Fathers, sons, golf & loss: How Tiger Woods' farewell to St. Andrews recalled tales of love

I don’t think about my father enough. It’s not by choice, believe me. He has just been gone so long.

Almost 30 years — the kind of mind-bender that sits in the space between consciousness and sub-consciousness. Sometimes it's a dull ache, but more often like the first days of a changing season, when you recognize the smell and feel and look of cooler air and emerging reds, but your memory remains attached to heat and greens.

Loss can be disorienting like that. Mostly, you move forward. The sound of their voice fades. The stories fade, too.

I thought about this when Tiger Woods walked over the Swilcan Bridge at St. Andrews a week ago Friday, tipping his cap to acknowledge the crowd and the reality that he probably wouldn’t play there again in a British Open.

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Not because my dad loved Woods; he died before the golf icon hit the tour. Not even because my dad loved golf and possessed a low-key liquid swing.

But because it doesn’t seem like that long ago when Woods won the 1997 Masters at 21. And yet there he was on the bridge, a quarter-century later, face weathered, waving a ceremonial goodbye.

No other sport stretches then shrinks time like golf. If so inclined, and if the knees and hips hold up, one can play almost an entire lifetime. Its most accomplished practitioners secure trophies decades apart, as Woods did. It makes for great stories, as life does.

This week, some of the best golfers in the world will tee off at the Rocket Mortgage Classic at the Detroit Golf Club. They’ll have stories. So will those that follow them outside the yellow ropes.

Maybe someone will be there without their father for the first time. Maybe they’ll run into someone that knew him. And they’ll learn.

I don’t remember the last time I learned something about my father. Or heard a tale. Or talked to someone who knew him, beyond a handful of my immediate family.

Until Mike Douglass began a sentence this way last week:

“The last time I saw your father, he walked into my office at school with a big grin on his face …"

The rest of the sentence is fuzzy. It was the late '80s. Or maybe early '90s. Douglas, whom I called “Uncle” as a kid, was a school principal in Indiana. My dad was selling school portraits while living in Illinois. He showed up unannounced, like Santa in the spring.

The details mattered, but they didn’t. Douglass just wanted to tell me what my father had meant to him. So did his wife, Sue. She began to share stories as well, about my father, about my mother — she'd roomed with her at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, in the early '60s — about the trips she and Mike had taken to see my parents, wherever they were.

Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Brooks AFB in San Antonio. Hahn AFB in Germany.

Most of us don’t write our own history. We carry it around in our head. It gets cloudy. And while I remember each of those stops, there’s nothing like learning your own history from someone who remembers it more clearly than you.

And, so, when the Douglasses reached out a month ago to ask if they could drive up from their summer place in Indiana for lunch, I couldn’t wait, because I knew — well, I hoped — they'd be bringing more memories with them.

After the initial jolt of hearing Mike say, “The last time I saw your father …,” I settled in and shared some of my memories, too. Eventually, the conversation turned to golf.

My father struggled after he left the military and didn’t always have the time or money to play as much as he wanted to. He’d grown up around the game in Texas, where his father took him out on muni courses in San Antonio.

My grandfather was a scratch player. My pop might have been, too, had he had the time.

Unfortunately, that swing went to my brother, Kevin — who is trying to pass it along to his son, Matthew — and (thank goodness) to my boys, Jake and Sam. The four of them play a handful of times a summer. When they do, I imagine my sons are out there with my father — my brother has much of his look and personality.

My brother and sons had joined me to meet the Douglasses for lunch, along with their daughter, Amy Douglass Crabb, and her husband, Mark Crabb, who, as it happened, played golf at Purdue in the 80s.

The final round of the British Open was playing out as we ate, and everyone kept checking their phones to follow along. Between talk of Woods’ farewell and Rory Mcllroy’s missed opportunity and the putting of eventual champ Cameron Smith, I heard tales of my mom and dad.

Golf can be like that, too.

I sometimes wonder ... if my pop hadn’t been taken down by a brain tumor all those years ago, would I have fought harder to fix the shanks that chased me away from golf for good by the time I was 30? As much as I love it when my sons play with my brother and nephew, I still miss the feel of hitting the sweet spot with a 2 iron, and the chatter in the fairway from tee to green.

For now, though, I’m content to live their outings through their tales when they return — the good-natured trash talk, their three-putts and slices, their approach shots that nestle near the cup after carving a perfect parabola through the thick, Michigan air.

The Douglasses gave me a similar gift last week when we all sat around a table to eat and reconnect and share stories.

“Life is short,” Amy reminded me as we said goodbye.

It’s even shorter when memories aren’t replenished.

Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.     

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Tiger Woods' timelessness elicits thoughts of fathers and sons