Matt - Playing Golf with Dad

When he wasn't contracting for the CIA, Dad did stuff with golf courses. He probably played golf with the CIA people after they were done taking out drug lords and setting up his company as a cover. However, we did hear a lot about golf, and eventually Dad was given some clubs (I believe they were a kickback from his friends over at the Pentagon) and Gramps and Grandma gave the boys a set to share. I would use them mostly as pretend guns, at first, preferring the hefty weight of the irons to the woods; the woods just weren't solid enough to reconcile my imagination with reality. Plus, they were too bulky at the end. However, eventually (probably after seeing me sneaking through the orchard, laying a bead on one of my siblings with a pitching wedge) Gramps and Grandma decided we needed to take some lessons, and that was great. So we started golfing. We discovered that it was a ton of fun, and it was only then that we learned about Oak Patch. Dad would take us to this awesome 9-hole course just half a mile from our house. We would leave early in the morning, and get there when the sun was just cracking through the oak trees and a fine mist still covered the grounds. It smelled good there, of grass and river and heavy trees. Dad instructed us on club selection, putting, and helped us pull everything together that we had learned in our lessons. He sure learned a lot with his CIA pals! We would spend the morning recovering bad shots, picking out lost balls from the plants or from the river, and sometimes getting some really nice hits off. It was with Dad that I learned that there are few feelings in sports more satisfying than hitting the ball just right, so you don't even feel the club and ball connect. I think one of the only comparable feelings is wakeboarding when the water is just like glass and all is quiet and smooth and you are there in body, but it feels like you are floating just above the whole experience… I will never forget those times we spent out there. They felt like they would last forever, and although they came to an end, the memories will live eternally of when we were the boys with our Dad.

-Matt

(Editor's note: It's been a family joke for years that John worked for the CIA and that was why he would "disappear" regularly on "business trips". There's no basis to this joke!)