Kevin Alan Milne - The Nine Lessons: A Novel of Love, Fatherhood, and Second Chances

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright 2009 by Kevin Alan Milne

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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First eBook Edition: May 2009

ISBN: 978-1-599-95218-5

Also by Kevin Alan Milne:

The Paper Bag Christmas

For my five caddies.

Swing hard and make the most of the course you play.

Golf is so popular simply because it is the best game in the world at which to be bad.

A. A. Milne

G olf. It has been theorized by more than a few frustrated golf enthusiasts that the sport was so named because all of the other four-letter words were taken. In fact, I personally know a man who uses golf regularly as a semi profanity, along with colloquial favorites fetch! heck! and dang it! Other more sophisticated observers have speculated that golfs inventors suffered from acute dyslexia, causing them to spell their new sport backward, suggesting that whacking a ball around in the grass is akin to corporal punishment.

Clearly, no one with such a dismal view of the game has ever met my father, Oswald London Witte. To him, golf is much more than just a hobby or a sport. It is, as hes reminded me so many times, life (which, coincidentally, is also a four-letter word). It has been my greatest teacher, he once told me in quiet confidence when I was a boy. Golf is life, lad, and life is golf.

I didnt have a clue what he meant, but I knew that he believed it with all his heart. For as long as Ive known him, those words have defined and guided his every thought and action. When hes not greeting customers at his golf-themed restaurant, you can be sure that he is either on a golf course, near a golf course, or watching a PGA tournament on the Golf Channel. Golf consumes him; it is and always has been the very essence that gives meaning to everything and everyone around him.

As parents often do, London desperately hoped that his own passion would become the center of my universe as well. From the day I came home from the hospital as an infant he began dressing me in golf clothes, as though miniature sweater-vests, knee-length pants, and argyle socks would magically infuse me with a burning desire to follow in his footsteps. When I was still just a toddler he began publicly forecasting my future as the next great golf prodigy. Just you wait and see, he would tell his friends. Its the second coming of Bobby Jones! Oh, yes, my little laddie has a bright future of beautiful fairways ahead of him.

Unfortunately, my father overlooked several critical considerations while trying to pass his lifelong dream on to his only offspring. For starters, high expectations are a heavy weight for any child to bear, and the pressure I felt to succeed at golf was so overwhelming that anything short of perfection on the course was demoralizing to me, almost condemning me to failure from the very start. But even more than that, there was the simple fact that I lacked the athletic competence required to play the game. When I swung golf clubs as a child I was more likely to hit myself in the head than to make contact with the ball, and when I did hit the darn thing (the ball, not my head), only God couldve guessed where it would go, and even then it would be a lucky guess at best.

By the time I was ten, London had seen enough of my embarrassing incompetence to persuade him to modify his grand prognostications about my future, but he still hadnt given up hope that I would eventually come around. Its going to click sooner or later, right? Hell blossom with a little more practice, and late bloomers can still enjoy the sweet, fragrant smell of success! The reality, however, was that any fragrant success of mine on the golf course would be nothing more than an occasional lucky shot, like a whiff of cheap cologne trying to cover up the stink of my natural ability.

Youthful inexperience eventually gave way to teenage awkwardness, which only made my ineptitude at golf all the more obvious. It was then that my father was forced to admit that his son would never excel at his beloved pastime, a fact that would drive a serious wedge in our already tenuous relationship. London told me I should stop playing the game altogether and focus instead on whatever other as-yet-undiscovered skills I might possess. That was a devastating blow to a teenage boy who wanted to make his dad proud, but it at least verified something Id suspected for quite some time: Because I couldnt golf well, I was a complete and utter failure in the eyes of my father.

In response, I distanced myself from the man who had brought me into existence, and he, in turn, sank deeper and deeper into an isolated world of dimpled balls and lonely tees. I vowed to never touch a golf club again for as long as I lived, and promised myself, above all else, that when I grew up I would never be anything like London Witte. The thought of becoming like my father was a fate I could not bear to accept, and something I would do everything in my power to avoid.

What I didnt realize back then is that fate, like the golf clubs of my youth, is a pendulum; the further we try to push it away, the harder it swings back to hit us in the head. It didnt happen overnight, but eventually, through a series of fateful swings of the club, I would be forced to acknowledge that my father was right all along: Golf is life, and life is golf, and we are all just players trying our best to finish the round.

I am Augusta Witte, named by my father in honor of Augusta National golf course, home of the legendary Masters tournament. I dropped the blatant golfiness from my name as soon as I was old enough to recognize how unfitting it was. London is the only person in the world who persists in calling me by my given name. To everyone else, I am simply August.

If you call on God to improve the results of a shot while it is still in motion, you are using an outside agency and subject to appropriate penalties under the rules of golf.

Henry Longhurst

S ome people cringe openly when I tell them that my wife and I were engaged by our third date and tied the matrimonial knot just one month later. I can tell exactly what those people are thinking during that semiconcealed flash of a moment when their eyebrows jut up in dismay: Idiots! Thats not nearly enough time to get to know the person you intend to spend forever with! Id like to say that those people are all wrongthat they wouldnt recognize true love if it bit them in the rearbut the truth is that although my wife and I were deeply in love, and remain so to this day, there is at least one teeny tiny topic that never came up during our abbreviated courtship (assuming a handful of dinners and three frames of bowling qualifies as such), and that might have had some bearing on her willingness to marry me at all.