The Range Bucket List: The Golf Adventure of a Lifetime - Softcover

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James Dodson is the author of sixteen books, including Final Rounds, A Golfer’s Life (with Arnold Palmer), Ben Hogan: An American Life, American Triumvirate, and The Range Bucket List. His work has appeared in over fifty magazines and newspapers worldwide. He is the only two-time winner of the United States Golf Association’s Herbert Warren Wind Award for best golf book of the year. In 2011, Dodson was selected for membership in the Order of the Longleaf by the governor of North Carolina, a prestigious award for exemplary service to the state. He is the founding editor of O Henry magazine. He lives with his wife in North Carolina.

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The Range Bucket List

PROLOGUE

THINGS TO DO IN GOLF

Several years ago I made a nice discovery while going through an old footlocker from my mother’s attic that contained various objects from my teenage years. Beneath camping gear and a well-worn Wilson fielder’s glove autographed by Orioles Hall of Famer Brooks Robinson, I found a trio of golf books and a small green spiral notebook marked “Things to Do in Golf” in large adolescent block letters.

The golf books—gifts from my father—were the first I ever owned. They included an autographed 1962 first-edition hardcover copy of Sam Snead’s folksy The Education of a Golfer, written with Al Stump; a 1967 paperback biography of Arnold Palmer by the editors of Golf Digest magazine (“An inside look at the most fabulous player in golf history!”); and a well-worn, water-stained edition of Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf, the best-selling golf instruction book of all time.

As you might expect, it was a pleasure to sit and leaf through my first golf books, noting passages I found important enough to underline in pencil, remembering what it was like to be a skinny Carolina kid falling in love with his old man’s game. My first sports heroes were indeed Arnold Palmer and Brooks Robinson. I’d tagged after Arnold many times at my hometown Greater Greensboro Open (GGO)—now the Wyndham Championship—and though I would never see Ben Hogan play golf in person, my father believed his instruction book, written in collaboration with the great Herbert Warren Wind, to be the best and simplest analysis of a golf swing in print. As for Brooks Robinson, the finest third baseman in Major League history, the Human Vacuum Cleaner was the person I hoped to be like in the unlikely event that my plan to be the next Arnold Palmer failed to bear fruit.

The pocket-size notebook marked “Things to Do in Golf,” however, was really what brought those memories rushing back. It was a Range Bucket List thirty-five years before I coined the phrase, begun because I’d read somewhere that as a kid, Arnold Palmer recorded his golf goals in a small notebook he kept in his golf bag. Decades later, when I was working with Arnold on his memoirs, I actually confirmed this with him during an early-morning chat in his Latrobe workshop. “Oh, for sure,” he said with a warm chuckle, “I had plenty of big golf dreams in those days. And, come to think of it, I did write them down. I wanted to get good enough at golf, first of all, to impress Pap [Deacon, his father]. Then I wanted to win the state amateur championship. I was probably twelve or thirteen at the time. Frankly, I never thought about turning pro in those days—there was no real money in it—though I did secretly dream about somehow winning the Masters or a US Open. I never could have imagined . . .”

His voice trailed off. Arnold was sixty-eight years old then and stood in the before-hours quiet of his modest Latrobe office workshop regripping a favorite driver as he revealed this, sounding almost as dreamy as a Pennsylvania teenager. We’d just begun collaborating on A Golfer’s Life, a two-year partnership that would reveal his incomparable life and transform mine—a writer’s version, if you like, of playing in the Masters or the US Open. Arnold had recently undergone surgery for prostate cancer. His wife, Winnie, had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The dimensions of his world were suddenly much narrower and more precious than ever.

He stared off into the ether and more than six decades of memories, then took a moment to compose himself. He glanced over at me, eyes wet with emotion, cleared his voice, and smiled. “Of course, every kid has those kinds of golf dreams, Shakespeare. I just never imagined mine would come true the way they did—or go so quickly.”

I knew exactly what he meant, but didn’t know what to say—and couldn’t have found my voice regardless. Suffice it to say, discovering my “Things to Do in Golf” list in an attic trunk a decade or so later brought on my own rush of memory and emotion. The game of golf will do that.

Here’s the list, such as it is:

Things to Do in Golf

1. Meet Arnold Palmer and Mr. Bobby Jones

2. Play the Old Course at St Andrews, Scotland

3. Make a hole in one

4. Play on the PGA Tour

5. Get new clubs

6. Break 80 (soon!)

7. Live in Pinehurst

8. Find golf buddies like Bill, Alex, and Richard [my dad’s Saturday-morning regulars]

9. Caddie at the GGO

10. Have a girlfriend who plays golf

11. Play golf in Brazil

That’s it: eleven items, short and sweet. It’s obvious why Palmer and Jones top the list. They were the reigning gods of American golf, both of whom had a strong connection to my hometown. Jones’s daughter lived in Greensboro, and one of Arnold’s early college buddies, Charlie Teague, was my dad’s best friend’s younger brother and ran the Gate City’s best sporting-goods store, where I purchased my Brooks Robinson fielder’s glove with my lawn-mowing earnings shortly before I got it autographed by the Human Vacuum Cleaner himself at my first Orioles game. Our voyaging, Henry Thoreau said, is only a great circle-sailing.

The other items on the list were the kinds of things any twelve-year-old boy in Palmer’s 1960s America might have placed high on his golf to-do list—the forerunner of what, nearly four decades later, I would come to call my Range Bucket List of things I still wanted to do in golf. To this day, however, I have no clue why I was so eager to play golf in Brazil. Might have just been the pretty, dark-haired exchange student in my eighth-grade earth science class. Her name was Juliana. But I can’t be sure.

In any case, had a magical genie appeared to me when I recorded this beginner’s short list—I place it anywhere from late 1965 to early 1967—and informed me that I would in time accomplish, in one form or another, almost every item on that list and a great deal more, growing up to know many of the great players, golf writers, teachers, design pioneers, and architects of the game’s modern era—not to mention be recruited to help the most charismatic player in the game’s history produce his best-selling memoir—I probably would have laughed out loud at such a crazy notion, or simply passed out from pure, glandular teenage joy.

But such is the transformative power of golf. For me, this extraordinary ancient game has not only been an unexpected career shaper but also introduced me to my best friends, and has even been something of a spiritual lifesaver over many years.

Just after I started that first list, you see, I was banished from my father’s course in Greensboro for half the summer by a colorful club professional named Aubrey Apple for losing my cool and burying my new Bulls Eye putter in the flesh of the fourteenth green after missing a two-foot birdie putt. This happened during my first-ever round on a regulation eighteen-hole golf course. I was playing with my father and his buddies Bill Mims and Alex Roberts. Visibly disappointed at my behavior, my father calmly showed me how to repair the green, then insisted that I walk all the way back to the clubhouse and report my crime to Mr. Apple, who...