The Old Man and the Tee
By Turk PipkinSt. Martin’s Press, $24.95
Fathers exist merely to ask us how the car’s running, to fork over a little extra cash when we’re short, and to be the butt of our jokes about their lame sense of fashion and ignorance when it comes to good music. Or so we think until they’re not around anymore. That’s when we often come to see how much more they were, as parents, men, and human beings, and how much more they gave us than spending money and questionable automotive advice.
Turk Pipkin’s The Old Man and the Tee begins with the passing of his dad, Raymond “Pip” Pipkin, a great lover of golf who passed his passion along to his son. As a farewell salute to the “old man,” Turk heads off to play a round at Pebble Beach, a course that Pip admired but never got to play. While he’s there, that simple gesture balloons into a wildly ambitious scheme to slice 10 strokes off his handicap in a year’s time, and thus begins a 12-month search for any means by which Pipkin can better his game: tips from pros, high tech clubs and balls, professional lessons. It’s a journey worthy of Homer, one that takes him from sun-dappled seaside courses in western Mexico to wintry, storm-lashed links in Scotland to sand greens in the Nebraskan heartland, with a cast of characters as memorable in their way as the Sirens, the Cyclops, and Circe: a hungover George Plimpton buying a 400-yard drive, a feisty Steve Fromholz cracking wise after a stroke, Byron Nelson recalling in detail golf games 60 years in the past, Willie Nelson spouting cowboy-Zen koans, and, of course, Pip himself, who keeps popping back up as Turk encounters people and situations that remind him of his father and provide a little more insight into who he was and what they shared.
While the book covers Turk’s quest for par (or thereabouts) in enough detail to have golf geeks drooling on their drivers – in-depth discussion of state-of-the-art equipment, analyses of his game, and summaries of his lessons from the master teachers – The Old Man and the Tee is as much about sons and fathers as following through on your swing or rolling a putt. In trying to take 10 strokes off his game, Turk is seeking the bond he shared with his dad through golf, something that both men relished and that added joy and companionship and shape to their lives. He’s playing for time, the time they had together that he wants to honor.
As he comes to a greater understanding of this and of the gift that it represented from his old man, Turk encounters other fathers, old men who offer him gifts of wisdom and humor: Plimpton, Willie, Nelson, Harvey Penick, Arnold Palmer, even Gregorio Fuentes, the boat captain and friend of Hemingway’s on whom he based the Old Man in The Old Man and the Sea. Their presence and Pipkin’s reverence for them and recognition of their gifts adds to the book’s deeply personal quality. That, combined with Pipkin’s West Texas-dry wit and knack for storytelling, make this a most enjoyable year to follow him around.
In the end, Pipkin is a San Angelo Odysseus, just trying to find his way home, to the game as he learned it from his father, a simple pleasure. It is a pleasure to report that, like the ancient Greek wanderer, he makes it there. 
This article appears in Iraqi Day of the Dead.