When acclaimed golf writer James Dodson leaves his home in Maine to revisit Pinehurst, North Carolina, where his father first taught him the game that would shape his life and career, he’s at a point where he has lost direction. But once there, the curative power of the sandhills region not only helps him find a new career working for the local paper but also reignites his flagging passion for the game of golf. And, perhaps more significantly, it inspires him to try to pass along to his teenage son the same sense of joy and contentment he has found in the game, and to recall the many colorful and lifelong friends he has met on the links. This wise memoir about finding new meaning through an old sport is filled with anecdotes about the history of the game and of Pinehurst, the home of American golf, where many larger-than-life legends played some of their greatest rounds. Dodson's bestselling memoir Final Rounds began in Pinehurst twenty-five years ago, and now A Son of the Game completes the circle as it follows his journey of discovery back to where his love of the game began—a love that he hopes to make a family legacy. Dodson, author of the popular memoir Final Rounds (1996), revisits fathers, sons, and golf with this story of his return to Pinehurst, North Carolina, often considered the home of golf in America. For Dodson, it is also his own home, the place where his father introduced him to golf and where he hopes to inspire the same passion for the game in his teenage son. Turning down assignments from national magazines, Dodson takes a part-time job as “writer-in-residence” for a small newspaper in the Pinehurst area and moves into a cottage, juggling between North Carolina and his home and family in Maine. The fabled Sandhills, home not only to Pinehurst but also to dozens of other world-class golf courses, prove the perfect tonic for Dodson’s incipient midlife crisis, restoring both his sense of his past and his love of golf. This slow-paced, eulogistic memoir draws on the deep, near-archetypal feelings that dedicated golfers have for the game, its history, and their own connections to the fathers and mentors who first put clubs in their hands. A bit sentimental, to be sure, but, in Pinehurst, that’s the rub of the green. --Bill Ott A Son of the Game By JAMES DODSON Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill Copyright © 2009 James Dodson All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-56512-506-3 Chapter One Pants That Just Say Pinehurst At the end of Spring 2005, on my way to cover the 105th United States Open Championship at Pinehurst, I stopped off to buy a new pair of pants. I realize how unexciting this sounds, but buying new pants is a rare event for me, something I do about as frequently as Americans go to the polls to elect a new president, which may explain why my pants, always tan cotton khakis, look as if they've seen better days. In this instance, it was a perfect Sunday afternoon, twelve days before the start of our national golfing championship, and I'd just rolled into Pinehurst following a long drive from Maine. Actually, when I arrived, I had no intention of buying pants. I was mostly worrying about locating the small log cottage in the middle of Southern Pines that I'd rented sight unseen via telephone from a local realtor named Ed Rhodes, who casually informed me the key would be waiting beneath a stone angel by the back door. I was also vaguely wondering if I'd made the dumbest career move of my life by agreeing to go to work for the Southern Pines Pilot , the award-winning community newspaper of the Carolina Sandhills. Some guys, when facing a midlife crisis, roguishly splurge on a red sports car, or get hair plugs, or maybe even buy a secret condo in Cancn. Fresh from a year in which I'd traveled to Africa with exotic plant hunters and loitered at the elbows of some of the world's top horticulture experts, I'd merely yielded to the persuasive charms of The Pilot 's enthusiastic young publisher, David Woronoff, scion of a distinguished Old North State newspaper clan. Almost on a whim, I'd agreed to write a daily golf column for the paper's ambitious Open Daily tabloid during U.S. Open week. There was also a friendly conversation about the possibility of my staying on to write a Sunday essay after the Open circus left town, though nothing had been formally proposed, much less agreed upon. That wasn't by accident. Truthfully, I feared that I had little in the way of wit or current insight to offer The Pilot and its Open readers because, factoring in the four long years my brain had been focused upon the distant, well-ordered world of Ben Hogan and another kind of America, and adding two years for my absorbing romp through the garden world, I'd been out of the current game for a small eternity. Since the death of Harvie Ward and the dissolution of my longtime golf group back in Maine, in fact, I'd scarcely touched my own clubs or watched a golf tournament on tele