He Played His Last Game
by Chip Duncan

A few weeks ago at the end of the Masters Golf Tournament, Arnold Palmer retired. The photo in the paper was haunting to me … a weary man walking across a final hillside. He'd played his last game in golf's most prestigious tournament.

I'm not a golf fan and I probably wouldn't have noticed the picture if it weren't for one simple reason: Arnold Palmer was my father's hero. They were close in age and they shared a passion that drove them for a lifetime - golf. In Palmer's case it went beyond a career. Palmer was so good, such an enormous talent, that he created an empire from his skill on the course. As a young man, my father had been his peer. He'd set records on several courses in Nebraska and he'd learned to play scratch golf. But my father lacked one thing on the golf course that kept him from reaching Palmer's status. He lacked the composure to play truly great golf. On some days that meant punching a gimme or shanking a pitch. On others, that meant swearing up a storm, throwing his clubs in disgust, even walking off the course during a match play fundraiser for a local charity.

As a kid, I learned quickly to stay out of the way when golf was on television. Weekends were about one thing - golf. He'd play it in the morning, watch it in the afternoon. By the time I was sixteen, I'd learned that the very last thing I wanted to do was to caddy for the old man. By twenty, I'd figured out that a social outing centered around golf with my father was a template for disaster. To this day, I have to be dragged on to a golf course, and even then, I'll only play with overt, sacrilegious cheaters who openly defy the rules of the game. My dad hated mulligans. I've learned to live with them (especially in relationships).

So just what was it about that photo of Arnold Palmer walking off the course for the last time? Yes, it was the end of an era. But for me it was more than that. It was the moment when it hit me, really hit me, that my father had died.

It was just a few years ago that he'd retired to Arizona to play golf. He and his wife had found a beautiful home on a beautiful golf course, a green oasis in a sea of brown. From all accounts, he was as happy as he'd ever been. He'd left behind a career in business that had challenged him and served him well to spend the last few years of his life doing the only thing he'd ever really wanted to do … play golf.

We stayed in touch. We talked regularly on the phone and saw each other a couple of times a year. We hashed over politics, social issues, business and family. And as always, I listened to him talk about his game. When it was going well, he'd jabber on about everything from "the guys" to the 9 iron he used on his approach "to that two-tiered monster with the deep trap on the left side."

The last time we talked was in early November as I was leaving for a trip to Peru. He was playing regularly and feeling great. He was putting like a young man again, stroking the ball with the precision of a pendulum instead of punching it toward the hole. And, though it wasn't causing him any discomfort, he was scheduled for a hernia operation while I was away. It was "routine."

My cell phone rang while I was driving through the coastal desert north of Lima. According to my sister, something had gone terribly wrong during the preparation for surgery. While inserting the "main line" for antibiotics and painkillers into his chest, the doctor had punctured his lung. For reasons that are still not quite clear, the doctors went ahead with his surgery anyway. But the lung didn't heal. In fact, it became dramatically worse. Within a matter of days, the punctured lung resulted in a serious case of pneumonia. By the time I made it to Phoenix, he was in a drug-induced coma.

Things get blurry when a family member is dying. Decisions are minute-by-minute. The stress is incomprehensible. And there are very few, if any, clear-cut answers to the onslaught of challenges. A patient in critical care lives or dies based not on black and white choices but on choosing among barely discernable shades in the infinite spectrum of gray.

My father had a team of five doctors, all with their own specialties, idiosyncrasies and unique personalities. Wait around long enough and we were sure to encounter the quietly confident intellectual backed with the latest research; the frenzied, arrogant extrovert barking at everyone around him; and the heroic optimist who dismissed anyone who would even think to question whether my dad might be in mortal danger. "Of course not!"

We did our part as a family. Questioning this. Questioning that. Limping by as lay people suddenly immersed in a world we did not comprehend. Then, after nearly four weeks in intensive care (three on life support), my Dad passed away quietly.

He wanted to be cremated and he'd kindly asked that we keep any memorial service low profile. A big remembrance just wasn't his style. Still, for family members, there was much to be done. We were all busied with contacting friends and relatives, organizing the less-than-formal memorial service, and dealing with the myriad of legal and financial issues that surround death. There was, frankly, no time for me to think, let alone grieve.

The memorial service was a blur as well. There were plenty of upbeat stories about his professional accomplishments and his love for wife and family. And of course there were no shortage of stories recounting his temperamental golf game. Even in retirement, he never found composure on the course. He never outgrew throwing a club following a horrible shot or the careless interruption of the group playing up. His regular foursome, now reduced to three, seemed oddly bittersweet in the telling of their tales. They would miss the man, they would not miss the meltdowns.
Through it all, it was my job to preside. To host. To comfort. And to play the role of first-born son. It was, after all, the role I was born to play and my own spiritual beliefs had prepared me well. While I wasn't in denial, I also found little time to connect emotionally with his passing.

Then, on a quiet morning in April, I sat at home reading the sports section (in the Journal Sentinel) of the local paper. On page 7, I found myself staring just a few beats longer than normal at the photo of a slump-shouldered old golfer walking off the course one last time. I felt a tear roll across my cheek. So many thoughts finally surfaced, among them the realization that I would never really comprehend my father's love of golf or his deep anger over never achieving the golfing goals to which he'd aspired for a lifetime. I'd never know that passion or that pain. It was as if no matter what he did, he'd always failed at the one thing he truly loved. Perhaps in his mind, he had.
But there was so much more to his life than golf. There was so much more to his legacy than a handicap he couldn't seem to live with. I thought of all he'd done for me as a role model, wondering whether it would bring him any comfort. He was not the sort of dad to play catch in the backyard. He wasn't the scoutmaster type, he wasn't likely to join the family at church, and he wasn't a handyman of any kind. In fact, I never even saw him mow the lawn or put up a storm window.

And yet there were so many things he was. My dad was a just man. He believed in fairness and equality for all people. He spent his career in business trying to build coalitions, especially between the white "old guard" and people of color. He was afraid of bumblebees and his own shadow would startle him, but he wasn't afraid to venture in to a high crime neighborhood or to be a true friend to people from all races and economic backgrounds long before it became acceptable to his generation. He wasn't afraid to challenge a political bigwig or a wealthy bully whose agenda included somehow making other people's lives more difficult. He was a Reagan Republican with conservative economic values whose party let him down time and again when it came to fighting unjust wars, criminalizing social behaviors he thought should be an individual's choice, working to deny women the right to choose, or bringing religion into the halls of government. And if ever there was a cutting edge where he'd made a difference in the business community, it was by walking the walk when it came to equal status for women in the workplace.

It wasn't until I was an adult that we really began a meaningful relationship. He'd never cared for kids and if he'd been born a few decades later, he'd likely never have had them. He really never got the hang of being a classic dad. But he did know how to be a father and a friend, and once I was old enough to talk about real, adult issues, he succeeded at both. It was then that I began to see the positive impact his values had had on me. In everything, that is, except golf. Maybe I'm lucky I never got into the swing of it.

Change happens. People move in and out of our lives all the time. When we're lucky, they leave an impact that makes us better people. Long before he'd played his final game, my father's life beyond the golf course had helped to make me a better man. For that and so much more, he will be missed.

Chip Duncan is an EMMY award-winning documentary filmmaker who presently resides in Wisconsin. Most of the articles that appear on this site were originally printed in Sunday editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel between 2001 and 2004. To contact Chip Duncan, please click here: Chip@DuncanEntertainment.com. Your comments are welcomed.

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