Granddaddy & My Grandpa

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.

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.