Titleist 4

The trees have turned and the daylight doesn't linger as long as it use to. A rich landscape of green has been repainted with the subtle hues of orange and gold. The sand traps are riddled with fallen leaves and if you brave the afternoon chill long enough to play the back nine you will be rewarded with a view from the fourteenth tee that is as pretty as an autumn postcard. Early frosts are already biting into my morning tee times and the gentle summer breezes have yielded to hearty northern gusts that whistle down the fairways and gobble up my errant tee shots before disposing of them in the next to impossible rough. It is early November and today will likely be my last round.

I love this golf course; I should, I've spent most of my days here. I love the way the morning sun shines through the towering pines that grace the front nine casting a tapestry of shadow and light across the undulating fairways. I love the cobblestone bridge on the fourth tee and the way my cleats click as I walk across, especially after stealing a rare birdie from the rather stingy par 4 third. I love the azaleas and dogwoods that welcome me back every spring and the oh so sweet scent of wild flower and fresh cut grass that lingers all summer long like a lover's perfume. In 33 years of marriage I never once entertained the thought of taking a mistress...short of this golf course.

Selling insurance paid my bills but it is the game that has long been my passion. The first time I picked up a club I was smitten. It was an old Spaulding 3 wood with a warped shaft and leather grips so dog-eared I had to spray the thing with Krylon to keep it from slipping out of my young and eager hands. The club belonged to my old navy buddy Tommy Hall and in 1952 he taught me the basics of the game the best he could from the deck of the USS Burlington as we patrolled the hostile waters of the North Korean Seas. For hours on end he and I would refine our swings by whacking makeshift golf balls of sailors twine and duct tape from the aft deck, smoking Luckys and watching as those little gray balls splashed into the choppy waters of Pyongyang Bay. After some crazy Red drove a truck full of TNT into the brothel Tommy was spending his shore leave...well...I guess that old 3 wood became mine.

But I was one of the fortunate ones. Instead of returning from the war with a gut full of shrapnel and a little purple heart pinned on my chest, I arrived back on American soil with my body intact and a hunger for the game of golf. In fact, the first thing I did when I got off the boat in the spring of 1954 was buy my own set of second-hand clubs. To pay for greens fees I took a job as a caddie at the same municipal course I play to this day. I would loop all morning long, lugging two, sometimes three bags at a time, learning form and etiquette, watching every move the players made and the subtle swing changes needed to draw or fade that ornery white ball. Come afternoon I carried my own bag, playing as many holes as the daylight would permit, fine-tuning the stances and swing planes I had studied earlier that morning. The love affair had begun. Life was glorious.

But before you go off thinking that this story is going to be about nothing more than golf, let me tell you that the second thing I did upon returning from Korea was to ask Millie Brower, my old high school sweetheart, to be my bride. Now Millie wasn't the prettiest girl on the block – she had mousy red hair, a face full of dark brown freckles and glasses so thick they made her eyes look like billiard balls - but she was true blue and well, I guess that was good enough for me. The day they shipped me overseas she pledged her fidelity and if she were anything, Millie Brower was a gal of her word. Every week without fail I would receive a letter filled with forget-me-nots and sprayed with the sweetest perfume any old sailor ever had the pleasure to whiff.

Now Millie's father was a reasonable man but he refused to have a dollar an hour caddie for a son in law. So when I requested his daughter's hand he would only give his blessing if I agreed to quit the loop and go to work for him. "Life's not about being happy, son," I remember him saying as he waved a money clip fat with bills before my impressionable eyes, "It's about making this!" It was pretty much a one sided conversation and not a week after I walked his only daughter down the aisle in August of 1954 he had me behind a desk in his insurance firm selling full term life. My sun filled days of caddying the links were over as quickly as they had begun and the stifling glare of fluorescent bulbs had faded my golden tan to a pasty white by the time the calendar read September. I wish I could say I worked as diligently at my marriage as I did my golf game but that, my friend, would be a lie. With my days consumed by the monotony of processing claims and quoting premiums, any spare time that I should have devoted to Millie was spent on the golf course. Sure, Millie was a good woman, but she could never stimulate my senses like a meticulously manicured green. She never stole my breath the way a placid sunrise from the first tee or a squadron of wild geese lifting off from one of the water holes could and still can to this day. Go ahead, call me callous - believe me, I've called myself far worse - but I learned early in life that I loved the game of golf far more than I did the woman I had taken as my wife.

A good perspective on my relationship with Millie in comparison to my relationship with the game of golf can be made quite effectively with a calendar and some simple arithmetic. Take in to consideration this: Millie bore me three beautiful children in three consecutive years, all born, incidentally, in the month of October: Tina in '55, Mary in '56, and Bill Jr. in '57. Coincidence? Some might say so. But simple math takes us back nine months to either the end of January or the beginning of February: the only months those particular years that I didn't play golf.

I use to play all through the winter back then, as long as there wasn't any snow on the ground. I'd be out there in my parka and long johns, hitting balls off the frozen ground; I didn't care, as long as I was playing. These days I can't even stand the thought of a long New England winter, much less playing in it. So, like the mallards who nest in the sparkling ponds that refine this beautiful course, I head south for the cold months - Florida to be exact - and bide my time down there until April sunshine and spring breezes makes things up here a bit more to my liking. Of course, I make that long drive by myself but I suppose Millie would be making it with me, were she still around.

So anyway, yes, we did have children, three as I mentioned, and I guess I'm as guilty as neglecting them for my silly infatuation as I am my wife. If I could list for you all the ball games and dance recitals I missed over the years for the sake of that little dimpled ball, you might begin to understand why my children remain distant to this day. All three have uprooted and make their livings and raise their families in other parts of the country. Sure, I get the phone calls on Father's Day and cards for my birthday but they, whether intentionally or not, now rob me of the same thing I selfishly denied them as children: time. It's a shame that those lost moments of abandoned fatherhood are something I will never be able to salvage.

And then, of course, there was my poor Millie. You know, there was a time in my life that I believed I was a good husband just because I made plenty of money, blessed her with children and provided for her a home filled with anything a woman with a lifetime subscription to Good Housekeeping could ever wish for. But I learned far to late in life that a new washer and dryer are not the things a woman's dreams are made of and any wife who is worth a damn - and believe me, my Millie was - doesn't want her husbands checkbook, she wants his attention. I learned this lesson in 1987. But by then, I guess it was just too late.

I was 54 that year: owner of the insurance firm my father in law had handed down, grandfather of two with a third on the way and - what I what I was most proud of at the time - a 2 handicap in golf and club champion four years running. When Millie told me about the lump that April, I dismissed it, told her she was just "going through the change." But as was usually the case, my assessment was anything but correct.

"It's cancer," I remember the doctor telling me, sitting there stone faced in his starched white jacket as Millie's hand trembled in mine. He told us her options and asked Millie if she was ready to fight. She was. And believe me, she did.

I usually measure the years in terms of the golf season, but not 1987. That was the year I finally devoted to my wife. Her battle was epic. By the time summer rolled around surgery had taken her right breast and radiation had left her skin burned and aching. But my Millie struggled on. Come August chemo had robed her of her hair, her ability to hold down solid food and most of her strength. But still, she refused to give up. By autumn I'm quite sure I had spent more time with my wife than I probably had during our entire marriage. I had not even looked at my golf clubs since spring.

That October was a cold and miserable month. Despite medicines best efforts Millie's cancer continued to spread. A mere shell of the woman she once was, I know in my heart she sustained those last agonizing weeks on sheer will alone. I often asked myself why she kept on fighting, why she persisted on through all the misery and pain when we both knew by then that the end was inevitable. "Because I so love spending this time with you," she answered one rainy afternoon without me ever posing the question.

When their mother's will finally ran out, my children sought comfort in one another. God knows I had never given them a reason to look for it in me. My daughters were the first to move away and not long after, their brother followed. I was 55 and all alone. In the spring of '88 I once again picked up my golf clubs. Not because I really wanted to, because they were all I had left.

So, I suppose by now you're wondering what the point to this whole story is anyway. Well, I admit that in my advanced years I do tend to ramble on but if you have been patient enough to stick with me so far, I guess this is it. But I think my point is best made - as most so often are - with a story of its own.

I was on the course a few weeks ago, like I am most afternoons, and I see this young hack on the tee in front of me take a half hearted swing and hook his tee shot out of bounds into a muddy area. Now as the rules state he tees up another ball and manages to keep this one in play but what astonishes me is that even though his first ball is out of bounds, it's clearly retrievable, yet this guy ignores it and proceeds on to his second ball. Now I'm not above ball hawking and once I realize he's not interested in going after that first ball, I do it for him. I had to step into a puddle to get at it but sure enough, there it was. I popped it out with my sand wedge, wiped it clean of the mud and held it up to the sun to see what I had found.

My labors were rewarded as I realized that this was not just any ball. No, this baby was a Titleist 4. And not one of those cheap knockoffs or x-outs either. What I had found was the real deal, the Cadillac of golf balls: the Pro V-1. Now whether you know anything about golf or not I am quite sure you can appreciate the value of a ball that sells for $60 a dozen. These balls are not cheap my friend and I was amazed that someone could so easily discard something that cost so much.

I thought about playing the ball on my next hole, but I didn't. I just kept her there in my pocket and started thinking about things of value, things that are really worth something and how some people can simply toss those things aside. And then that got me thinking about life – in particular my relationship with my wife and children - and how maybe mine is a lot like that Titleist 4: hooked out of bounds with an unenthusiastic swing and left there in the mud, discarded, for someone or something else to come around and claim.

The science of a golf ball is all kinetics: potential, so to speak. Let it just sit there and it is useless, it does nothing. But strike it just the right way and it can do amazing, even glorious things. Life's like that. I've devoted mine to mastering the art of hitting that little white ball -and I do that very well - when what I should have been working at all those wasted years were the things that really mattered: marriage, children, family. The potential has been lost. My wife is gone; my children live far, far away.

I'm 71 now and I know my time is short. I have this dream that when I die God makes me play show and tell with one object that best sums up my life. In the dream I'm waiting there in line and all these people in front of me have the most marvelous things to show Him, wonderful symbols of achievements from their time on earth. But when He gets to me I fumble through my pockets and all I can come up with is that muddy Titleist 4.

I'm almost finished, I promise.

Remember that old Spaulding 3 wood I told you about? I still have it, believe it or not. The head has more than a few cracks and the shaft is still not right but the grips are brand new. It's the hands that hold those grips that are all aged and worn now. I like to take her out on days like today, late in the season when the skies are gray and the fairways deserted. I hold her in my knotty old hands and let one fly and for just a moment I'm 19 again, on the deck of that old frigate somewhere off the coast of Korea with my whole miserable life still in front of me instead of fading away in the rear-view mirror like some hitchhiker I entertained the idea of picking up. But the brisk autumn winds and rustling leaves bring me back again and I drop that old 3 wood back in my bag and move on the next hole. Just like I always do.

The season has grow old and tired - much like myself - and the concession to November means the cold and snow are only weeks away. Winter comes early to these parts and in two days I will pack up the old Wagoneer and make my annual pilgrimage south with the rest of the snowbirds. But right now, I putt out on 18 and take one last look around before penciling in my score and turning my card over to the pro.

"Will I see you tomorrow, Bill?" he asks as he logs my score.

"Nope," I reply, shaking my head and stamping the grassy residue from my cleats. "Last round. I'm leaving for Florida on Friday."

"Well, okay then Bill," he smiles, handing me back my card and shaking my hand with a wink in his eye. "You have yourself a real safe trip now and we'll see you back here in the spring."

I smile politely and walk away with my clubs in tow knowing he will never see me again.

You see, a persistent cough finally brought me to the doctors last month. I figured I would get myself a quick prescription to tide me over until the warm Florida air can clear out these old lungs of mine but I got a whole battery of tests instead. The doctor says I have tumor on my left main bronchus that extends into my aortic arch – whatever the hell that means. One too many Luckys, I suppose. Basically, he tells me that without treatment I have two, three months tops. With surgery, chemo and radiation, however, he can promise me at least a full year. I thought about it but after watching what my poor Millie went through I don't think I'll be staying for the show; I'll just take my check and leave now, thank you very much. The doctor expects me in his office on Friday morning to tell him my decision but by then I will probably be stuck in traffic somewhere on the Jersey Turnpike.

You know, I will truly miss this beautiful golf course. Maybe I'll do one more drive by on Friday morning; we'll see. But there is one stop that I must make before jumping on I-95 and heading south.

At St. Mary's Cemetery on the Hill there is grave I know far too well. It is a modest stone of polished granite that bears no fancy ornamentation or design, only two names: Millie's and my own. Under her name are carved two sets of dates; under mine, there is only one. As I always do when I visit this peaceful and serene place, I will lay a single red rose under her name. But this time I will leave something else, something on my side of the stone.

I imagine the ground will be hard with frost when I push the golf tee into the cold soil that will soon hold my remains. My fingers tremble when it's chilly out and I hope that I'll be able to get it on there straight. I'll stand for a moment or two and roll it around in my wrinkled old hands and then, just before I turn to leave, I will rest it atop the tee: the symbol of my life and of all that lost potential, my show and tell to God and the rest of the world. I wonder what the grounds keeper will think when he finds it there under my etched granite name. My lonely Titleist 4.