Writings

Then the day came, as it does eventually for all players, no matter how great, when I just couldn’t keep up the pace required to stay on the Tour. In 1984, I lost my card and was faced with the prospect of figuring out what to do with the rest of my life. I wasn’t […]

The trouble with a false god—even if your false god is named “working for Jesus”—is that at some crucial point in your life, its powerlessness becomes obvious. For me, the power gap showed up in my marriage. This was in the late 1970s. I was playing the Tour and doing pretty well. During my time […]

So, my problems were solved, right? Sure, I still had my Army service to get through (I was in ROTC at Florida), but God handled that pretty neatly too. Get this: on my very first day at Fort Bliss in El Paso, I went out to the golf course to play some golf, and a […]

After college I decided to get a master’s degree, with the idea that I might become a golf coach. Now that my life belonged to Jesus, continuing as a player and potentially going out on tour never was an option in my mind. It just didn’t seem like a very good thing to do. I’d […]

For years, people have told me I have more energy than anybody they’ve ever seen. It’s true: left to my own devices, I can go from one project to another, one tournament to another, one coaching session to another, one event to another—never looking around, never pausing, never stopping to reflect or question or savor […]

My dad had been a pretty good baseball player in his day, and I inherited his athletic ability. In the early years, before the corporate entertainment aspect of his career began (and the heavy drinking and chain-smoking that went with it), Dad got me interested in golf and baseball. We had probably twenty kids in […]

How is it possible for a guy to be a committed follower of Jesus like I was for thirty-six years and still miss out on the life offered to him through Christ? For me, the explanation goes back to my childhood. I grew up in Indiana, a Baby Boomer in the heartland. But my boyhood […]