Jake's World

The fat brown football hung in the cool autumn sky. Eleven Ducks held it in their gaze as they ran down the field, not an easy thing to do, because an equal number of Rams were attempting to knock the quackers on their asses and practically all the thousands of fans in the stadium wanted them to do exactly that. This was a home game for Fordham, at the Polo Grounds in the Bronx, New York City, Saturday afternoon, Oct. 15, 1938. The Rams were beasts in the East; they had been undefeated in '37 and would drop only one game in '38. The boys from the University of Oregon, on the other hand, lost about as many as they won. But they looked vivid in their white jerseys with green numerals over emerald pants. The white pattern painted on their leather helmets resembled headphones or earmuffs. Fordham wore maroon.

As the punted ball tumbled down from its apogee, its potential receiver extended his right arm and waved, a gesture indicating his wish to catch the thing unmolested in return for a promise to not advance after he caught it. But one running Duck, number 49, missed or ignored the white flag, and he leveled the Fordham man with such extreme prejudice that spectators gasped before they started to boo. Referees immediately threw Erling Jacobsen out of the game.

Fordham won, 26-0. The momentarily disgraced football player boarded a train with his teammates for the long slow ride back to Oregon. He'd traveled from one coast to the other and back for a football game in which he lasted only four plays. What manner of man would he become? The verdict among his friends and family 50-odd years later would be surprisingly unanimous. Erling Eugene Jacobsen was a gentleman but not a gentle man, simultaneously fierce and funny, stoic and strict. A caddie as a kid, he held out golf to his wife and children as a suitable activity, and he guided the project along until their cumulative handicap was 27, a microscopic number for a family of six. Despite the most severe provocations, he never complained, and he couldn't tolerate those who did. He was a stickler regarding rules and comportment and had a complementary and frequently expressed disdain for golf carts and for the wimps who would ride in them. He taught his kids by the hour and they won tournaments by the score, but he almost never watched them in competition.

A moment: Erling came to breakfast dressed for work one morning and observed his two college-aged sons at the table digging into bowls of corn flakes. "What the hell are you doing here?" he asked. "We're playing in the Oregon Open," they explained. "It started yesterday." Father snapped open the sports page and observed a headline: Jacobsen's 68 leads Open. "Maybe you should withdraw and go back to Eugene," he said to the tournament leader, Peter, and to his oldest son, David, who'd shot a few more than his brother. "You boys need to focus on your studies."

"I knew Erling since the late '40s," says Tom Edlefsen. "A character. Jesus. A firecracker. A very positive man but not flexible at all; there was no difference of opinion with him. He was tough with those kids. Tough love, although that was a term we never used. He insisted they do it right.

"He could be difficult as hell. When I was president of the club, he became unhappy with some trivial thing—a branch was trimmed incorrectly or something—so he asked me, 'Did you have anything to do with this?' And I said, 'I guess so, I'm the president.' He said, 'Then you should resign.' He and his brother Leif, they were Vikings, believe me. He was a damn good man."

Golf Dads: Fathers, Sons, And The Greatest Game published by Houghton Mifflin Company. © 2008 by Curt Sampson

If you don't look too closely, the incidents and accidents around the gruff but benign patriarch seem like fodder for a television sitcom. His wife and golf tournament-winning kids loved him, and indulged him. Their conflicts could easily be portrayed as mild and comedic, set at the country club, and resolved in half an hour. "Wow," he said, observing his daughter on the practice tee once. "Someone's gained some weight." Consciousness-raising on what puberty does to girls' hips—that could be an episode. He was a prankster: While on vacation, he used breadcrumbs to lure a couple of geese into his sons' bedroom to wake them up. The birds accomplished their mission, but it was messy. He was a disciplinarian: When teenaged Peter threw a club and uttered several magic words that we'd have to bleep, Erling ordered him off the golf course. Peter couldn't wait in the clubhouse and have everyone ask him what was going on, so he sat in the car for an hour or two, muttering and alone with his thoughts. That's a show. And there'd be some laughs in this golf dad's wonderful lack of awareness of popular culture. Once he was invited to walk inside the ropes at a celebrity pro-am, the better to mingle with his son Peter and Clint Eastwood. "So, Clint," he said, shaking the actor's hand. "What do you do?" But Erling's journey was far too complex for a sitcom, and although it was frequently fun, it wasn't really funny. Life eventually hit him with its very worst. He became the guy getting clobbered when all he wanted was a fair catch.

The short silver prop plane zoomed through smoke and boiling air. As anti-aircraft fire popped and pinged into its wings, the pilot felt an irresistible desire to fly higher above the guns on Truk or Okinawa or Formosa, but he couldn't get high and stay there, not if he wanted to do his job. The Curtiss SB2C Scout, a dive-bomber, crew of two, held a thousand-pound bomb in its fuselage and smaller bombs under each wing. Pilot in front, gunner-navigator in the rear, both encased in a clear eggshell that allowed them to see and be seen. The "Helldiver" had to get ridiculously low—about 1,200 feet—to be effective. Erling Eugene Jacobsen flew from, and landed on, a carrier called the USS Intrepid.