Golf and My Life

Golf is my biggest passion in life and I want to explain why.

My dad first got me started playing golf when I was 4 years old, my first set of clubs was a cut down set of old Wilson blades that my dad had cut down to fit me. For the first couple of years being so small he would only let me play from within the immediate area around the green, so for the longest time I played with only a wedge and a putter and learned from there. However, when I was around 6 years old I began playing other sports like baseball, basketball, karate, and my interest in golf waned for awhile.

When I was 9 years old my family went on a boating trip in McCall, Idaho which is about a 2 hour drive north of Boise, the day was August 3rd, 1997. The day started out nice, the weather was clear and the sun was out which made for a great day of boating and so we set out for North Beach for a nice picnic on the lakeshore. Sometime in the afternoon the weather took a nasty turn with a strong wind coming out of the north creating dangerous boating conditions so we decided to head back for our dock, we were about halfway across the lake and coming around a rock outcropping when a boat came around the corner right in front of us and when we swerved to avoid it our boat hit the wake of the other boat sending our bow airborne which knocked my little brother Brian overboard and the boat came down directly on top of him and pulled him through the propellor completely severing the lower half of my brothers body from his torso. When I jumped in after him to pull him out he was already dead.

After my brother passed away my mother became addicted to prescription medication and became an alcoholic as well as abusive towards me both physically and verbally, at one point my step dad would hold me up against the wall by the throat while my mom beat my stomach with a belt. One day when I was twelve years old my mom was yelling at me and I decided I couldn’t take it anymore and I ran out of the house with a length of rope in my head and headed for the park near my house with the intention of committing suicide because I felt like my life at that point was not worth living anymore. So I found a tree that I could climb easily and I tied the rope around it and my neck then proceeded to hang myself from the tree. When I had hung myself from this tree a group of kids who were part of a church camp saw me jump from the tree and immediately alerted their camp counselor who ran over and lifted me up by the ankles in order to take the pressure off my neck, while this woman was holding me up a retired police officer happened to walk by with a knife in his pocket and he immediately cut me down and proceeded to call 911 while the church camp counselor attempted to give me CPR. Fortunately the quick thinking of these two individuals saved my life and I lived to tell this story. After my attempted suicide I went into 7th grade and on the first day while in my Music Appreciation class the teacher was taking role and when she got to my name she asked to see me in the hall, and when we went to the hall she told me that she was the mother of the woman who saved my life and that while I was in the hospital she talked with my dad who had told her about my mothers less than stellar moral character and that after hearing everything my mother had done to me she wanted to do what she could to make sure I had a positive mother figure in my life. For the first year or so after I tried to commit suicide I would spend the lunch hour with her talking about life and what I wanted to do, and it was her who really got me interested in playing golf again.

After going through junior high and high school I realized that I wanted nothing more for my life than to work in the golf industry so I decided to attend the University of Idaho and pursue a degree in Professional Golf Management, and for a while things in my life were great I had been elected to the Board of Directors for the PGM Program at U of I and had made plenty of new friends who were making a positive impact in my life. However, during my sophomore year my high school sweetheart was killed along with 4 of her friends in a black Friday traffic incident and I withdrew from college because I could not attend classes without having an anxiety attack as we had a lot of classes together and it was impossible for me to keep myself together in public so I left university that same year and gave up on my education.

Through all this turmoil in my life the one thing that has consistently kept me happy and grounded is the game of golf, because when I am playing golf I feel completely at ease nothing can bother me or upset me. Whenever I get to the course I unplug from everything and completely immerse myself in the natural surroundings of the golf course and focus on shooting the lowest score I am capable of. Golf has given me so much clarity in life that I want to make it my career and I am currently thinking about trying out for Q-School and making it on the Web.com Tour, but I realize that is a mighty difficult road that not many people are blessed with traveling and if I cannot make it through the gauntlet that is Q-School then I would gladly accept a PGA Professional job somewhere.

Keep swinging.