I finished a book today, which isn’t unusual.
But this one moved me in a way that a book hasn’t in a long, long time.
That is unusual.
The book is called Pappyland, and it is, as the subtitle suggests – A story of family, fine bourbon, and things that last – as much about bourbon as it is about family, and in particular fathers. That’s no surprise, coming from Wright Thompson.
He is the greatest writer alive. I write that as fact, just as he safely wrote in Pappyland, as fact, that the bourbon preserved by the Van Winkle family is the greatest bourbon on Earth.
He has been, for as long as I can remember, the writer I view as the north star of the craft. For years, I’ve brought his book, The Cost of These Dreams, wherever I’ve traveled. The pages are now worn and dog-eared in a way I love. There’s just something about an old, worn, beat-up book. Reading his prose awakens a different type of writer within me, because it awakens a different type of thinker. Deeper, one who wrestles with topics bigger, more human, than the score of a game and what it might mean in the larger context of a season.
He writes of Ted Williams’ daughter, and it is her story, yes, but it is the story of every daughter who, no matter what she has accomplished, sought only one thing: the love and approval of her late father, which in her case happened to be the greatest hitter who has ever lived.
He writes of Michael Jordan, who wrestles, with his 50th birthday approaching, with the ghost of his past, finding an outlet for the simmering rage that made him who he was but is unfit for the stage of life he is in now.
He writes of Pat Riley, who claims to want to retire quietly at his beach house in Malibu but will never have won enough to do so and he knows it. He just doesn’t want to know it. He wants peace, or thinks he does. He doesn’t know. It’s a fascinating journey. Thompson’s closing to that story is still one of the all-time greats to me: “You know the greatest lie in the world?” [Riley] says, starting to laugh. “Pat’s retiring to Malibu.”
He writes stories in which we find ourselves and our lives and our own angels and demons in his words and his subjects’ pasts, in their vices and dreams, connecting us, in the mystical way of words, to their lives. We see ourselves in them and them in us.
In Pappyland, he told a tale that hit me like a thunderclap.
I know nothing about bourbon, or the complex and strange world it inhabits. I have never been to Kentucky.
Yet I felt myself on every page.
I know of family and of being a father, which, for two years now, has turned me inward, reflective in a way I’ve never been, taking inventory of my relationship with my own father.
My son is now 2, my daughter four months. When I look at my kids, I see them through the prism of how my father still sees his three boys.
Maybe it’s possible for some folks to understand how much their father loved them before becoming parents themselves. Maybe they can understand it without becoming parents at all.
I thought I did.
I didn’t.
Every time I leave home, I feel torn by two worlds pulling me apart: the man who must travel to provide for his family and the father who must be home to love his family. The former is a clever guise for much of my own self-interest and ambition, for how I provide – much like Thompson – requires me to leave home. Often this will look glamorous, and much of it is. My job as a beach volleyball player and coach and writer and commentator takes me to the most beautiful places in the world, to hang out with many of the world’s most beautiful people. It is rollicking good fun, and I find an enjoyment and a fulfillment in my career I’m sure is quite rare. There’s that scene in Chariots of Fire, when Eric Liddell, the Scottish Olympic runner and missionary, tells his sister, Jenny, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.” That’s how I feel when I write, and why I know, no matter what unexpected twists and turns my career takes, writing will always be the foundation of it. I’d feel a terrible shame to waste that gift.
I’ll admit that much of my own ambition for ambition’s sake died in the hospital room the day my daughter was born. Not sure why it took a second kid for that to happen, it just did.
But not all of it.
There is still much of that within me, a maniacal drive that must achieve, achieve, achieve. I don’t dislike that part of myself, for it’s what has gotten me to where I am, living a life I quite enjoy. But what, now that I have everything I could have ever wanted, is its remaining utility to me? What could possibly be greater than sitting on the porch with my wife and two kids, listening to the thunder roll through our flat and grassy neighborhood, smelling the rain, hearing it patter gently and then drum violently against the sidewalk, a concert soon to be followed by the rhythmic cacophony of a million frogs bursting with their songs in the nearby ponds and streams?
What moment could eclipse that of my son running into my arms after a startling crack in the sky, seeing those blue eyes turn big as saucers, laughing as he exclaims “Big rumble rumble!”
I don’t know.
But I am on a plane again, torn apart by those two worlds.
Thompson inspects his own soul throughout Pappyland, being pulled by those same worlds: an expecting father and his own furnace of ambition. He writes of the same conflict that roils within me every time I step on a plane.
“I’ve been ordering my life foolishly. A voice of warning has been growing louder as I considered what being a father actually means. When I make an accounting of myself honestly, I do not like what I find. Always a pleaser, I have put satisfying bosses above myself at the top of my hierarchy of needs and live accordingly, hoping that the people who loved me would love me enough to indulge and forgive…
“I think about my wife as we walk, about what she’s doing now. Sonia is so important to every part of my life that her presence often exists as a shadow in everything I do. The happiest I ever am is when she smiles…
“In the last years of his life, Alabama football coach Bear Bryant read a devotional over and over again, a window into how he appraised his successful and famous life; his own sorting out of the things he gained and what it cost him. ‘When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever, leaving something in its place I have traded for it.’ I feel like I am forever making bad trades.”
When Thompson wrote that, I realized something that had never dawned on me before: My dad never made a bad trade.
Not one.
I don’t know how he did it.
I don’t suppose I ever will.
Gone, in today’s modern world, is the hero of the household, the man – or woman – who works to provide, and finds enough satisfaction in that to live a life much fulfilled, regardless of what he or she does or accomplishes in order to do the providing. Those stories aren’t the ones that get written, for they are lives devoid of accolade and fame.
My dad was a hero of a household.
He worked what, in my rough retroactive accounting, must have been 40-50 hour-weeks, plus commute, and returned home to coach every basketball and baseball team I ever played on before high school. He taught me how to golf and walked more holes than I care to count, in rain and sleet and stifling heat. He’d write notes and leave them on our desk or in our shoes before a big match or tournament. I still remember one, and repeat it often to my girls at Florida State: “Golf isn’t about the great shots you hit, it’s about the bad ones you don’t. Play smart.”
I don’t remember anything about the round that day, but I remember the note.
One of my favorite pictures of my dad is taken from behind the fence at a baseball game. The chain links, covered in a black plastic, stand blurry in the foreground. He’s talking to my older brother, Tyler, a catcher, his mess of reddish brown hair sitting atop his head. They are unsmiling, serious as sin. My dad is pantomiming something important. My brother hangs on every word. It is a coach and a player, a father and a son. To my brother, it was the World Series.
To my father, it was his son.
Only today am I understanding that they are one and the same.
If there is a picture that sums up our childhood to me, it is that one: a father, a son, the shared language of sport, and a mother behind the camera whose cup runneth over with a nurturing love I wish all boys could feel from their mothers.
The costs of that dedication are exorbitant, yet my father bore it without complaint. He let his own dreams die so we could have ours.
And never a complaint.
Even when he had cancer, never a complaint. Only time he grumbled, when I drove him to a radiation appointment, was about the drive. Forty minutes for two minutes of radiation?
What a terrible waste of time.
As for the radiation itself? The surgeries? The recovery?
Shrug.
That’s Dad.
I never knew how much money my dad made and still don’t. Never knew if he was stressed about it or not. He simply provided, in both his presence and by allowing us, encouraging us, to live whatever lives we chose to live.
I see much of that in my little brother, Cody, who works a job I still don’t fully understand. He never feels the need to elaborate on what, exactly, he does, because, frankly, I don’t think he ever aspired to do what he does. He makes a lot of money, and that money in turn provides well for his family, and that’s all that I know.
What he talks about is his girls, all three: his beautiful, lovely wife, Karen, and his two daughters.
He talks about what matters.
He doesn’t make bad trades.
He and my father are a lot alike in that.
I can’t think of a single thing my dad has ever done for himself. When we got a membership at a golf course in town, it wasn’t for him – although he played plenty – but for me. I made the varsity golf team as a freshman and he held up his end of the bargain by getting me the membership he promised if I made it. That membership then extended to my brother when he entered high school, and that turned into a decent career as a college golfer.
The only trips my parents take are for weddings, celebrating other people, or flying to see me and their daughter-in-law and their grandchildren.
Last year, my dad used his last vacation days to drive across the country to help me move from California to Tallahassee. That drive will forever be one of the enduring memories I have with him.
I hope I can be the same man for my son as my dad is for me.
I see this now, as a father myself, and it’s a wonder to me that I didn’t see it before. There were clues about how much our parents loved us, how much they’d sacrificed for us. Plenty. Like the time my parents were playing one of those games where each is asked the same question and must guess the other’s answer. The question in this case was what a perfect day would look like for my dad, or something like that. My mom didn’t hesitate. She knew the answer like she knows her own name.
Golfing with his sons.
And yet, just a few days ago, on Father’s Day, my second as a dad, I didn’t have time to call my dad.
We had recruiting calls from 9:30 through well past dinner with a couple breaks in between. There was time enough for me to call. It’s just a day, one assigned to Fathers by marketers and spun into campaigns by companies to get you to buy things in the name of celebrating someone we should celebrate anyway, I know, but still.
It was a bad trade.
But this is what draw’s me to Thompson’s writing, other than the fact that it’s damn fine prose: It’s universal. We all have fathers. Many of us will become them. He has written about fatherhood before, in a beautiful reflection while covering the Masters that has been preserved in the Best American Sports Writing anthology. I remember that story well, and still occasionally read it from time to time.
Pappyland hit different.
The thing about my dad’s cancer was that the surgery to remove the initial tumor cut out a bunch of the nerves that register taste. For months, pretty much everything tasted the same in that it tasted liked nothing, except for the strongest stuff.
Like bourbon.
Once a beer guy, my dad has turned into something of a burgeoning bourbon aficionado. Nothing like the folks Thompson writes about in Pappyland, but enough that he knows a bit about the nuances of the craft and can enjoy many a good conversation with bartenders and men at weddings and parties. I bought the book without reading what it was about, for I knew two things that mattered a great deal to me: Wright Thompson wrote it, and I’ll read anything he puts on paper, and it was about bourbon, something that could connect me with my dad.
I had no idea.
“The future is waiting,” he writes, “and it is never the vision the hopeful world conjures, so I want my love for my wife and child to eclipse whatever love I have for my work (which is just another way of saying ‘for myself’). I worry I won’t be worthy of this child, or of my wife, and that I won’t be able to find the version of myself who is called upon to stand up in this new act of life and be a man.”
My dad was always worthy of his kids. It is my hope I will be able to say the same for myself. For the first two years after my son was born, I felt like I had a kid but wasn’t really a parent. I made bad trades and did so willingly. I waited for that magical moment of becoming a parent, when the heavens open up and the angels sing and golden trumpets blast from the clouds and you discover a new well of love you never knew existed but it never happened for me like it did for many of my friends and my brother. I was not all that dissimilar from the athletes and coaches Thompson wrote about in The Cost of These Dreams, the title of which has only now begun to truly hit home. Those trades, the cost I’ll pay for these dreams of mine, are becoming fewer, made, now, almost entirely to provide for my family and less for achievement and accomplishment. I think that’s honorable. It’s a direction I’d like to keep heading.
A direction, no doubt, Thompson wants to head as well.
When he wrote Pappyland, he was an expecting dad.
Now he is a father to a daughter, Wallace.
“Julian is an archetype for the kind of man I’d like to be: a lover of fine wine and food, a traveler, a storyteller and court-holder, a good wing shot, a devoted father to one son and triplet daughters. Hanging around him requires being focused and funny – he is of a generation and social class that were taught how to play verbal ping-pong at rollicking dinner parties – and I always walk away feeling like I’ve gone back in time to sit with my father and his friends.”
That’s how I felt after reading Pappyland.
Which is why, when I finished, I went back to the beginning and began reading again.
