Kes: Leon Invented Carpe Diem

We grew up playing basketball, football, and baseball. We’d never heard of soccer or synchronized swimming. And golf was too expensive.

Plus, we didn’t have a golf course in McKenzie until the early sixties. Leon worked there while it was being built. I was in junior high. David Mark was a year behind me.

I was too busy with the sports I loved to try something new. Besides, money was fairly scarce for us.

And money would not have made any difference seeing as how we didn’t know how to play. We had no clubs. Or shoes. Or really much of an inclination to chase a tiny ball across a cow pasture.

None of that bothered Leon one bit. As soon as it opened, he drug me and David out to the course. We rented one set of clubs. And we had one ball, which Leon had found, borrowed, or been saving for a “rainy” day.

I had never seen anyone swing a golf club in my life. We studied Roe Alexander and Joe Gooch as they teed off. Leon let them get way down the fairway, and he hit our only ball like a rocket ship taking off straight down the middle. Leon could just do things like that.

He made David run down and put a tee in the ground where the ball rested and bring it back to us. I made a practice swing and Leon immediately stopped me, “Slow down, you are not trying to hit a baseball over the service station behind the leftfield wall.”

I swung and missed. A couple of times. I finally hit it short and to the right. I ran over, marked the spot, and threw the ball back to the tee box so David could hit.

I think Roe and Mr. Gooch had finished their round before we walked off the first hole.

We found a ball beside the pond we had to hit over on the second hole. And we found another one in the woods on the left of the fourth hole. By the fifth hole each Colbert brother was playing his own ball.

Naturally, I lost my “new” ball on the next hole. “Leon, what are we doing out here? We don’t know nothing about playin—”

“It’s springtime. In America! We are enjoying the most beautiful day God ever made. And we are playing for the Championship of the Known World. Nobody but you would complain on a day like this!”

We didn’t hit a ball for a while, while he talked about my negative attitude and explained to us the history of golf. Leon could tell you everything about everything whether he actually knew anything about it or not.

He was giving us four shots a hole and beating the pants off of both of us.

He played our first round of golf as Arnold Palmer. He made me “be” Dow Finsterwald, David was Ben Hogan. Leon also began to announce our shots, like it was a radio broadcast, “Finsterwald is over his putt on the fifth hole here at Augusta; this one will break left towards Rae’s Creek,” he whispers. “Dow pulls the putter back, the ball is rolling, rolling…oohh, it just slides by the right side of the cup!”

Leon didn’t have many turn down days.

He made us hit every shot on every hole. “We didn’t come out here to mess around.” He won the championship on that first occasion. He also won it for the next 100 rounds we played together.

Nobody on earth liked golf, or life, more than Leon.

In July we would play in the British Open. Leon paid for all of us. And again, he won by a wide margin. He was Arnold Palmer, always. But he began to let me and Dave choose which professional we wanted to be. We had our own clubs by then. And he still did “play by play” on every shot….

David Mark came back from Vietnam, practiced enough to get a golf scholarship to Bethel College and beat me and Leon on a regular basis. I went to work at the golf course in the summers, practiced when they weren’t looking, and finally won the championship a time or two.

We played a lifetime of golf together. Leon still paid for most of it. When we tried to argue he would wave us off by saying, “I’m having more fun than both of you put together.” Leon died in 2014. Golf, and life, have never been the same.

But what a gift he gave us making us go with him on that first day back in 1961.

He would walk into the pro shop at a new course he had found for us over the years and ask loud enough for all to hear, “Where is the first tee…and what is the course record?”

And remind Dave and me when we found that tee, “I’m hitting first. We are going by age today. And guys, play hard. This is for the Championship of the Known World!”

Love you like a brother,
Dow
kesley45@aol.com