I raised kids who don’t play golf. Did I fail them?

This content was first published in Golf Journal, a quarterly print publication exclusively for USGA Members. To be among the first to receive Golf Journal and to learn how you can ensure a strong future for the game, become a USGA Member today!

***

Last fall, my wife and I flew east to take part in a tradition unlike any other: dropping off a kid at college. Having carried out a campus move-in once before with our daughter, Scarlett, we knew what to expect in the way of logistics; the shopping, packing, hauling and unpacking were familiar. But the emotional depth charge of this trip was different. Scarlett’s brother, Leo, is our youngest. He was starting a new life, and so were we.

The term “empty nesting” comes from ornithology, but I wonder if birds, being bird-brained, wrestle with big questions when the last of their fledglings learn to fly and feed themselves. Do they marvel wistfully at the swiftness of time’s passage? Do they take inventory of their parental failings? Congratulate themselves on a job well done?

Winging back to California to a home that was destined to be quieter — and cleaner — than ever, I found myself in a reflective mood. By bare-minimum measures, I figured I’d succeeded. Scarlett and Leo had both been tutored to say “please” and “thank you” and to stand up straight. On other fronts, though, I reckoned I’d come up woefully short. I had supplied them with smartphones far too early. I’d let them be lousy at yard work and hopeless with the dishes. Worst of all, my children were now grownups, and neither played golf. 

Maybe I’d been doomed by my DNA. Tracing my family tree as far back as possible, I can identify precisely one golfer: me. Neither of my parents played. My mother, the more athletic of the two, found an outlet as a ballerina, while my father, the son of Eastern European immigrants, became an ardent fan of baseball, through which his own dad had assimilated. He could recite the dimensions of Ebbets Field, run down the full roster of the ’29 Yankees and tell you what Joe DiMaggio batted every year of his career. But once, late in his life, when I asked him what he thought of Jack Nicklaus’ record, he paused, stroked his chin in faux contemplation and slyly declared: “I loved his work in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

AS A BOY, I WAS DRAWN to baseball, too, though my on-field focus was Lucy Van Pelt-like. As for golf, it never even crossed my mind. By my late teens, the closest I’d come to the royal and ancient game was putting toward a clown’s mouth or a windmill. 

That I took up golf owes to a high school friend who, one afternoon just before graduation, persuaded me to join him at a driving range by telling me a girl I liked would be there. She wasn’t. But with the first shots I got airborne — you can see where this is going — I fell hard, and golf became my new unrequited crush. Based on how it often treats me, I’m not sure that the feeling has ever been mutual.

The woman I married, Sara, is far more forgiving. Still, she’s frosty toward golf. Her fondness for the game is limited to the fact that she knows I care deeply about it. 

I should stop with the romantic metaphors. Golf isn’t really like a lover, and, despite what people say, I don’t think it’s much like life, either. I’m with those who compare golf to a language. The later you learn it, the more likely it is that you’ll have an accent. If my own swing could talk, I imagine it would sound like Seve Ballesteros’ heavily inflected English, minus the “I miss, I miss, I miss, I make” charm.

And because we all strive to do better by our children, when our first-born came along, I vowed that Scarlett would become a native speaker of the game. As kindergarten approached, I didn’t enroll her in Spanish-immersion classes. I bought her a sawed-off set of clubs.

How to get her started was another matter. While teaching her myself seemed out the question, given that I played more by intuition than fundamentals, formal instruction for a four-year-old also felt like overkill. Instead, I showed her videos of Tour pros in action. 

Like many kids, Scarlett proved a brilliant mimic. Also like many kids, she was keen to please her dad. On our first trip to a course, a pitch-and-putt not far from our home, she parred her second hole and made several fluid passes at the ball that filled me with a mix of pride and envy. When I praised her game, I could tell she was happy that I was happy. 

As time wore on, though, I could also tell that her heart wasn’t in it. I stopped forcing the issue, and our course outings ceased. Years later, as Scarlett was getting ready to go off to college, I asked her about her early sporting memories. “I liked soccer because it was fast-paced and social,” she said. “The only part of golf I really liked was being with you.”

Leo arrived nearly two years after his sister. With him, I tried a less direct approach. “Gaslighting” is what the shrinks might call it, but I prefer to brand it as reverse psychology. 

It worked like a charm with music. Hoping that Leo would become the rock-and-roller I’d once dreamed of being, I left a guitar out in the living room when he was a toddler and told him not to touch it; by middle school, he was shredding like Jimmy Page. 

I hoped for and expected a similar story with golf. Displaying clubs prominently in my home office, I sat back and waited until it finally happened. Leo wandered in, grabbed a driver, and begged me to take him to the range.

Anyone with more than one kid knows how different siblings can be. Where Scarlett is patient and accommodating, Leo can be short-tempered and headstrong. After scuffing a few shots, he asked me for some swing tips, which he proceeded to ignore, then blamed me for every foozle that followed. 

Over the years, we tried a few more sessions on the range and on the course, always at his insistence, often with fleeting moments of enjoyment. But it was clear that golf and Leo weren’t going to bond. He had better ways to get his ya-ya’s out. By the time he gave up on the game for good, he was playing in a band.

He still is, just as I’m still whacking a ball around, albeit without either of my offspring as companions. Golf runs in the bloodlines of countless families, passed down from one generation to the next. But in the Sens clan, we are one and done.

***

WHERE DID I GO WRONG?

In the first few weeks after leaving Leo in his dorm, this was how I framed the question to myself. I’ve since realized that it’s a silly thing to ask. 

Post-mortems can be helpful in golf. Any trained instructor can watch a swing in slo-mo and identify the causes and effects. If you do this, the ball does that. The flight of a shot boils down to physics. A child’s upbringing is more complex.

Perhaps that’s why, over the past 20 years, I’ve heard hundreds, if not thousands, of smart-sounding swing tips but little of what I’d consider slam-dunk parenting advice. Of all the guidance I’ve been offered in that realm, the only insight that has struck me as enduring wisdom came some years ago from an unexpected source: Lou Holtz, the former Notre Dame football coach and Augusta National member. 

Over the course of a phone interview for a fluff piece, Holtz spoke to me at length about the gridiron and golf, addressing softball questions with locker-room bromides, before breaking off, mid-thought, to pose a query of his own.

“Son, do you have children?” he asked.

“Two,” I said.

“And do you know how to raise happy, confident and caring kids?”

“How?” I wondered.

“Show them that you love their mother.”

I fell silent for a moment. I still often think about this plainspoken comment, and about how lucky I am: loving Sara isn’t something I have ever had to fake, and I’m convinced my kids have benefited from that. 

Golf, though, deserves some credit, too. I’ve loved the game since before I had a family — it is family to me — and my wife and children have seen and heard plenty about what golf has meant to me and done for me.

Scarlett and Leo may be hopeless with dishes — college doesn’t seem to educate on that front — but they are honest and empathic. They are kind and compassionate to friends and strangers alike. They own up to their errors and attempt to learn from them. They can laugh at life’s absurdities and at themselves. 

Golf helped teach me these things, and I managed to help teach it to them. They are golfers in the ways that matter most.