The Hook

"Come out in the garden. I'll show you how it's done. A wonderful sport."

I suppressed a smile as my father reeled my husband in to his favourite game - golf.

"The clubs are in the garage. Just a tick. I know there aren't many courses out your way. But once you're hooked, you'll find a place to play," he said.

Jim grinned over to me and shrugged: Why not? No harm in having a go.

"You'd be better of with a spade," my mother muttered.

"What's that?," Dad said.

"Oh, nothing." Mum smiled.

It was Jim's first visit to Australia and we were all on our best behaviour. Parents usually meet their son-in-law when he is still a fiancé, but somehow we had missed out on that formality. Jim followed my father to the garage where Dad kept his clubs, bag, buggy, buckets of balls, brolly, shoes, cap, towel and rainwear. He listened to the litany Dad read him on the clubs and the distances they could hit: the woods for the longer lengths, the irons for long and shorter ones, and those two distinctive fellows, the pitching wedge and putter.

"You don't need all this to start, of course. A half-set will do. Now let's take this one."

Jim nodded as Dad, always fond of an exhibition, pulled out a club with a shiny brown head.

"That's a Number 1 wood, " he said. "The driver. It gives you the greatest distance when you tee off - if you hit it right, that is."

Dad then took a small white plastic ball with more holes in it than plastic.

"It's a practice ball," he said. "Can't go hitting real balls around in the garden. It won't fly far, but you'll get the swing."

Jim was not completely unacquainted with golf. He'd watched it on television and had found it a bit slow for a sport. A sport for the old and wealthy, he thought as he followed my father to a small plot of grass in the backyard.

"A spade would have been better," Mum muttered again.

I sat by the open window, my back to the men and watched her pluck two paper-brown leaves from the potted red begonia on the table.

She nearly snapped a young green shoot as a deep howl hollowed from the garden. I turned to see Jim flop to the ground like a puppet with a severed string. He lay ajumble on

his side, then drew his knees up to his chin, as if he were playing egg. I would have laughed had it not been for the moan that rocked forth from deep inside him.

Mesmerized, I watched my father bend down to him, his hands hovering over Jim's fetal form, the way he used to hold them over our campfires in the bush - close enough to feel the heat, but full of fear of getting burned. Jim rolled his back away and clenched his teeth in fists of pain. Dad recoiled, helpless at his rebuke.

Mum and I stood planted as Dad picked up the driver. He pounded the earth in rhythm to a chant of: "What have I done? What have I done!"

I watched - it was like a film - the motion slow as Jim rose to his feet in after shock. He steadied and stood there, strangely at ease, back turned, feet in lush ferns and grasses edging the cauliflower in my parents' suburban garden. He looked as if he were relieving himself - in broad daylight. This time I couldn't care less about Dad's concern of what the neighbours might think. I ran out of the house. The slow heaving of his shoulders was his only movement, the deep drawing in of breath, his only sound.

"Jim! Dad! What's up?" I cried as I dashed out to break the hypnotic song that seemed to hold them both in trance.

My father straightened as if to stretch his sadness and floated his arm towards my husband's back. Like a kite, half billowed in a steady force, Jim was anchored by the legs to the herbaceous borders of the vegetable garden where my mother had spiked old plastic practice balls on to the end of stakes as markers.

"I think I've changed your lives," Dad said as tears welled in search of a downward roll. "His manhood." The emotion, the tiredness of years, broke through the dam of education and control.

I stepped to my husband's side as he let out a deep long breath through puckered lips and zipped his fly. "It's OK now," Jim said and smudged the pearly sweat from his brow. "But, hell, did it hurt. He was showing me how to swing. 'Keep your head down', he said. 'Pretend you've got a fish hook from your collar to your crotch.' He was concentrating so hard - I should have moved back out of the way .. 'Swing easy, hit hard,' he said - I never thought he would. His posture must have been perfect, he was on a high.."

I watched Jim go through the stance and the motions, somehow bound by the spell of the game.

"On the down stroke, I thought he would stop, but he followed through. Luckily, I moved - just a bit - moved my right thigh forward - that was a bit of protection when he connected."

Dad edged towards us, his head pulled down as if still caught in the hook. His eyes were wet and the tips of his mustache quivered like those of a cat listening to the wind. Jim turned and caught Dad's shoulders in both arms and held him, almost held him tight.

"I'll be sure to step back next time," he said. Relief washed over Dad's sunken face as a smile tugged at the corners of Jim's mouth. "Will you show me the driving range tomorrow?"

Arm in arm, Dad and Jim came back inside, with me, a matron of honour, behind them. Mum smiled: "I said you'd be better off with a spade."

The three of us looked at her in puzzlement.

"Take a spade, dig about in the garden. That's exercise. Take up golf, that's exercise too. But you'll be buying the clubs, bag, buggy, buckets of balls, brolly, shoes, cap, towel and rainwear, and the tees, of course..... Spade's still cheaper."

"But I didn't get hooked on gardening, ...Mum," Jim said with a broad grin and winked at Dad.

Back home, Jim found a place to play, just like Dad said he would. Every year, when we visit, our three children love to hear Grandpa tell the story of how their Dad got hooked on golf.

There are always tears - tears of laughter as Grandma sinks the final putt: "He'd have been better off with a spade."

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Published in print in Beginnings (US) in 1995 and online at IGA-FS Golfing stories.