Plenty of lessons to be learned for kids playing tournament golf

The floor of my 10-year-old son’s cramped bedroom has one bare spot — a perfect square, roughly 2 feet-by 2 feet, nestled between an assortment of nerf guns, dozens of golf balls and a slew of sports trophies. The depth of the indentation on the carpet betrays that the square has not been empty for long. But we’ll come back to that.

Even before he could stand and walk on his own, yellow plastic golf clubs found their way into my son’s hands. Sitting in just a diaper, he’d scoot around on the ground, whacking balls and chasing them around the house.

Soon, the Fisher Price specials gave way to a tiny, left-handed metal wood my wife brought home from a garage sale. “Ping,” a nod to the high-pitched sound the club made, became the club's name. Ping came with him everywhere, including plenty of places golf clubs didn’t belong. But few seemed to mind a toddler swinging a tiny golf club in strange places. More often than not, fellow golfers stopped to watch with a smile and a thumbs up.

Over the course of the next several years, as kids do, our son played a slew of other sports. Baseball, basketball, soccer, even ping-pong, but if pressed, he always claimed golf as his favorite.

By age 4 or 5, Ping was outgrown, stuffed in a closet, replaced by a longer version of the same thing. As a 7-year-old, he played his first tournament, pitted against kids much older, taller, and stronger. There, much to the admiration and appreciation of this sappy old dad, the other players took him under their wing. His fellow competitors kindly offered advice and encouragement to a young kid who had to hit driver on every hole, par-3s included. He never had a real shot to win a tournament that year, but one thing was for certain — he was hooked.

A year later, after a growth spurt and a lot of practice, tournament golf looked a lot different. He was still one of the younger kids in his tournaments but the oldest of the kids he had competed against the year prior moved up a division. Winning no longer seemed like a pipe dream.

After a handful of tournaments during the summer of 2020, he enjoyed success for the first time, winning a small event that might as well have been the Masters to him. One tournament win soon became three, and he arrived at the season-ending championship with plenty of confidence and an eye on the tournament’s prize — a 4-foot tall trophy, it’s base a perfect square, 2 feet by 2 feet.

Despite a mediocre opening round, including a wild 5-putt triple bogey, he stayed within striking distance of the leaders going into the final day. After that first round, he spent a good 10 minutes gazing at the trophy, studying the names of almost 50 kids over the past half century who had held it before.

“Hey daddy,” he said to me on our drive home. “Guess what? A few people have won twice ... but nobody has won it 3 times.”

“Well, you haven’t even won it once, yet,” I said.

That changed the next day.

My son played like a boy on a mission. He made putt after putt all day, got up and down out of bunkers, and opened up enough of a lead that by the final hole he knew exactly where he was storing the trophy when we got home.

The trophy fit nicely in the corner of his room, standing tall amongst his others, his name on a plaque similar to the other winners of the tournament. He beamed each time he showed his new trophy to his friends when they came over, along with aunts and uncles, grandparents, basically anyone who would be even remotely interested in a trophy almost as tall as him. With respect to other mementos and evidence of junior sport success, this trophy was the only one that truly mattered. And maybe, most importantly, he knew he could win it again.

A year went by, and as the big tournament approached, the thought of giving up his prized possession fueled his practice rounds with an urgency we almost never see from him. He played a few particularly poor rounds as the event drew closer, the threat of losing the trophy clearly weighing heavily on his mind. But what do you say to a 9-year-old whose love of golf is only eclipsed by a love of the recognition it provides?

When the tournament arrived, so did his game. The poor rounds he’d played recently seemed as though they had never happened, and he built a lead from the opening hole. By the final hole of the first day, he was cruising. He owned a 5-shot lead over everyone in the division, with just a par-3 remaining. Within a matter of 6 minutes, everything changed.

Each minute felt like an eternity. He hit his approach in a bunker and simply couldn’t get out. One, two, three attempts, no luck. A few putts later, he walked away with a quintuple bogey and no lead at all.

It was a long night after that. A year of staring at that trophy, idolizing it, dreaming about being the first person to ever win the Pee Wee division of this storied tournament three times, and a 5-stroke lead simply vanished in a matter of six minutes.

The next day, he barely spoke to anyone as he warmed up, a major departure from his normally chatty self. He was there on a mission — a trophy mission.

He again opened up a sizable lead fairly quickly, playing the first half-dozen holes close to even par. As he got close to the finish line, it was clear his lead would be around the same as yesterday — but would he be able to bounce back and forget his quintuple?

The answer was yes. He managed to walk away from that final hole with a nice par to win his second title, and maintain his beloved trophy for another year. As a parent, it was one of those precious few times where everything seemed to be going well, all at the same time. I was so proud to see him set a goal, work towards it, and fight like crazy to achieve it. Little did we know, we would all soon learn an even more valuable lesson: how to handle it when everything falls apart.

The trophy spent another year in Casa de Helm in the exact same spot as the year before. The excitement of the victory faded quicker this time, and less people were treated to a victory lap presentation. Most of his friends had already seen it anyways, or they understandably didn’t care. It was old hat, the giant trophy that bore his name, twice.

Even his golf took a backseat to other sports for much of the year, with baseball in particular taking up a significant amount of time. When the 2022 rendition of the big tournament came around, it was like it snuck up on him, an entire year of trophy ownership gone in the blink of an eye. There was no preparation this time, no effort put into practice, no series of tournaments to prepare. But no worries, at least according to him, he was finally one of the biggest kids in his age group now – if he’d won at 8 against 10-year-olds, surely he’d win at 10 again, right?

Unsurprisingly, the 2022 tournament began on a rough note. The lack of preparation was evident on the first two holes, launching his bid for a three-peat with a disappointing bogey followed by a four-putt double. Despite the shaky start, and having played just a few rounds all year, his increased length of the tee kept him close to the lead.

After those first couple holes, he played the rest of the opening round in even par, eventually wrestling a lead away from his good friend and baseball buddy who had made significant improvement over the past year. An opening round of +3 was good for a three-shot lead, however, and my son’s confidence, maybe arrogance, soared.

“Dad, can we please put the plaque with my name on the trophy quicker this year? I didn’t like it that we waited until the last minute to put my name on it,” he asked me with one round still to go.

The final day he started slowly again, but again played well in the middle of the round. His buddy quietly put together a nice round himself, and with three holes remaining, my son still maintained a three-shot cushion. When his buddy hit a poor tee shot on the tricky par-4 16th, leaving himself an impossible approach, the tournament seemed all but over. And then it wasn’t.

His buddy hit the best shot of the tournament, a towering 5-iron over a pair of deep bunkers to 6 feet. My son responded, making a great swing in a tight situation. But then, it looked as though the left lip of the bunker jutted out at the last moment, grabbing his ball and swallowing it whole, with my son and his precious trophy along with it.

His world crumbled right there in that bunker. Tears welled up in his eyes. The golf tournament was over even though it wasn’t, and that beloved trophy had been ripped out of its resting place in the corner of a 10-year-old’s bedroom who adored it.

The buddy missed his putt, but it didn’t matter. Tears turned to sobs, and the sobs turned to something else entirely. In his 10 years of life, I’d never seen him brought to his knees with grief, but that’s where we were, right there in the middle of a golf tournament that meant so much and meant so little all at the same time.

Neither my wife nor I knew what to do. It was the exact opposite moment that we’d experienced as parents the year before, where we were proud of our boy for all the right reasons, and now he was literally laying on the ground in defeat.

Before I could muster words of encouragement, it was his buddy’s soft voice that helped him to get up and finish the round.

“You can do it,” said the buddy. “You’re OK. It’s OK. C’mon man, you can do it.”

And he did. His scorecard would show he finished double bogey, quadruple bogey, quintuple bogey to close out the tournament and lose to his buddy who by every definition deserved to win. To this moment, my son and I haven’t spoken one word about the big tournament itself, or the great implosion of 2022, or the fact there’s still an indentation on the floor of his room. But we have talked about what happened next.

At the closing awards ceremony, which includes players from every age group at this particular tournament, my son suddenly walked up to the podium as they prepared to announce the 2022 champion of his division. In a near panic, thinking that my kid was such a sore loser that he was literally going to steal the trophy and try to take it home one last time, he did something that I’ll never forget. He grabbed the microphone, proudly announced his buddy’s name as the winner, and handed the trophy off himself.

Every time I walk through my son’s room, seeing that open space where a trophy spent two glorious years, I’m reminded that the most enduring lessons in life never come from winning, but from the losses that linger. Recently, I gave serious thought to walking away from golf. I was tired of losing, tired of playing badly, tired of the humility that golf forces on every competitor but one. But two ten-year old boys recently proved that former losers are the easiest to cheer for in victory, and the kind of people who cheer on their friends in the face of defeat.

As a parent, it’s easy to watch our kids fill their bedrooms with evidence of their victories. But nothing compares to the lessons learned by losing, lessons that outlast any indentation on the floor.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Plenty of lessons to be learned for kids playing tournament golf