Fathers & Sons & Sports (16 page)

“What did you order?” he asks.

“Chipped beef on toast,” I say. He laughs.

“Breakfast of champions,” he says.

“It was my dad’s favorite meal,” I explain.

“Did you ever bring him here?” he asks.

There is a silence. “No,” I say, turning away.

Daddy watched the Masters every year. He dreamed of attending just one, and he’s always on my mind when I come here for my job. Indeed, for all of us lucky enough to actually walk through these gates, we cannot leave without having thoughts of our daddies, for Augusta National is a place for fathers and sons. Davis Love III navigates the same fairways as Davis Love Jr. New fathers carefully hold toddler hands. “Can you see?” you’ll hear them say. Strong arms tenderly steer stooped backs. “Look out, Dad,” you’ll hear them say softly. That is Augusta.

When Jack Nicklaus finished his final round ever at the Masters, his eyes welled on the green. He glanced at his son, who was caddying for him, and repeated his own father’s last words, “Don’t think it ain’t been charming.” As Jack ended his relationship
with this special place, he looked at his son and thought of his father. That is Augusta.

When Tiger Woods won for the first time, his eyes searched the gallery near the scoring shed for Earl Woods. They hugged, Tiger’s head cradled on his father’s shoulder. And when he walked off the green almost a decade later, and Earl Woods was no longer there, Tiger remembered that shoulder and he mourned. That is Augusta.

This, too, is Augusta: me, needing a daddy more than ever, finishing the chipped beef on toast, walking the grounds in search of fatherly wisdom. Me, a thirty-year-old man, who failed in my promise to bring Daddy to this place he longed to visit, unable to control my emotions when I see a father and a son standing by the first fairway. The boy is a half-head taller and growing. Both wear blue Penn State gear. I see myself in that boy, standing with his father, both thinking they have all the time in the world.

We were a father and son in my dad’s imagination before my parents even knew I was a boy. On the day I was born, he sat down and wrote a letter to himself, cataloging his thoughts as his first child came into the world. He called me his son, with daughter written each time in parentheses, just in case. When I arrived, before my mother even cleared her head, he had already filled out the birth certificate. There was never even a discussion of what I would be called. “Walter Wright Thompson, Jr.,” he wrote.

Walter Wright Thompson, Sr. had grown up in the Mississippi sticks with three brothers. Many of the traits my friends would recognize in me came from him. He loved to be the loudest guy in the room, and he loved telling stories, and hearing them, too. He loved his favorite places to eat beyond any normalcy and the sound of the ocean and the hum of late-night conversation. He loved working hard.

His own dad was a tough man with unfulfilled boyhood dreams. Nothing was good enough. When my daddy, a star quarterback, would run for three touchdowns and throw for two more, Big Frazier would be waiting after to ask why he’d missed that tackle early in the third quarter. Daddy decided that when he had a son of his own, he’d do it differently. He’d give his whole heart, shower all the love and attention and approval he could muster. He would be a good daddy. A sweet daddy.

I remember tailgating before Ole Miss football games, him throwing passes just far enough away that I’d have to dive. I remember Destin, Florida, when I dropped my favorite stuffed animal, Sweetie, and didn’t tell him until we got back to the condo. He spent hours looking for that rabbit, and he found it, too. I keep it around, but I don’t ever tell anyone why. When I look at it, I can feel how much he loved me. I remember skipping school to go fishing, and I remember promising not to tell Mama. I remember him always reminding me that “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” and “if it feels wrong, it is.” I remember him taking me to see
Superman III
the night it
opened, even though I was in trouble; I remember watching
The Guns of Navarone
a thousand times with him. And I remember, as clear as if it happened yesterday, that April day in 1986 when Jack Nicklaus charged toward his sixth green jacket.

I was playing in the other room, probably with that G.I. Joe aircraft carrier, when he called my name. I didn’t want to go. He called again. So I went into their bedroom. He was lying on his stomach.

“Jack Nicklaus is going to win the Masters, son, and you’ve got to watch this. You will remember this for the rest of your life.”

So we lay there, my feet only coming to his knees, watching. I was ten. He was forty, six years younger than Jack, and he cried when the final putt went in. I can’t remember now if I’d ever seen him cry before.

The years slipped away, but every April, we lay down on our stomachs—tumbuckets, he called ’em—and oohed over the azaleas and aahed over Amen Corner. Each time, he’d smile and mention that, one day, he’d sure like to see what such a place must look like in person. He grew older. I went to college and, as a freshman, called him to ask if he was watching this kid named Tiger Woods. He was. I sat in the Phi Delta Theta house three states away. I could picture him lying on his stomach.

Home didn’t feel so far away.

It has been ten years. I no longer watch the Masters on television, and I pinch myself each time I get the credential, though
I try to hide it. Sportswriters are supposed to act jaded, right? I’m sitting right now with colleagues in the press center interview room. Tiger Woods is at the dais, no longer the kid he was a decade ago, either. Normally, he’s full of boring blather, using a lot of words but carefully saying nothing. Only now he’s talking about fathers and sons, about losing one and gaining another. I lean in a bit. He talks about regret, and the things he wishes he’d done. He talks about what kind of parent he’d like to be.

“Here I am, thirty-one years old,” he says, “and my father is getting smarter every year. It’s just amazing. But hopefully, my child, down the road a little bit, will say the same thing.”

That, to me, is the definition of growing up. There comes a time when every son starts the slow transition to father. Mine began four years ago. My dad felt pain and went to the doctor. A scan revealed cancer. He was fifty-seven years old, with marriages to attend and grandkids to spoil. Instead? He was in a fight for his life. He pulled into a parking lot on the way home and read the report. It said something about the pancreas. He understood he was in trouble. Up a creek without a paddle in a screen-bottomed boat, he’d say.

But the man had never backed down. Once, in college, he knocked out an All-SEC football player for messing with his brother. He attacked this disease just as viciously. After the first chemo session, he stopped at a greasy fast-food chain to get a sack of sliders, an f-you to the poison. To walk through a hospital with him was to understand his gift for life. All the nurses and
doctors and patients—especially the patients who sat through the treatments alone—called him by name. For each, he had a kind word and a smile. He raised the energy level of every room he entered.

We took a fishing trip he’d always wanted to take. I knew there wasn’t any time to waste. We spent a glorious few days on a river in Arkansas, filling our cooler with trout, talking late into the night. “I’m not afraid,” he told me. Before leaving the fishing camp, I made a reservation for a year later. This, he said, we had to do again. “We’ll be here,” he said, almost whispering. “I guarantee it.”

Back home, he spent hours alone, at his spot behind the house. There was a canebreak out there, and a brick wall, and tall oak trees and a creek. He’d sit there, long past sunset, and he’d think about his life. It’s where he prepared to die. Once, my mom pointed out toward his silhouette, tears filling her eyes and running down her cheeks, and said, “It just breaks my heart. I think he’s scared.”

Still, he read the right books, by preachers and by Lance Armstrong, and he’d make damn clear he didn’t want to know the odds. So we didn’t tell. But we knew. And they weren’t good. I wept the first time I Googled pancreatic cancer. What would I do without a daddy?

Only, sometimes, it does happen like in the movies. He responded to the chemo. The doctors saw the tumors shrinking and, finally, a scan revealed he was cancer free. We couldn’t believe it. He didn’t act surprised.

Of course, I was at the Masters when we got the news.

Daddy and I made immediate plans for a vacation. We’d go back to Destin, where he’d found my stuffed animal. I bought the tickets and, the day after the tournament, I drove to Atlanta, met him at the airport and, together, we flew south. In the air, I gave him my Masters media credential. He collected them, kept them hanging by his bathroom mirror to remind himself that his son had gone places. He treasured the parking passes, too, and, faithfully affixed them to his truck after I left Augusta.

In Florida, we sat in lounge chairs by the ocean. We ate quail and grits, and Daddy talked the place into giving us the recipe. We drove in a Mustang convertible with the top rolled back, and we made plans. His reprieve made him realize that he needed to stop practicing law sixteen hours a day and do those things he’d always dreamed of doing. He wanted to visit China, stand above those gorges. He wanted to see Tuscany, rent a villa.

Mostly, he wanted to go with me to the Masters.

“It’s a done deal,” I told him. “Done deal.”

We celebrated his birthday. I picked up dinner, the first and only time I ever did that. We laughed, and I gave him a present: a black Masters windbreaker. He held it up before him, glanced at me, words failing. He slipped it on and went outside to read. I shuffled off to bed. With the cancer gone, time was no longer precious; we had all the time in the world. But something made me take one last look, seeing him sitting on the balcony, thin and
pale, the waves crashing somewhere out in the blackness, a thin ribbon of smoke rising from an ashtray.

Three months later, I got the call. I was in Pittsburgh for a Chelsea-AC Roma soccer game. Mama was crying. They’d run some tests and the results were in.

“It’s cancer,” she sobbed.

Two months later, he felt bad and went to the hospital. The doctors weren’t too worried. Mama and Daddy asked, “Do we need to call the boys?” Love is a strange thing—you go from a fraternity dance to the altar of a church to a cold hospital room, asking: Is one of us about to die? The doctors said no.

They were wrong.

As I sat in Kansas City, watching the movie
Miracle, my
father passed away. It was only a few days away from our return fishing trip. My mom didn’t want to tell me until I got back to Mississippi, so she made what had to be the toughest phone call of her life. After watching her husband of thirty-four years take his final breath, she called me and said it didn’t look good and that I needed to bring a suit. I refused to pack funeral clothes, holding out hope.

The next morning, I landed in Memphis and took the escalator down to the baggage claim. I saw my brother, William, at the bottom. I smiled and waved. He just shook his head. At that moment, my mother stepped out from behind a sign. I knew.