Remeber the Titans- The Sham-Na-Pum edition

It’s so funny about time - you get into these nice little grooves with people you love, and you think it’ll go on forever. But time goes so fast, and nothing goes on forever.”

Henry Winkler

At the beginning of the movie Remember the TItans, a legendary High School football team gets together to remember a teammate who has tragically passed away. It's a nice scene and there is singing and all the rest of it. But it also captures a different kind of feeling when you see someone you haven't seen in a while that used to be a huge part of your life. That simultaneous feeling of being a brother and a stranger at the same time. I recently thought about this when I read my old pal Nate Lee had died. He was one of the kindest, sweetest guys you could ever meet.

You see, once upon a time, I inhabited a time and a place still frozen in time in my memory called Sham-Na-Pum golf course. It really wasn't much of a course. Just a flat patch of land off the side of a busy road.

But I can tell you with my hand placed firmly on my heart, that the Shenanigans that went on here would make Caddyshack look like a movie about choir boys. One way or another, we would have to GET ourselves to the course. Most of us rode our bikes, some relied on parents, and a couple of older kids had cars. Much like any hierarchy, it was tough to break in with the older guys. One of the initiation rituals involved pushing the outhouse adjacent to the 6th hole over. But more on that later. In the summer, the logistics of our day meant getting to the course sometime in the morning, and we would remain there until well after dark most days. And of course SOME of what we did was play golf. After all, we were there for like 16 hours. And we even got pretty good at it. There was a state championship in there, several guys who went on to be golf pros, and plenty of individual accolades. And we were extremely competitive, but that was certainly not the only vibe going on. Like any good 80's movie will tell you, the gang of misfits always needs an enemy. And boy did we find plenty. These enemies primarily consisted of the people trying to keep the golf course running smoothly, namely the greenskeepers and the golf pros. They would give us serious speeches about character and golf being a "gentleman's game." And we would arrive at their homes in the middle of the night with toilet paper and eggs. I remember once reading an article by one of the world's great golf writers called "The Glory Game at Goat Hills." He recounted stories of playing the course backwards and 16 guys teeing off in the same group, etc. Again, it seemed pretty tame compared to the things we would get up to. My friend Nate was the youngest and newest member of the group, somewhat affectionally named "thin" Lee. He had not yet "made his bones" by tipping the outhouse over, but he seemed to be one of us, and the time was coming. Now you might ask yourself, what would possess a group of young men to continually knock down an outhouse that was there for other's convenience? As a mostly continent middle-aged man, I can certainly see the utility of this feature on a golf course. But as a 16-year old who regularly played with 50-something year-old men known for discussing the intricacies of their digestive issues? That shit wasn't on. Literally or figuratively. The large group we played with was called the "Gangsome," and consisted mainly of these older cranky guys discussing said bowel movements. The whole group was full of characters. There was Bill Norton, who always had a bottle of Schnapps in his bag and was happy to share despite our poverty of age. He always got more cross-eyed as the round went on. There was Bob Ibatuan, who golf cart was equipped like Al Czervik, the rich millionaire from Caddyshack (there was liquor in there as well). There was "Rod" who would become enraged if the group in front of him was playing too slowly and explode, which we did everything in our power to encourage. And at the top of the enemies list was Les, who was an extremely slow player who was in the habit of sitting on his putter. And I don't mean leaning on it. That thing went in deeper than a doctor giving a proctology exam. He was at the top of a (long) nemesis list. Anyway this ragtag group of 30 or so would gather on Saturday and Sunday mornings and split into teams. One day Nate and I were in a group with the aforementioned Les, when we saw him walk over to the miraculously standing outhouse (it was almost never standing). I knew this would slow down our already tedious pace, and I looked over at Nate and gave him the nod. "You know what you have to do now Cowboy," I said. And Nate's eyes lit up, and I swear he would have knocked that outhouse over with Les in it if I hadn't stopped him. So we came back later and finished the job. Hearing Les and another old Pepto guy talking about how those damn kids "knocked it over" again brought us some satisfaction. No more dumps on the 6th hole when we are trying to play quickly. it was like a Sicilian message. After that, something in Nate changed. He went from being that little kid always looking up to the older kids, to a very good golfer, to someone who eventually competed in the state championships two years in a row. Now I'm not suggesting knocking over the outhouse gave him some kind of magical powers. But I'm also not, not suggesting that either. Looking back on those days, I think now about all of us at the same age as those old men we used to torture. Probably with the same leaky bowels and enlarged prostates. Life has a way of reminding you of the shit you've done. But beyond all of the endless pranks, what I will really remember from those years is what it feels like to have that level of friendship with someone. I am reminded of a quote from the movie Stand by Me, where the narrator poses the question, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”

And so of course I feel sadness for the loss of my friend. We lost touch, like we promised not to do. As Joni Mitchell once so eloquently said, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. 

And in our case this was literally true. It turned out our little paradise sat on valuable real estate, and what was once our eternal summer playground was turned into a series of high-end restaurants and hotels. Sure there's still a golf course there, but it's nothing like it used to be.

Nothing ever is.

But anyway, goodbye Nate. Know that you occupy a place in my heart and imagination that is eternal. 

Those were the days my friend.