Paired Up with Jack: A Life Lesson from a Smooth-Swinging Five-Year-Old
“Can you block my husband from seeing this story? His expectations for our son will grow to an unhealthy level.”
“Safe to say this kid’s college is gonna be a free ride.”
“I’ve watched this 27 times. Pure.”
“OMG.”
“That’s the hip movement I need! Does he give lessons?”
Those were the first five comments on Instagram when I posted a video of Jack’s swing during our round together at Sewanee two weeks ago.
I felt the same way when I first saw his swing, and this even dates back several years. To try and remember when I was first impressed, I scrolled back on Jack’s mom’s Instagram and found a post from when he was barely three-years-old. One comment on that post was from Jack’s parents’ best friend, Jay, saying, “Swing looks better than mine.”
Although it’s this five-year-old’s swing that first catches your attention, what left me inspired after pairing up with Jack for nine holes moved me much deeper.
A Brief Rewind
Joseph holding his youngest son, Teddy, moments before an up and down on the eighth.
Jack is the oldest son of Joseph and Palmer, both of whom I met back in 2010. My college roommate, Clayton, was childhood best friends with Joseph in Memphis, where they better forged their relationship in the halls of White Station High School. Clayton went on to Tennessee, where he and I met, and Joseph attended Vanderbilt, the only SEC school that you can forget exists while living 10 minutes from their campus.
Just making sure my Vandy friends are paying attention.
Speaking of Vandy friends, most of them were made through Joseph during a weekend trip to Vanderbilt’s Rites of Spring, an annual music festival held on campus featuring well-known musical acts. To time stamp this weekend in 2010, a young Drake headlined, performing songs off of his 2009 So Far Gone mixtape like “Best I Ever Had” and “Successful,” and a young Jeremy consumed alcohol like the world was ending. In my defense, I was only off by about 10 years, apparently.
Rites of Spring, 2010… the year we all wore Polo. Clayton (left), me, Joseph (right).
When you meet Joseph, you feel like you’ve known him for years. Whether it’s over sports, pop culture, politics, or when to play an immunity idol on Survivor, Joseph can find a way to connect with anyone. Then he has a way of connecting you with his network of friends, just like he did for me in 2010. I arrived in Nashville that weekend only knowing Clayton, but I returned to Knoxville with five or six legitimate friends. When I moved to Nashville in 2014, knowing that crew was in town helped quell some of my anxiety. In present day, we all play fantasy football together, and a few of those same guys are in an overly-active golf group text with me—both formed by Joseph.
When I think about Jack’s golfing life ahead, I’m reminded of how big of a cheerleader Joseph has been in my life. He champions all of my creative endeavors, like when I did a t-shirt campaign to raise money for the Smoky Mountain wildfires, or when I used to write recaps of a certain Monday night reality show on ABC for a website we both contributed to—more on that another time, maybe—and there’s a good chance that you’re reading this right now because he shared this post too. Safe to assume that Jack will have the support he needs.
Admittedly, I don’t see Joseph near as much as I’d like—maybe it’s the phases of life we’re in, or that’s just part of getting older—but we still communicate regularly through text and social media, because we are millennials after all. But when I saw that Jack had really gotten into golf the past six months, I knew that would be an easy avenue to bring us together, even during the pandemic.
Now, back to my youngest pairing yet.
The Sneds Tour
“Do you ever watch golf on TV?” Joseph heard Jack ask his cousin, Walter, in the backseat of his car on the eve of their first Sneds Tour event.
“No,” Walter said.
“Well, you need to. Just watch it and do what they do. That’s what I do,” Jack responded.
Brandt Snedeker with his son (left), Jack (center), and another competitor.
This Spring, Jack started playing his first competitive golf tournaments as part of the Sneds Tour, a junior golf program in Tennessee created by nine-time PGA TOUR winner Brandt Snedeker in coordination with the Tennessee Golf Foundation. At five-years-old, Jack is in the youngest age division, 5 to 7, and Brandt has a son in the same group.
While 5-to-7-year-olds competing in a golf tournament might sound harder to watch than your nephew’s first basketball game where you just hope someone grazes the rim, the Sneds Tour is no joke. The parents caddie for the kids, they announce their names on the first tee, and they even have detailed tournament results online, including hole-by-hole scoring, meaning they count every stroke and follow all rules.
Jack had played his first few tournaments prior to our round at Sewanee, and it really showed from the moment we met in the parking lot.
Now on the Tee, Jack Williams
Joseph and Palmer had taken their three boys for a weekend getaway to a resort in northern Georgia, so on their way back home to Nashville we decided to meet each other at Sewanee. Jack’s grandfather, Buddy (Palmer’s Dad), also joined us for the round. He’s the teaching pro at Vanderbilt Legends Club, a private country club in the suburbs of Nashville.
The moment Joseph pulled in the parking lot, Jack hopped out with his pastel-striped collared shirt tucked into khaki shorts, his Sneds Tour hat on, and his golf glove secured tightly on his left hand, ready to go. It was as if he was dressed like a professional golfer for Halloween, and he completely fit the bill.
I was reminded of the last time I saw Jack a month prior on my way home from Sweetens Cove. I dropped off some merchandise for Joseph, and while talking on his front porch, Jack said, “I have a surprise, but it’s going to take me three minutes.” After disappearing into the house for what was an accurately-advertised three minutes, Jack reappeared in a full Newsies outfit—his latest Disney+ movie obsession of the week. A couple weeks before he was Henry Rowengartner from Rookie of the Year. Other times he is Davy Crockett with the coonskin cap, and if all else fails he has a deep rotation of superhero costumes.
But the one costume Jack can’t remove is his infectious spirit.
He can hardly wait to hit each shot, and this was evident when we pulled up to the first hole, a 530-yard par five. Jack hopped out of his cart ready to hit, while Joseph had to tell him that he’d take him further up in the fairway to tee off. Up ahead in the fairway, he had a six-person gallery for his opening tee shot—his parents, two brothers (Henry and Teddy), his grandfather, and me—and he didn’t disappoint. After two practice swings and a proper alignment check, Jack hit a beauty right down the middle, and away we went.
He played down the hill to the first green, carefully avoiding a bunker the size of 100 Jacks, and then he battled the uphill slope at the second. After a good shot we’d all say, “Great shot, Jack,” and he’d raise his hands in the air out of pure excitement before quickly returning his club to the bag and asking which one he should use next.
As we approached the third green, my head was spinning from watching Jack’s beautiful swing. I had recently spent a couple of days on the range trying to get my hips turned more towards the target at impact, and in watching him I realized he had that down better than me. Most kids his age hold a golf club like a hockey stick and swing it like they’re drilling for oil, but Jack’s swing is poetry in motion, and you can’t help but feel as if you’re watching two-year-old Tiger hit shots on the Mike Douglas Show with Bob Hope, or a young Rory McIlroy chip into a washing machine. As I was about to ask how he learned it, Jack said, “This is my favorite hole.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
He stood flat footed, looking like he had just seen a ghost, and whispered, “That,” pointing forward at the infinity-edge third green that looks down upon a rolling green terrain of mountains underneath a blue sky.
Jack was more interested in the mountain views than talking about his swing—and rightly so—but the person who might be responsible for it was in our pairing.
Not Your Average Grandfather
If you ever needed to find Jack’s grandfather, Buddy, during our round, all you had to do was look in the middle of the fairway. At 68, Buddy still has some serious game, but golf wasn’t his first love.
Born and raised in Nashville, Buddy devoted most of his time to baseball. His high school team won the state championship, and then his college team, Lipscomb University, went to the NAIA World Series three times in four years.
Buddy caddying for Jack in his first Sneds Tour event last month.
By the way, Jack’s other main sports interest? Baseball, where just last week he had a little league game in the evening after playing in a golf tournament that morning.
After coaching baseball for a few years after college, Buddy decided to get serious about golf at age 25, moving to Miami to be an Assistant Pro. You’ll be on the move quite a bit in that line of work, and golf took Buddy to multiple places in Florida, back to Nashville to coach Lipscomb’s men’s and women’s golf teams, then to Kentucky for a while to teach, and eventually back to Nashville where he lives and teaches golf today—Jack being his youngest student.
Buddy felt his game improving at each stop, so after turning 50 he started playing Monday Qualifiers on the Champions Tour, making it into around 15 events in three or four years. His excellent play took him as far as the PGA Championship at Hazeltine in 2004, two US Senior Opens, and two Senior Open Championships in Scotland at Troon and Turnberry.
So maybe the golf gene was in Jack’s DNA at birth.
But even with all of the great golf Buddy has seen in his life, we were all treated to an unbelievable moment on the seventh green.
In Your Life
Whether you’ve played in major championships or if you’re in the Sneds Tour’s youngest division, putting can make or break your score. For Jack, this was the area of his game that needed the most improvement, according to Joseph.
Even if he would get his shot on the green in three or four shots, it could be just as many shots right around the hole. A three-foot putt would zoom past the hole leaving a six-foot putt coming back, causing your heart to melt for him.
So on the seventh green, Jack hit his approach shot about 40 feet passed the pin, leaving him with a downhill putt that would require excellent pace. Like a good golf content creator (sarcasm intended), I reached for my phone to film it just in case we had some fireworks. Jack lined up the putt and sent it towards the hole, with each foot of ground covered you could tell there was only one place it was going to end up. As it slowed to a crawl we all froze and looked on like a Last Supper painting, and when it dropped in the cup we screamed in disbelief as Jack threw both hands in the air. It was the best shot of his young life, and one that we talked about the rest of the week.
fresh eyes
After eating lunch on the patio and saying our goodbyes, I was inspired by my time with Jack and company.
Was it from marveling at his swing for 2 hours? No—but that certainly was stunning to watch, and I’ve rewatched a slow-mo video I posted more times than I’d like to admit, maybe you have too. But at age five, you don’t care about the clubs, your outfit, the course design, you aren’t drowning in swing thoughts, and you have very little scar tissue from previous outings. You just want to play, and that’s what Jack did. He raised his hands in the air at the good shots—like the 40ft BOMB he made—and he didn’t seem to care about the bad ones.
But really, at his age, there’s so much newness in his life, and especially with golf. Every chip around the green could be the first time he’s ever chipped in, and that putt he made on number seven is probably the longest one he’s ever made. Each new hole comes with so much newness and possibility that he hardly ever walks in between shots, but rather he sprints Sergio-style, yet in a cute kid way—almost like he’s hovering. Watching him run from shot to shot made me realize how tired my golf eyes or perspective around the game can get, and if we’re being honest, it made me analyze where else in my life my eyes are really tired and need to see some newness that would make me want to sprint with excitement.
Luckily for golfers, we are presented with an opportunity for newness every time we show up at the course, and that comes in the form of a stranger. We get to decide if we want to do our same old routine at the same course, or play with a stranger, get to know them, and listen to their story. What I’ve found is that doing this at a course you’ve played a million times brings it to life in a whole new way.
Jack grabbing his ball out of the hole on the infinity-edge third green at Sewanee.
For instance, last Sunday at my local muni, a course I’ve played countless times, I paired up with a guy named Sterling who just moved to Nashville a month ago. On the first hole he told me about his hometown of Sandwich, IL. By hole 3 he told me that he works in sales for a company that sells infectious disease tests—you can guess what we talked about—and by the last hole he told me about how he is going home in a few weeks to renovate his mom’s house to sell it, which is a tall order because his father, who passed two years ago, was a hoarder so they’re still trying to comb through mountains of newspapers, loose trinkets, and anything imaginable.
That unplanned connection with Sterling brought that round to life that evening in a way that playing by myself with a podcast in my headphones could never match.
But, back to my youngest playing partner yet—Jack wasn’t a stranger to me, this was my first time playing with him, and watching his infectious enthusiasm cause him to scamper from shot to shot presented Sewanee in a completely different form than I had seen it in my 10+ previous trips. Hole seven wasn’t just a dogleg-left par 4 with trouble all up the left side, but rather it was the hole where Jack made a 40-foot putt and couldn’t wipe the smile off of his face.
I know which description of hole seven I’ll remember much longer.
Just like the golden hour sun reveals the topography of land that looked flat during the mid-day sun, Jack casted his rays of fresh perspective on our day at Sewanee, exposing the pure joy in playing golf.
For that, I thank him.
Now, back to watching videos of his swing.
For more photos and videos, hop over to @pairedupgolf on Instagram and Twitter.
