Three Rights Make a Left

A PROUD PARENT MOMENT

There are moments in your kids’ lives that stand out and make you proud as a parent. It starts when they are little with little things like cleaning their room without being told. Showing kindness to another person. Things like that. It doesn’t stop when they are grown. Sometimes as an adult, your kids will demonstrate a degree of caring and ability that is far beyond your teaching and those moments make you very proud as a parent. I had one of those moments this weekend.

On Saturday, at the appointed tee time the temperature at the Teravista Golf Course in Round Rock Texas was 27 degrees. Mercifully the course manager delayed the start of the golf tournament for an hour to allow frost on the grass to subside as the temperature rose a few degrees. As I waited I had to ask myself: Why am I playing golf in this freezing cold?

I was far from alone in my golf cart waiting for the tournament to begin. As I looked down the path in front of the clubhouse, there was a full complement of players for the tournament. Every team spot had filled up and only one team failed to show up, I’m guessing because of the cold. My son made sure that two senior citizens were comfortable as I had a cart cover on the cart I shared with my brother Jeff and my granddaughter Harper, who rode along. We had a rare luxury on our cart. A propane heater. Few of the other golfers were as lucky. The day promised to be the coldest round of golf I had ever played, by far, even colder than Scotland.

Two months ago, I got a call from my oldest son TJ that he decided to plan a golf tournament to benefit his Father-In-Law Donnie Frietag to help with his medical bills. Last March Donnie, who is a heathy robust minister and a prominent consultant in high-tech security, contracted Covid. Donnie has had a very bad time with the pandemic. He has been in intensive care on a ventilator for the better part of a year. In all of that time he has never been without a family member by his side.

TJ has experience putting on golf tournaments, starting with the Rachel Blasingame Golf Tournament. I served as Co-Chair along with Sammy Walker, though in reality Sammy carried most of the load. When TJ was in his twenties we put him on the board of directors and he excelled. He took to it like a duck to water. However every tournament I have ever been involved in has taken a year of planning and work. What TJ was planning was risky. First he was planning to do it in two months, but even worse he was planning to do it on January 22nd, months before golf tournament season would begin. I told TJ my concerns but he was undeterred. He said that he thought he could raise as much as $15,000 even in January. I reluctantly told him that I was in and Lori and I committed to putting in some money to help pay for it.

Keep in mind that TJ lives in Jerrell, TX, north of Austin and I have very few contacts there, so I wasn’t much help. It was all TJ and his wide circle of thirtysomething friends as well as a few of us outside that demographic. Over the last couple of months, TJ has enthusiastically given me updates at least twice a week.

On Saturday the date final ly arrived. To say his tournament went off without a hitch was an understatement. The manager of the course said that it was the smoothest golf tournament he had ever been a part of. TJ had taken care of every detail.

There was another potential problem that I had concerns about. TJ had planned a big afterparty with a band, raffle prizes, an auction, and Texas BBQ. But that wasn’t at the golf course. It was 20 minutes away at Typhoon Texas Waterpark in Pflugerville where TJ worked when he first moved to Austin. The question was, would everyone show up? They did, almost everyone plus a lot of people who didn’t golf. Lori and I were treated to an army of TJ’s friends and his wife Sarah’s family telling us what a terrific person TJ is.

When everything was said and done TJ didn’t raise the $15,000 he had hoped to raise to help with Donnie’s medical bills. He raised nearly three times that amount netting $57,000 and clearing $44,000.

As a dad I couldn’t be prouder of my son, not just because of his heart and his ability but because of his wide circle of friends, most of whom I had never met. TJ is truly a remarkable man.