I raised children who do not play golf. Have I failed?

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Last fall, my wife and I flew east to attend a tradition unlike any other: falling from a child to college. After making a movement on the campus once with our daughter, Scarlett, we knew what to expect in the way of logistics; Purchases, packaging, transportation and packaging were popular. But the accusation of the emotional depth of this trip was different. Scarlett’s brother, Leo, is our youngest. He was starting a new life, and so we were.

The term “empty nest” comes from ornithology, but I wonder if the birds, being brined by birds, try with great questions when the last of their flights learn to fly and feed themselves. Do they wisdom wisdom in the passage of time? Do they get inventory for their parental failures? Wishing yourself for a well done job?

Returning to California For a home that was destined to be calmer – and cleaner – than never, I found myself in a reflective mood. With naked-minimal measures, I realized that I would succeed. Scarlett and Leo were tutled to say “please” and “thank you” and get up straight. However, on other fronts, I thought I would come out with a brief misery. I had supplied them with smartphones very early. I would allow them to be cute in the yard work and hopeless with the dishes. The worst of all, my children were now adults, nor playing golf.

Maybe I would be doomed by my DNA. By tracing my family tree as much as possible, I can identify exactly a golf player: me. None of my parents played. My mother, more athletic of the two, found an exit as a ballerina, while my father, the son of Eastern European immigrants, became an ardent baseball fan through which his father was assimilated. He could recite the dimensions of the EBBETS Field, lead the full list of ’29 Yankees, and tell you what Joe Dimaggio did every year of his career. But once, late in his life, when I asked him what he thought Jack Nicklaus’ Record, he stopped, hit his beard in contemplation of Faux and diligently stated: “I loved his work in One flew over the doll’s nest”

As a boy, I withdrew For baseball, too, although my field focus was Lucy Van Pelt-Si. As for golf, she never thought of me. Of my late teens, the closest to come to the royal and ancient game was coming to the mouth of a clown or a windmill.

That I got Golf owed a high school friend who, one afternoon just before graduation, persuaded me to join her in a range of direction by telling me a girl I liked would be there. It wasn’t. But with my first shooting I got in the air – you can see where this is going – I fell a lot, and golf became my new unconceptive press. Based on how it treats me often, I’m not sure that feeling has ever been mutual.

The woman I married, Sarah, is much more forgiving. However, it is cold towards golf. Her love for the game is limited to the fact that she knows I care deeply about her.

I have to stop with romantic metaphors. Golf is not really like a lover, and, despite what people say, I don’t think it’s too much like life. I am with those who compare golf to one language. The later you learn, the more likely it is that you will have an emphasis. If my swing could speak, I imagine it would sound like the English Ballesteros’ English -touched by English, minus “I miss you, I miss you, I do.”

And because we all try to do better from our children, when our first born were born, I pledged that Scarlett would become a native player of the game. As the garden approached, I did not register it in the Spanish diving classes. I bought her a set of sawn clubs.

How to start it was another matter. As I learned it myself seemed that the question, given that I played more by intuition than the bases, the official instructions for a four-year-old also felt like congestion. Instead, I showed her pro -tour videos in action.

Like many children, Scarlett proved an excellent imitation. Also like many children, she was inclined to satisfy her father. On our first journey on a course, a step-and-putt not far from our home, she put forward her second hole and made some fluid crossings on the ball that filled me with a mixture of pride and envy. When I appreciated her game, I could say she was happy to be happy.

However, while time was worn, I can also say that her heart was not in it. I stopped forced to have the case and our course exits ceased. Years later, while Scarlett was preparing to go to college, I asked her about her early sports memories. “I liked football because it was fast and social,” she said. “The only part of the golf I liked was to be with you.”

Leo arrived nearly two years after his sister. With it, I tried a less direct approach. “Gaslighting” is what shrinks can call it, but I prefer to market it as the opposite psychology.

It functioned as a beauty with music. Hoping that Leo would become a rock-and-roller that I had once dreamed of being, I left a guitar out in the living room when he was a little boy and told him not to touch him; From high school, he was being shattered as Jimmy Page.

I hoped for and waited for a golf -like story. show club Apparently in my home office, I sat again and waited until it finally happened. Leo wandered from the inside, caught a driver and begged him to take him to the range.

Anyone with more than one child knows what different sisters and sisters can be like. When scarlett is patient and accommodating, Leo can be short and head. After deceiving some shots, he asked me for some shaky tips, which he continued to ignore, then blamed me for every fosal that followed.

Over the years, we tried some other sessions in the range and course, always at its insistence, often with pleasant moments of pleasure. But it was clear that Golf and Leo would not be connected. He had better ways to get out of his ya-ya. At the time he gave up on the game for good, he was playing in a group.

He is still, just like I’m still hitting a ball around, though without any of my offspring as friends. Golf goes to the blood lines of countless families, passed from one generation to another. But in the sense clan, we are one and we have done.

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Where did I get wrong?

In the first few weeks after I left Leo in his dormitory, that was how I created the question for myself. Since then I have realized that it is a silly thing to ask.

Post-mortemists can be useful in Golf. Anyway trained instructor can watch a swing in Slo-Mo and identify the causes and effects. If you do this, the ball does it. Flight of a stroke descends into physics. The education of a child is more complex.

Perhaps this is why, over the past 20 years, I have heard hundreds, if not thousands, tips for smart swing, but few of what I would consider tips for the collided parents. Of all the instructions offered to me in that field, the only mirror that struck me as lasting wisdom came a few years ago from an unexpected source: Lou Holtz, former football trainer Notre Dame and Augusta National member

During a telephone interview for a piece of fur, Holtz spoke to me extensively about Gridiron and Golf, addressing softball questions with bromides in the closet room, before you break, to think, to ask a question.

“Son, do you have children?” he asked.

“Two,” I said.

“And do you know how to raise happy, safe and careful children?”

“How?” I wondered.

“Tell them you love their mother.”

I was silent for a moment. I still often think about this flat comment, and how lucky I am: Dear Sarah is not something I have ever had to counterfeit, and I am convinced that my children have benefited from it.

However, golf deserves another loan. I’ve loved the game to have a family first – it IS The family for me – and my wife and children have seen and heard much about what Golf has said about me and did to me.

Scarlett and Leo can be hopeless with the dishes – the college does not seem to be educating on that front – but they are honest and empathetic. They are kind and compassionate to friends and strangers alike. They possess their mistakes and try to learn from them. They can laugh at the absurdities of life and in themselves.

Golf helped me teach me these things and I managed to help them teach them. They are the players in the ways that matter the most.