GRAND CANYON: GOLF AT THE MUNI

There are three public golf courses in Modesto. The oldest is a nine-hole layout next to the ballpark affectionately referred to as the Muni. It is the equivalent of no name at all since all public courses are municipal. Despite the flat terrain the Muni is an excellent test of skill. Its fairways lined with tall sycamore, oak and pine require the golfer to bend the ball both left and right. It is a course designed for shot making.

The finishing holes offer a fair sampling of all the shots in golf. Number seven is a 475-yard par five. For a long hitter it is reachable in two shots but there are a line of trees about two hundred and fifty yards down. The hole calls for a draw off the tee, bending to the left to clear the barrier of trees. The second shot presents a choice: You may be able to reach the green with a fairway wood but you have to avoid a trap guarding the left side and out of bounds on the right. The safer option is to lay up with a mid iron to the right leaving a short wedge to the green. It takes the trap and out of bounds out of play. A third option is to drill a two iron to the front, leaving a chip for eagle. It carries the same risk as a fairway wood to a lesser degree. Unless you’re in the zone the safe play is the best play.

The eighth hole is a standard 150-yard par three to a large sloping green with a large bunker on the left. Pin placement is critical. If the hole is located short right you can fire an eight iron at the stick. If it’s up left the trap comes into play. Aim at the pin and you risk the trap or worse, skipping over the backside for a tough chip back. The best play is an easy seven iron to the middle of the green. Take your chances with the putter.

Number nine is a classic and one of the toughest holes in the valley: A long par four dogleg right with a road bordering the entire right side and a tough bunker to the left of the green. A power fade off the tee leaves you a long iron or a five wood home. There is nothing easier in golf than losing a long iron to the right. The shot calls for a low draw or a gentle fade aimed directly at the trap. If you hit the trap, however, you would prefer to hit from the green side, leaving an uphill lie and a relatively easy sand shot.

My only eagle came on the fifth hole, a short par four. I chipped in after an excellent drive. The Muni has the added feature of a free driving range with room enough for a solid five iron.

I love the Muni. Back in the day we used to play those three holes over and over into the night, stopping only when we could no longer see the flight of the ball. I went to high school a block down the road. We paid five dollars for a monthly pass of unlimited play. Those days are long gone.

Ironically, I was not in love with the game back then. It was the late sixties to early seventies and I had plenty to occupy my mind. It was a time of upheaval. I started hitchhiking and had plans to join the flower children of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. I almost dropped out of school. I had my first taste of mind-bending drugs. I went public with my agnostic views on religion and experienced the effects of ostracism. It was a time of great change and great promise and I wanted nothing more than to be a part of it.

There was so much I did not understand and could not condone. As graduation speaker I accused our president of lying and causing the death of over fifty thousand American soldiers as well as more than a million Vietnamese. More than anything else I represented the frustration and sense of betrayal that my generation felt. In the wake of Kent State and Jackson State, Berkeley, Watts and Chicago, we felt we were disenfranchised.

The worst was yet to come. For me as for countless others the ultimate betrayal was the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. I had seen him only days before he was gunned down on the back of a campaign train running through the central California valley. All the joy and promise I once felt was suddenly transformed into a pervasive cynicism. I felt betrayed not only by the nation’s leaders but by the elders of my own generation. To have offered so much hope only to have it smothered and swept away into the back pages of history before I was old enough to play my part.

It seemed a cruel fate to be born at precisely the wrong time: Old enough to be aware but too young to engage. It would be years before I understood well enough to forgive them and to forgive myself. There was nowhere to go and nothing to be done. I had no plan and those we had empowered with our faith were all gone. Dead and gone. We thought we could change the world on faith alone but we were wrong. Jim Morrison became the spokesman of a lost generation and James Dean its hero.

Survival is the cardinal rule of the revolution and the one most overlooked. Too late. It was much too late. Those of us who survived must carry on in our own individual ways. It would be many years before I could recover enough faith to enjoy the simple pleasures and pastimes of life, including baseball where the drama of life is metaphorically played out every year over the course of spring, summer and fall, and including golf which more than any other sport is a game of individual faith.

It is Saturday morning and we arrive at the Muni for a round with my father and an old friend. Mike and I share a common interest in golf, baseball and theater. We met during our college days when we were both engaged in competitive speech. He made his mark with a rhetorical analysis of Charles Lindberg’s opposition to America’s entry into World War II. The tainting of an American hero. My greatest accomplishment was a gold prize in Reader’s Theater at the state championship for my portrayal of the legendary Woody Guthrie in a show called Hard Travelin’. For years after I would answer to the call of Woody. The show turned professional and played the college circuit for a year. It sent my ambition soaring. I wrote, directed and acted in my first original play, Fosdick and Muldoon. I moved to New York shortly thereafter to stake my claim. Two years later I came back home with more modest expectations.

Mike was a member of the cast for both Hard Travelin’ and Fosdick and Muldoon. I typed him as an accountant whose central motive was to win at any cost. There’s a lot of history between us and a lot of memories. Our compadre back in the day was a man who married and later divorced Mike’s sister after a long struggle with alcoholism. He was one of the most intelligent and levelheaded persons I ever knew. There but for the grace of god go all of us. At one point he called upon his circle of friends to provide support in his battle. It was the first time I had heard the term Intervention. I felt acutely uncomfortable sitting in his living room, listening to testimonials of the harm, pain and despair he had caused. My days with him were full of joy and laughter, glory and adventure. He had never been a source of misery to me but I was told these accusations were critical to his recovery. I sensed that I was much too far removed from his life to be of help. Maybe I also feared that I was in danger of drowning myself so I didn’t have the heart to hang on to a drowning man.

The last I heard from him he was doing well, a dedicated member of Alcoholics Anonymous. He had begun a new relationship. From the depths of my heart I wished him well. I offered him what I did not know then was a major truism of AA: One day at a time.

Don’t look back, brother. You can never look back.

I wonder now if what drove us in those college days of glory was not some fundamental insecurity. I wonder if we sought external recognition to compensate for some deficiency in our upbringing. Our ends never know our means.

Mike is now an accountant for the county, married to a woman we half jokingly refer to as a saint. It is a title she does not claim. She has without doubt helped him along to overcome his reputation as a hot head. Wiz recognizes a few glimpses of that personality trait in his golf game. As it is in golf, so it is in life. It has been Mike’s habit to curse a wayward shot and talk incessantly about his own game to the last person on earth who wants to hear it: another golfer.

Fortunately, Mike is in control today, though his game is suffering from his characteristic stubbornness and a lack of attention. He is not interested in improving his game. He is only interested in improving his score. He does not seem to understand the relationship between the two.

I have learned not to offer advise on the course. I have come to believe that a player’s game need only be good enough to enable him or her to enjoy the walk. One does not have to play well to keep pace.

My father is on his home turf. He smacks one down the middle, long lean and mean. Wiz finds the trees left, Mike skies one to the right and chump one about a hundred yards in the fairway. Pop remarks that it is one of the worst shots he has seen me hit. His memory is apparently not as good as it once was. I make an excuse of the road though I know there are no excuses in this game. Back to basics: Balance is the first lesson. I recover with a solid shot and hit the green in three but take three putts for a double bogey. I make a note that I need to warm up before a round.

Pop, whose nickname from his boxing days is Killer, has a number of tactics to distract and otherwise thwart his opponents. In addition to good-natured ribbing, they include whispering while a fellow player is addressing the ball and standing directly behind the ball while another player hits or putts on tees and greens. They are practices that drive many golfers through the roof. Because of them I had great difficulty playing with my father until I decided to welcome distractions as a challenge to my ability to focus on the shot. Although I still may gesture for silence when others are addressing the ball, I have greatly enjoyed the rounds we have shared since that time. On the golf course, we have achieved a level of camaraderie and mutual respect that we rarely experience while living in the same house.

Pop is a great golfer and a great man. He has fought his entire life for the things he believes are right. When he stays within the limits of his age, he is the kind of golfer who compliments you on a drive fifty yards past his and then takes the wind from you sails with a 30-yard chip to the center of the cup. The difficulty is accepting one’s limitations.

I double the second hole in the same manner as the first. Bad drive, good recovery and three putts. I save par on three with an excellent wedge over a trap. I take a tough bogey on number four and after a booming drive on five, par out the nine. The last three holes I play to perfection. On seven, I take the fairway trees out of play with a draw to the left, play a mid iron to the right side and hit a wedge to within eight feet. I just miss the putt. On eight, with the pin up left, I play to the center of the green and two putt. On nine, I follow a power fade with a low two iron to the front of the green. Up and in for par.

My run of pars draws me even with the old man, who has played well despite a few careless shots. It is a good round enjoyed by all. We have each played well enough to enjoy the game, the walk and the companionship. Mike has managed to keep his cool despite his trials and Wiz takes great joy in my father’s company. According to plan, pop calls it a day after nine and we join him in the clubhouse for a beer. We talk golf, politics, Nashville and Motown. Others join in the conversation. Everyone knows Killer.

When I was growing up pop was a policeman and a wrestling promoter, a celebrity on the local sports scene. Pop has spent most of his life in the limelight. He was a star athlete as a kid. He was a top ranked boxer as a young man, at a time when pugilists were regarded as baseball or basketball players are regarded today. We kids were awed by his collection of trophies, photographs, clippings and stories. One of his most prized possessions were a championship belt and a sterling silver statuette of a boxer, commemorating his military conquest of allied China, Burma and India during the great war. He was named the most scientific boxer of the tournament and he was proud of that acknowledgement. He also had a black satin jacket with a Golden Gloves emblem on it. He once said that I was the only son who had the skills to follow him in the ring. He gave that jacket and I treasured it.

Acting as his own lawyer he sued his former fight manager for skimming the purse and won. He used that money to stake himself to his own gym in Modesto. For a while he trained boxers and promoted fights but eventually went exclusively into wrestling and rock promotion. There was just too much risk in the boxing game and not enough profit. Top ranked fighters required a large purse up front but wrestlers worked on a percentage basis. Rock and roll had a large following in a town that offered so little to its youth.

I have vivid memories of the day two young Mexican American brothers who were trained by my father decided to challenge the old man. One of them had risen to the ranks of local stardom but my father knocked them both out, one after the other in a matter of minutes. It may have ended a budding career but it secured pop’s larger than life stature in the eyes of his children.

Pop was the man who brought The Doors to Modesto only weeks before Light my Fire hit the airwaves catapulting them to international prominence. They were by far the most professional I have ever seen. They were the second bill that night and I remember a local band wanting billing above them. Their manager informed them that they did not want to follow The Doors.

Eventually pop’s promotion of rock concerts ended his career as a policeman. After twenty years service as a Westside cop, the only cop trusted in the black community during the days of racial unrest, the new chief didn’t approve of rock and roll. My father didn’t approve of the new chief or many of his policies, like ticket quotas, duck ponds, preferential law enforcement or phasing out veteran cops. He fought his dismissal and won a personnel hearing against long odds but the city dismissed him anyway. His appeal was allowed to expire by a corrupt lawyer turned politician who had volunteered to represent him at minimal cost. A red cent would have been too much. His last advice to my father was to sue him, knowing that he could not afford to do so.

I wondered then how he was paid off. The city had spared no expense defending itself in a nonbinding personnel hearing. A sitting circuit court judge who soon after was appointed to an appellate court bench represented them. He did all he could to avoid the civil rights issue at the heart of the case. The corrupt politician lawyer advised my father to save the issue for an appeal he knew would never happen. He instructed pop to cease his practice of stating his case before the public where he was winning widespread sympathy. It was then that I became suspicious but my father still believed in him. He was from our neighborhood and had been a state representative. Pop wanted to believe in him. It would be years before he realized he had been betrayed.

The local paper pulled an enthusiastic reporter from the case when he got too close to the truth. The story had been front-page news but was afterward buried in the back pages. A particularly damning piece of evidence, a newspaper clipping in which the chief and several of his lieutenants advocated an ordinance requiring local businesses to purchase alarm systems. The article did not mention that those same individuals had started a security alarm business, a clear conflict of interest. The profit they stood to gain was staggering. My father spent hours in the local library looking through back issues to find that article to no avail. Somehow the city had been tipped off. The article disappeared. The mayor, who had advocated the establishment of a citizen’s review board for police affairs, was called to testify and turned to mush. The case was much larger than the mayor’s office.

This was the way city hall fights back against those who dare to stand up against the machine. They all but crushed my father’s spirit. He was only months shy of retirement but they could not allow him to retain his job after such a challenge. He ended up selling the wrestling business and found jobs as a security here and there. He moved from Modesto to the bay area to Reno to Portland, Oregon.

In Portland he suffered a heart attack on the golf course and returned home for bypass surgery. I happened to be at his side when he awoke from the operation. He held my hand as if for life itself. It was a strange feeling to be holding the hand of this proud man who had long ago rejected his religious upbringing to stand alone as an atheist of conviction. I felt his fear of death.

I wanted to be sure he knew I loved him. We were all changed by that experience. We were all a little wiser and a little stronger. Life is frail in the strongest man but life goes on in the community of man.

Of all the words the great Walt Whitman ever wrote the only ones I ever disagreed with were those of his most his most famous poem:

Do not go gently into that goodnight
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

I believe that this life is but a prelude to the great mystery ahead. We should not race to an end but neither should we fail to accept it when death arrives. When the time comes we should go gently into that goodnight. But Whitman spoke for my father now and it was not his time to go.

Within three years my father’s father, a wise and devoutly spiritual man, my father’s sister, who had fallen into her own snake pit of madness and returned, his mother, who was always kind to her grandchildren but who preached hatred and distrust of men, and his brother, who in the end betrayed him by handing what remained of the family inheritance to an opportunist black widow, would all be gone. Like my father, maybe they expected too much in life and, with the exception of my grandfather, too little in death.

Pop was the last of his family and in a very real sense he was more alone than he had ever been. He is in many ways the tragedy of the American family.

My mother understandably grew apart from him during his years of wandering. She grew stronger over the years, influenced partly by the women’s movement and partly by her own resolve. After more than two decades of raising a family of eight children, running a home and keeping the books of the family business, she was forced to reenter the workforce. At fifty-five she learned to drive a car alone for the first time. She soon learned that she had valuable skills to offer and that children instinctively treasured her. Eventually, she secured her own modest retirement and began spending more and more time with her sister and less with the family in Modesto. We were all very proud of her fortitude and accomplishment but saddened that she was no longer around as much as we would have wanted. We were saddened too that my father’s pride was damaged; however much he brought it on himself. Her dependency was broken and they would never again be as close as they once were.

Now it seems pop lives mainly for golf, for the camaraderie and competition it affords him, and for the hope that my mother will one day forgive him and come home. He is unable to live in the secluded surroundings of the Klamath River cabin nor in the mountain environment of Graeagle. He needs the company of his family and friends as much as he needs her affection.

Let go. Let go of the things you love and they will find you. Let go of your feelings of guilt and betrayal to rediscover your own sense of worth. Sit still in the winter of your discontent and behold the glory and the beauty of life all around you. The best is yet to come.

We leave pop at the clubhouse and embark on second nine. We are joined by a local legend known to all Golfer Joe. He has known more hard times than an Appalachian sharecropper. In his early forties he is dedicated to making a go at the senior tour on his fiftieth birthday. Outside our foursome he is pretty much the only familiar face left at the old Muni. Rising fees and the changing attitude of the new staff have alienated everyone else. They have moved on to other courses. Once a golfer is alienated it is difficult to win him back.

Joe has been able to pick up some cash giving golf lessons but is acutely worried about his job situation. The off-season unemployment rate in Modesto is up to forty percent, an astonishing figure. He talks about coming to Nashville to seek his fortune on the mini tours in the south. I can only tell him: Times are tough all over. I am unaware of Nashville’s unemployment rate but I am very much aware of the rising problem of homelessness. I am also aware of the amazement that greets me in the city of music when I say I was able to find work without difficulty.

It is hard to concentrate on the game when you’re listening to someone’s story. It is equally difficult to concentrate while telling your story. Golfer Joe has an up and down round while showing off his new titanium shaft oversized driver. He hits them long but a little out of control. I pick up a birdie on five and finish the nine three over par. On number eight I’m feeling good and go for the pin. It’s on line but comes up about ten feet short. Wiz sends a seven iron stiff to the target. It hits hard and skips to the back fringe about fifteen feet away from home. We leave the stick in as he lines it up, addresses the ball and strokes it dead center. It is his first birdie. The satisfaction of that dead solid perfect stroke will last a lifetime. It is a blessing to bear witness. He buys the beers at the clubhouse.

It’s a great round of golf.

I love this game. You can skull it, scrape it, chunk it, slice it, duck hook, shank it and yank it for seventeen holes and then: perfection. The game teaches you to hang in there no matter what happens. Never give up a shot. Never give up on a hole. Never give up on a round because, if you still believe, anything can happen. Anything you can imagine in a round of golf is possible. I am still waiting for that magic moment when the perfect shot drops into the cup for a hole-in-one. Twice on this very hole I have been everywhere but in. One hit the stick on the first bounce and settled inches from the cup. The other marked in front of the hole and finished directly behind it. Wiz’s birdie goes a long way toward keeping the faith. Hang in there. It will happen.

Keep the faith.