Knapp Fred D and Son

I’m slouched low in the theater’s first row and my answer is filling the screen, standing on a movie-land 1st tee, his bright blue eyes watery in the cool of 8 a.m., giveaway baseball hat covering the top of his bald head. He’s wearing a TV mobster’s windbreaker, long polyester shorts and sheer black businessman socks. His matching golf shoes are untied and he’s dragging the plastic tips of their waxed laces through the morning dew. The scorecard in his back pocket is semi-lodged at best and you can only wonder when it will fall out. He has his driver in his tanned hands and he’s ready to go, or ready as he’ll ever be, anyway. My golf partner, Fred. Or, to borrow the sign-off he used on a hundred voicemail messages, “FRED!” It’s like he never left.A golf partner is different from a tennis partner or a business partner or a law partner. Of that foursome, only your golf partner is always rooting for you. Through the rounds and over the years, your golf partner — your Fred — becomes some other thing. It’s all those outdoor hours together. The shared pain of duffed shots. The teamwork of a genuine ball-search. The empathetic handshake on the home green. You’ve endured something together, and it could have been better.Then you retreat, together in spirit if not in fact, to the grill room, the locker room, the parking lot. To weddings and baby-namings. Graduation parties and retirement dinners. Hospital rooms. Etc.Fred left an impression wherever he went, in golf and beyond her green borders. His gravelly voice announced his arrival and he left a trail of exclamation marks in his wake. (“What a putt! Have you been practicing!?”) Fred wasn’t intentionally funny but his candor — his pathological truthfulness — often contained trace amounts of accidental humor.Fred, as golfer and man, was always searching for improvement.Fred lived in Philadelphia, where I li...