Escaping the rough by choosing the right club
In 1964, when I was 12 years old, our family moved from Georgetown to London Ontario. This permanent change of scene came as a devastating blow, complete with the typical leaving behind of school and friends, entailing the requisite adjustment to a new, bigger city culture. In Georgetown, my greatest joy in life and my escape hatch from the atmosphere of mania and acute anxiety that reigned in our family home was to play hockey and baseball year round, both street games and the more organized variety of team activities. Not only did I play these sports religiously but I also memorized a vast array of statistics gleaned from a massive collection of hockey and baseball cards purchased with money purloined from my heritage coin collection. Like Raymond, the autistic-spectrum character from the film Rain Man, I repeated sports statistics over and over in my head to quell chronic and near debilitating anxiety while I lay in bed sleepless night after night, the victim of acute insomnia that persists to this day.
I was a dud at sports and a disaster at school phys. ed., but I knew all the dope on all the players and cheered on my favourite teams, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Detroit Tigers, with a quiet desperation that bordered on the pathological.
Much to my chagrin, in London there was little in the way of organized baseball, and although kid hockey did exist, the opposing teams were often manned with adolescent mastodons who enjoyed nothing better than brawling. My career ended abruptly at the ripe old age of 13 after I was mercilessly pummelled by a testosterone-enhanced farm boy from a rural team, the Lucan-Ilderton Combines.
Fortunately London had a unique sporting venue that rushed in to fill the breach: a public golf course called Thames Valley, where individuals with limited means could play for next to nothing a sport usually reserved for rich elites. My father happened to have a set of rusty ancient clubs that he’d inherited from my Scottish granddad, with strange names like niblick, mid-mashie, and spoon. I took up the sport with an obsessive passion commensurate with my compelling need to escape the wild and woolly tension that reigned at home and the agonies of adolescence which so beleaguered my life at school.
For the next five years, from March until November, I spent nearly every non-school waking hour at that golf course, learning the sport and earning the money to pay for balls, clubs, and lessons by working ceaselessly as a caddie. I became thoroughly obsessed with golf. I read Golf Digest and memorized all the players’ stats and tips. When I wasn’t playing round after round (sometimes as many as 54 holes a day), I spent endless hours on the practice range whacking thousands of balls, before moving over to the putting green to improve my “short game.”
I practiced day and night to become a somewhat proficient golfer and spent all my caddie and babysitting money on second hand clubs that were a step up from those of my grandpa. Like Salieri in the play Amadeus, I was cursed with mediocrity and had to play second fiddle to many a fairway Mozart among my golfing friends. At Thames Valley, we systematically handed in our scorecards and on the basis of our results were assigned a handicap, which sounds like an imposed disability ( a “challenge” or “special need”), but which actually referred to the average of how many strokes over par you played per round, based on an average of your better rounds.
I eventually reached a 13 handicap and often played with guys who were much more gifted than I could ever hope to be, with my stiff swing and tendency to shank. (Those who’ve never played golf need to be forewarned that it’s among the most frustrating sporting activities to take up, perhaps one notch below bareback bronco riding.)
Pyrrhic victory: Winning a fishing reel
In 1966, at the ripe old age of 14, all this hard work and missionary zeal was rewarded: I placed 10th in the Junior Jaycee Golf Tournament, Juvenile Category, shooting a 17 over par 87.
Junior Golf – Picture – 1966 – pg 1
Junior Golf – pg 2 – Scores – 1966
My random, unlikely prize: a fishing reel.
And I hated fishing.
Growing up in my family, any purported pursuit of pleasure soon turned into torture, especially exercises in bonding with my dad.
As an employee of the Canadian National Railway, my father, Jim McBryde, was the proud possessor of an unlimited-travel train pass, the benefits of which extended to all members of our nuclear family. So it was that we crisscrossed Canada and the United States on family holidays that generated even more anxiety than everyday life.
Dad was obsessed with fishing, and from a very early age I would be bundled onto a night train and dragged into remote corners of northern Ontario, places with names like Gogama, Longlac, and Hornepayne, on father-and-son fishing trips, usually in the company of at least one of his office cronies, including the rather aptly named Mr. Mel Hunter. The train pass didn’t cover sleeping car accommodations, so we would sit up all night on 14-hour chugs into the muskeg of the far north, Dad and Mr. Hunter smoking and gossiping about work while I sat lumpishly, dreading the snags and castigations to come.
Once we arrived, bleary eyed, in the latest god-forsaken outpost of angling, Dad would bait the hook and cast my line into the shoals, where it would immediately become snagged. The celebrated author and iconic angling enthusiast Ernest Hemingway would have disowned a son like me. And although my father was in fact a city slicker and himself hardly adept with hook, line, and sinker, he would be so crabby about my snags that I would actually sit still, snarled for hours, the rocks piercing my tender behind, so as to avoid reopening the can of entanglement worms with Dad.
Meanwhile my father and Mr. Hunter would down prodigious quantities of the fiery beverages that lubricated their expeditions and served to compensate for the dearth of pike and pickerel that inevitably undermined these adventures in the wild.
Inevitably Dad would lumber over to my solitary perch as the interminable angling afternoon wore on, exhaling fumes as toxic as those of the steam locomotive that dumped us on these dismal shores, and would confide that he was soon going to die.
Just as inevitably, I would cry. I cried and cried. I didn’t want to lose my dad, even though he was often so mean and corrosive that, lashed by his words, I felt flayed, excoriated, gasping for life itself like the goggle-eyed fish that floundered in a more fortunate angler’s basket.
A first brush with mourning foretold. A practice session for the waves of tears experienced in the wake of my true love’s harrowing death.
Anne Schlenker McBryde, felled by brain cancer, May 3, 2026.
Your friend,
Robert
https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/
If you feel like reading more about Anne’s cancer journey, I’ve chronicled it in prose and poetry here:
https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/news/