A Father’s Day Message to Rory McIlroy

I’m easily old enough to be your father, and as I was watching and rooting for you when you missed those putts earlier today at The U.S. Open, I was thinking about my own father, and fathers and sons, winning and losing, and what those terms mean.  I have a son your age, also an excellent athlete in a different sport, as I was in my youth and my father in his turn.

Bitter it no doubt was to miss those putts, and shocking for the fierce competitor that you are.  It no doubt hurts a lot.  When you grimaced in pain, I did too.  But it’s not the end of the world or the end of your great golf career.  You will have other chances and you will win more Majors, but only if you forget today and stay focused on tomorrow and the days that follow.

There’s a profound wisdom in letting it go and dismissing comments such as Nick Faldo’s – “That’s going to haunt Rory for the rest of his life, those two misses.”  He may mean well, but such a statement fails to grasp an essential truth: that those who allow themselves to be haunted by the past, haunt their futures.  To follow such a road is a fool’s game.  It is the old Irishman William Butler Yeats at his pessimistic worst.

Yes, the luck of the Irish wasn’t with you on those holes, as it was earlier in your round with your many made difficult putts.  Like life itself, golf is a very strange game, as you know.  It begins in youth as a lark, pure fun in efforts to hit a small white ball with a long stick down green grass into a small hole.  A game of skill and chance before the play of life opens and so many lose their sense of fun and humor to the dark voices of the old disappointed ones.

Be bred to a harder thing than triumph always, be secret and exult, and remember Yeats in his merrier mood – wise words to Faldo’s words of doom and gloom – when Yeats wrote of the Fiddler of Dooney:

For the good are always the merry
Save by an evil chance
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.

Or if you prefer a different poet, another minstrel boy, who sang a song of sage advice at about the same curly-headed age you were when you won your first major, listen to Dylan shock the older folks with Mr. Tambourine Man.