Sands Point and the Lessons of Golf
By Colman McCarthy
A half-century has passed since the summer of ’57 when I lived a secretive double life: a rich college kid by day and a poor college kid by night. When the sun rose, I walked the fairways of the Sands Point Golf Club on what was called the Gold Coast of Long Island. When it set, I was a few miles away at the North Shore Country Club where I watered the fairways.
Somewhere between naivete and brazenness, one of my older brothers wrote membership-seeking letters for himself and me to some high-end golf clubs near our home in Old Brookville: Meadowbrook, Piping Rock, Deepdale, The Creek, The Links and Sands Point. He explained--this is the brazen part--that we were talented players who could shoot par golf and would assuredly raise the level of play at their club.
No replies came back, except one: Sands Point. Bill Shea, the New York lawyer-deal maker with a 16 handicap and soon to have a baseball stadium named after him in Flushing, ran the membership committee. Let’s talk, he wrote back, the club might have some room. But it would have to be as non-voting junior members. That was fine for us because it meant no initiation fee.
Bill Shea was right about the roominess. Sands Point took exclusivity to the limit—as in limiting itself to less than 80 members. Tee times weren’t needed. Saturdays and Sundays often saw less than a dozen foursomes go out, weekdays two or three. The club had no tennis courts, no swimming pool, no dance floor. Only golf, and no carts allowed.
Across Roslyn Harbor on Long Island Sound was the North Shore Country Club. There I was the lowest of the low on the greenskeeping crew: the night-shift waterboy. From six p.m. to 3:30 a.m., I sprayed the fairways by rotating nozzle heads 50 yds. apart hole by hole. For $1 an hour, I kept the grass green and lush. Some days I would go directly from playing at Sands Point to watering at North Shore, from riches to rags.
I managed this double life through two summers, with my fellow members at Sands Point--including Perry Como, Rex Harrison, Herbert Warren Wind, Averill Harriman, Alvin Handmacher and Bill Shea—being as unaware of my lowly greenskeeping life as my North Shore workmates were as equally unknowing that I hung out with millionaires and celebs at the most exclusive club west of Shinnecock Hills.
Then it happened. My cover was blown—by The New York Times. On July 17, 1959, the sports section carried a story by Lincoln Werden with the headline: “McCarthy Paces Qualifiers in L.I. Amateur Golf Title.” The sub-head ran: “Collegian scores by 2 shots on 71.” After writing that “in a field of 136, McCarthy was the only one to clip par with a 71 at Wheatley Hills,” Werden came in with a scoop: the Sands Point golfer “also has a summer job at the North Shore Country Club.”
Who tipped him off? My mother. I had teed of early, broke par and then hustled off to play another 18 holes, at Sands Point. Needing a quote or two from the collegian par breaker for his story, Werden called the club. I was on the course, the pro shop said, and not to be troubled any more than Governor Harriman or any member was to be bothered by the grubby media. Werden, the good Timesman not giving up, called my home, to be told by my mother not that I was the two-time club champion at Sands Point--which I was by then—but that I was the head sprinkler at North Shore. Motherly pride had its values straight. Her son was a working boy, not a playboy. And she reminded
Werden that I was the head sprinkler, as if I were in charge of a massive crew and not just me roving the fairways alone in the darkness.
Outed by the Times, I feared the worst at both clubs. At Sands Point, I imagined that an emergency meeting of the membership committee would be called. I’d be bounced as an imposter. A commoner. A night shift laborer. At North Shore, I’d be fired for slumming: taking a slot from a kid who really did need a paycheck.
The opposite happened. At Sands Point, I was heaped with praise. I was seen as a scrappy kid not above earning a buck the hard way, just as many of the millionaires once did on their way up. Perry Como told me of his days of hair-cutting in a Pennsylvania barber shop. A few members sighed, wishing that their layabout sons would get a job instead of lazing around summer after summer running up a tab at the club.
At North Shore I was also celebrated--not for my watering skills but for having connections. One evening at dusk when I had the sprayers going at full gush on the front nine, a member came rolling over a hill on his golf cart. Just between us, he said as we moved off the fairway to avoid getting soaked, he had long dreamed of joining Sands Point. North Shore, with more than 600 members, was too crowded. Too often, you had to wait on every shot. Too many Rodney Dangerfields had infiltrated the club, not to mention all the dentists. Cigar butts were left on tees. Golf etiquette was wretched. There were pikers, people so cheap that they pilfered striped range balls to use on the water hole—number eight, a par four—in case they dunked their new $.60 Silver King.
As the member poured out his angst to me--he was a man clearly in pain and desperate for relief—I was overcome with empathy. Then came the purpose of this golfer-to-golfer emergency meeting: could I use my influence to get the North Shore member into Sands Point, say by inviting him to be my partner in next summer’s member-guest and where everyone, especially the power broker Bill Shea, could see what see what a grand fellow he was.
What a moment. I had a new role in life, influence peddler. I was up there with the Chicago ward heelers in the Daley machine handing out patronage jobs. I was like a Washington lobbyist who could arrange free trips for members of Congress to play the Old Course at St. Andrews.
I rose to the challenge. Sure, the member-guest sounds possible. Really?, my new friend asked. His eyes suddenly sparkled, he looked to the heavens as if a beatific vision had infused his golfing soul. Had I asked, I’m certain he would have spent the night sloshing around the course helping me rotate the nozzles—and thanked me for the privilege.
That would have been 1959. The member-guest date next never happened. I finished college, waved goodbye to Sands Point, North Shore and my bipolar youth, and spent the next five years far away from the golf world--in a cloistered Trappist monastery where I tried to get my head together by reading scriptures, not greens.
I went back recently to Sands Point for the first time in nearly a half-century, returning more as a prodigal than a native son. I arranged a foursome: my three sons and myself, all of us bonded by deep affection for each other and for the game that nourished our family so often. It was a time for storytelling, which is what a round of golf should first of all include. After the game, we stopped in the golf shop. The pro, our host, was there. He, too, had some stories, starting with the summers when he was my caddy. He recalled the exhibition match when Claude Harmon came down from Winged Foot and Shelley Mayfield from Meadowbrook to play against the Sands Point pro and me. I was in the game as the club champ, an automatic berth.
I remembered that day, too, and how rushed I was to get going after the match finished in late afternoon. I had only minutes to get over to North Shore where nozzles were waiting to be jammed into the earth for the 6 pm shift.
So what did it all mean? What lessons were learned from my Sands Point/North Shore days--or could be learned from moments like them. First off, it was a summer of experiential knowledge, the kind that stays with you as against theoretical knowledge which passes quickly. The enduring lesson is that life rolls along much more smoothly if we stay clear of pre-judging, of not defining people by what they are but rather who they are.
Membership in a golf club—or many golf clubs, in this grand age of incredulous hedge fund bonuses—doesn’t automatically stereotype you as a Republican angling for tax write-offs and forever reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page as if it were the Holy Writ. At Sands Point I came to know men who were other-centered, not self-centered. Many had gentle natures and caring hearts, the kind of assets that added up to moral wealth.
Being a manual laborer dealing everyday with the high cost of getting by doesn’t mean you an inferior lacking an intellectual or spiritual life. At North Shore some of the greenskeepers were in their 40s and 50s, dayworkers who had not gone to college but were well educated in the survival skills: coming back from alcoholism or home foreclosures. They had inner resilience that signaled who they were--strong rebounders--not what they were: the near-poor who would never be rich enough to get tax breaks. Who we are is the inner self, what we are is the outer self. One matters much, the other little.
The lesson of not judging people by the accidentals of their lives, rather than the essentials, would have lasting utility for me. I went into the judging business: writing opinion columns for some 30 years for The Washington Post. Scrounge around for as many facts as possible before heaping scorn or praise on someone. With wary eyes, look at the issues from four or five sides, not just my side. Remember that even if we don’t see eye to eye with someone we can always talk heart to heart.
These lessons have served me well in my post-Post life: teaching courses on conflict resolution at Georgetown Law, American University, the University of Maryland and three high schools Washington. Allowing myself one digression per class, I have reminded my students--over 7,000 now--that golf is the game of games: a lifetime, outdoors and family recreation that really does recreate us, if we let it. It was Bobby Jones, and it usually is, who tried to teach us: “The trouble with all of us, who grumble over the game and thus spoil an otherwise pleasant afternoon with congenial friends, is that we do not understand the game, nor ourselves.”
Colman McCarthy, a former columnist for The Washington Post, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington and teaches nonviolence at four universities and three high schools. His books include “Pleasures of the Game: A Theory-free Guide to Golf.” ( Dial Press).