This being Father’s Day weekend, I decided to do a little rummaging through some old newspaper clips — and I mean really old newspaper clips.
My dad — his first name was Francis but everyone called him by his middle name, Clyde — passed away a decade ago this year at the age of 86. I subsequently received some of his personal collectibles from those 8 1/2 decades. Included was a newspaper photo and story about him and a few other U.S. soldiers meeting Princess Elizabeth — now Queen Elizabeth — while on leave in Scotland in 1942. There were plenty of other military-related pictures from his days serving in North Africa, Italy, Taiwan, Vietnam and all over the U.S.; of him as a champion trap shooter; and tons of family photos.
But all that isn’t what led to my search of these personal archives. No, I was looking for a golf-related newspaper item that featured my dad as a youngster. To indicate how old it is, the newspaper it ran in, the Omaha Bee-News, folded in 1937. I’m not sure of the date of the clip I located, but based on a few snippets in the newspaper, I’m guessing 1935, during the thick of the Depression.
The paper published a large photo and caption (above, with my dad at far left in the picture) about the caddie tournament at the Omaha Field Club, which had 140 loopers at the time. For the record, my dad won the third flight, though the paper misspelled his last name as “Barnes”.
Anyway, golf turned into a longtime bond between my dad and me. Four decades after my dad caddied in Omaha, I followed a similar path by looping at Columbine Country Club and later becoming caddiemaster and working in the bag room there.
The reason all this strikes home now is threefold:
— Obviously, it’s Father’s Day weekend.
— The U.S. Open, which has concluded on Father’s Day all but once in the last 50 years — barring a playoff or weather issues — was probably my dad’s favorite tournament, though he watched PGA Tour events about every weekend after retiring.
— My dad’s favorite golfer, by far, was Hale Irwin, who grew up in Boulder and won his NCAA title almost exactly when we were moving to Colorado in 1967. And, of course, Irwin largely made his career on Father’s Day weekend at the U.S. Open, winning in 1974, ’79 and ’90. That last victory — which actually came in a playoff the day after Father’s Day — made Irwin the oldest U.S. Open champion ever, at age 45, a distinction he still holds.
As a sports writer, I’ve only had the pleasure of covering two major championships held outside of Colorado, and both are due to Irwin. As the golf writer at the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder for many years, we paid a great deal of attention to PGA Tour players such as Irwin, Dale Douglass and Steve Jones, all of whom played on the University of Colorado golf team. And after Irwin made his improbable run to win the U.S. Open in 1990, the Camera’s sports editor, Dan Creedon, wanted plenty of coverage for Irwin’s U.S. Open title defense in 1991 at Hazeltine outside of Minneapolis, and in 1992 at Pebble Beach. It was eight years earlier at Pebble Beach that Irwin won the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am after bouncing a drive off the rocks bordering the Pacific Ocean and back into the fairway en route to a birdie on the 72nd hole, forcing a playoff which he won.
But the golf connection that linked my dad and me went far beyond that. I knew that he had played golf as a youngster and into middle age. But major back problems, no doubt exacerbated from many, many hours spent as a navigator/bombardier in B-52s, kept him from playing for a long time. But by the early 1980s, he recovered enough to be able to join me for a round in the Evans Scholars Father-Son tournament.
Soon, my dad was playing a lot of golf. Just about every time we’d chat, he’d note proudly that he had racked up some ungodly number of rounds that year. I remember tallies getting well over 100, which is pretty impressive for Colorado, and he normally walked during those rounds despite getting along in years. I joined my dad and his retired military buddies occasionally for rounds, almost always at his two favorite military-course haunts — Fitzsimons and the Air Force Academy. (At left, we’re at Fitzsimons in the late ’80s.)
My dad and mom also got a huge kick over the years from annually attending The International at Castle Pines. The folks at The International were nice enough to give me a couple of complimentary passes, and my parents made good use of them for about the first dozen years the PGA Tour event was held. I’d run into them in between my coverage duties at the tournament, and you couldn’t wipe the smiles off their faces.
Though it’s been quite a while since last celebrating a Father’s Day with my dad, those golf-induced smiles are etched permanently in my memory. And so is the joy that golf brought my dad.
