The eighteenth hole at Argyle Country Club, a roughly 460-yard uphill par four from the back tees. Photo courtesy of Argyle Country Club.
Andrew J Lewis
In December 2019, my wife and I bought our son a set of left-handed TaylorMade M2 irons at Golf Galaxy. My wife helped me pick them up. He was thirteen. Soccer was still his sport, but golf had begun making its move. Nothing about the purchase suggested destiny. We needed golf clubs. He was left-handed. Golf Galaxy had some. Done.
Seven years later, my phone buzzed. I did it. That was the entire message and a screen grab. I knew exactly what he meant. My son had just shot 70 at his home course. For the first time in his life, he had completed eighteen holes below par.
And I wasn’t there.
This is a peculiar feature of raising children that nobody adequately explains at the beginning. You spend years attending everything. Practices. Games. Tournaments. Lessons. Tryouts. Victories. Disasters. Long drives home during which everyone agrees not to discuss what happened on the sixth hole.
You watch so much development that you begin to mistake yourself for part of it. Then, eventually, if everything goes according to plan, kids start doing important things without you. I had seen enough to know this round was coming.
I’d watched him shoot two or three under over nine holes. I’d seen him finish one round three-under over the final five, the kind of stretch that doesn’t merely produce a good score but reveals what might someday be possible. For two summers he’d been hovering around scratch. The golf ball was behaving differently. The bad rounds weren’t as bad. Bunches of birdies no longer required notification of next of kin.
Still, eighteen holes is eighteen holes. Golf has a near malicious ability to distinguish between capable of and in the clubhouse.
For years, he had been capable of shooting under par. Now he had.
The scorecard is wonderfully imperfect: birdies and bogeys. There is a double bogey on fifteen that, had I been witness, would almost certainly have caused me to begin calculating the emotional consequences before his ball stopped rolling.
Then he birdied sixteen. Parred seventeen. Parred eighteen.
Thirty-five out. Thirty-five in: 70. One under.
There is something satisfying about the absence of drama. He didn’t shoot 64. He didn’t win the U.S. Amateur. Nobody from the Golf Channel requested an interview. He beat par by one shot at his home course. For almost everyone who plays golf, this is preposterously good.
Which is where golf gets weird.
Spend enough time around serious junior- and college golfers and your sense of normal becomes badly distorted. Scratch golfers begin appearing like mushrooms. Plus-handicaps multiply overnight. You encounter teenagers who hit drives into neighboring jurisdictions. Someone casually mentions that the kid on the range plays Division I golf, and then another kid walks up who is better.
Professional golf makes the distortion worse. We spend our Sundays watching mutant freaks make 68 look mildly disappointing. They are not normal. Neither, for that matter, is shooting 70. There is an enormous and fascinating world between ordinary recreational golf and the handful of people whose names appear on television. My son had wandered nearer to it.
And, because I’m his father, so had I.
We had arrived late. That’s part of the story. He wasn’t one of those junior golfers who began tournament play shortly after establishing object permanence. Soccer came first. Then golf. Then the pandemic.
We learned as we went. Clubs. Shafts. Lofts. Bounce. Lessons. Tournaments. The too-often discovery that the swing you possess on the driving range may decline to accompany you onto the golf course.
TaylorMade was there for a surprising amount of it. That first M2 set was followed by other equipment, experimentation, fittings and, eventually, the AJGA TaylorMade Discount Program. That program mattered to us for a reason I didn’t understand at the time.
It made our mistakes cheaper.
Junior golfers change. Bodies change. Swings change. What seemed correct six months earlier suddenly isn’t. A shaft doesn’t work. A wedge has the wrong bounce. Something that made perfect sense on paper turns out to be completely wrong after three rounds.
A substantial discount gave us permission to experiment. So, we did. Not everything worked. That was the point. Eventually the equipment got better. The coaching got better. The swing got better. He got better.
One summer accumulated on another.
And then my phone buzzed.
The 70 did one other wonderfully ridiculous thing. It nudged his handicap into plus territory. This requires a brief explanation for non-golfers and perhaps several golfing accountants.
In golf, zero is excellent. Then, because golf has never encountered a simple concept it couldn’t make unnecessarily complicated, if you become better than zero your handicap acquires a plus sign.
A plus handicap opens certain doors. Not important doors in the schema of life. Mostly doors leading to substantially more difficult golf tournaments populated by substantially better golfers.
But follow enough of those doors, apply some handicap arithmetic, add considerable hard work, favorable qualifying rounds, several increasingly improbable victories, an impartial abacus, and a conspiracy board connected with red string… and one theoretical path eventually terminates at The Masters.
I’m calling this Bonus Golf.
To be clear, nobody in our household is reserving lodging in Augusta. This is not a plan. It is barely mathematics.
But once your child has spent years trying to get to scratch and suddenly arrives on the other side, you are entitled to spend at least several minutes investigating every absurd consequence of the achievement.
Some people buy champagne. I researched amateur exemptions. Different strokes.
It isn’t the handicap. It’s the text.
I did it.
Three words arriving from a golf course while I was somewhere else.
For years I had watched almost every step toward that round. I bought the first clubs. Found lessons. Drove to tournaments. Learned just enough about equipment to become dangerous. Followed him around courses. Watched good rounds disappear. Watched terrible rounds somehow survive. Watched the possibility of breaking par slowly stop seeming ridiculous.
And then he did it without me.
Which, I suppose, is another way of saying the whole thing worked.
The thirteen-year-old with the left-handed M2s doesn’t need his father standing behind the eighteenth green anymore. The twenty-year-old sends him the scorecard afterward.
I like that. Mostly.
I would have liked to see the putt on eighteen.
But I have the screenshot. Score: 70. To Par: -1. And three words: I did it.
Welcome to Bonus Golf.
