My son Noah is 13, poised on that precipice between boyhood and manhood. When he was eight, I began him on golf with the fervor of a convert, daily pilgrimages to courses and driving ranges, the pandemic having made hermits of us all save for those emerald sanctuaries where hope could still be struck with a seven-iron.
The photographs on my iPhone tell a slightly different story: There he is at four, maybe five, gripping a club like a scepter, his face as serious as a surgeon’s. But those were merely glimpses, afternoon diversions. The actual devotion began later, when golf became our shared recreation, our excuse for traveling this vast, beautiful country together, chasing tournaments as though they were small but shining dreams.
For years, we lived by the rhythm of practice swings and scorecards. Every afternoon after school, we’d visit the driving range, and I’d watch him strike balls. He won tournaments much like other children collect stamps: methodically, joyfully, with an appetite that seemed inexhaustible. Under-par rounds became his signature, and I confess I wore his victories like expensive cologne, letting everyone catch the scent.
But then something changed. A couple of summers back, a duck hook appeared like an unwelcome guest who came to stay indefinitely. His drives began curving left, beyond his control; suddenly, the boy who could thread a ball between trees was sending shots into water hazards and sand traps with heartbreaking regularity.
I became his unpaid, unqualified instructor, armed with nothing but paternal determination and a smartphone full of slow-motion videos. Frame by frame, I’d compare his swing to Tiger’s, Rory’s and Adam Scott’s. But Noah’s game had acquired a stubborn logic of its own, one that resisted my amateur analysis.
The tournaments that once energized him now seemed to drain him. Where victory had been expected, par became a small win. I watched him struggle with the cruelty that golf reserves for those who have tasted success. The knowledge that greatness once lived in your hands makes its absence feel like amputation.
I, fool that I was, pressed harder. Like some demented stage father, I pushed him toward a game that was clearly pushing back, wanting desperately for him to love what I loved, to achieve what I never had, to justify all those hours, all that training, all those half-formed fantasies of college scholarships and professional tours. The more his game deteriorated, the tighter I gripped, following that perverse law of romance whereby excessive attention breeds indifference.
After a demoralizing showing at the World Championship last summer, Noah delivered his verdict with the finality of an austere judge: he was done. Tournaments, at least. Maybe some recreational golf, he said.
I was devastated, though I tried to conceal my disappointment.
Life, however, is prone to unforeseen reversals. Not long ago, I found myself in an auditorium, surrounded by the acoustic dampness that such spaces possess, watching Noah perform on the bassoon.
The bassoon: an instrument that until recently I couldn’t identify in a lineup, whose technique remains as mysterious to me as particle physics. I can’t read music and have never played an instrument.
He was magnificent.
Not in the way I had once imagined him on a golf course. That was my aspiration, dressed in his small body. This was something else entirely: his discovery, his motivation, his private interaction with beauty. The music flowed from him like water from a spring, natural and unstoppable.
Lately, he’s picked up new instruments: saxophone, piano (self-taught) and guitar. Each one is a new language he’s teaching himself to speak, a territory where my expertise cannot follow, cannot interfere, cannot corrupt with the weight of my own unfulfilled ambitions.
Perhaps this is the lesson golf was trying to teach me all along: that love, true love, means stepping back far enough to let people become themselves. In my ignorance of music, I’ve given Noah the rarest gift a parent can offer: the freedom to excel without expectation, to discover joy without the burden of someone else’s grand desires.
Sometimes, when he practices, I hear melodies drifting from his room like smoke from a distant fire, and I think about all the tournaments we won’t attend together, all the golf courses we’ll never see. The sadness is real, but it’s clean now, like the ache you feel when a fever finally breaks.
The boy who once made birdies is now making music, and perhaps that’s not a trade but a transformation: the simple, mysterious business of becoming who we’re meant to be.
His golf clubs sit there in the garage like old love letters we’re not quite ready to throw away. Sometimes I catch him looking at them with what might be nostalgia or relief. Either way, the boy is free now, and so, I suppose, am I.
Allen Mendenhall is a Senior Advisor for the Capital Markets Initiative at the Heritage Foundation. A lawyer with a Ph.D. in English from Auburn University, he has taught at multiple colleges and universities across Alabama and is the author or editor of nine books. Learn more at AllenMendenhall.com.
