I loved baseball and basketball, watched football every Friday night and Saturday and Sunday afternoon in the fall and winter. That's how life works, how habits are formed, how passions are burned into your very being - a son and sibling wanting to like what their father and brothers liked, wanting to do what their father and brothers did. His swing was compact, though so was he, a short, round man whose takeaway was so slow you could get an oil change in the time it took to get from first movement to contact.īoth of my brothers played golf, too. My father, in the summer, played in a Thursday night golf league with people I've known forever - adopted relatives, my Little League coach, his lifelong friends from two streets over. Growing up, there was always a game on, an event to attend. He passed that gift down to his three sons, who then handed it on to their sons and daughters. I FIRST LOVED SPORTS BECAUSE MY FATHER DID. I played Pebble Beach with my three boys. Open at Pebble Beach, reminds me of this place's magic, makes me think of family and memories and a proud, stubborn, flawed man I still miss every day.Īloysius Vincent Charles Pietruszkiewicz - to make it simple for everybody, he was simply Wish - died seven years ago, two years after he got to say this: It is why today - Father's Day - being here at the U.S. Pebble Beach is all of those things for me. We all have special places, the ones that make us smile, or make us laugh, or make us cry. Too many people wait too long, the moment missed, the would-be memories replaced by lifelong regret. We booked the trip once or twice, maybe even three times, only to cancel, our schedules too chaotic, the real world tossing up a roadblock. 7 - the little, downhill, waves-crashing-in-the-background par-3 that just has to be the prettiest short hole in the world - could really be as beautiful in person as it seems in HD. We would talk about standing on the 18th tee, the Pacific looming up the left side, hugging the coast in what the Scottish poet Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have called "the most beautiful meeting of land and sea in the world." We would wonder if the view atop No. When he'd say it to us, we agreed, every time, that we would make this happen. He said it to neighbors when he sat for summer nights on the back deck, to lifelong friends at his Thursday night golf league, to strangers on the barstool next to him. He said it over and over, to me and my two older brothers, Chris and Alan. I am going to play Pebble Beach with my three boys. I must hear the roar of the engines at the Indianapolis 500.įor my entire childhood and all of my early adult life, I heard my father say one thing, without hesitation, the words never changing, the conviction only growing as he got older. I need to peer over the rim of the Grand Canyon. Everyone has that magical place, the spot their eyes need to see or their foot needs to step just once before they take in their last breath. Editor's note: This story was originally published June 16, 2019.
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