The Magic of Golf
The author and his father at Old Head in Ireland.
We are more interconnected today than we have ever been. With a simple friend request or follow, the lives and activities of long-lost friends can scroll by, one reel at a time. But for my father, Steve, a member of the baby-boomer generation, the vastness of the today’s social media landscape stretches beyond his care for comprehension.
To my millennial memory, this story begins in the days of trying to get my oxen to ford a river and not die of dysentery. Sitting in the garage, next to my father’s Tulane golf bag—still holding his Tourney Custom blades and persimmons—sat the most iconic golf trophy of all for us amateurs: a hole-in-one plaque. That plaque mentions, the names of the two military members as witnesses, the location of West Germany, and the date of the Summer ‘82.
My father’s story of his hole-in-one, his only one, is more ingrained in my memory than even my own; he was visiting his high-school golf teammate, a member of the military stationed in West Germany. I heard he hit an 8-iron not more than 10 feet off the ground that found its way from thin to win, and then in. My father and his high-school teammate Pete then travelled to Scotland with Pete’s wife—another high school classmate—to take their first trips to the linksland of Scotland.
After that trip, Pete and his wife attended my parents’ wedding, visiting my father in Miami one more time in 1984 after my older sister was born. But the distance, and their lives, pushed them physically apart for decades. After my father’s second trip to Scotland—this one with me in 2015—he asked me to look up Pete on social media. All I could find was a sparse LinkedIn page, showing Pete was a teacher at a military institute in the Washington D.C. area. Connection evaded the friends from a lifetime ago, who lived their lives away from their electronic devices.
Coral Gables High 1972 Golf Team. Pete is back row center. Steve is front row, farthest left.
I could fill pages with my father’s stories from his trip with Pete: 36 holes a day, teeing off on the Old Course by themselves at 5:30 a.m., only for the starter to catch up with them an hour later to collect their £6. And for my whole life, these were tales of lore.
Until May 2023. That’s when I met Pete and his wife. A chance meeting. Thousands of miles away. At a golf course.
With Covid travel restrictions being lifted, my father and I were finally able to take his delayed 65th birthday trip to Ireland. As with any good golf trip, the first night’s dinner was spent regaling each other with golf tales of the past, before one ball has been stroked in the present. Sitting in the restaurant at the clubhouse of the Old Head Golf Links, my father told his tale of his only hole-in-one and his first trip to Scotland to the table. After he finished, he excused himself to the restroom.
Upon his return, my father stopped short of our table, tapped the shoulder of a woman at the table next to us, and they proceeded to hug in the way that old friends hug. The others at our table asked me who my father was hugging, and I told them I had no idea. My father returned with a goofy smile on his face and announced, “I just ran into Pete in the lobby! That’s his wife.” I didn’t know if the odds of him running into Pete in County Cork were as long as the odds of a hole-in-one, but both things often never happen in a lifetime.
We later learned from Pete that he suspected it was my father from the minute he was seated. But if you haven’t seen a face in 40 years, how sure can you be? As if by coincidence—or just the law of averages for men of a certain age—Pete had gotten up to use the restroom a few minutes after my father. His plan was to quietly ask the front desk if “Steve Brown” was a guest at the hotel, as Old Head only has approximately 20 rooms on the bottom floor of the clubhouse. But before he could ask, he saw my father walking toward him. At that moment Pete believed he knew, and just looked at the familiar stranger walking toward him and asked, “Stevie?”
After everyone finished their dinner, Pete, my father, and I retired to the bar. Over a few pints, Pete began to confirm all the stories I had heard over my lifetime. He also added a few new ones about high school “Stevie.” Apparently, my father “Stevie” had hair down his back and liked to have a good time. As the evening was wrapping up, the two old friends exchanged cell phone numbers: their version of a follow request.
Steve teeing off on 18 at Adare Manor, the last hole of the trip.
As it turned out, Pete and his wife were there with another couple, travelling on an itinerary nearly identical to ours. After rounds at Ballybunion, Waterville, Lahinch, and Tralee, we would compare notes via text, and stories over breakfasts in Killarney. On our last stop and round of the trip, we played Adare Manor. As my father and I played the home holes on the banks of the River Maigue, which bisected the golf course from the Manor House, Pete appeared across the way, as if he always knew where his friends would be, and when. Golf had brought them together many decades ago, and now it reunited them and brought back their friendship.
We finished out our round, with the sounds of cheers and jeers from Pete, standing on the bank near the Manor, watching over his friends, both old and new. After the round, the two friends said goodbye, both knowing that this goodbye really meant “talk soon.”
Now, many months later, the two friends remain in constant contact through their form of social media: phone calls and texts. There have been discussions of getting together for a golf trip, this time planned together, with myself and Pete’s son. But most importantly, there have been discussions—about golf, life, and times gone by—as if they were yesterday.
And that’s part of what I call the magic of golf: it makes the impossible possible, and it can bond people together forever. Whether we are able to get everyone together to play is still unknown. Regardless, I know the magic of golf will bring us together again one day, either by design, or by the divine.