Sean's golfing origins

Where does Sean's interest in competitive golf come from? How did it evolve into what it is today?

I hope to cover this in the next few posts by way of catching up.

I suppose it is fair to say that Sean began golf at a very young age. Perhaps even as a 4 year old? I don't really remember exactly when he first took a swipe at a golf ball, whether plastic or real. But even if that sounds real young, I can assure you this is hardly a story of a kid groomed for the game of golf from the earliest of ages. For Sean, golf was a sport that always was there for him, but mostly in the background, coming in fits and starts up to the age of 12 or 13.

From those earliest years, for the 5 or 6 years, golf was just one of the many sports that attracted Sean's fancy. Sean hit golf balls from a very young age, but not in any organized way. Before I joined our current golf club, I had a hitting mat and net in the back yard which I used for my own practice (or to vent frustration after work!). The yard was littered with both plastic and real golf balls, and golf clubs including pint-sized ones cut down for the kids. So the opportunities were there to hack away, whether taking a break from yard chores or waiting for something to cook on the bar-b-que, or during some after dinner R&R.

I joined a golf club around the time Sean was 5 or 6. In those days, Sean was mostly motivated to spend time with me and it didn't really matter whether I was going into work, putzing around the house or over at a hardware store, or out to the driving range. In fact, he was uncommonly jealous of my time, irrespective of what I was doing. And so it evolved that if I was going to get any work accomplished on my own golf game, whether at the driving range or out on the course, I had no choice but to involve Sean. He made certain of that.

On vacations at golf resorts, I'd have to get the earliest possible tee time and sneak out before he awoke, and hurry back to be with him for the rest of the day. I had some guilt about doing this, but also relief to have chances to get out and play without the distraction of having a young child with me out on the golf course, because your first concern is making sure the child doesn't disrupt the other golfers.

Eventually, perhaps at the age of 8 or 9, Sean seemed sufficiently well-behaved that I enrolled him in a couple of junior golf clinics given by our club's teaching pro. In those sessions, together with a handful of other kids, is when he was first concepts like grip and stance and balance.

His baseball interests are what largely held him back from golf at the early ages. He played baseball from late August to November, then from late February through June, leaving little time for golf except during the oppressive heat in July and August, which wasn't really conducive. The baseball limited his golf so much, for example, that if I had a couple of new, correctly-sized golf clubs prepared for him in the early spring, by the time July and August rolled around he might have only used them a few times before outgrowing the clubs. And as he grew older and developed a sense of self-responsibility for his baseball performance, he wasn't particularly interested in taking the risk that swinging a golf club might mess with his hitting and hurt his chances of making an all star team.

Other than the clinics, Sean never really got much in the way of formal golf instruction until he was almost 14. I was also his baseball coach during those years, and possessed of a gnawing sense that our relationship would suffer if I were also to serve as Sean's golf coach. Beyond the fact that I know almost nothing about how to teach golf, he just didn't need me coaching his golf, too.

So when Sean and I were out together on the course, or the driving range, I tried to just let him hit the ball as it came to him naturally, and doing my best to bite my tongue when I saw that he was doing things 'wrong'. For the most part, although imperfectly, I'd give him swing advice only if he asked for it. I focused instead on teaching him the myriad course etiquette issues, like pace of play and repairing divots and pitch marks, and staying quiet and still while others addressed their shots, knowing when it was his turn to play. And anger management. Lot's of anger management.

So Sean's golfing origins were mostly accidental and largely undirected. Of course I was delighted that he enjoyed playing a game that I could share with him, but the truth is that for up until the time he was 12 and 13, if I had any ambition for him in sports it was as a baseball player, not as a golfer.

But the accidental nature of this golf upbringing raises the question of whether I served him poorly. Sean begins his golf journey several giant steps behind his more successful peers in the junior golf tournaments. There are a lot of kids out there his age and younger who shoot some very low scores! Was I too late in getting him hooked up with a swing coach? Should I have guided him away from baseball towards golf sooner? For the latter, I don't think I had any choice because it first has to be something Sean wants. Now that he is there, how does he get to the next level and can he get there?

We'll see soon enough, but my theory and hope is that he will be able to make up the lost ground. From what I think I see, some of these junior golfers get to shooting low scores at a pretty young age, and others seem to be able to catch up to them. It strikes me as a neurodevelopmental analog...the good young players have the advantage of their brains literally maturing in some ways sooner than some of the others.

Lessons from a successful youth baseball career

As a "sports" dad, I want to see my children active and involved in things. I'm sure at some point I'll have to address any projection issues related to my own athletic inadequacies. But irrespective of the degree by which projection colors my thinking, the fact remains that participation in youth sports strikes me as mostly a good thing. And if not youth sports, then find something else to be passionate about.

The motto of our childrens' day care center was "Play Is Work" meaning that there is a developmental good to the seemingly randomness of gaming that goes on as kids play. To my mind, youth sports are an extension of preschool play. Particularly when a kid is truly passionate and self-motivated about his or her sporting activity, a sport can keep him grounded and away from trouble. At least that's the hope as Sean enters adolescence, as we hope the golf bug helps to smooth out his metamorphosis from adolescence into adulthood?

Sean has always loved sports, playing one or another since preschool, when he first rambled with the scrum up and down the field in a community "Lil' Kickers" soccer league. Sean also played basketball with his school classmates for the past 5 years and also played rec and middle school football in his 5th and 6th grades. I can honestly say that all of his sporting activities are through is own choices, and that today as a 14 year old, athletics are a central feature of his self-image.

Sean has always had the final say about whether he will participate in a sport. After his first experience in soccer, he didn't want to play it again. It appears that two seasons of youth football are enough for him. He is also now pretty clear that this will be his last baseball season. We're grateful that golf will be there to fill the vacuum.

He is a good athlete, but not so good that anybody would accuse him of being tremendously athletic. Throughout grade school, he has tended bigger and stronger than than most of his peers, but also somewhat less coordinated and certainly slower.

His main sport from the age of 5 has not been golf, but baseball, which he played enthusiastically in a recreational league. He played baseball well enough to be chosen for the all star team each year from the ages of 9 through 12, which mostly served to extend his spring baseball season well into the summer.

As a 12 year old, he had a very strong spring season, leading his league in home runs. But after being chosen to play on the summer all star team, he struggled to get any playing time under some fairly petty and vindictive coaches who appeared to be directing gripes with me at Sean. It was a classic "daddy-ball" situation, and was very unsettling for most everyone involved on the team. As anybody involved in youth baseball would recognize, the 12Usummer season is the pinnacle of the kids career, after which kids slide into school athletic programs. The greatest harm of the summer was that it destroyed stole the idyllic sense of innocence and fun that Sean and several of the other boys held for baseball in their hearts. After this experience Sean's enthusiasm for baseball was dramatically redirected to golf, and he seemed to start thinking as less as a sideline activity and more as a viable sporting alternative.

To his great credit, as the following school year approached, after considerable indecision, Sean decided to play another fall baseball season in the rec league. He wavered mightily before finally deciding to play, but it seemed like what he eventually settled on was that he was not about to let someone run him out of the league. It would have been far easier for him to just walk away, wounded, from baseball. And I was prepared for that to happen, because it was Sean's decision alone to make. I was never more proud of him, and I think it says a great deal about his character as a young man, that he could dust off the tremendous disappointment and bruise to his ego.

In the spring of his 13th year, as a 7th grader, Sean wanted to try out for a middle school baseball team run by one of the private high schools that draws kids from throughout the metro area. It is a good program and a team he tried out for but failed to make the previous spring. Sean got to work to get ready for the tryouts, and began working with one of my students, who had played catcher in college. Sean made the team and played very well as their starting catcher, batting in the clean up and five hole at near .500, and was the teams RBI leader by a wide margin. Altogether, it was a tremendous bounce back from the disappointments he experienced the summer before. Still, baseball had lost some luster

After that season ended, for the first time he decided not to play summer baseball so that he could play more golf. He is playing on the same middle school baseball team this spring as a catcher, and doing well, but it seems almost assured he won't play baseball with them this summer or beyond. This is likely to be his last season playing organized baseball.

Irrespective of the sport, Sean has always approached athletics with what I would characterize as a balanced seriousness of purpose. What I mean by that is that he had fun on the field with friends during practices and games, but also seemed to see some value in the need to work at his skills. For example, he would want to throw the ball with me when I'd get home from work, or stay at the fields after games and practices to get some extra hitting and throwing. Before his spring 12U season, the season he was home run leader, he asked me to bring him to the fields for extra hitting practice, almost daily. The extra work paid off.

From this, he seems to have developed a work ethic applied to sports. He knows, intuitively, that if he works at a sport he can get better at it. Which is not to say he has killer practice habits. Far from it. But there is a base there, a base of having experienced how success is coupled to effort, which is something that he can grow with as he takes on the lonelier challenge of building a solid competitive golf game.

Finally, Sean not only learned how to compete in these other sports, but saw fun in it. When a game started, he could turn on a deeper focus then he might have in practice. He thrives in competition and, again, that seems like something that will serve him well in golf.

Where to start?

This is a true story about a boy who, in the summer of his 13th year, looks to have decided to chase a competitive golf dream.

The story is being told by his father. To chronicle what happens, to see where the chase leads him and his father, what we discover along the way, and who we become because of this journey. I have a sense it will be dramatic, whether or not the dream is fulfilled.

My son doesn't know that I am writing this story, and I don't know if or when I will tell him. We'll just see how it evolves. There may come a time to reveal who he is. Or maybe not.

But it will be real and true and will be as honest as it seems to me. So true that if one really wishes to uncover our identities, enough clues will be scattered about to make that possible.