This week's song - You've Got a Friend in Me - Randy Newman - Toy Story is one of my favorites. So is Christopher Leach
The ground was still wet with dew. I looked down the fairway trying to envision my shot. The stakes were huge. When my new driver struck the ball, it rose against a late-summer sky and gently faded over the trees that stood at the corner of the dog-legged par 5, landing safely in the fairway. “Good one,” my competitor said. It was his common compliment - short, to the point. There would not be much conversation during the round. This wasn’t our first rodeo. The game was on. He teed his ball, and after he struck it, Chris Leach’s drive flew mine by 10 yards. We picked up our golf bags and walked stride for stride down the fairway. It was 1988. I was 19. He was 17. I was starting my sophomore year at UT. He was the star senior quarterback at Farragut High, bathed in the glow of all that befits the age and position.
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| Money Players |
Because of my close relationship with my brother, John, his friends became my friends. My friends became his friends. Chris and my brother were in the same class. As kids, we all played golf, tennis, billiards, basketball - well, anything - together. Chris and I were usually pitted against one another, inevitably for money. I like to think I taught him how to gamble, but in hindsight, I think it was as much a genetic predisposition as hair or eye color.
We often played for large sums of money, despite the fact we didn’t have access to more than pocket change. But, on that day, we played for something more - The Fire Stick. The club, manufactured by Wilson, was the hottest driver of the day. The beautiful and intimidating red fiberglass shaft ran down into a titanium/metal head. Every golfer wanted a Fire Stick in their bag, and I was one of the fortunate few. My father had given it to me the week before as a gift. It was a good club, but it was also something else, something players like Leach and I couldn’t resist - flash and status. Bad golfers would look silly trying to play it. People paid attention when it was carried onto the driving range. Rumors flew around our club about which golfers were going to get one. A friend of my father’s approached me at my grandmother’s funeral, extended his hand and said, “Sorry about your grandmother,” then leaned in to whisper, “How do you like that Fire Stick, kid?”
I’d lost to Leach the day before and he came up with the idea that, instead of having me pay, he wanted to play for the Fire Stick. “Absolutely,” I said without hesitation. Money players don't hesitate or turn down a challenge. It was a beautiful day. We strolled down the fairways of Fox Den Country Club with the confidence that tomorrow was promised and the world belonged to us. We were good. We knew it. Our bodies were lean. The inevitable tragedies and storms of life had never earned proximity to us. We were boys playing a game we loved. It was a 9-hole match. We battled back and forth like it was the Ryder Cup. It is always serious between friends upon the field of battle. We pulled for each other, conceded the right putt, and made club suggestions. It came down to the last hole. When I tapped in for par, we shook hands and walked to the clubhouse, laughing and reliving the match that resulted in my retention of the desired Fire Stick.
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| The Fire Stick |
The years slid by faster than those infinite summers of my youth. Chris would become my little brother in the fraternity. He stood with me at my wedding to Cheryl. I toasted him at his. We have so many close friends. When a money game was being put together, it has to include Pryor and Leach. We’ve traveled to football games and multiple locations to play golf with my brother and other friends. And, then he and his wife gathered with many one fall afternoon, outside the emergency department of Park West Hospital, awaiting word about my wife’s condition after she’d been rushed there from our home. When I exited to deliver the news of her death, Leach was the first. The first face I saw. The first friend to rise. The first person I embraced. The first of many to come unglued with me, as the eye of the hurricane arrived in defiance of our presumed exemption from such things. Long before that terrible day, we had been dear friends and rivals in all manner of games. The storm transformed us into brothers. A Storm turns a friendship into something greater, something deserving of its own temple.
It has been 28 years since we first played for the Fire Stick. The club has long been obsolete. Driver technology has gone through the stratosphere, but the ole Fire Stick is still around. I looked over at Chris’s bag this past April to see its red shaft and gray titanium head protruding as we stepped onto the first tee in Destin, Florida. It has been our tradition, our temple if you will, for 21 years, that the first day of our big golf trip is the day we annually renew our competition for the relic. The Fire Stick Round. One round of golf. The club itself hasn’t touched a golf ball for a quarter of a century. At the end of the tee box, away from the others, he approached me for the ceremonial conversation. “I see you brought it with you,” I said. He smiled. During the past year he’d had his picture taken with it on his travels, texting the image to me with very little if any caption, each photo serving as both a good-natured jab and a nod to the institution of our brotherhood.“We’ll play straight up as usual?” I asked. That is how it has always been, how it shall always be regardless of the fact his game is much better these days. The winner always keeps the Fire Stick for the next year. “Alrighty. Good luck,” he said, winking as he turned to walk away, still the cocky kid I taught to gamble on the golf course, the one who would roll out for a pass on fall Friday nights and then keep it just to run someone over. He is the same cocky kid that never gave up the ball on the basketball court and the same confident man who told me everything was going to be alright after he and five others carried my Cheryl to her place on the hill where the leaves still fall with a certain grace this time of year.
I leaned over and placed my ball on the tee then struck a slow-rising shot that drew slightly around the fairway bunker and into the plush green fairway. “Good one,” he said. A Good One, indeed.
