A simple round of golf re-ignites several connections

It was a good golf day. It was a good "friend" day. It was a wonderful day to reconnect.

Friday, as part of my 40th high school reunion that also served as a fundraiser, I played a round of golf with three friends and school chums that I hadn't seen or talked to in 20 to 30 years. There were good shots, bad shots and weird shots.

But the golf was secondary. This was about reconnecting to each other through connection to a game played by many but never mastered by any.

Perspective slapped us in the face on the first tee. There was a placard noting 15 of our fellow graduates who are no longer with us. At least one of us knew them all. As we waited to hit our tee shots, we reflected how we remembered a few of them young people, smiling faces, all with special abilities, a few with daunting disabilities.

One of the deceased was Raymond, the young man I referred to in a previous column. My most vivid memory of Raymond was the April morning he sat in speech class and proclaimed he was going to go downtown and shoot Martin Luther King. The civil rights leader was assassinated that afternoon. My first reaction was Raymond had pulled it off and was relieved when his pronouncement proved more bravado than substance.

No one among the several I visited with over the weekend knew how Raymond had died. He was remembered as a kind, funny, brilliant young man whose life somehow got misdirected sometime after the seventh grade.

That was part of the tone this weekend in Memphis. We furnished the "Cliff's Notes" catchup version of our lives. We tossed away outmoded prejudices, old issues and talked about the upside of our existence and the best about even those who were often in trouble. We celebrated with grayer hair, thinning hair, no hair and a little more weight that we had generally turned from immature teens to pretty good folks in a variety of professions.

Despite everyone's status in life, the grimaces are the same after a missed 5-foot putt or after a stealth smudge of barbecue sauce at the dinner afterward.

Later-year reunions and anniversaries seem to be the most genuine, the most fulfilling. The early ones are so often about pride, ego and lofty ambitions, kind of a post-graduate show-and-tell. The later ones are about renewed and restored relationships, a celebration of survival and an appreciation of life and the piece each of us have added to the class fabric.

High school is a time to develop goals and dreams. College is a time to hone or totally adjust to the realities when those dreams are challenged. Then, life is about persevering and moving on and adapting to the rhythms of life when some dreams are fulfilled, others are shattered.

One classmate, who seemed to have so much fun and some of the best moves on the dance floor, flew in from Seattle for the weekend, not just for the reunion fun but for the arduous task of placing his mother in a nursing home.

Another, who faces his third Father's Day today with a dad, talked of receiving an e-mail from a both a sandlot sports and cruising chum, whose father recently died.

One of the most popular members and best athletes in our class, now a successful businessman, told the story of a meticulous research and investigation that led to another former classmate getting into serious trouble.

Where have the days gone where the biggest problems were zits, whether to go to the dance and whom to take, the details of the game with the arch-rival and that looming term paper?

During a social that evening, there was a slide show of grainy black-and-white photos where football players donned cheerleading uniforms for pep rallies, boys basketball uniforms appeared obscene, typewriters and old wooden desks were in every room and everyone was smiling, laughing or acting goofy.

The smiles at the graduation were from hopes, dreams and relief from officially escaping our 12-year cocoon. Those smiles at the 40th reunion resulted from a sense of having fought through the realities of those dreams, survived and having made it with many old relationships still intact and the sense that a lot of us are doing OK. There's a greater appreciation of the gifts and the talents we all had.

For example, I found out one friend, now a successful dentist in Memphis, had been in Little Rock a few weeks ago to provide free dental work to underpriviledged or disadvantaged people.

There was a lot of good in this class. I witnessed it again first-hand.

It's amazing how energizing just a few seconds of checking a nametag, then a handshake, a simple "doing OK?" and some basic conversation can be to a relationship buried by time, baggage and other relationships. It's incredible how in a scramble game of golf between previously disconnected buddies, a combination of four good shots by everyone for par or seven muffed or just plain awful shots for triple-bogey can renew a sense that we're all in this together.

At the early reunions, there's a tendency to say what a person wants to hear in answer to the question of "how are doing?" At a 40th reunion, innocence gone and trappings removed, folks usually tell the truth.

At the end of the slide show, there was a large black-and-white group photo of our 400-plus graduating class on the night of our graduation when all those hopes and dreams reached a collective apex.

It was a stark photo of a bunch of indistinguishable kids in caps and gowns alternatively shocking and sobering.

None of us fully realized how nothing would ever by the same, individually or collectively, after that night.

Forty years later, we took another group shot Friday night. It was a much smaller, much life-hardened group. But it was a fun photo just getting lined up. Fifth-graders would have been easier.

But I wondered what had happened to so many others who formed such a neat and large tapestry for that graduation night photo. Where were a lot of those folks you saw almost daily for 12 straight years and shared so many experiences and emotions? What stage were both the best in that class and just the average guys in their journey?

That's why golf on a hot afternoon in June was so cool.

It was your regular nice country club course. But philosophically and for several hours, we played the links.

(Sports columnist David McCollum can be reached at 505-1235 or david.mccollum@thecabin.net)