The Sky is the Limit

Sean had his 1st swing lesson of the season.

We travel ~1 hour from home to see Bobby, who works at a fine golf club well beyond our metro area. We simply don't have as good a teacher at our club. Last summer, when Sean was 13 and showing very serious interest in golf, it became apparent that Sean would never fulfill his dreams without getting hooked up with a golf swing coach, and fast.

We head about Bobby through the grapevine and finally met him when Sean played a tournament at Bobby's club. Bobby is one of those guys who has earned teaching awards and in particular has a tremendous history of teaching successful junior golfers. I knew instinctively that when the time came to get Sean hooked up with a teacher, it would have to be with someone who worked not only with juniors, but juniors who are out there competing. In fact, today, one of Bobby's star students is the #1 ranked collegiate golfer and has just been invited to join the US Palmer Cup squad. Sean started seeing Bobby near the end of the last golf season, and had maybe 4 or 5 lessons with him before school started, the days shortened and there wasn't much time for golf.

After we arrived, late for the lesson--sort of miscalculated travel time due to being a bit out of the practice of getting there--Bobby and I shook hands before I excused myself to a lounge next to the practice area that has a wireless signal, to get a little work done.

I've also made the conscious decision that I don't want to hover over Bobby and Sean while they work together. Trust me, I would love to see everything that goes on between them during the lessons. I would thoroughly enjoy watching a master teacher ply his craft, and can imagine my pride in seeing Sean respond to the lessons. But I just have the sense that neither of them really needs me too much involved in their relationship.

If Sean is to grow into the skilled golfer he dreams of becoming, he will need to figure out alone how to apply what his teacher gives him. For virtually all of the competitive golf Sean will play from here forward, he'll be out there alone on the course figuring out a way to golf the ball into the hole. To accomplish that, Sean will need Bobby a lot more than he'll need me, and so stepping away from these lessons, to let Sean and Sean alone own them, is part of the inevitable process of a father relaxing his grip on his child. Painful but necessary.

Not quite an hour after it started, I came back out to collect Sean, as the time to end the lesson had arrived. Bobby had gone into his office to pick up some papers, returning with them back out to a desk in the teaching area.

As he opened up the papers, he asked Sean, "Do you want to play in college?"

Sean said he did.

Then Bobby went over what was in his papers. It was a list of junior golf tournament organizations, and he pointed out those that were followed by the various junior golf ranking systems.

Bobby told a story about one of his students, a good golfer with some wins under his belt at the regional and high school levels, who is finishing his senior year of high school. Bobby had explained how this kid, who has the talent to play at a lot of Division I programs, had approached college coaches far too late, that they had already finished recruiting golfers in his graduating class.

Bobby basically told Sean that by starting high school next fall, he can be recruited and that "the game" is to get status on the national circuits, the AJGA in particular, so that he can start climbing the rankings in order to get noticed by the schools. Bobby indicated that his game plan should involve getting noticed by coaches no later than next summer, the one following his freshman year.

Having spent the hour in the lounge away from his lesson with Sean, I was curious about what provoked this conversation. I wondered, hopefully, if Bobby had seen something impressive in Sean. Bobby is a man of few words. What he basically said, however, is that Sean has as much if not more talent than his other successful junior golf students.

Sean then wandered off to the other end of the driving range to hit some balls.

I sort of protested to Bobby, reminding him that except for pretty much one round--when Sean had won his junior club championship shooting a final round 72--that Sean hasn't really accomplished much in competition. In fact, relative to a lot of other kids in the tournaments he's played so far, he'd scored pretty poorly.

Bobby said that he'd be happy to do a lesson with him out on the course next time, to see what he can do in terms of strategy and whatnot.

I asked him, "But do you think Sean is that good? Do you see decent potential in him? Are these drives down here for these lessons worthwhile or are we deluding ourselves?"

Bobby was eager to end the conversation since he had a client waiting for a lesson with him, but his last words were, "The sky is the limit." And you can see in his eyes that he meant it, as in, "You two morons need to reach for the sky, because he really is that frigging good."

There is not a lot of bs in Bobby, which is something I really like about him. So his statement provides me with a tremendous sense of affirmation about Sean and this road that he is on, and that although we really don't know where he is heading or if he'll ever get there, but we are doing the right thing.

On the drive back I told Sean what Bobby had said. Other than this blog, there are no secrets between us.

So Sean and I will keep plugging away. Hopefully we can draw strength from Bobby's words after the bad rounds and tournaments and practice sessions that are sure to come. I told Bobby on this lesson day that if Sean is one thing he is not a quitter, that if Bobby thinks the sky is the limit for him, we'll just rely on his judgment for a while.

Inflection Point

Even though Sean is in the middle of his baseball season, he has been sneaking in some golf course time the last couple of weeks to work on his game. He would not have even considered doing this during previous baseball seasons, when Sean would zealously impose upon himself a religious-like abstention from golf mostly to avoid anything that might disrupt his baseball swing.

But he's hardly been getting any at bats during games this season, and so whatever loyalty he might have felt he owed to himself or to the baseball coaches at the beginning of the season has long since passed. This is not to say that Sean isn't getting into games. Because of free substitution rules in the league, Sean has been getting innings as a catcher, where he has done well, and he has also performed some spot pitching duty. The coach just doesn't view him as a good hitter, and so not getting many chances to hit has really stolen his passion for baseball this spring.

Still, Sean has done a superb job of deflecting the disappointment. I'm sure he had visions of going out of baseball in a grander style, as one of the key producers on the team, spraying the balls into the gaps and driving in runs, as he was last spring. He sees this simply is not going to happen, so he has come up with ways of dealing with it. As he told me a few weeks ago when it began to dawn on him, "You know Dad, I'm disappointed about what is happening with baseball, but at the same time it doesn't bother me at all. If that makes any sense?"

The head coach, it turns out, is much odder than we had been led to believe going into it. He is one of those old school types who simply cannot resist impulses to dress down his players if they make mistakes or fail to rise to his sometimes unrealistic expectations. One who lets most everything that is hanging around within his head flow directly out of his mouth. One who chases the streaks, with some largely untouchable players in the core line up assisted by what he gathers are "hot" players from the 'role playing group' who are out of the line up as soon as they "don't get the job done."

I've been proud of Sean for keeping a good attitude throughout this. He shows up on time and eager to go. He gave his best for his baseball team and his coach, but it wasn't good enough, I guess. What has buffered Sean from the disappointment is knowing that his future lies in golf and at some level whether he plays or not will be coupled to the numbers he puts up rather than what sort of opinion a coach might have formed about his skills.

As if it wasn't perfectly clear before, this baseball season has served to confirm that Sean badly wants to succeed as a golfer. There is also no doubt in my mind that his singular focus on golf is the right thing to do. I would imagine most parents of children-athletes, irrespective of the sport, go through a period of uncertainty trying to determine whether it is right for a child to focus on one sport (or any activity) with the level of single-mindedness it takes to make a splash at the level of their dreams. Over the last few months of Sean's last baseball season, I have reached a point where I am completely convinced that it would be counter productive to encourage Sean to play another sport or do anything else that might distract him from his academics and golf.

The baseball situation has additionally soured him on the high school the team represents, and reinforced his hope to enroll at the rival high school, a bitter rivalry I might add, to which he has also applied. His mom and I want Sean at the rival school because in our opinion it sets a far higher standard of excellence, most especially academically. Consequently it is a more difficult school to gain entry.

Which is a long way of saying how pleased we were when Sean found out this past Monday that he's been accepted by the rival school. In fact, he set that as a goal at the start of his 7th grade, buckled down to do better school work and making on the honor roll each term. And on Monday his efforts were rewarded!

It was truly fantastic news and we couldn't be more proud of Sean for the achievement. And getting into this school has proven to be an incredible lesson of what can be accomplished by setting goals and how hard work breathes life into them. Hopefully, a lesson he can draw upon as his golfing "career" unfolds.

So to celebrate, Sean and I played 18 holes together the day after he received his acceptance letter. It was as fun and relaxing of a round that I have ever played with him. We talked a lot about what an accomplishment he had achieved and how proud I was of him. He sort of gloated about how fun it was going to be to tell his baseball coach that he intended to enroll at the rival school.

Playing the last hole I suddenly became almost drunk with the sense that our relationship had reached an inflection point and would differ fundamentally from this day forward. It came to me on the 18th hole, when I realized that Sean had been walking consistently 10 yards or so ahead of me down the past several fairways. I had been struggling, in fact, to keep up with him. He was just playing fast, but it was as if he subconsciously had someplace he was eager to go, and didn't really need my help getting there.

Sean was also playing much better than me all day. He was getting off the tees better than me, and out drove me almost without exception. His drives were straighter and longer, and his iron shots on the par 3's were crisper and closer to the target. On the par 4 10th hole, Sean hit his drive so well, it caught a fairway down slope that netted him another 60 yards of roll to the bottom of a hill--for a 340 yard poke! Whereas on the same hole one of my better tee shots of the day was a good 80 yards behind him.

Sean had also been encouraging me all that day to stick with a putting tip that he had given me a few days before, on our living room carpet. The tip had caused me to putt the ball far more squarely and solidly than I had putted in a long while. Consequently, I had little in the way of distance control and was blowing the 1st putts some 5 feet by the hole, all day long. Frustrating, but in a good way.

During the round, Sean had also remarked on a couple of instances on how "now that was a good swing" while one time breaking out in laughter right after a pretty crappy shot I hit, deriding me for having the swing of an old man!

And so chasing Sean up the par 5 18th fairway I came to suddenly realize that we had reached an inflection point. Two years ago, he was the one who was chasing me down the fairways after our tee shots, with my ball well beyond his. Two years ago, I was giving Sean tips and suggestions, and even admonitions about his behavior on the course.

Now, on this day, suddenly Sean was the more skilled player, the pace master and mentor, while there I was as his student and protege.

And his 79 that day beat my 81. The thing about his 79 was that he was in complete control of his game, losing his shots on the front side when we both sort of let our focus wander while talking about his high school plans. To be sure, his 79 looked more like a 72 or 73 to my eye. As solid of a round of ball striking as I've ever seen him play. In contrast, I had nothing going since neither my putting nor driving nor approaches were all that good. I had to scramble and grind out my 81. It was by far the best I could have hoped for that day.

To see what he has become today, a confident young man who seems to have a plan for himself, from where he was, and to imagine where he is headed with his good-natured personality and God-given talent, it was perhaps the most gratifying and enjoyable round I have ever played with my son.

To have a relationship like this and such experiences with a son is such a tremendous privilege, I would wish it upon anybody.