The Nine Lessons Read Online Free PDF

promised to help me tow my car out of the mud when there was daylight to help us. Once we pulled into my driveway I briefly apologized for the rude awakening in the middle of the night.
    “Forget it,” he said sternly. “But I bet that wife of yours would like to hear a bloody ‘I’m sorry’ or two.”
    I looked up at the house. As early as it was in the morning, the bedroom light was still on. “Yeah,” I said softly, tapping my fingers nervously on London’s unusual stack of journal entries. I took a big breath, swallowed my pride, and went in to face my pregnant wife.
    To my great relief, the handle to the bedroom door was unlocked. I turned it slowly clockwise and pushed on the door. The light was on in the room, but Erin was sound asleep in the chaise near the window. Probably waited there all night for me to come home so she could give me the lashing I deserve, I thought. I scooped her up carefully in my arms and laid her on the bed. She awoke as I tucked a blanket around her.
    “You came back,” she said groggily.
    “Yes,” I whispered and kissed her on the forehead. “I came back.”
    She squinted through very tired eyes. “And?”
    “And… it looks like I’m going to be a father.”
    “And?” she asked again.
    I knew she was fishing for a formal apology, but I found it hard to say the words. Part of me felt like “I’m sorry” would seem hollow, given my incredibly poor reaction to the news of her pregnancy. Another part of me was afraid to apologize at all for fear that she would misinterpret that to mean my opinion on the matter of her pregnancy had somehow changed. But there was at least one tiny portion of my subconscious that understood full well that not apologizing to my wife right then, no matter how trite such an apology might sound, was marital suicide. “And… I’m sorry for how I reacted earlier.”
    “Good,” she said curtly, “that’s a start. If you’re lucky, I’ll forgive you tomorrow.” Erin rolled over and drifted quickly back to sleep, but I was still too wound up to follow her lead. I sat for another hour just running the day’s events through my mind, stewing on every little detail, looking for ways that things might have turned out different. But no matter how the thoughts churned in my head, I couldn’t change the fact that I had unwittingly stepped onto a path that led straight toward fatherhood, and the thought terrified me to no end. I cringed as I considered my own father and wondered if there was any chance that I could avoid ending up just like him. Was I destined to follow in his miserable footsteps? Was the genetic die already cast, or could I somehow find a way to break free from the dark shadow that London had cast on the title of father?
    Rehashing my father’s shortcomings eventually gave way to thoughts of my mother. I retrieved the stack of scorecards and removed the thick rubber bands that kept them bound. There were more than fifty of them, all from the first half of 1973. Most were from Torrey Pines and Pebble Beach, famous golf courses located in California, but there were also a few from Pine Valley golf course in New Jersey. They were stacked in chronological order.
    I grabbed the topmost card and started reading, and within a matter of minutes I’d learned more about my mother—and, for that matter, my father—than I’d known in my entire twenty-seven years on earth.

CHAPTER 4

    When you fall in love with golf it is never easy; it is obsession at first sight.
    —Thomas Boswell
    J anuary 7, 1973 —It is late at night, but I cannot rest until the events of this day are recorded, lest I wake tomorrow and convince myself that it was all just a dream. And should it turn out to be a dream, God help the person who wakes me!
    As I’ve written before, I have been keenly focused on improving my skills on the golf course, training each day in pursuit of obtaining full-fledged PGA membership. To that end I have strived diligently to keep my