Fathers & Sons & Sports (12 page)

n the spring of 1985, Jack Nicklaus walked into my room at the Chi Phi fraternity house in Chapel Hill, N.C., and offered to teach me the game of golf.

Okay, not that Jack Nicklaus, the Golden Bear, the winner of 18 major championships, the living legend. It was his son Jack Nicklaus Jr., also known as Jackie, who was a fraternity brother of mine and a class ahead of me at the University of North Carolina. That was the spring I gave up trying to play baseball
for the Tar Heels, realizing that, at 5′6″ and without a lick of speed, I would never get over the hump and be a varsity player. Why it took me two and a half years to figure this out remains a mystery. But in 1985, my athletic career was over and Jackie recognized my depression. “Come on, we’ll go hit some balls,” he said. “You can have these clubs. Keep them.” He was handing over what looked to be a set of clubs that had been, as they say, gently used. Jack was a player on the Carolina golf team, so I’m sure they were top-of-the-line.

Nonetheless, I said, “Nah. I’ve got no interest in golf. Not for me.”

Jackie pushed the sticks toward me. “Here, take them,” he said. “I’ll show you the basics, and you can take your time learning. This isn’t baseball. You can play this game the rest of your life.”

I just waved him off. I’d tried to hit golf balls before, as a kid. My dad bought me a set of junior clubs, got me involved in a clinic at the country club, and all I can remember is that he told me I had a “great swing” as I shanked, topped, and skulled one ball after another. I remember that poorly struck iron shots stung worse than hitting a baseball off the handle on a freezing cold day. Those were my golf memories.

So I turned down a free lesson with Jackie Nicklaus, but what’s funny is that a year later, when I was a senior, some of my other fraternity brothers coerced me into taking golf as a physical education class. I then spent a good bit of my final semester of college tearing up the turf at the university golf course. We snuck
beers on the course, gambled a bit, surely never broke 100, but had some fun. And then, soon after that, it was off to work.

I didn’t touch a golf club for the next four or five years, but when a change of jobs landed me back at my parents house—at the age of 27—my father, who was nearing retirement, asked me one day to go out and play. I took him up on it, and even though I was horrendous, I started to enjoy the game. We played again and again.

A round of golf with my dad became a weekly—sometimes twice weekly—event. Having learned the game when he caddied as a boy, Dad did not give a whole lot of instruction. He never tried to change my grip or my stance. “Hit down on the ball” was about as technical as he would ever get. “Forget the bad shots,” he’d always say. “And try to remember the good ones.”

Golf changed us. When I brought childhood friends along, for the first time I didn’t care if they called him by his first name. My father emerged as a regular guy from the fog of old family relationships. In face, he was a great guy. He wasn’t a great player—probably a 14 handicap in his best days—but what I learned from him on the course was something I still try to remember when I play golf today, 20 years later. “Being a good player,” he told me, “is not as important as being someone people want to play with.”

I’ve thought of that expression so many times as my love affair with golf has grown, and as my own sons have taken up the game. With one son, who was breaking 90 at the age of 11, and
to another, who’s struggling with the game, I always stress the same thing, that when they’re playing in a group, they need to compliment everyone’s game and not just focus on their own. I remind them to do the little things, like saying “Nice shot” when a brother makes solid contact. Or when their grandfather holes a long putt. Typically, the good player has a more difficult time with that issue than the other guy.

We’ve got a foursome now. Me, my dad, and my two sons. Turns out the present I didn’t accept from Jack Nicklaus’ son—the pleasures of golf—has become one of the greatest gifts I’ve been able to give to my own. And to my dad. And I look forward to the day when my sons’ buddies tee it up with us, and call me by my first name.

f you want to play, Bob, my father told my oldest brother, who was the first one of us to approach Dad about playing football, “you’ve got to be ready for all the stuff that’s going to happen to you.” Lou Golic worked as a bricklayer in Willowick, Ohio. He was a former Marine, with thick forearms and calloused hands. To me, all of five years old, he was the strongest, toughest man in the whole world. He was also my hero.

“If you play football, you’re gonna get punched, okay?” he told his wide-eyed eleven-year-old son. “You’ll get kicked, scratched up, bitten. You’re gonna bleed, and you’re gonna break bones.”

My brother was floored. Dad had played for a year in college at Indiana and then for several seasons in places like Montreal and Saskatchewan with the Canadian Football League, but all of that had happened in another world, far away from our suburban home in Ohio, long before any of us—Bob, my other brother, Greg, or me—were around. Maybe the game is different now, we thought. Maybe he’s trying to scare us. Maybe something awful happened in Canada. Undaunted, we all suited up and took to the practice fields in town, where Dad coached us for St. Mary Magdalene in the CYO league.

Dad was big on fundamentals. Every play begins with the football player in his stance, he told us, and one afternoon after another he’d get us to crouch down to work on nothing but the most basic elements of the perfect, three-point stance.
Toes straight! Get your weight right! Head up!
At home, I’d get down in my stance in front of the mirror in my bedroom and watch myself rise up toward the first instant of contact, again and again, hour after hour.
Thumbs up! Elbows in!
My dad had brought a tackling dummy over and set it up in our tiny backyard, and soon I was coming home from school to hit it a few dozen times, go off to practice, and then return home for more tackling drills.
Drive your feet! Hands inside!
And then, at the end of every long day of
bricklaying and coaching, he would make sure to go over my school assignments with me before he went to bed for the night.
The books are just as important, Mike. Work ahead
.

My father was dead right about the brutal realities of the sport, as he was about a lot of things. Along the way, we were punched, scratched up, bitten, and bloodied. But we all went on to play in high school and then college football, all three of us landing at Notre Dame. But when I left home for South Bend and the Fighting Irish, at 18, I didn’t leave my father behind. It was his deep voice I heard booming inside my gold helmet on the field during defensive-line drills and in my dorm room as I studied at my desk late into the night. And before every game—whether USC or Michigan State, Pitt or Air Force—I would call him to hear his real voice and ask for his advice. “Never forget what got you where you are, Mike,” he told me before my first game. “Remember all the hard work you did. And keep your toes straight, and your elbows in.” And for four years, on every Saturday morning during football season, he would remind me to keep my feet moving.

I would later find out that my father had received several offers to play in the NFL but had turned them all down. He was hoping to start a family, and he wanted to be there to help raise his children. So he settled down in a small town on the shores of Lake Erie and found a nine-to-five job that would allow him to spend time with his sons perfecting the three-point stance.

As a kid, needless to say, I couldn’t appreciate his sacrifice, and I wouldn’t appreciate fully what he had done for his family until I had children of my own.

And I’ll admit it, Dad: I’ve borrowed a lot from you. Flat-out stole it. When my older son, Mike Jr., came to me to ask about playing organized football, I told him, “You’ll get kicked, scratched up, bitten. You’re gonna bleed, and you’re gonna break bones.” And when his brother, Jake, one year younger, turned 11, he got the exact same talk. My daughter, Sydney, took up competitive swimming, and she got a lecture too, although I spared her the part about the punches and broken bones. I coached both of my sons through Pop Warner and the youth leagues, working with them on the fundamentals of the stance, blocking, and footwork. There were no tackling dummies in our backyard, but I found a park a few minutes from our home where my sons pushed the SUV across the parking lot, ran, and learned the proper way to catch a football. At night, they’d hit the books and were told to work ahead a little.

When the time came for Mike Jr. to leave for Notre Dame, I was unprepared for how brutal it was to see him go. The day before he left for South Bend, I wanted one more talk with him. He was hanging around the house with friends who had dropped by to wish him good luck in college, when I pulled him aside. “Mike,” I said, “I’m going to need about a half hour of your time.” We left the house, got in the car, and drove over to the park to our practice field.

As we walked away from the parking lot and toward the trees, I thought back to the times I showed him how to get his hands inside a lineman, the times I saw him hunched over and heaving after wind sprints. I stopped and turned to him. I told my son how proud I was of the man he had become. “Never forget what got you where you are, Mike,” I said, almost whispering, “because it will carry you.”

And then I hugged him, throwing my weight around his shoulders, and cried.