Slinging Birdies

  • Home
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
  • Media Kit
  • Home
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
  • Media Kit

Granddaddy & My Grandpa

1/15/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
Pine Lakes Country Club, the patriarch of Grand Strand golf opened in 1927, ten years after my grandfather was born. Grandaddy’s welcoming fairways and receptive greens that tend to usher solid putts holeward bound are gentle, kind, and fair.  Those traits also describe to a tee my  grandfather, a very special man, who passed away last May.

In 1954 Pine Lakes was assured sports immortality when Time-Life execs playing the course during a retreat were inspired between rounds here to create a little national weekly magazine called Sports Illustrated.  A framed copy of the debut issue hangs in the clubhouse and there’s a bronze plaque outside commemorating S.I.’s 50th anniversary.   In the mid-50s my grandfather, William Kemeny’s life had also been steeped in significant history.  A Holocaust survivor who cheated death on multiple occasions, the son of a deaf mute who was deaf in one ear himself due to a bout of Typhus, escaped communist Hungary and emigrated to Canada where he’d start up his life again as an upholsterer.


Picture
My grandfather never played a round or even hit a bucket at a range in his lifetime, but he got me started in the game during my high school years, asking me to take his place in best ball corporate golf tournaments whenever he'd get an invite.  I imagine had he acquired a taste for the game he would have been a natural. He was preternaturally strong even through his octogenarian years still bench-pressing well over 100 pounds.  On one occasion when his car ran out of gas on Toronto's Allen Expressway, he got out and pushed it 4 kilometers to the nearest service station.  Had he been bitten by the golf bug, he certainly had the physicality to hit monster 300-yard drives and mentally he was a chess master, always thinking six moves ahead, so reading greens and thinking a mere stroke ahead would have been cake. We played upwards of 1000 chess matches over the years.  Grandpa was a very contemplative and patient player, a sharp contrast to my impulsive and flawed move-first-figure-it-out-later strategy.  It took me over 20 years for me beat him legitimately without taking back a toppled queen or granting myself some other mulligan partway through a match.  

When I was twelve I was an avid baseball card collector, ripping open packs mainly in hopes of finding Blue Jays like Pat Borders, Joe Carter and Pat Hentgen.  Dempsters bread one year decided to release a Jays team set seeding one player per loaf for a limited time.   Seeing that I was collecting the set and that my parents carbohydrate eating habits would never get me even halfway to completing the team before the promotion was up, Grandpa schleps down to Miracle Mart and sifts through the entire shelf, opening each loaf and extracting the cards one by one, not wanting to waste the bread by buying them all, and risking jail time and being booted out of his local supermarket just to make a twelve year old boy happy.  That's the kind of man my grandpa was, a straight up mensch always putting the needs of others above his own.

I played Pine Lakes shortly after seeing my grandfather for the last time.   It wasn’t a very significant round, didn’t have my first hole in one or any other stroke of divine providence but there was a sense of comfort and peace as I stuck my tee in the ground on the 18th.   I caught my first glimpse of “The Granddaddy” text written on the tees they give out and remember thinking this one’s for you grandpa before launching a heaven strafing parabola which would touch down in great shape smack dab in the middle of the fairway.
Picture
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Mike Dojc

    When Mike isn't repairing impossibly large divots or alphabetizing his impressive ball marker collection, he’s slinging copy for a diverse range of editorial and corporate entities.  Clients have included Nike, AAA, Maxim, Esquire.com, Metro, Inside Fitness, Sharp, Huffington Post + tons more.  Reach Mike at dojcster@gmail.com


    Archives

    November 2018
    October 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    January 2018
    June 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013


    Categories

    All
    Apparel
    Equipment
    Food
    Golf
    Myrtle Beach
    News
    Pga
    Tomfoolery
    Travel

    RSS Feed


© 2015 Slinging Birdies