pro said to do This, so I did This and it worked. I couldn’t figure out why no one else was doing what he said to do.

We couldn’t afford too many lessons after that, nor too many rounds of golf, but I did get some plastic balls and hit them all the time in front of my house during the summer. There weren’t many kids in my neighborhood, so I didn’t have anything else to do.

The telephone wire into our house ran about twelve feet above the ground and just in front of the spot where I would hit from. I would take a real golf ball and see how close I could get to the wire and still be able to pitch a ball over it. I could get pretty close. Getting a short shot in the air in a hurry is still pretty easy for me, because of that.

My father took me to my first professional golf tournament, the Portland Open Invitational, when I was ten. What I remember most is watching the players warm up on the range. In those days, the pros had to bring their own range balls, so their caddies were all down-range picking up the balls that their pro hit to them. Right to them. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing that someone could hit the ball that straight time after time.

One more memory before I go, which I have to, lest this essay turn into a volume. I was about eleven years old when my father and I went to see Patty Berg give a clinic on the 10th fairway of our local golf course. There wasn’t a lot of money to be made on the LPGA tour back then, and this is how she made her living. It was amazing the amount of control she had over the ball and how it did exactly what she said it would do. I got her autograph, and I still have that, too.

I would tell you about the day I got Arnold Palmer’s autograph, but that’s post in itself. Soon.

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