The Bladed Balata I: How Golfing Saved my Life

                I first picked up a golf club the year after my mom died.

And it saved my life.

I grew up in a magical, if not entirely backwards, period known as the 1980s. In addition to my miraculous survival through an era when seatbelts were practically optional, organic hadn’t been invented yet, and parents only had the wisdom that their parents had passed down to them, my childhood was spent in a very small town. The year I was born, it’s population was just over six hundred people. And so, my beginning was spent as the oldest child of a barely-making-ends-meet working class family of five, in a three-bedroom house that stood next to a filbert orchard in Dundee, Oregon.

In that town, whose only municipal buildings were a single post office and an elementary school, my parents, for fear my brain would rot or my soul lost to the devil, forbade me many things. Mind you, I was allowed to do some things. Like ride my bike in the street completely unsupervised, without even owning a helmet. But there are two things that have stood out over my thirty-six years as being the most important. So of course now, besides my wife and kids, they’re the two things that have meant the most to me in the world.

I was five years old when I asked my father what the bag full of chrome sticks was hanging in the rafters of our garage.

“They’re golf clubs,” he told me.

“Can I see them?” I asked.

“Golf is for rich, old people. I only have those so I can play when my boss asks me to. It’s not for you. Don’t ask again,” he told me.

That was it. For the rest of my developmental years that’s what I believed. And anyone who played golf fit right into that stereotype for me. Golf was for rich people. Old people. And not me. If you weren’t those things, rich or old, then you weren’t doing it right. And golf wasn’t for you either.

That is, save a single instance in high school, when I was sixteen years old, and the girl I worshiped most had a poster of Tiger Woods hanging on the back of her door.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Tiger Woods,” she smiled. She was always smiling. Like she knew something I didn’t know. It drove me crazy.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“You will.” Maybe she really did know things.

                Secondly, I wasn’t allowed to listen to music.

Not the music I wanted to, anyway.

Around the same time that my dad was telling me that golf wasn’t for me, my mom was telling me how dangerous music was. And was subsequently only allowed to listen to Bible stories on the record player and mom’s gospel music. But, she thought, even gospel could get a little racy sometimes.

It wasn’t until I was quite a bit older, riding the bus to the next town over for middle school, that I finally heard genuinely artistic music through the awful clock-radio speakers of my blessed bus driver’s radio.

I very clearly remember hearing Peter Gabriel for the first time. Eric Clapton for the first time. And remember my heart absolutely stopping any time Michael Jackson came on.

                I admitted to her one day that I didn’t want to spend any more time learning to play the clarinet. They had bought it for me to play in the school band after I had specifically asked for a saxophone. So I could be like Kenny G. “It’s the same thing, just cheaper,” they told me. Every male trumpet player in the 6^th grade disagreed.

I told my mom that I would rather spend my time learning to play the electric guitar.

                “Electric guitars are the devil’s music,” she informed me. She added later that it was the high squealing solo parts that made the devil especially happy, which made me sad because those made me happy too.

                That was the first time in my life I remember thinking that my parents were wrong about something. And refused to believe something they had told me. It took me nearly ten years from that moment, after thousands of attempts, from multiple angles, with every last bit of angst and determination a boy could muster to finally wear my mother down.

She bought me my first guitar when I was sixteen. I went to music college in New York City when I was eighteen. And was playing professionally by the time I was twenty-one.

She never got to see it.

I still loved my parents, then. I love them even more now. It’s just that my father was, and I think to some degree continues to be, filled with the kind of wisdom a person gets filled with growing up in the late 50s as the youngest son of a WWII chaplain and his British war-bride. His great rebellions consisted of going to see a movie after they told him movies were evil. And running off to live with his sister after high school, who herself was married to a pastor. What I’m saying is that his story isn’t a life lived out in The Hunger Games or The Catcher in the Rye. It was a life built with rules and boundaries and precision, and measured only by how steady one could be.

I want to be steady now, too. For my family.

But my story happened differently.

Mom got sick when I was fifteen and was gone by the time I was twenty. And when my world ended, collapsed, meaning ceased to exist, I just wanted something to fight against.

I needed it. A new battle. Something I could win. Because you can’t punch cancer.

And I was already well on my way musically.

What I needed was something new to fight. Something to pour the passions and fires and war from my life’s destruction into. Lest I destroy myself. Or someone I loved. Or both.

I remembered then the poster on the back of the door, and felt romance and passion.

I remembered my father telling me no. Rebellion.

I remembered what it took to get good at guitar. How my fingers bled on the frets. Fire.

My next door neighbor, a man named John, was one of the angels in my young life. He found out I wanted to play golf, was himself left-handed, and gave me my first clubs. He set them on our doorstep, bound together in a carboard box, for me to find. In those months after my mom’s death, being happy was such a foreign feeling to me that I cried when I saw them.

They were rough in my beginner hands.

MacGregor blades with hard, cord, black and green grips. You know the ones. They’re the ones your neighbor probably gave you when you first started playing.

My maiden voyage out was nine holes at the OSU home course with my best friend. I couldn’t hit a 7 iron more than a hundred yards and we barely finished. The skin on my hands, red and raw, pealed off in quarter sized blisters. 

“When can we go again?”

The only words I could speak. I was in awe.

There’s never a good time to lose your parents. There’s never a good time to lose anyone. But spending high school watching her go. And then facing the idea of my twenties, trying to become the person I was meant to be, by myself? Alone? That I would never hear her calming voice again?

There’s no other word for it. I was scared.

But also, something new was forming. After buying a set of baseball gloves to cover both my hands so that I could still play guitar the next day, I wanted something beautiful. Maybe more than I had ever wanted anything before. I wanted to flush a 7 iron again. I wanted to learn how to hit the ball farther and straighter than anyone else could. And I wanted to hear my name called by the starter and walk out onto the course with nothing but me and the ball for hours and hours.

You can’t compare some things. Being a father or a good husband isn’t compatible or comparable to golf. Those things have separate categories.

But golf is perfect to me.

That’s what I’m trying to say.

For however long I’m out on the course, it’s perfect. Golf is my heaven.

When I first started out, the oldest, and hence cheapest, balls in the used ball bin were the old balata balls. Soft cover balls that, if you hit it with the leading edge of your club, left a scar that never went away. Cut it right to the core.

Some scars never fade. We can accept that.

But you can still finish the hole if you can find new reasons to go on. New joys and passions. New games to play. New courses. New playing partners.

A long time ago I was a very broken boy. Maybe I was broken from the start. But I’m still here and playing. And I couldn’t be happier.

That’s what I’m going to write about here.

My name is Nathan Christensen, and I am an old bladed balata.

And maybe that’s great, because maybe you are too.