Who We Met on the Way to Stanford

Book excerpt: In the fall of 2000, my son began attending Stanford on a golf scholarship. It was a long and challenging road to achieve this goal. When he learned about the college, he went around the house with his Stanford sweatshirt and seldom took it off. After winning the San Diego Junior World Golf Championship, he was an accomplished junior golfer. Stanford's coach at the time was Wally Goodwin, an excellent, cheerful fellow who was also Tiger Woods's coach. Wally had seen the best golfers at Stanford, so he was a coach who knew what he wanted in a player. He started following my son after this victory at the San Diego tournament, and around the time, he received a letter asking Wally if he would come to watch him play golf. Wally did; he was there often to oversee this young man's development and golf. As a father, I took my son to many golf tournaments. He was a joy to watch and did well as a junior golfer through high school. He even had the accomplishment of replacing Tiger Woods' scoring record. Tiger’s best score for the high school championships in Southern California was 66, but my son managed to shoot a 65 in his junior year in high school against players from five hundred and eighty-six schools and other high schools. Many other delightful moments were watching my son play, and good times I will not forget. One day, while reading through some of my writings, I came across some notes my son had sent me about appealing the dismissal of his scholarship. Reading the notes almost seventeen years later was a revelation to me. I was unaware of the time frames at the time of the essence of this story, so I investigated the information further. What I discovered became the basis of this book. There were weeks of struggling with the time frames and difficulties understanding what happened in the struggle at Stanford. The book is my way of putting together what I discovered. What I found to be mostly true, but not having been there myself, I may not even know half the story. Nevertheless, this is my memoir of what it was like raising a kid with extraordinary talent playing golf and what happened when he arrived at Standford to fulfill his obligation for the scholarship he received.