Kelly,
I'm disgusted to report that my attempt to contribute to junior golf was unsuccessful yesterday. As it turns out, the First Tee program had moved to a city 10 miles away. The local high school - just 1/2 mile down the street from a half-empty 36 holes on a Sunday morning - no longer had a golf team because of budget cuts.
Not a single parent had stood up and saved the high school program; one of the kids was a golf prodigy from a struggling family and ended up having to transfer to another high school because his only hope of paying for college was getting a golf scholarship.
This saddens me because I've seen the result of what happens when a kid is given some encouragement.
I coached a boy named Ryan years ago who wandered onto our golf team as a sophomore. He had no confidence in golf or life and literally whiffed on the first tee the first time he played for us in a JV match. His Japanese mother had moved him to Burlingame when she left his Mexican father to take a programming job in Silicon Valley. The kid had never had a male in his life and was afraid of his own shadow.
Except he was such a decent, honest kid without a micron of larceny in his heart that I essentially adopted him in many ways. The head golf coach doubled as the football coach (he did the organizing, I did the coaching) and rolled his eyes every time I insisted that Ryan get match experience. We had 23 kids on the team, but I did not spend a lot of time on the ones who got by on athletic talent but never studied the fine points of the game. These types rarely move to the next level and don't listen very well to begin with.
We all know that golf both teaches and reveals character, and the truth is we chased off all the kids who were only on the team to avoid P.E. class.
Instead the mantra was to preach character character character. At the end of five years, our once last place team ran the tables twice in a row and not only were we stealing potential gunners from the private schools, but Ryan ended up getting a full ride to U of S.F. and winning his last two college tournaments. I hope my daughter grows up and marries a kid like him. I could not be prouder of what he accomplished.
It all began because the tertiary effect of using golf to teach some life lessons led to stellar GPA's and success in life. Ryan - who had little interest in academics - became a teaching pro and is getting an advanced degree in international economics. I swear that these kids pushed each other to be better people and students because the team ethos was to give your best effort in all things.
But it started with taking up a collection to fund the local golf squad - mostly because several of us could not stand the fact our alma mater was no longer the top dog in golf.
Around the same time, a Freshman from a different high school (who read my columns) came and told me he had decided to study golf architecture. I lent him a few books and he read every single one of them twice. His parents did not know much about golf, so I encouraged him to apply himself and try to get accepted to Cornell. I was shocked speechless years later when he sent me a note to let me know he had won the 2004 Fredrick Dreer Award . . . . yeah, the same one that Tom Doak won.
This is not to make a speech or try and pawn myself of as having done 1/1000th of what some of golf's real heros have accomplished, yet it all begins with a donation of time or money - not for the good of the game of golf - but for as a contribution towards the upward march of the human race through the examples we set in raising kids.
Kelly, you need to move out of the city before you become that which you despise.