Bethpage and Me — Playing golf and embracing life: A family affair on Long island

Golf Digest, June, 2002 by Ed Weathers

In the summer, Mr. Nistad was the caddiemaster at Bethpage. He took new caddies out on the course and taught them where to stand, how to tend the flag and how to find balls. It was from him that, at age 13, I first learned where not to let my shadow fall.

Mr. Nistad ruled the caddie house with the same calloused hand that he taught phys. ed. The caddie house was a quarter mile up the road from the golf courses. You put your name on the list and waited to be called. When someone at the golf courses wanted a caddie, the phone rang and Mr. Nistad yelled a name. When you were called, you ran to the course.

Meanwhile, we caddies hung around waiting. Sometimes I'd read. More often, I tried to get a shot at the Ping-Pong table. It was there that I discovered the noble, savage nature of table tennis.

The highlight of my brief caddie career came when I was 14, and a slick guy from the city who looked like Frank Sinatra and smoked cigars asked me to be his "regulah" caddie when the round was over. I never heard from him again. I caddied for only one summer. I didn't have my brother Bobby's work ethic.

EPILOGUE

My father helped found the Little League in Farmingdale and later devoted his life to voluntary school-board work. In that, he was like thousands of other civic saints of his generation who gave every ounce of themselves to the welfare of my generation. Anyway, Dad was locally kind of famous. Last summer, when I played the Black Course at Bethpage in a media shotgun outing, the marshal who took us to the hole where we were to start noticed my name tag. He looked surprised and asked if my father was Terry Weathers. I said yes. He said, "Terry Weathers--I loved that man. Let me shake your hand."

If Bethpage feels that way about me and mine, you can imagine how I feel about Bethpage.

And today, in the cabinet under my mother's television set in her apartment in Farmingdale, is a videotape labeled "Weathers Family." Onto the tape, my sister Joyce (who worked the cash register at Bethpage when she was in high school and college) has transferred the 8-millimeter home movies we took of the family in the '50s and '60s. The film is all flickery and overexposed--the result of repeated showings through the white-hot projectors of the period. The first 45 seconds of the tape--the earliest moving picture of my family--shows my father in 1951, again in a white shirt and tie, pretending to sneak out of the house. He is carrying, in one hand, a Sunday bag full of golf clubs and is followed by our friend Mr. Priest, carrying a driver. They skulk into a 1949 Ford and wave conspiratorially to the camera from inside the car. Just as they are about to drive off, the camera swings around and my mother comes running out of the house in hot pursuit, waving a rolling pin. She is laughing her head off. There the scene abruptly ends.

It is a sweet and funny bit of business, this piece of film, and of course it means the world to me. Whenever I'm on a golf course, I often think of my father, who died in 1992. I imagine him on a bright summer Sunday, overexposed and pursued by my laughing mother, sneaking off for a round of golf at Bethpage.