My Grandfather Takes Golf Seriously
Grandpa has been an avid golf player for the last 50 years. His cousins first introduced him to golf when he was twelve; this was the first time he had ever stepped out on a golf course in his life. While grandpa looked out at the course, all that was going through his mind was awe; the Yale course was rated 45 on the list of top 100 golf courses in the United States. It was a magnificent course, open and free, the trees were blossomed and the smell of summer was in the air.
The first time I ever played golf was at the Weekapaug Golf Club with my Grandpa, my mom, my cousin Charlotte, and Aunty Amy. It was a torching day of, at the very least, 85˚F. When I took my first step out of the chilled building and into the summer air of the seaside course, I burst into flames. “Why would anyone want to play a long game of boring swinging in this heat?” was my first reaction to golf. Obviously we weren’t going to make it through the course on foot, so my mom cracked and rented blazing red golf carts. We carted around, playing a horrendous game of golf in the process; not Grandpa, he wasn’t having his greatest day, but he was playing well. Charlotte and I drove the carts amazingly, scaring our mothers in the process. They didn’t want us to get caught driving the golf carts because you had to be sixteen or older to drive them, and we were fourteen and thirteen. When we finally got done with our two-hour long nine hole game, we went in for a relaxing lunch in the cool, air conditioned space inside the Weekapaug Golf Club. The hot day out in the sun playing golf next to the seaside didn’t turn out to be that bad, even though I did lose about three balls in the ocean |
Grandpa didn’t actually play golf that much at Yale, he was too preoccupied with baseball and classes to play; however, he kept his love for it all the way through. In his free time after he graduated college he would spend it playing golf with his buddies and honing in on his skills, trying to seek out the perfect swing, and the perfect club. He still hasn’t gotten there, he never will, but seeking perfection is one way you can seek becoming the greatest at almost anything. I do the same thing with snowboarding. In the 1990’s he decided to take golfing to another level and use his business degree at the same time. He started looking into building his own incredible golf clubs. He had to research for hours to find what the correct ratios of the golf clubs should be, it was strenuous work, but he enjoyed every minuet of it. Grandpa found that he really loved making golf clubs, but couldn’t continue because of a major decline in money; when he sold clubs to pro golfers, they would never pay him in any royalties. As a result, Grandpa ended up losing over $100,000 and had to drop out and find another job to invest his time in. He never forgot his love for golf, he plays as much as he can, and he still sometimes builds his own clubs to this day, and eventually, he tells me, he wants to try to start the business back up.
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