‘We don’t have to achieve anything … we need only be’

This article written by Michelle Hiskey was published Oct. 31, 2007. She can be reached at michelle.hiskey@gmail.com.

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The picture shows the mighty hands of Tiger Woods cradling his newborn daughter, his face full of tender pride. Tiny Sam Alexis, her eyes shut, cannot see all that lies ahead: the travel, the spotlight. Amazing opportunities for the child of such a focused achiever.

Looking at this photo in midsummer, I felt a bittersweet ache, the same weight of memory that pulled at me shortly after covering Woods at the Masters in April. I was just back from Augusta when my phone rang.

It was my dad.

Jim Hiskey is a former PGA Tour player and instructor who taught his three kids well enough to earn college scholarships.

Now our lives mostly connect through the occasional cellphone conversation that crackles the 600 miles between me in Atlanta and him in Annapolis, Md. These quick chats let me ignore the forces we had buried like land mines: his diehard belief in my potential beyond golf, and my desire to break free. But this call brought an unexpected request that threatened our uneasy balance: Would I, Dad asked, spend a long weekend with him?

He said we could go anywhere. For me, only one place beckoned:

Where he taught his only girl the unforgiving standard of par and where she chased his approval.

Where the scorecard showed our close family foursome, but not its cracked foundation.

Where I first confused love with performance.

It was a conflict, I knew as I packed my golf clubs and my writing pad, that I had been running from.

^^

Dad sped his convertible down a two-lane highway, our destination the Sandhills of central North Carolina —- home of some of America’s finest golf courses. I didn’t want to spend my precious vacation days with Dad, so I promised my boss I’d write about the do’s and don’ts of teaching a kid to play golf.

The old roles were reset: dutiful me and my expert dad, who loves to drive fast. Taking notes wasn’t easy in the wind. We almost had to shout to talk.

It was vintage Dad —- always on the move, often hard to reach.

Golf bred in him an intense concentration that blanks out the rest of the world. That’s an asset on the course, sure, but a hazard for those closest to him.

During my childhood, his golf travels meant amazing experiences when I went with him, and a deep yearning when school made me stay home.

When he played the PGA Tour in the 1960s and then the European circuit, we went along —- me, my mom, my two brothers.

I watched the moon landing in a motel room in Ohio. I was 7 when we lived for a summer in a Swiss chalet and saw him play the British Open. By middle school, I had visited the lower 48.

More than a dad, he was our shepherd into an extraordinary world.

Displayed in our living room near Washington was a black-and-white glossy of Dad giving a putting lesson to Lyndon B. Johnson. Much later, he would take us to China to play with Premier Zhao Ziyang and hit drives off the Great Wall.

Back in the Jack Nicklaus heyday, when a schoolteacher asked what my father did, I loved the awe my answer put on her face. It was as if he were a pro football or baseball player, only better. Golf is played so poorly by so many regular Joes that an elite player instantly commands respect. When Dad became a sports chaplain, I saw Washington Redskins and Baltimore Orioles look up to him, too.

As I became a teenager, I wanted the warmth of his spotlight. I knew where to find it. His office was the course.

On the driving range, Dad needed only to hear the sound of a struck ball to diagnose a problem in a swing. Countless times he straightened out a hacker, transforming a face of anguish into the beatific look of the miraculously healed.

Dad’s hero was Don Quixote, a character who could see what others could not —- someone whose love and belief forced change within those in his world. All this, in my mind, made him more than a dad. He was God to me.

During high school, we made a weekly date —- often scheduled around his golf trips —- for a lesson. Those were the moments I felt closest to him.

As we drove along in North Carolina, he smiled thinking about how he had seen my doggedness as a toddler, when he nicknamed me “Iron Will.” In golf, “you were not a natural, ” he said. “You had to work for what you got. I was that way, too.”

Hearing him say we were alike used to make me so proud inside. But that was three decades ago.

Now I was my own person, wasn’t I? The voice inside me kept telling me so. But the more miles Dad drove, the less I could hear it, the less I believed.

At age 44, I was a kid again, powerless and in his big shadow.

And our trip had barely begun.

^^

Maybe some parents who are highly competitive professionals don’t take that home. Maybe some parents who are stubborn don’t pass that down to their kids.

They aren’t Hiskeys.

Dad never pushed me to play golf. I just copied the way he pushed himself.

Like other kids in Idaho, Dad was a potato picker, let out from school during harvest. He grew up on golf links that his dad helped build as a public works project in the Depression. The course became a refuge for my dad and his brothers during their mom’s long hospitalizations for manic-depression.

En route to the school bus stop, Dad played three holes. Rather than just play, he kept score. If Dad had grown up in a canyon, he’d be a champion rock climber.

He dominated his state events and started a golf dynasty at the University of Houston with his brother Babe, who later played in two Masters and on the PGA Tour for more than two decades. A constant spectator was my mom, Lorraine, Dad’s childhood sweetheart; they’ve been married since 1958.

My brothers and I heard all the stories and created a version of what our father had as a kid. We set up a backyard course with a sand trap. Dad, who I never saw fix anything around the house, used a vise and gasoline to cut down and re-grip clubs.

Like the goals he always set for himself, he dangled incentives for us —- rewards for good grades, for memorizing Bible verses and, of course, for low golf scores. I got my first pair of cleats after breaking 100.

Then there were the putts for a nickel or a quarter during our family matches. That was our U.S. Open pressure.

Dad set up strokes so we could try to beat him, and we kids, stubborn as rocks like him, tried our best. It never happened, but that’s how we got better.

Dad showed us golf as an expression of faith, a game of honor and discipline that often had to be learned the hard way. He took away our clubs when we threw tantrums.

Fear had no place in golf, because whatever you were afraid of —- like hitting a ball into a lake —- became your target. We learned to aim at what we wanted, and like Dad, block everything else out.

I didn’t see any room for grace on the scorecard. My performance was there in black and white. No space for explanation, but plenty for judgment. Golfers know the cruelty of these stark, unpredictable numbers, and as I tried to become someone publicly through golf, I held on even tighter to who I had always been privately, the do-no-wrong daughter.

The stakes continued to rise. Dad would praise a good round, but what I would hear were his tips for next time. Just think how good you could have done if you hadn’t three-putted.

Tiger Woods went through far more than this, coached by a father who envisioned Gandhi-like greatness for him. And Tiger grew into that vision.

I struggled with what was enough —- for Dad, for myself?

I didn’t know the answer. I practiced so much, trying to find out, I peeled calluses off my hands.

As my scores leveled in high school, my frustration rose. Par is around 72, and I was stuck at 85 —- not good enough for the top college teams.

Dad was frustrated, too. He had shaped in me a smooth, sound swing. The only thing missing was power.

For once, he was stumped. He searched for another teacher for me, and his standard —- as always —- was high. So were my expectations that he would succeed.

Now, in the summer of 2007, we were heading back to the guru Dad had found for me.

“This is like visiting the Queen, ” he said as we pulled into the circular driveway in Southern Pines and a valet greeted us. “The royal family of golf.”

^^

Peggy Kirk Bell seemed old to me 25 years ago when I made my pilgrimage to her for an intense weekend of lessons. She’s 85 now, still teaching 10 hours a day in the sun.

She helped found the LPGA, and last summer, the world’s best female golfers played the U.S. Open at her resort, Pine Needles.

Amid those preparations, she sat down for lunch with Dad and me and talked about parents teaching kids. When do either know what’s enough? What’s too much?

“It’s pretty hard for a father or mother to get involved” as a teacher, she said. But it’s OK “as long as they know the kid loves the game.”

But love for the game can confuse love between parent and child. Even in her own family, her son-in-law, Pat McGowan, is a former PGA Tour player who will not teach his son Michael, a promising teenage golfer. Instead, he calls in Grandma.

“I remember teaching you, ” Bell said to me. “You knew a lot about the game, and that’s always good —- to have a student with knowledge. You were good. I thought you would go on to be a pro.”

All I had wanted back then was another 20 yards on my drives, and she had seen what my dad had missed. She had given me simple drills to build power, and I took my first golf steps away from him.

After lunch, Dad and I teed off on her course. The next day we played Wild Dunes near Charleston. I couldn’t remember when we had last spent this much time together without distractions.

Almost 71, Dad was off his game, but sharp as ever with the teaching tips. He gave me a simple, much-needed putting lesson, and we laughed about bad shots and old memories.

We didn’t talk about the darker memories of what happened in North Carolina, events that changed so much between us.

^^

Back in 1980, powered by Bell’s advice, I went on to win enough tournaments to earn a scholarship to Duke University, about an hour north of her club.

I took Dad’s voice to college. Surrounded by high achievers, I strove for A’s and birdies and seemed to effortlessly achieve both.

Inside, I never felt satisfied. Enough was elusive.

One morning, in the spring of my freshman year, I was supposed to meet my team for a road trip to a tournament. I couldn’t.

I couldn’t get out of bed. I started to cry. I couldn’t stop.

What happened next was something both Dad and I wrote about —- me then, him a decade later.

“She’s having problems of identity and …” the psychiatrist said in the first call alerting Dad that I had been hospitalized.

“What do you mean, identity? I don’t understand, ” Dad replied. “She hasn’t been sick a day in her life. What’s wrong?”

I was immobilized by a deep depression, in the pre-Prozac days of 1982. At first Dad thought I could just make up my mind to get better, as I had in remaking my golf swing.

“I didn’t believe in so-called ‘chemical imbalances, ‘” he wrote. “I felt that was just a cop-out for people who didn’t have the will and discipline to change their lives.”

For three months, there were no answers. Insurance money ran out. I transferred hospitals. I suffered through various medications that either didn’t work or made me worse.

Dad watched me turn into “a zombie.” He had seen his mom go through a lifetime like this.

“One doctor told us, ‘What you’re experiencing is worse than cancer. At least with cancer you know what you’re dealing with, ’ ” Dad wrote. “I’ve never felt such pain. … I felt so helpless, so powerless.

“Deep down, I was scared. I was afraid that [my daughter’s illness] might turn into a life of agony and despair. And I wasn’t sure I could handle it.

“I was shaken to the very core of my being. … I couldn’t bear to think of my lovely, lively daughter drugged up in mental institutions. I was afraid.

“No, I was petrified!”

Fear overwhelmed me, too. I spent long nights staring at the ceiling, the fear of something unknown gripping me. So far away from the sunshine and turf. Who was I anymore?

Finally a new doctor in a new hospital convinced Dad and me that this crisis was one no Hiskey could bootstrap out of.

“Not the kind of depression you get when you have a bad day at the golf course, ” he explained. “This has to do with the chemicals in the brain.”

Aided by better medication, I slowly came to identify and make peace with what I feared. It was failure.

Depression like mine happens to kids in families like mine. I saw success as my ticket to acceptance in my family. But if I could never do enough, why keep trying? Failing seemed like the only way out.

I wrote in my journal:

“I get this feeling sometimes that when I go home everything’s just going to be the same, and I’m still going to feel rotten for not living up to my own expectations. Just how much can I produce, and how much can I be satisfied with?”

Something —- no, everything —- had to change for me to survive, much less return to college and the golf grant that helped pay for my education.

Writing helped. I started jotting down the simple tasks I completed every day. Forget shooting par. I was happy if I could get out of bed.

“People tell me, ‘Be independent. Break away from your parents. Be your own person.’ That’s a lot harder than it seems, ” I wrote. “Maybe if I’m just a little less dependent in certain areas, I’ll chip away at it, slowly growing away.”

I moved back home, then back to school. I practiced telling myself that my best on any day was enough. As I let go, I improved at golf, and played in two NCAA championships and several major amateur events.

Competition may be all or nothing, but life doesn’t have to be.

Dad was trying to change, too. My illness became a powerful turning point for him, spurring him to write, a decade later, a 340-page set of letters to us about this and other critical lessons in his life.

“My whole life has been indoctrinated with the concept that my worth is based upon my performance, ” he wrote in regret. “In short, I am worth what I can produce.”

Dad began to see the life and love he had missed by striving so much as a parent, and as a child. He saw it not only in what I went through, but while sprucing up his 85-year-old father’s nursing home room the final time they saw each other.

“I was feverishly trying to perform for him, even though he was nearly unconscious, ” Dad wrote. “When I realized all he wanted was my hand on his, a hug or a kiss, I relaxed. All Dad wanted was the pleasure of my company.”

This discovery was so powerful he compared it with finding that his car had a fifth gear. Dad learned to enjoy life and relax more. But he was still Dad.

Over time, as I moved to Atlanta, married and had children, I grew distant from the sport that once connected us. I only played golf a few times a year.

Even without that common ground, our old pattern remained the same —- seeing more in each other than we should.

“Why don’t you write a book?” he often asked.

Of course, I translated that as my newspaper writing not being good enough.

His lofty visions that once drove me to success in golf now drove me away.

After several years, I finally asked him to quit the book talk.

“I don’t stop talking about ideas I think are good, ” he replied.

Why did he have to be so stubborn?

Why do I?

On our golf trip through the Carolinas, he didn’t bring up the book idea.

I hugged and kissed him goodbye and exhaled as I drove back to Georgia.

^^

As summer turned to fall, I struggled to write this essay. I was afraid to put into words something I couldn’t even talk about with Dad. I was scared, too, realizing how much we are alike.

Fear is crippling in writing as well as golf. The journey is an expression of faith, a test of integrity and discipline that often has to be learned the hard way. Results are published in black and white.

“You know, J.K. Rowling writes the ending first, ” my 9-year-old daughter told me.

So that’s where I began.

Looking at my daughters, I realize the story of Dad and me is written anew every day with the next generation.

The kid inside me struggles to make peace with my first and biggest hero. The mom I am wants to be, like him, a strong role model.

And every day there are two little girls watching what I do and say.

This is a passage of life I considered when I was stuck in the mental hospital. “Maybe I’ll have a different kind of love, ” I wrote of parenting. “A different way of expressing it.”

Today, with mixed feelings, I don’t encourage competition in our home. Our clubs are in a closet that rarely gets opened. We have some putters we mess around with on the living room carpet.

I have to curb my natural reactions. When my daughters turned out to be left-handers, I rejoiced —- out of their earshot —- that they’d have an advantage in learning to play golf. Then I had to admit they might not want to play, and I might be better off if they didn’t.

A college scholarship sure would be nice, though….

Oops, I can hear me as Dad again.

But something major is missing. How will my girls cope in a competitive world that put a standardized test in front of them in first grade?

Most importantly, how will they know that they are worth far, far more than any report card, any pay stub, any accolade?

My most powerful influence, just as Dad’s was with me, is what I demonstrate to my girls every day. I try to be attentive, knowing I so easily get preoccupied.

So I seize this chance to put in black and white what I most want my girls to know.

We don’t have to achieve anything. We need only be.

My daughters, that’s enough.