The Range Bucket List: The Golf Adventure of a Lifetime - Softcover

James Dodson is a two-time winner of the United States Golf Association’s Herbert Warren Wind Award for best golf book of the year. He is the author of ten books, including The Range Bucket List, Final Rounds, American Triumvirate, A Golfer’s Life (with Arnold Palmer), and Ben Hogan: An American Life. He lives with his wife in North Carolina.

The Range Bucket List PROLOGUE

THINGS TO DO IN GOLF

Several years ago I made a nice discovery while going through an old footlocker from my mother’s attic that contained various objects from my teenage years. Beneath camping gear and a well-worn Wilson fielder’s glove autographed by Orioles Hall of Famer Brooks Robinson, I found a trio of golf books and a small green spiral notebook marked “Things to Do in Golf” in large adolescent block letters.

The golf books—gifts from my father—were the first I ever owned. They included an autographed 1962 first-edition hardcover copy of Sam Snead’s folksy The Education of a Golfer, written with Al Stump; a 1967 paperback biography of Arnold Palmer by the editors of Golf Digest magazine (“An inside look at the most fabulous player in golf history!”); and a well-worn, water-stained edition of Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf, the best-selling golf instruction book of all time.

As you might expect, it was a pleasure to sit and leaf through my first golf books, noting passages I found important enough to underline in pencil, remembering what it was like to be a skinny Carolina kid falling in love with his old man’s game. My first sports heroes were indeed Arnold Palmer and Brooks Robinson. I’d tagged after Arnold many times at my hometown Greater Greensboro Open (GGO)—now the Wyndham Championship—and though I would never see Ben Hogan play golf in person, my father believed his instruction book, written in collaboration with the great Herbert Warren Wind, to be the best and simplest analysis of a golf swing in print. As for Brooks Robinson, the finest third baseman in Major League history, the Human Vacuum Cleaner was the person I hoped to be like in the unlikely event that my plan to be the next Arnold Palmer failed to bear fruit.

The pocket-size notebook marked “Things to Do in Golf,” however, was really what brought those memories rushing back. It was a Range Bucket List thirty-five years before I coined the phrase, begun because I’d read somewhere that as a kid, Arnold Palmer recorded his golf goals in a small notebook he kept in his golf bag. Decades later, when I was working with Arnold on his memoirs, I actually confirmed this with him during an early-morning chat in his Latrobe workshop. “Oh, for sure,” he said with a warm chuckle, “I had plenty of big golf dreams in those days. And, come to think of it, I did write them down. I wanted to get good enough at golf, first of all, to impress Pap [Deacon, his father]. Then I wanted to win the state amateur championship. I was probably twelve or thirteen at the time. Frankly, I never thought about turning pro in those days—there was no real money in it—though I did secretly dream about somehow winning the Masters or a US Open. I never could have imagined . . .”

His voice trailed off. Arnold was sixty-eight years old then and stood in the before-hours quiet of his modest Latrobe office workshop regripping a favorite driver as he revealed this, sounding almost as dreamy as a Pennsylvania teenager. We’d just begun collaborating on A Golfer’s Life, a two-year partnership that would reveal his incomparable life and transform mine—a writer’s version, if you like, of playing in the Masters or the US Open. Arnold had recently undergone surgery for prostate cancer. His wife, Winnie, had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The dimensions of his world were suddenly much narrower and more precious than ever.

He stared off into the ether and more than six decades of memories, then took a moment to compose himself. He glanced over at me, eyes wet with emotion, cleared his voice, and smiled. “Of course, every kid has those kinds of golf dreams, Shakespeare. I just never imagined mine would come true the way they did—or go so quickly.”

I knew exactly what he meant, but didn’t know what to say—and couldn’t have found my voice regardless. Suffice it to say, discovering my “Things to Do in Golf” list in an attic trunk a decade or so later brought on my own rush of memory and emotion. The game of golf will do that.

Here’s the list, such as it is:

Things to Do in Golf

1. Meet Arnold Palmer and Mr. Bobby Jones

2. Play the Old Course at St Andrews, Scotland

3. Make a hole in one

4. Play on the PGA Tour

5. Get new clubs

6. Break 80 (soon!)

7. Live in Pinehurst

8. Find golf buddies like Bill, Alex, and Richard [my dad’s Saturday-morning regulars]

9. Caddie at the GGO

10. Have a girlfriend who plays golf

11. Play golf in Brazil

That’s it: eleven items, short and sweet. It’s obvious why Palmer and Jones top the list. They were the reigning gods of American golf, both of whom had a strong connection to my hometown. Jones’s daughter lived in Greensboro, and one of Arnold’s early college buddies, Charlie Teague, was my dad’s best friend’s younger brother and ran the Gate City’s best sporting-goods store, where I purchased my Brooks Robinson fielder’s glove with my lawn-mowing earnings shortly before I got it autographed by the Human Vacuum Cleaner himself at my first Orioles game. Our voyaging, Henry Thoreau said, is only a great circle-sailing.

The other items on the list were the kinds of things any twelve-year-old boy in Palmer’s 1960s America might have placed high on his golf to-do list—the forerunner of what, nearly four decades later, I would come to call my Range Bucket List of things I still wanted to do in golf. To this day, however, I have no clue why I was so eager to play golf in Brazil. Might have just been the pretty, dark-haired exchange student in my eighth-grade earth science class. Her name was Juliana. But I can’t be sure.

In any case, had a magical genie appeared to me when I recorded this beginner’s short list—I place it anywhere from late 1965 to early 1967—and informed me that I would in time accomplish, in one form or another, almost every item on that list and a great deal more, growing up to know many of the great players, golf writers, teachers, design pioneers, and architects of the game’s modern era—not to mention be recruited to help the most charismatic player in the game’s history produce his best-selling memoir—I probably would have laughed out loud at such a crazy notion, or simply passed out from pure, glandular teenage joy.

But such is the transformative power of golf. For me, this extraordinary ancient game has not only been an unexpected career shaper but also introduced me to my best friends, and has even been something of a spiritual lifesaver over many years.

Just after I started that first list, you see, I was banished from my father’s course in Greensboro for half the summer by a colorful club professional named Aubrey Apple for losing my cool and burying my new Bulls Eye putter in the flesh of the fourteenth green after missing a two-foot birdie putt. This happened during my first-ever round on a regulation eighteen-hole golf course. I was playing with my father and his buddies Bill Mims and Alex Roberts. Visibly disappointed at my behavior, my father calmly showed me how to repair the green, then insisted that I walk all the way back to the clubhouse and report my crime to Mr. Apple, who unplugged the smoldering stogie that anchored the southwest corner of his mouth long enough to issue a stream of profanity that raised the hair on my skinny chicken neck. He pointed me to the door, warning that I’d better not show my bleeping face around the club until “after the God-damned Fourth of Joo-lie!”

Which explains item number 7: “Live in Pinehurst.”

The day after this unfortunate incident, I was moping around in the backyard after church, smacking Wiffle golf balls over the roof of our house with my father’s old Spalding Bobby Jones pitching wedge, when my dad suddenly appeared wearing golf clothes and instructed me to grab my clubs from the garage and follow him.

We drove ninety minutes due south from the rolling Piedmont into the lonesome longleaf pines of the Carolina Sandhills. As I recall, my father didn’t say much during the ride on that beautiful May afternoon. My (not entirely kind) nickname for my relentlessly cheerful and incorruptibly upbeat father was Opti the Mystic. He was an adman with a poet’s heart who always seemed to have some nugget of wisdom reserved for any occasion and who viewed one’s transgressions against man or nature as timely opportunities to teach lessons about character and personal growth. Opti possessed an unsinkable belief in the power of human optimism and gratitude that shaped his life and, ultimately, mine, a belief perhaps most tellingly revealed through the life lessons of his favorite game: golf.

It was Opti who taught me the protocols of the ancient game and patiently endured my early eruptions of teenage angst as I struggled to control my hot temper and learn to play proficiently. It was Opti who placed those iconic golf books in my hands and gracefully spoke about the game’s “higher properties,” explaining how it is both an ever-changing journey into the unknown and a wonderful test of skill, character, and imagination that reveals who you really are and what you aspire to be.

This was pure Opti-speak, a few almost fairy-tale words that my older brother, Dicky, and I heard many versions of while growing up in North Carolina, the code by which our funny, philosophical, straight-arrow old man lived his life. Back then, neither my brother nor I could fully divine the deeper meanings of such lofty phrasings, and especially how they applied to a seemingly simple game like golf.

Our father, for instance, was the first person I heard say that golf is a metaphor for life, with its unexpected ups and downs, unfair breaks, and sudden breakthroughs, a game played by uniform rules of conduct that “apply to all” and that are older (and even more commendably democratic) than the US Constitution. Above all else, it was a “gentleman’s game” that offered challenges that tested, shaped, and ultimately “revealed one’s grit under fire.” The stories he loved to tell about taking up the game in England and Scotland during the Second World War, highlighted by his pilgrimage to the “Birthplace of Golf” at St Andrews just before D-Day, were magical to me.

Opti even told us how golf was something of “a mental anchor and lifesaver” during those years of war and uncertainty, a game he discovered as a homesick Carolina boy stationed on England’s Lancashire coast not far from the entrance gates of Royal Lytham & St Annes Golf Club, where Bobby Jones captured the 1926 British Open title. The club had a civilized wartime policy that allowed American servicemen to borrow the clubs of absent members and play the course for a few shillings. Shortly before he shipped out in the second wave of Operation Overlord, Opti and a second lieutenant buddy from South Carolina hopped a train to St Andrews just to play the Old Course. I still have a faded photograph of them posing on the first tee, the solemn facade of the Royal and Ancient clubhouse rising in the background. Befitting the occasion, Opti and his pal are both dressed in their Eighth Army Air Corps uniforms, neckties tucked into shirts, grinning like excited teenagers. Afterward, young tech sergeant Braxton Dodson mailed this photograph home to my mother, his war bride, a former Maryland beauty queen who was doing her part to save democracy by being chased around a desk by an admiral in Annapolis. At the bottom of the photo Opti jotted in ink: “A couple good eggs at the Home of Golf.”

Weeks later, a terrible tragedy occurred at the air base where my father was stationed that prevented him from piloting a troop glider into Normandy, an event he never spoke of until he and I took a trip to England and Scotland during the summer of the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day to play the courses where he fell hard for the game. It was then and there that I unwittingly exhumed an unspeakable event that had dramatically changed his life and that explained so much about his unsinkable optimism and passion for living, his determination never to waste a day. “Life promises us sorrow,” he said to me one evening as we walked together across the Old Course at dusk, repeating something I’d heard him say many times but never before understood. “It’s up to us to provide the joy. The game ends far too soon, Bo. But if you’re lucky, the journey will bring you safely home.”



In a manner of speaking, my own long journey to such opti-mystic awareness began the day after I got booted from Green Valley Golf Club in May of 1966, a golf awakening that began on the beautiful Sunday afternoon we rolled into sleepy Pinehurst, the so-called Home of American Golf.

We drove past a magnificent white hotel with a copper roof drowsing in the longleaf pines, and I saw, out the window of the Oldsmobile, golfers and caddies dressed all in white moving along a baize-green fairway while a church somewhere chimed a familiar hymn.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Opti remarked. “That’s Pinehurst No. 2, Donald Ross’s masterpiece. One of the most famous golf courses in the world. It’s right up there with the Old Course at St Andrews. Every legend of the modern game has played it, including Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer, and Sam Snead. Unfortunately, unless you learn to control your temper on the golf course, you’ll never get to play there.”

With that, he fell silent as we rolled on past the course, leaving me both dazzled and crestfallen.

A few minutes later, though, we wheeled into a charming smaller hotel called the Mid Pines Inn and Golf Club, and my father suggested we step inside to say hello to an old friend named Ernie Boros. He explained that Ernie was the younger brother of recent US Open winner Julius Boros. Julius was Mid Pine’s touring professional and my father’s favorite golfer. Earlier that spring, Opti and I had followed Boros at the Greater Greensboro Open, amazed by his buttermilk-smooth golf swing.

In the pro shop, Ernie Boros greeted us warmly and chatted with my dad about mutual friends from Greensboro. When the subject of his famous brother came up, Boros mentioned that Julius just happened to be on the property that afternoon, and was presently having lunch alone in the inn dining room. Ernie Boros offered me a Mid Pines visor and wondered if I wished to meet his brother and maybe get his autograph. Looking back, I remember how he glanced at my old man, smiled, and winked.

The encounter was brief. Julius Boros couldn’t have been nicer. He asked me a few questions about my game and offered to autograph my new visor. He thanked us for coming and observed, as we departed, “You know, son, golf is a game for gentlemen and ladies. It’ll teach you a great deal about life and can take you a lot of great places.”

Had I been in less of a daze, I might have heard the echoes of Opti’s own words coming from the great man’s lips. As it was, we then strolled out to take a look at the spectacular final hole of Mid Pines, and Opti pleasantly remarked, “Wasn’t that something? You just never know who you’ll meet in golf. That alone is a good reason to calm down and behave on the golf course.”

He let that soak in for a moment. “Tell you what,” he added, as if undergoing a change of heart, “if you think you can knock off the temper tantrums, maybe we can play the golf course here today. It’s al...