Golf Dads: Fathers, Sons, and the Greatest Game - Hardcover

CURT SAMPSON was inspired to write this book by the death of his own golf dad in 2005. He is the author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestsellers Hogan and The Masters. He is also a regular contributor to Sports Illustrated.

1 REBIRTH DAY

Rick, Curtis, Kevin, and Ryan Rhoads

A brown two-door 1970 Buick Le Sabre sped south on I-5, tracing the spine of California. Behind the wheel sat Rick, a slight man wearing contacts beneath his sunglasses. Beside him, Joan, his pretty, dark-haired wife, divided her attention between the road ahead and the hubbub in the back seat. Actually, the car had no back seat; it had been torn out in favor of a playpen, which Rick had bolted to the floor. Inside the padded enclosure, among blankets, teddy bears, an Etch-a-Sketch, a Slinky, and a handful of GI Joes, Curtis and Kevin Rhoads gibbered and played and drooled and slept. They were ages four and two, respectively. It was 1974.
We had a two-bedroom apartment in Woodland [a Sacramento suburb] where you could always hear trains going by,” recalls Curtis. We were there some and on the road a lot. I know it seems a quaint thing now, but the tour and the car were our life and our lifestyle.” When Curtis fell off a jungle gym and gashed open his forehead, Joan rushed him to a hospital. Somewhere. Neither of them remembers where between the Andy Williams San Diego Open in January and the San Antonio Texas Open in November this occurred. A quick trip to the ER and twelve stitches in your child’s cabeza was merely business as usual for what sportswriters used to call golfing nomads.” Cars with clubs in the trunk virtually defined the tour for the first fifty years of its existence. Roads still ruled not jets when Rhoads played in the ’70s. Caravans formed on Sunday nights for the long haul from, for instance, the parking lot at Silly Willow Country Club in central Mississippi to hotels near the next event in Tallahassee. The following Sunday night the convoy snaked north to Philadelphia; then, a week later, west to Chicago, and on and on into the future like a runaway train. As ever, golf pros carried tools for minor repairs and learned to handle blowouts and highway hypnosis and bad food and all the other hazards of life on a concrete strip. The cars had to be big, so partly to fulfill the wheelbase requirement and partly to finance her husband’s rookie year, Joan sold her treasured white Pontiac Firebird. That car had some guts,” Rick says with as mile and a touch of remembered regret. The newlyweds missed the way the ’Bird pinned your spine to the seat, but one bland Buick was all they needed or could afford.
One time he left me in Tucson,” Joan says. Rick was feeling flush enough, or fatigued enough, to fly to Miami for the next tournament. He said just follow Ken Fulton.’ Well, Ken Fulton liked to go eighty-five, and he didn’t like to stop. I was like this the whole way.” Joan extends her arms and widens her eyes, the frozen pose she held for two solid days across seven states.
But on their usual, less frantic cross-country drives, when the kids were napping or playing with GI Joe, the couple had time to think and to talk. Joan looked at the farms and fields rushing past and wondered why fate had surrounded her with males all her life. She had five brothers, no sisters. Now two sons and a husband, with another baby boy in her future. A schoolteacher and a nongolfer, she often posed blunt questions. Why did you miss that putt on eighteen?” she’d ask. Why did you hit it in the water on twelve?” Admits Rick, I never had an adequate answer.” As the odometer spun, Rick mused aloud, and in his head, about the future. As good as he was and he knew he could really play this game his position on the tour remained tenuous. Like his brother Ron before him, he’d attended USC on a golf scholarship, and twice was named All- American. He turned pro and succeeded immediately. In the late fall of 1967, in the eight-round qualifying tournament to get a PGA card an event so stressful that vomiting at the first tee was almost commonplace he sailed through on his first try. Rhoads and the other newly minted tour pros Bob Murphy, Deane Beman, and Marty Fleckman among them were summarily extended invitations to play in a series of tournaments around the rim of the Caribbean. The first one was in Caracas.
It’s the only golf memory that gives me chills,” Rick recalls. He shot 65 his first round as a touring pro, then hung around well enough the next three days to have a final-hole fifteen-foot putt to tie Alvie Thompson for first. When he made it, it was asif he’d killed the bull: the throng of Venezuelans around the green punched the air and screamed in Spanish.
The outpouring of emotion his own and that of los aficionados left Rhoads drained. But then something else happened to make the moment even more vivid. Al Besselink, one of the tour’s legendary bon vivants he once played the eighteennth hole at Colonial with a rose in his teeth put his arm around Rhoads’s thin shoulders: He said, Calm down, slow down. Everything goeeeees at your pace now.’ It helped. I don’t think I would have made contact with the ball in the playoff if Bessie hadn’t talked with me.” Rhoads won with a birdie on the first hole. First prize was$3,000.
He never won again.
For most of the next decade he eked out a living in the middle of the pack, and strived and studied the unforgiving game, a quest that included a season toiling at Winged Foot, in suburban New York City, for Claude Harmon. Because of Harmon’s wonderful lreputation, a spot on his staff was considered the best club job in the country. Graduates of his program owned the credential to work almost anywhere and to teach almost anyone. Claude Jr., AKA Butch, taught at Winged Foot when Rhoads did, and later hit the big time as Tiger Woods’s swing coach. But Rhoads didn’t want to work at a club. He wanted to play.
Play. If ever a word was inadequate for its purpose, it’s playing” professional golf. As if constant travel and backbreaking hours on a practice tee are play. After hitting a couple hundred balls himself, Rhoads often extended his workday by studying more successful practitioners. He’d walk down the practice tee and park a polite distance behind one superstar or another, often Gary Player or Lee Trevino because they were little guys, like me” and just observe. Eventually, Gary and Lee would wave Rick in to discuss what they were working on and to have a look at his swing.
His biggest year was 1973, when he won $16,120, good for113th on the money list. The equivalent in today’s dollars is about $125,000 not poverty, but after expenses, not much. The magic phrase back then was top sixty”: the sixty leading money winners could compete in any tournament they wished. But those ranked in the purgatory of 61st on up had to either make the cut in the previous event or play in one-round qualifiers on Mondays to earn a place in the main draw. It was a brutal way to live. When Rhoads didn’t shoot low enough on Monday to make the tournament field, he often participated in minor league satellite” events, a concept the tour toyed with to give their unemployed pros a little something to play for. A little something: in one satellite, the Future Stars Classic in March 1972, he won eight bucks.
But still, Rhoads got rich. Travel with his wife and two young sons bound them to a degree they might not have achieved otherwise. And stories: memories of his life on the run are as good as gold. What Nicklaus said on the first tee at the L.A. Open (it was not endearing). How Sanders, the tour’s Romeo, handled his women (carefully, but honestly).How he himself endured the tortures of the damned when his dependable fade devolved into a hook so big he had to aim north to go west. The advice from Lee Trevino, when Rick got near the lead at the Hartford but then hurried his way into some late bogies: You can’t watch yourself, but next time you feel the heat, just look at your shadow. You and your shadow were moving so fast you looked like Charlie Chaplin out there.” What a novice caddie said to Art Wall, when the soft-voiced pro squinted at a green and asked how far it was to get home: Man, I don’t even know where you live.” One story, The Story, is painful. Driving cross-country on the southern route alone this time, and now in a burgundy Impala Rick pulled off I-10 in El Paso and parked on a side street. He got out of the Chevy and yawned and stretched, observing the orange mountains across the river in Mexico and smelling the dry air. He walked for a while, then jogged for a mile or two. Several happy dogs ran with him. Back in the car to resume the interminable journey to Florida, he discovered blood on his leg. One of the dogs had bitten him. Just to be safe, he stopped in the next town that looked big enough to have a hospital. Good thing you came in, the doctor told him. There’s a rabies epidemic in El Paso.
The rabies cure is a lot less stressful and intense now, but the state of the art in 1975 involved shots of vaccine and immunoglobulin once a day for two weeks. Faced with the knowledge that the virus, if he had it, would travel slowly from his peripheral nervous system to his central nervous system and then to his brain and kill him, Rhoads got back in the car to continue his worst trip ever, stopping in general hospitals along the way for his shots. You should have heard the buzzing in those emergency rooms when I said the word rabies,” he says.
Despite the shots and the stress, Rhoads somehow qualified for the Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic, and was even close to the lead after shooting 71-69. But he felt sick that Saturday night as he went to the by-now familiar hospital in Fort Lauderdale. The docs there made no specific diagnosis, so he played on, but not well, staggering to the finish in 73 and 77. He tied for fifty-third, winning $559. The weary pro packed the car for Jacksonville and the next tournament.
Feeling awful, he quit halfway through a practice round that week and drove to the local hospital for his fourteenth injection. There was blood in his urine. The doctors admitted him, and, suspecting that the rabies cure had caused the internal bleeding, decided to forego the final shot. But that wasn’t it; tests eventually revealed the presence of autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease. Rhoads had the most common inherited lifethreatening disease in the world. Common, yes; cure, no, the physician said in response to the obvious question. All we can do, he said, is treat symptoms, such as backache, headache, and high blood pressure. But it’s a long-term problem, nothing to worry about now. You’ve got to concentrate on getting your blood chemistry right, and the only way to do that is to eat right and rest.
Rhoads withdrew from the Jacksonville Open and headed home on I-10 with the setting sun in his eyes and three thousand miles to think. It didn’t occur to him that his career as a touring pro had ended, although it had. And he didn’t think his kidneys would fail. But they would.
One of his boys would have to save him.

That the sons of Rick and Joan Rhoads make a good impression is not a matter for debate. Their high profile jobs require amiability, intelligence, diplomacy the entire catalog of virtues, in fact, asked of ambassadors to difficult countries. All three salute their father by working in his profession. Rick and his three sons all have a low-key, look-you-in-the-eye style and a gift for instruction. Seekers come to them to have their backswings unkinked and their minds untangled, a process similar to and as painful as psychotherapy.
Curtis, the oldest, is thirty-six. He’s an assistant professional at the Olympic Club in San Francisco. Lush” is not lush enough to describe Olympic, where the trees are slumbering giants and the air from the cold Pacific is thick and salty. Several of golf ’s most memorable U.S. Opens have been held there, giving a hacker on the grounds the feeling of tiptoeing through history. Including its par-three course, called the Cliff, Olympic has fifty-four holes, and many, many members and guests, so it’s simultaneously exclusive and very busy. Curtis Rhoads helps keep order and ensures everyone enjoys it. He only wishes he gave more lessons.
He’s always liked team sports more than golf. Today he looks like what he was, a second baseman, a point guard, and a soccer halfback. He had a pretty good golf game he played a bit for USC but at dinner he’s more likely to talk about the Golden State Warriors of the NBA than to muse about the PGA Tour. His understatement and cooperativeness set the tone between and among the siblings. His father marveled at the harmony in his house; it hadn’t been that way when he was a kid. I was the youngest of three brothers, all of us very competitive,” he recalls. I tried to fight with ’em, but I lost every fight.” Curtis, the good teammate, deflects the credit. It’s a loving family,” he says. Top-notch on both sides. We don’t have that one strange uncle no one wants to talk to.” Kevin, the middle child, is thirty-four. He’s the teaching professional at The Country Club, in Brookline, Massachusetts. You remember The Country Club: it’s that gorgeous course where Ouimet won and Arnie lost and the 1999 U.S. Ryder Cup team pulled a win out of its . . . hat. TCC is as upscale and private as its name implies. When Kevin is not instructing a Boston Brahmin or Brahminette, he’s coaching the Harvard women’s golf team. Like his older brother, he’s unfailingly upbeat and polite. He looks a little like Bobby Kennedy, but with shorter hair and better teeth. He’s the best golfer among the brothers, and the only one who thought about playing the Tour.
He’d been a so-so player in high school, but at UCLA he dedicated himself to the game. He won the golf team qualifying tournaments his freshman and sophomore years, but the coach couldn’t accept that he’d beaten his scholarship players and didn’t put him on the team an injustice that still bothers Rick and Kevin doesn’t mention. Kevin finally got his spot on the squad for his last two years, and was Honorable Mention AllPac-10 as a senior.
Give me a minute,” he says. I want to say this right.” On the eighteenth tee at The Country Club, he’s been asked if, on the way to following in his father’s footsteps, he didn’t have some period of rebellion, some phase in which he put his hair in a ponytail and smoked Marlboros or cigarettes without a label. Kevin hits a solid drive, but a little left, into the succulent rough by a fairway bunker. From there he somehow gets a seven iron high enough to hold the scary final green. I never felt any need to rebel, for one simple reason,” he says, walking in the sunshine toward the big yellow clubhouse. My dad is my hero.” Why? It’s hard to know that at any one time, because the criteria changes,” Kevin Rhoads says. What he did and where he worked impressed me. Watching him in the Crosby every year, how he knew players I’d seen on TV and they knew him . . . And when I went away and saw how other men comported themselves that certainly didn’t diminish him in my eyes.
He taught all three of us to play golf, and he was always extremely encouraging. Father-son in golf instruction can be a rough dynamic. Even though both may be trying, very often it doesn’t work.
Dad’s knowledge of the game was beyond question, but he never threw that in your face. At the same time, he didn’t sugarcoat things. Here’s what I think we should work on,’ he’d say. Here’s what I think might work.’” Kevin’s a strong player but he can’t get a driver within thirty yards of his long-hitting baby brother. Ryan Rhoads, twenty-four, is as John Daly compared to the smooth, classic swings of his brothers. He works in the golf shop and on the lesson tee at Catta Verdera at Twelve Bridges, a golf course/real estate development in suburban Sacramento. Painted in the enduring strokes of nature, the panoramic canvas and unspoiled beauty of Twelve Bridges at Catta Verdera has earned a disti...