Paul Daugherty: To my absent friends, thank you for the reminders

Red Smith, the famed sports columnist, wrote that dying is easy. "The least of us will manage that," Red determined. "Living well is the trick."

Ron Curran lived well. No, check that. He lived terrifically. I know because I asked him. Ron was old when I met him and then he had cancer, which aged him in dog years. His health was of particular concern to him, and to me.

"How you feelin’, Ron?" I’d ask him, sometimes twice, every time I saw him.

"Terrific, terrific, terrific," Ron would say. Three terrifics. Every time.

By the time he died, Ron had taught me to play "solid, respectable golf," which is to say I could shoot mid-90s and feel terrific about it. If that had been Ron’s only lesson, I’d never have forgotten him. (Or forgiven him, depending on my game on any given day.) 

As it was, golf was just the opening of the door. It was Ron’s way of teaching me about everything else.

Do you believe we meet people for a reason? That they are sent into our lives, purpose in hand, to make us better versions of ourselves? I do. I believe that. And I knew this world – or some other world, entirely mysterious – had dispatched Ron Curran to me, same as Someone sent the angel Clarence to George Bailey.

It is, in fact, a wonderful life.

Lots of people have danced up and back through my days. It has been the nature of the job. I’ve met people. It was also natural to let them go. Not purposely, of course. The river of time has taken them. Time passes, so do we.

Some folks remain. Joe Acito, the late, great English teacher at Elder, remained. We were friends for 20 years, from the day Joe was so nervous about being at an East Side establishment, he knocked his beer all over my wife’s lap. Joe was a West Side guy. Once, he invited me to play golf at a course he ascertained was “halfway between’’ his home at Hidden Valley Lake in southeast Indiana and mine in Loveland.

"Miami Whitewater," Joe said.

Joe’s friendship gave me the Elder people, whom I love to this day, and a big appreciation for the deep bonds of family and friendship on that side of town. Joe did not leave me his sense of direction or geography. Good.

Skip Prosser was my friend. He wasn’t supposed to be. Media hacks aren’t supposed to befriend the people they write about. It messes with the objectivity. Well, heck with that. Skip was an immensely good human being, a lover of literature and Guinness, not necessarily in that order.

He’s atop an Irish cliff now, somewhere on the Dingle Peninsula, alternately reading a fine book of Celtic history and staring at the waves. Someday, who knows when, I will join him.

I didn’t cover my lifelong best friend Fred, even as I occasionally wrote about him. Fred was a trapped soul, whose courage kept him trying at life. Whose example I never forgot. A few years ago, Fred died alone in a Tucson, Arizona, motel room, 30 years after the vodka got ahold of him.

Jim Daugherty died in September 2018. Elsye Daugherty passed 11 months later. My parents reminded me of time’s thievery. Best protect our time while we’re able. Their deaths influenced my retirement. I’m 64. Plenty of living left, but not behind a keyboard. 

I met Ron Curran in about 1995. I was at the Golf Center at Kings Island, waiting out a rain delay during a round of what they used to call the Kroger Senior Classic golf tournament. I started reading The Enquirer classified ads, why I have no idea. Never read them before, never placed one. Life is happenstance.

In a four-line ad – INSTANT BOGEY GOLF, it blared – Ron promised to teach me "solid, respectable golf" in three hours. Yeah. Sure. After that, I would prep for my Everest ascent with a week on the stair-stepper. I called Ron, though. What the heck.

He had me putt at a dime across a motel-room rug. The diameter of a golf cup is 4¼ inches, Ron explained. If I could roll the ball over a dime, a golf hole would look like the Grand Canyon.

Our friendship lasted 15 years, give or take. Maybe five years into it, Ron got the cancer. He didn’t talk about it, ever. Instead, he kept playing golf whenever he could. The disease took the strength from his left leg. Ron adapted his swing and still managed to hit the ball 175 yards off the tee, off his back leg, without rotating his body through the swing.

He never complained. His leg gave him constant pain. More than once, he fell while we played. Simply collapsed. Ron used his clubs as canes, walking from his golf cart to his ball.

The last time we met on a golf course, he fixed the horrible shank that had infected my short game. "How, you feelin', Ron?" I asked.

"Terrific, terrific, terrific."

That was in May of 2011. Ron died on the last day of that August. He was 75.

He’d been a salesman. He started Instant Bogey Golf for something to do in retirement. He got good at teaching the game. Money from the lessons he gave covered his health insurance bills. Ron helped lots of people play better golf. He reminded me golf was incidental to his bigger lessons.

Ron knew how to appreciate. He was good at gratitude. He taught me that playing good golf was not the point. Simply playing golf was the point. By the end, Ron was playing on one leg.

I think of him now, whenever I feel a whine forming on the tee box or in the rough. I’m a little ashamed of me. Then I think of Ron and it goes away.

Life is only a little about who we are today. It’s more about who we’re capable of becoming. In learning from the past, we honor the future. To absent friends Ron, Joe, Skip, Fred, Jim and Elsye, thank you for the reminders.