Nathaniel Crosby - 18 Holes with Bing: Golf, Life, and Lessons from Dad

Bing Crosby, or Dad to me, was the most popular entertainer in the world in his day, a day that lasted the better part of five decades. In the last year of his life, he was still selling out shows in London and New York City. Just imagine something five times stronger than the popularity of Elvis Presley and the Beatles put together, Tony Bennett, a legend in his own right, said in 1999. Dads influence spanned generations. According to David Sheffs The Last Interview, the Beatles first hit single, Please, Please Me, was inspired in part by a line in one of Dads songs. I remember the day I wrote it, John Lennon said. I heard Roy Orbison doing Only the Lonely or something. And I was intrigued by the words to a Bing Crosby song that went, Please lend a little ear to my pleas. The double use of the word please. So it was a combination of Roy Orbison and Bing Crosby.

Billboard called Dad the most popular radio star of all time. For five years in a row he was the number-one box office draw, and in 1944 he won an Academy Award as best actor for his portrayal of Father OMalley in Going My Way.

He ranks among the best-selling recording artists in history with more than a half billion of his songs and albums in circulation. His recording of White Christmas is the best-selling single of all time and remains a holiday standard. Late in his career, he delivered another holiday standard, Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy, with his unlikely collaborator David Bowie. Generations have been bridged by this voice, which The Times of London once wrote had been heard more often by more people than that of any mortal in history. Between 1927 and 1962 he had 368 charted records. No one else is even close: Frank Sinatra had 209, Elvis Presley 149, and the Beatles 68. In 1960, Dad was presented with a platinum record and honored as First Citizen of the Record Industry, based on having sold 200 million discs.

But theres more. Yank, a weekly military magazine published during World War II, identified him as the individual who had done the most to boost morale during the war, according to U.S. troops polled; President Franklin Roosevelt came in second. In 1947, an Associated Press poll identified him as the most admired man alive, ahead of Jackie Robinson and Pope Paul XII.

And then there was golf. Everything Dad accomplished in the entertainment field was a distant second to this game that animated him more than anything else. As my mother so aptly described many years ago, Bing Crosby was a golfer who sang.

In the battle against par or against your opponent, Dad once told Golf Digest, you cant think about much else, and the result, for me at least, is good therapy. For me, golf has been a kind of passport to relaxation and happiness.

He began the Bing Crosby Pro-Am in 1937; and it still is played today, though under an assumed name, the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. The pro-am concept that is a staple of virtually every PGA Tour event today, with proceeds earmarked for charity, was Dads idea.

Yet with his unsurpassed fame and his exalted standing in the history of both entertainment and golf, he was just Dad to me, albeit with unusually large accommodations. When I was four, he moved the family from Beverly Hills to the San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough. Our home on five acres was somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000 square feet, with 25 rooms. We had a butler, two housekeepers, a gardener, and a governess. The artwork included a variety of western pieces: a Remington, two C.M. Russells, three Herman Hansens; a Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and an Alfred Munnings. Moreover, my mother had a large Faberge collection, accumulated via gifts from my father every year of their twenty-year marriage. None of it meant anything to me until I took an art history class in college and realized the historic significance of much of the familys art collection. When asked on a test where the location of a particular famous rendering was, I answered, Upstairs at my house.