For Sandra Haynie, going through her late mother's belongings was such a melancholy milestone that she put it off for more than a year after Mary Jo Haynie's death. In the spring of 2007, she sat on her bed in Bedford, Tex., sorting through cardboard boxes filled with memories of her mother's life. When she upended one particular box, stacks of green, yellow and white Post-it notes tumbled out. There must have been a thousand of them. As she read, wonder replaced sadness. Be careful—be happy—be mine—love abounds, read one of the scrawled messages. I ain't rich with money but I feel wealthy—because I've got you.
The sentiments on these scraps of paper were evidence that her mother had been deeply loved by a man Sandra had never met. The odd thing was, the notes were in her father's handwriting. You are my everything—love in bloom??I hate to leave you for even half a day. But I'll be thinking of you all the way??It was my destiny to love you—so I do??It must be love! Why else would I think of you constantly?
Her father wrote love letters to her mother? He was capable of love? Haynie had never seen it.
"My father and I didn't get along from as far back as I remember," she says without flinching. We're sitting at a cozy table at the Four Seasons Resort and Club in the Dallas suburb of Irving. Brown-haired and articulate, Haynie is opening up on a topic she had previously only discussed with her psychiatrist. "He was very pushy regarding my golf and inclined to take credit for my success. Even into [my] adulthood, we'd get into such arguments. It could be about anything. Money. My schedule. There was always an undercurrent, and I was always wondering if he was going to explode."
Haynie's career was one of the greatest in LPGA history. Of her 42 career wins, four were majors; she was the Player of the Year in 1970. She dominated in 1974, winning six times, including the LPGA Championship and the U.S. Women's Open. Her peers in that golden age were fellow Hall of Famers Mickey Wright, Kathy Whitworth, Judy Rankin and Nancy Lopez. The strongest parts of her game were long fairway shots and putting, but her real strength resided inside: She was famous for her focus and her competitive fire. Yet one aspect of Haynie's life—her relationship with her father—sapped much of the joy from her triumphs.
Then, last year, she found those notes, and, after hearing that I was working on a book about golf parents, she called, compelled to share her story. "It's not my intent to make my father appear to be a bad man," Haynie told me. "My point is that this is a man I did not know. He was outgoing to others, but he shut me off. And I discovered that he had a real love for my mom even as he was a stranger to me."
Haynie had come to realize that parents occupy their own separate world, one that their children can never really access or understand until they are adults themselves, with their own conflicting sets of relationships, values and dreams. Sandra and Jim Haynie were an example of Dr. Spock's maxim that "parenting is a strange mix of stress and joys." For them, a golf club stirred the pot.
For years, Haynie tried to explain her father's constant disapproval by looking at his father and mother. About the only facts she gleaned were that his mother died on Christmas Eve the year he turned 9, and that while he was in high school, he lived with another family—a sad necessity of the Great Depression. Her father's father, a Southern Baptist minister, was an especially stern man who did not invite intimacy. "You couldn't really call him Granddad," says Haynie, who never even knew his first name. "He was convinced I was going to hell—for wearing jeans, or for playing golf, I guess—and often told me so. And every Christmas, it was the same gift: a bible."
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