A medal by any other color...

Last year the medal was gold.  This year the medal is bronze.  Yet the color of the prize is irrelevant in a golf tournament where competition is NOT the point.  This was the Special Olympics National Golf Tournament, and even at this highest level the focus should be on doing your best and having fun. 

My grandson, Kody Montgomery, and I were expecting to do well in 9-hole Alternate Shot.  We were the defending gold medalists in the championship flight from the competition at Atlantic City, NJ in 2023.  We had won the gold medal at the Tennessee State Tournament last month, something we hadn’t done in 2023.

Bronze Medalists!

I am Kody’s unified partner, which means he is the special athlete and I’m his somewhat normal playing partner.  Kody is a special athlete.  He and his dad had won the gold medal in Corn Hole at the Tennessee state tournament the week before and he had gotten a silver in bowling as well.  Golf is something we have done together since Kody was small.  He owns 20% of the new golf cart as we had to sell his old one to upgrade for my retirement gift.  He is the designated driver everywhere except at the Special Olympics tournaments as the athlete is not allowed behind the wheel.  I get a lot of driving advice when we compete.

The national tournament was held this year at Crestview Country Club in Wichita, KS.  Crestview is a nice course, but didn’t look too tough on the flyover videos.  Pretty flat but with lots of trees. 

What didn’t show up in the flyover videos was the wind.

On the first day the wind blew about 30 mph with gusts up to 50.  I had seen wind like this during the three hurricanes I’ve survived as well as on spring days in Lubbock, TX when I was at Texas Tech.  The winds blew like this in Lubbock, but I didn’t play golf then and so never learned to flight the ball down.

We also had an issue on the first hole with a ball in the trees.  I hit a tree trying to just pitch out and things went downhill from there.  We ended up taking the 10-stroke maximum score for the hole.  We then wrestled with the wind for eight holes and limped in about 10 strokes higher than our target.  

Chris & Jack Miner from Connecticut

At about the next to last hole I could tell Kody was frustrated with a swing he made.  I determined maybe we had put too much pressure on ourselves.  I realized we had let competition take front and center.  I reminded Kody there was no place I would rather be, than with him on a golf course.  Whatever score we shot was our score.   We were just going to have fun.

We improved by five strokes the second day although the wind was about the same.  We finished a stroke out of the championship flight going into the final round. The third day the wind was down because it rained, but the temperature was about 40 degrees at tee time.  We once again had trouble on the first hole and shot a stroke higher than the day before to earn a bronze medal.

Somehow, we shot two strokes better overall for three rounds than our winning score the year before.  The weather was better in New Jersey, but the Seaview resort course was tougher.

The year before had been one of the most special weeks of my 70+ years.  Kody and I had won unexpectedly since we had only been silver medalists at the regional and state tournaments in Tennessee.  Kody was chosen to carry the torch into the opening ceremonies representing Tennessee to pass to New Jersey.  We had a story and our pictures in our hometown newspaper when we got back.  That was pretty “high cotton” as we say in Texas.

It was going to be hard for 2024 to live up to that experience.  We had a great road trip with Jan Hallmark orchestrating us across Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas and back to TN.  About 24 hours on the road.  We spent an evening at the Tanzanyika Wildlife Preserve where Kody got up close and personal with giraffes and lemurs. We got to visit the newest Bucee’s and had a great steak dinner the night of the final round after driving to our hotel in Springfield, MO.

Road Warriors!

We even coined a phrase for wind like we faced in the tournament - Wichita Wind!

Special Olympics athletics has been a Godsend to our family.  Special needs adults like Kody don’t have a lot of options after high school to meet people.  He went to a vocational college program that was interrupted by Covid and was lucky enough to be hired at the middle school within skateboarding distance from his house.  He had his family, his church family and work family, but who else?

Jan discovered there was a Special Olympics group that bowled in Lebanon.  Kody has since branched out to regular golf, Top Golf, basketball and corn hole.   He is blessed by an understanding boss who lets him take time off to compete.

As for me, I’m honored to be his unified partner.  If we were really focused on winning, I would yield to Kody’s dad, Kevin, who is a better golfer than me.  Our family is competitive, but we need to make this about more than winning. I think we need to focus instead on the Special Olympics motto:

“Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave at the attempt”