“Golf serves a purpose,” he retorted. “And there will be scholarships for kids who want to play but can’t afford it.”
“What a clever technique to encourage underprivileged kids to become lifelong consumers of a useless game.”
He braced his hands on his hips, his jaw tight and voice hard. “Lady, golf is a sport, not a game. Not all of life’s lessons come out of a book.”
She took a step back. “Golf is an extravagant waste of natural resources practiced only by the privileged class and serves no health or moral purpose beyond sheer self-indulgence.”
She whirled around to escape his sweaty, over-exposed body and scurried as fast as possible into the yoga room.
Jack glared at Alice’s back as she retreated, itching to call her back and defend the sport that saved his life. His background was the opposite of privilege, but she couldn’t know that. With her healthy, limber body and expensive yoga classes, she probably couldn’t know what it was like to grow up spending more time in wheelchairs, leg braces, and hospital beds than outdoors playing like normal kids.
He headed toward the free weights, one of the few activities aside from golf his doctor allowed. He grabbed a pair of dumbbells and began cranking out curls, still steaming over Alice’s ridiculous assertion about privilege. Sure, most people who played golf were rich. So? Most kids who went to college were rich, but he didn’t attack her entire profession or suggest it shouldn’t exist.
Golf demanded stamina, concentration, and muscular control. The first time Jack picked up a golf club he had been wearing leg braces but was so eager to try his hand at the sport that his dad drove him out to a public driving range to give it a whirl. He’d been stiff and clumsy, but it didn’t matter. He was hooked.
His fascination for golf started when he was in the hospital after playing flag football during school recess. His parents had forbid him from participating in sports, but what ten-year-old obeyed his parents’ rules once he was free of their eagle-eyed supervision? There wasn’t any tackling in flag football, and it gave him a chance to test his speed and agility against the other kids. He wasn’t as fast or coordinated as most of them, and he fell down a couple of times, but it didn’t hurt andit was exhilarating. For once it felt like he was part of a team, running and chasing until he was breathless. He caught a pass and almost made a touchdown. He still remembered the scent of the grass and the dusty tang of dirt in the air. He was alive and free and kids cheered when he almost made that touchdown. Those ten seconds of pure joy powered him through the rest of the day at school.
It wasn’t until that evening when the swelling started. His hip took the brunt of a fall, and the swelling turned serious quickly. His parents rushed him to the hospital, but there were tests and forms to fill out before Dr. Jensen, the staff hematologist, was summoned to the hospital. By the time the doctor ordered a delivery of frozen plasma, the swelling in Jack’s hip was so badhe sobbed like a baby, rocking in agony even as his parents tried to hold him immobilized against the mattress. He tried to stifle it when Dr. Jensen was in the room, but it didn’t work, and his humiliation was complete when the doctor rolled him over to examine his other hip and Jack screamed.
Once the plasma was ready, Dr. Jensen threaded a needle into a vein and Jack watched through a blur of tears, waiting for the clotting factor to start infiltrating his blood. It took hours for the swelling to stabilize, but he was trapped in a hospital bed for another week. His hip joint had been savagely damaged by the swelling, and any rapid movement could trigger another episode.
The day after the accident, Dr. Jensen came for a checkup, a clipboard tucked beneath his arm and a stethoscope dangling over his shoulder. He was fit and good-looking, and Jack instinctively tried to straighten up on the bed to prove that he wasn’t a loser like the blubbering weakling of the day before.
“Well, kid, I think you’re old enough to know that football isn’t the right sport for you.”
Jack looked away. “It was flag football,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, you still can fall down and trigger a bleed,” the doctor said. “You’re going to have to learn the limitations of your body, even if your parents aren’t there to keep you in line, okay?”
Was he supposed to lie in bed or sit in a wheelchair his entire life? Those ten minutes of flag football, the thrill of running, the grass a blur beneath his feet, reaching upward to catch a ball flying through the air—they were the best ten seconds of his life.
A sheen of tears prickled and he hunched over, defeated.
The doctor dragged a chair closer to the bed, the scrape of metal loud as he plopped the chair down and sat. “Hey, just because you can’t play football doesn’t mean there aren’t other things you can do.”
Jack snorted. “Like what?” The only thing his mother let him do was walk, always holding her hand and never letting him stray off the sidewalk. Other kids ran in the woods, climbed trees, played on monkey bars.
“There’s lots of things you can do,” Dr. Jensen said. “You can go swimming or play golf or maybe archery.”
Jack didn’t know what “archery” was, and there weren’t any swimming pools where he lived. Golf looked boring and didn’t seem fun like football or soccer or any of the other sports at school.
“Yeah, okay,” he mumbled.
Like most times he was trapped in the hospital, there was little to do but watch the television mounted on the wall. That afternoon, while his father dozed in the chair beside him, Jack scrolled through the channels and paused when he landed on a game of golf. The television was on mute so it wouldn’t wake his dad, and the game still looked boring . . . but at least it was outside.
Rolling green hills with patches of sparkling water stretched out in an endless expanse, so different from the stark hospital room with beeping machines and clinical smells. He lay on the mattress, letting the calming glimpse of nature carry him beyond the bleak hospital room. It was hypnotizing. The golf course looked like paradise, and the men on the course were tanned and fit as they positioned themselves before the golf ball with fierce concentration. What were they thinking about?
The television was on mute, but he didn’t need sound to understand what was happening. For the first time, Jack could picture a future for himself. He could be one of those men, casually leaning on a club while watching other competitors. Or conferring with his caddy as he walked to the next tee box. Best of all was watching the men as they shaded their eyes to stare into the distance, thinking majestic things.
His dad eventually woke up and they turned the volume up, and then golf got even better. The announcers spoke in quietly reverent tones as they narrated the game, and Jack was swept along with the action. Hope and anticipation collided because the future was suddenly opening up before him. It would be filled with rolling green hills and comradery and challenge in a world flooded with sunshine.
In the months and years that followed, he did everything the doctors ordered to achieve that dream. Even after his mother died and his dad fell off the wagon, Jack learned to look out for himself. He avoided unnecessary risks and took his injections. Instead of tearing headlong down hallways and up staircases, he taught himself to stroll and be mindful, alert and aware. The doctors recommended stretching exercises for hemophiliacs to develop balance and stay limber, and guess what? Stretching was good training for golf, too.
Jack watched every PGA tournament on TV. He studied the golfers the way a microbiologist studied life forms under a microscope, gradually understanding their swings and techniques. He saved his allowance to buy a used set of clubs from a thrift shop, and mimicked what he saw on TV. While in high school, he volunteered to pull weeds at a golf course in exchange for free lessons. He soaked up golf lore and wisdom as he tended the greens and loved it all. Hard work, practice, and love of the sport won him a scholarship to college.
Sometimes it didn’t matter how badly a person longed for a dream. Training, hope, and prayers could only go so far in making childhood wishes come true. Over the years, Jack’s health improved, but there were still spells that landed him back in leg braces and sometimes a wheelchair. No matter how cautious he was, a simple sprained ankle or bruised knee could spark internal bleeding, with swelling so severe it risked jointdamage. Those were the times he relied on crutches or a brace, sidelined from training until his joints could bear weight again.
The hope of a life as a professional golfer slipped further away with each passing year, not in one crushing blow but in a slow, relentless drift. Eventually, he accepted that dreams sometimes need to change. His early days tending the grounds at a golf course offered him a glimpse of a different future, one where he could still draw on his love for the game as a business, not as a player.
