Living and teaching

GOLFING THROUGH LIFE


I learned to play golf in 1968 from Mr. William Blatner, who at the time was a 57-year-old high school English teacher. I, too, was a high school English teacher, but I was fresh out of college and on my first paid teaching assignment, and had just realized that I had a lot to learn about the realities of teaching and life.

Mr. Blatner was thin (he smoked) and walked with a limp (he was a veteran of two wars and had been wounded in Korea) and rose a few inches taller than I, so I looked up at his gray eyes. Even at 57 he had a boyish look and wore his hair like Caesar, his straight graying blond hair combed down on every side: to his collar in back, around his ears, and in bangs half way down his forehead in front. He typically donned white or light-colored long-sleeved shirts with dark blue or black pants (sometimes blue jeans) and black cowboy boots. Occasionally, he sported a bolo tie with a turquoise clasp or a black vest.

At the time, Mr. Blatner’s interest in me puzzled me, but in hindsight, I think he perceived that he and I had some things in common, and he wanted to help me in some way. What we had in common was a passion for language, literature and teaching; I knew that then and feel it even more now that I am older than Blatner was then. We were also individualists who had always (in his case) lived life according to his own rules, and would (in my case) live life according to my own rules . . . more than most people do but less than Blatner had. He recognized a similar single-minded focus in me, although I, at 21, thought I was fairly unexceptional.

As a teacher, he was both old-school and innovative at the same time. He taught sentence structure through diagramming, but he made diagramming into works of art as he had the students show off the diagrams by creating diagram murals on the walls of his classroom. He had no tolerance for inattention and could go into a rage if a student’s mind wandered from the lesson, but he could spend hours counseling that same student’s psyche after school, if he thought the student was salvageable from the scrapheap of life. He declaimed poetry with such gusto and emotion that I had seen students leave his class crying because they had been so moved by his rendition of Keats or Tennyson. He taught as if involved with each student both as loco parentis and mentor. I admired him.

I couldn’t quite perform similarly because I was still learning how to keep the little squirmers in their chairs and to get them to do what I wanted them to do—something that is almost impossible to learn at a university before one gets into the classroom. A fresh teacher learns all that in the first six weeks of actually teaching. After those first six weeks, a determined teacher begins to develop the glance and voice that impose themselves on students, so the classroom becomes a kind of orchestra and the teacher a conductor, who, if he or she is skilled enough, directs the students, manages the classroom space, and imbues the pupils with knowledge in a way that an observer would find almost mystically—subtly, yet inspirationally—sublime. Maybe Mr. Blatner saw in me the potential to be such a teacher.

So, he asked me one day if I played golf.

“Never have.”

“Would you like to?”

“I’d like to learn.” (I needed something to entertain myself in the swamplands.)

“It’s a great sport. You play against yourself. Come out with me Saturday, and I’ll teach you the basics. I’ll provide the clubs.”

The golf course in Okeechobee had been built up by dredging and dumping and land-filling and draining near a swamp. From the first tee, one could hear gators growl. The clubhouse was a prefabricated aluminum shed, but without a pro or even a clerk unless a group was playing by appointment.

That Saturday, Blatner and I were the only players on the course, probably because he had me meet him at 7 a.m., less than an hour after the sun had risen to create a low mist over the swamp and adjacent golf course. The insects were ticking loudly, the frogs were croaking, and the birds were cooing and hooting as we lined up our first shots.

He taught me the basics just as he said he would: how to address the ball, how to hold the club handle, how to place the feet, how to swing the club—all on the first tee. My first swing sent the ball slicing into the nearby swamp. He coached me into contacting the ball with the sweet spot of the club head. My second ball hooked left, but the third went up and down the center of the fairway.

“Ok, now you’ve begun playing golf.”

He teed off and sent his ball to within ten feet of the cup on the green of the par 3 first hole.

He showed me how to chip in from where I was: twenty feet off the green. I did and my ball landed behind but close to his ball. He showed me how to use the putter. I putted and missed. He putted in for an ace. I knocked in my second putt for a bogie (disregarding the two sliced or hooked Mulligans).

Then we were treated to the sight of an amber-eyed doe and her speckled fawn trotting across the next fairway. Later, a goose and her goslings waddling. Even later, a rabbit and her kits hopping.

We played nine holes, by which time he was probably tiring of his less apt partner, who spent as much time admiring the wildlife as he did concentrating on the next shot. Blatner was very good: he consistently shot in the mid-to-low 70s as he did that day. Meanwhile, I felt good if I managed a double bogie. At the end of the round, Blatner said, “You can keep those clubs and bag. They’re an old set I’ve had for years.”

“Thanks,” I said, wondering why he felt so earnestly that golf and I should bond.

Thus, he had hooked me. Because I was married, I couldn’t always play when Blatner played, but I made it out a few times before the year ended, usually playing a solitary round, enjoying the wildlife—including one day seeing a Florida panther run across the first fairway just after I had launched my ball. I had hit the ball well and watched it climb and arch toward the flag. The sharp-eyed predator saw the ball and did a double-take as the ball swished overhead, perhaps momentarily thinking that the fluttering, spinning white orb might be a wounded bird. I held my breath and my stance until I saw the big cat disappear into the trees of a nearby hammock. Then I walked forward and two putted to par the hole.

I liked the exercise: the walk in the sun along a scenic route of open course, swamp, and wildlife. Being solitary didn’t bother me, for I could think and create between strokes. However, what I enjoyed most was the steadying effect that golf had on me, and this is the great secret of golf: the game teaches patience and forbearance. The golfer—especially if he plays alone as I did—is faced with his or her own shortcomings; he or she must overcome frustration (the ball landing just short of a ridge and rolling back), incompetence (hooking into a water hazard), arrogance (over-hitting and adding strokes), bad luck (the ball nicking a pebble and bouncing sideways), and apprehension (calming oneself before a putt to save par). After enough rounds around the golf course, a player learns not to get too depressed no matter through what catastrophe he or she has just maneuvered, nor to get too elated by an ace or a chip-in because more challenges lie ahead. At each hole the golfer has a chance to improve or a chance to fall apart. Either good or bad can happen next, so keeping an even keel is essential. Keeping faith in oneself is paramount.

I believe now that Blatner wanted me to play golf because he thought I needed something to teach me to stay steady; he certainly didn’t need my company, for he was a solitary soul outside the classroom. Maybe he could see that my marriage was not solid and wanted some solace for me when the marriage finally ended. Maybe he could see that I was too willing to see the good in others and would be disappointed and wanted me to be self-reliant and centered to withstand those disappointments that would come.

Besides golf, Blatner and I had other points of convergence.

We were both writers. Using a manual Remington typewriter on weekends and nights, I was clicking and clacking away on my first novel manuscript and boring my needy wife a la Hemingway. Blatner claimed to write in longhand and on top of his refrigerator had a cardboard box stuffed with his magnum opus, a gigantic unfinished manuscript a la Thomas Wolfe. I’ve often wondered what happened to that textured cache of lonely sweat and inspired blood. Had he ever gotten it published? (My first one never found an audience.) Had he ever attempted to publish it? Or, postmortem, had it been thrown out with his remnants by an oblivious landlord? Surely he has passed—a war-wounded smoker and fugitive with secret stresses couldn’t have lived much past age 60.

In addition to writing, we were part of a group that was invited to dine with the Episcopalian priest “Ace” Scovanner and his wife on Sundays. Those gatherings usually included the young draft dodgers. Because of the Vietnam War, never had Okeechobee had such an assemblage of intellectual teachers. They came from everywhere: University of Chicago, Ithaca College, University of Pennsylvania (Tom Runge, who shared with me The Sotweed Factor [John Barth] and Anti-intellectualism in America [Richard Hofstadter]), University of North Carolina, Duke University (Nick Ciompi and his wife, who turned me on to Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?; Nick’s father had played violin for Toscanini), Rutgers, and several Florida colleges and universities.

Those dinners were lively. Mrs. Scovanner (also an English teacher) was a wonderful cook, so, for most of us, her fare was like dining at home, getting a savory home-cooked meal: beef or pork roast with potatoes and salad accompanied by wine. We dug in. The conversation jumped from laments about the war to comic plaints about the tribulations of teaching to eruptions against the cultural abyss into which we had fallen. We leaped in.

Blatner was often the contrarian: scoffing at others’ wanting to avoid war, condemning the youthful teachers for their disparaging comments about the rural cultural aridity. One night, he told of teaching in New Mexico in a reservation school without electricity or in-door plumbing and how the students stopped attending when the local river (a stream by Florida standards) ran dry. However, Blatner kept coming to the get-togethers, for I believe he thought of us young teachers as interns and of himself as a mentor; besides, the meals were undoubtedly the best of the week for him.

However, Mr. Blatner turned out not to be the paragon I had imagined.

For one, he was a war lover during an unpopular war. Although many of the teachers at Okeechobee High School were there to avoid the military draft, Mr. Blatner had volunteered for Vietnam, but his bum leg and age had disqualified him. He told me one day that every young man should experience war firsthand. I didn’t believe that then, and I don’t believe that now, for life is a tough-enough struggle without the misery of war. He had a romantic mind that charged with the light brigade, unsuited for a reality of mega-tonnage nuclear weapons.

As I slowly learned more of Blatner’s history, I eventually discovered why he was teaching at the end of his career at a place where most teachers begin their careers. He had had a penchant for teenaged girls. When he was younger, his verve and gift with words must have attracted many to him, for the rumor was that he had twice fled states to avoid statutory rape charges. I believe he was one of those men who fall in love with the same type of jejune, romantic girl over and over, girls that can be enraptured by his emotive volubility. He may genuinely have loved them, but no parent could have tolerated such infatuation of his or her daughter. Ultimately, Blatner was forced to flee or face criminal charges.

At the end of the school year, Okeechobee County—in a near-sighted paroxysm of parochialism, claiming corruption of the town’s youth—fired all the single teachers, including Blatner. Some of us married couples quit in protest against the educational massacre. Then the county tried to amend things by hiring back the single teachers, but my wife and I found jobs elsewhere and left as did most of the other married teachers. I had chipped out of a hazard.

Nonetheless, I weathered those setbacks, and remain thankful to the man who taught me to play golf and to learn steadiness of purpose. I played golf steadily on the weekends for another three years until golf courses began requiring guests to ride golf carts and ended my thinking walks in the sunshine.

Besides, I had won my first award: some of my eighth grade students had presented me with a medallion. Inside its box was written “Mr. J. C. Blanton, ‘68-’69. May God bless you in everything you do.” Beneath the quasi-art-deco emblem, the medallion stated simply “Quality Service.” I felt as if I had landed a double-eagle.

End of "Golfing Through Life."

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