Scuppernong Bookshelf

Male Call

Exploring masculinity in American letters

It’s hard for men to know how to behave. Acceptable social behavior changes from generation to generation, and sometimes from year to year. The pompous balloon of chivalry, once the norm, has been lanced and deflated. Even holding the door open for “the fairer sex” feels antiquated at best, demeaning in many circumstances. What’s a man to do?

Change is difficult, and some will resist it with all the testosterone in their rage-filled veins. This month’s Scuppernong Bookshelf looks at the phenomenon of “Toxic Masculinity” from a literary perspective. Who are the pillars of hyper-masculine literature? How do we think of them today? And what contemporary books address the evolving norms of masculinity?

The grand men of 20th-century American literature have not aged well. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer should be judged for the excesses of their openly demeaning attitudes and behaviors toward women. And the crimes of the Beats include William Burroughs killing his wife, among a litany of misogynist behavior by other Beat writers. Still, we can read The Sun Also Rises and The Executioner’s Song and Naked Lunch with enthusiasm and interest even as we recognize the failings of the authors. Can’t we?

Neil LaBute, a prolific playwright, really made his name with an early, provocative film, In the Company of Men, in which two men separately seduce a deaf coworker, then dump her, comparing notes and enjoying themselves all the way. It’s a savage film and controversial in its day, exploring both the dark side of male conquest and the sliminess of the relationships some men have with each other.
Reasons to Be Pretty (Faber & Faber, 2008. $14) is pretty much more of the same. The thing is, LaBute no longer appears to be exploring the dark side of masculinity, he just seems to be sadistically reveling in it. There’s not much fresh or engaging here. It’s just another exercise in walking a fine line toward misogyny under the guise of psychological truth. The characters are repellent, which is a LaBute calling card, but they’re not saying anything new, so that the play itself becomes a monument to the very thing it professes to explore.

Unlearning toxic behaviors is painful enough. Unlearning toxic behaviors as a country is truly excruciating. J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize–winning 1999-novel Disgrace (Penguin, 2000. $16) follows the fall of a predatory English professor, David Lurie, who employs the words of Lord Byron to manipulate his young female students into bed. It is the story of a man who must pay for his actions, which are simultaneously a metaphor for the abuses of white males in post-Apartheid South Africa. Reading this multilayered text is by no means easy, but then again, neither is change.

The knockout stories in Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead, 2013. $16) continue the misadventures of Yunior, narrator throughout most of Díaz’s other books Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, as he tackles love — romantic, familial, unrequited, and doomed. Presumed dominance as a man living in a hyper-masculine Dominican-American culture crops up repeatedly, often to humorous ends. It is his fatal assumption that the women in his life will always stand by him regardless of his actions, though, that comes back to knock him down in the rawest sense. Díaz, as usual, handles these moments flawlessly.

As late as the 19th century, knitting was considered primarily a male trade and pastime. And why not? What’s more manly than being able to whip up your own horse blanket out on the range with only some spare yarn and two dowels? The Manly Art of Knitting, (Ginko Press, 2014. $13.95) by David Fougner, is the perfect resource for beginners, offering easy-to-follow pictorial instruction on basic stitches, common problems and solutions. There are even a few manly patterns, including a dog blanket, a skullcap and a rope hammock knitted with two shovel handles as needles. How do you get more manly than making your own hammock with nothing but rope and shovels?

Of course, some think that “toxic masculinity” is not the problem at all. Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth — in his book In the Arena (Threshold Editions, 2016. $28) — sees a greater danger in “the feminization of masculinity.” He warns, through the speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, of the blindness of “a man of refinement” to his own failings.

Finally, there’s Rebecca Solnit’s lovely little book Men Explain Things To Me (Haymarket, 2015. $12.95), which examines the phenomenon of mansplaining. She suffers through a man explaining her own book back to her (without knowing she was the author), and when she corrects him on a few points, he dismisses her — even after she lets him know she wrote the book!

NEW TITLES COMING IN SEPTEMBER:

September 6: Dear Mr. M, by Herman Koch (Hogarth, $26). The author of the deliciously wicked The Dinner returns and once again spares nothing and no one in his gripping new novel.

September 13: Killing the Rising Son: How America Vanquished World War II Japan, by Bill O’Reilly, co-written with Martin Dugard, (Henry Holt, $30). Will the Killing never end?

September 20: Odes, by Sharon Olds (Knopf, $26.95). Poet Olds has spent a career looking at gender and violence.

September 27: Born to Run, by Bruce Springsteen (Simon & Schuster, $32.50). “When I look at myself I don’t see / The man I wanted to be.” Bruce offers his own examination of self.  OH

Scuppernong Bookshelf was written by Brian
Lampkin, Steve Mitchell, Shannon Jones and Gabriel Pollak.

The Omnivorous Reader

Updike Redux

A collection of 186 stories and a new biography
are a chance to reexamine a remarkable literary life

By Stephen E. Smith

In his biography Updike, Adam Begley quotes from a letter John Updike wrote to his mother while he was a student at Harvard: “We need a writer who desires both to be great and to be popular, an author who can see America as clearly as Sinclair Lewis, but, unlike Lewis, is willing to take it to his bosom.”

Updike was describing the writer he’d become. For more than 50 years his novels, essays, poems and short stories filled America’s bookshelves, and the upper middle class, the culturati from which he drew his characters and themes, received each new volume with enthusiasm.

When Updike died of lung cancer in 2009 (addiction trumped intellect), we were left with 30 novels, 15 short story collections and umpteen books of poetry and assorted prose to appreciate anew. With the publication of Library of America’s quality two-volume edition (a boxed set) and Begley’s biography, Updike, readers have an opportunity to read or reread 186 stories (the Bech and Maples stories are published in separate volumes) arranged in order of publication. Astute readers can correlate the stories with Begley’s exposition of Updike’s richly complex life as an observer and participant in the subculture about which he wrote with extravagance and often shocking excess. Best remembered for his “Rabbit” novels, it’s Updike’s short stories, most of which were published in The New Yorker, that most closely parallel the life he lived.

Begley is quick to point out that few American fiction writers were more autobiographical than Updike — so obsessively so as to raise questions about Updike’s capacity for rational detachment. Readers unfamiliar with his short fiction are forewarned that his dominant theme is betrayal and its resultant complexities. His characters are white, usually Protestant members of the American upper middle class living in southeastern Pennsylvania or New England. His subject is adultery. The operative emotion is guilt, as explained in his 1977 story “Guilt-Gems”: “A guilt-gem is a piece of the world that has volunteered for compression. Those souls around us, living our lives with us, are gaseous clouds of being awaiting a condensation and preservation — faces, lights that glimmer out, somehow not seized, saved in the gesture and remorse.”

Updike is the master of The New Yorker short story, carefully wrought prose narratives with lengthy passages of description and meticulously rendered characters who find themselves unhappy in a world of affluence that encourages the guilty pleasures of adultery. So pervasive is this mindset that in “The Women Who Got Away” the narrator is touched with exquisite regret for potential affairs he failed to consummate: “There were women you failed ever to sleep with; these, in retrospect, have a perverse vividness, perhaps because the contacts, in the slithering ball of snakes, were so few that they have stayed distinct.”    

For all of his literary sophistication, Updike is the most parochial of writers. With a few possible exceptions — most especially his story “Varieties of Religious Experience” (a real clunker) — he wisely sticks to what he knows. Southern readers won’t discover tobacco worms, hogs and banjo-picking rednecks in his fiction (although there’s an occasional working-class hero), and his characters are, after the similitude of their re-embodiment in story after story, possessed of a mildly annoying self-indulgence and an irritating dissatisfaction with bourgeois abundance.

Moreover, the focus on the purely carnal is likely to wear thin when the stories are read without interruption. Even the most voyeuristic of readers are likely to experience a vague unease. Certainly sex has much to do with our lives, but at what point is the committed imagination overwhelmed by irrational obsession? Guilt experienced vicariously may have a temporary exhilarating effect on the reader, but it’s accompanied by a sense of sorrow at having benefited emotionally at the expense of others. This becomes especially apparent when Begley reveals Updike’s serial adultery, a philandering so obsessive that Updike was immensely proud of having made love to three women in one day, all the while living a life in which he remained a civic luminary and held responsible stations in various Protestant churches.

In the final analysis, however, Updike is more than a horndog with a thesaurus. In conveying memorable life moments, true and full of empathy, and producing examples of sense experience used to good effect, he is unsurpassed. The poignant, knifing nuances of life permeate his fiction, as with this typical passage from a pedantically sexual visit to a dental hygienist in “Tristan and Iseult”: “Sometimes his roving eyes flicked into her own, then leaped away, overwhelmed by their glory, their — as the deconstructionists say — presence. His glance didn’t dare linger even long enough to register the color of these eyes; he gathered only the spiritual, starlike afterimage of their living gel, simultaneously crystalline and watery, behind the double barrier of her glasses and safety goggles, above the shield-shaped paper mask hiding her mouth, her chin, her nostrils. So much of her was enwrapped, protected. Only her essentials were allowed to emerge, like a barnacle’s feathery appendages, her touch and her steadfast, humorless gaze.” Updike is tirelessly observant, and any careful reader of his fiction is bound to wonder if there’s an emotion, gesture or technical detail that’s gone unexplored.

Updike’s early stories are a study in the evolution of the great writer he would become, and the later stories are often burdened with excess detail and Jamesian syntactical constructs that leave the reader yearning for a misplaced comma or a dangling modifier. The less ambitious middle stories — most notably those included in the collections “Museums and Women” and “Trust Me” — are varied in subject matter  and more experimental in structure and execution. “The Orphaned Swimming Pool,” “Invention of the Horse Collar,” “Poker Night,” “Under the Microscope,” “Museums and Women,” “During the Jurassic,” “The Baluchitherium,” “The Slump” and “Still of Some Use” are departures from Updike’s formulaic adultery fiction. They’re overlooked gems that avoid the quirky, distracting The New Yorker ending and are more immediately appreciated.

Updike became the writer he described in that long ago letter to his mother. A large segment of the American public took him to their bosom, convinced that his vision of America was correct — or at least sufficiently believable. Whether his literary reputation will eclipse that of Sinclair Lewis’, well, that remains to be seen.  OH

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry, and four North Carolina Press awards

THE BIG ASK!!

Just trying to have me some fun(d)

By Maria Johnson

Dear Potential Sponsors,

I wanted to let you know that I have the most amazing opportunity. I can’t believe it. It’s like a dream come true. I could go to Tahiti!

THAT’S RIGHT, Tahiti!!

I have always wanted to go to Tahiti!! And now it’s possible for me to go!! YES!!

There’s just one hitch: money.

Don’t get me wrong. I could save enough money to go to Tahiti.

But I really don’t want to do that.

I want YOU to pay for it!!

ISN’T CROWDFUNDING AWESOME?!!

In case you don’t know, crowdfunding happens when people go online (and sometimes in magazines!!) to ask for money for specific projects. This idea is, you can raise a lot of money if everyone gives a little. Usually, the projects help people who are truly needy or down on their luck. But sometimes, the campaigns are like mine!!!

Just to be clear, I am not sick.

I am not a flood victim.

Or a crime victim.

I have no religious agenda.

I’m not trying to help anyone.

Or be reunited.

Or start a business to benefit people.

I JUST WANT TO GO TO TAHITI!!!

COME TO THINK OF IT, MY HUSBAND WANTS TO GO, TOO!

He’s a swell guy. We’ve been married twenty-seven years, and he’s always there for me. He loads the dishwasher every night! He walks the dog every morning! Sometimes, when we grill hamburgers, he points to the last one on the platter and says, “Do you want that?”

And I’m like, “Awwwwwwwww! You are soooooooo sweeeeeeet! Yes. Yes, I do!”

And he gets this sad little look on his face.

WHAT AN ADORABLE GUY!

How can you not send this man to Tahiti with me?

Right about now, you might be saying, “Where the heck is Tahiti, and why do you want to go?”

Well, allow me to educate you. Tahiti is an island in the South Pacific. It is part of the Society Islands in French Polynesia, south of Hawaii and directly east of Australia.

The sunsets are breathtaking, and water is Ty-D-Bol blue.

The area is a magnet for movie stars and artists, and it has been for a long time. The French painter Paul Gauguin lived in Tahiti in the late 1890s. Marlon Brando liked it, too. He bought a chain of tiny islets near Tahiti after filming there for his 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty.

In fact, his former islets are now home to a super-luxury resort called
The Brando.

You guessed it!! That’s where we want to stay!!

Yes, it’s expensive, but we plan to go in the OFF SEASON!!

BIG $$$$AVINGS!

I can hear the cynics now. “Maria, why should we help you and your husband go Tahiti? Why don’t you spend your own money on something that benefits only you?”

Wow. OK. Wow.

Let me explain something, all right? This trip is about ENRICHMENT. It’s about enabling us to OPEN our minds, and UNDERSTAND another culture, and RESPECT indigenous people.

Who do you think bakes the croissants in these places? Who rakes the beaches and minds the bicycle liveries? Who gives the massages at the spas? The local people, that’s who. We will be interacting with them face-to-face, talking to them as needed, and tipping them — but not too much because we will be good stewards of your generous donations!

If we happen to see people in dire need — which, let’s face it, would be a total vacation downer — we will point them to local churches.

Also, we will be documenting things with our cell phones and posting our photos and videos.

DOCUMENTATION IS VERY IMPORTANT WHEN YOU DO A CROWDFUNDING PROJECT!!

What will we be documenting? Well, endangered stuff for sure.

Coral reefs, probably, when we go snorkeling.

Maybe migrating whales, when we go kayaking.

Birds. God knows there’s got to be an endangered bird over there somewhere.

So, really, this trip is about learning, which is almost like RESEARCH, which, as we all know, has been linked to SCIENCE!

Let’s just call this trip what it is: a SCIENTIFIC EXPEDITION!!

WHOA! YOU HAVE A CHANCE TO BACK A SCIENTIFIC EXPEDITION!!

I’ll tell you something else: You ARE going to directly benefit from this trip because a) We will tell the most wonderful stories about Tahiti at your next party, and b) We will text all of our donors the recipes for the best drinks we encounter in the course of our research at The Brando. Don’t you want to know how to make The Dirty Old Bob? YOU KNOW YOU DO!!!

So don’t hesitate. Please give to this worthy cause. We would sooooooo appreciate it! THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU in advance!!!

With Beaucoup Good Energy,

Maria

P.S.: A few people have asked about going to Tahiti with us. We have carefully considered these requests, and, after many nanoseconds of thought, we have decided it’s probably best if you create your own crowdfunding pitch. In other words: Go fund yourselves.  OH

To help Maria get to Tahiti, go to www.giveit-heresukkah.com and click on the button that says “hahaha.”

Early Pickin’

The virtuosity of guitarist Presley Barker

He shares a surname with the king of rock’n’roll. But neither Presley Barker’s music nor his moniker pays homage to Elvis. His parents were at a loss to find something unique, “so they just came up with Presley,” the 11-year-old guitarist says.

Inclined toward bluegrass, Presley is already busy filling his room at home in Traphill, North Carolina, with awards and trophies, including first place in the guitar competition at last year’s Galax Fiddlers Convention. He’s also jammed on stage with Ricky Skaggs in Houston, played MerleFest and has gotten to study and play with bluegrass titans Uwe and Jens Kruger, who have high praise for his focus and skills.

Barker’s mom, Julie, says her son has always loved music. “Since he was old enough to ask for some kind of toy, he wanted a trumpet, he wanted a flute, he wanted a drum — anything that made noise,” she says.

When Presley was 4, his parents got him a small banjo, but his guitar teacher advised them to start him on a child-sized guitar instead. “Took that little guitar, started learning how to read music, and he just picked it right up,” Julie says proudly.

So well that he’s made some influential friends, including renowned guitarist/luthier Wayne Henderson, who has built instruments for Doc Watson, Gillian Welch and Eric Clapton and was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship in 1995. Henderson’s also a world-class fingerpicker who travels the globe showing off his skills  Henderson thought so much of Presley’s skills that he built him his own custom guitar. “a beautiful D-42 Dreadnought Brazilian rosewood, Appalachian spruce top,” Presley says. “It sounds great, I really love it. He put my name on the seventeenth fret, in abalone.”

But all the flash is not on the instrument.

“Presley plays nice and clean,” Henderson says, and Jens Kruger has said that the young picker is already developing his own style even when he covers others’ works. “His versions are distinct, his version,” Kruger says, “It’s very charming.” The brothers saw his skills close up when Presley attended their music camp in Wilkesboro. “I got taught by Uwe, great teacher, he was teaching some on improvising, and stage presence and how to use a microphone,” he recalls.

Some of his skills seem intuitive, including his fingerpicking style: His picking hand floats above the strings. “I just started doing that from the beginning,” Presley says. “Never even thought much about it, never even tried to anchor my thumb or my pinkie.”

In addition to his solo gig, Presley works with other young pickers in the Shawdowgrass band. “We first met at a fiddlers convention, we’d kinda been jamming and stuff, and we said well we ought to get a band together,” Presley says. Kitty Amaral, 14, doubles on fiddle and vocals, 11-year-old Kyser George is on bass and vocals, 15-year-old Clay Russell on banjo, 16-year-old Luke Morris on mandolin and vocals, and Presley on guitar and vocals.

He is content with his career, happy hanging out with Henderson and playing with Shadowgrass, as well as his teacher, national banjo and guitar contest champion Steve Lewis, who usually accompanies him on gigs.

For all his technical prowess, Presley is still a kid, and his musical future is a long journey he’s just started. “I might want to go to a music academy or something,” he says. And continue to be really something.  OH

—Grant Britt

Short Stories

Venture Capitol

Here’s something Greensboro residents — and in fact every North Carolinian — would agree is worth a road trip to Raleigh: a shindig to help preserve our state’s capitol. Since 1840, the Greek Revival monument with the iconic domed rotunda has been home to N.C.’s seat of government. But the er, state-ly lady with National Historic Landmark status needs constant primping. Thanks to the North Carolina Capitol Foundation, she has, since 1976, seen windows and lighting repaired, statues and paintings restored, desks, chairs and lighting refurbished, and received 60,000 schoolchildren (and more than 100,000 across the state, county and globe) every year. So why not help keep the People’s House of North Carolina presentable, by presenting yourself at the “Shuckin’ and Shaggin’” oyster roast at 7 p.m. on September 16? Held on the capitol’s grounds (1 East Edenton Street, Raleigh), the affair is a casual one, with shagging demos, music by the Embers, tasty food and beverages and a silent auction. Tickets: ncstatecapitol.org.

Wingin’ It

Who isn’t charmed at the sight of tiny, ruby-throated visitors hovering over red flowers and feeders, while beating their wings at an astonishing fifty times per second? Known for their ability to fly extremely long distances (and backward), hummingbirds never fail to fascinate — and in some cultures have become the symbol of joy and playfulness. On September 8th at noon, find out how to attract them to your yard at “Gardening for Hummingbirds,” a Lunch and Learn at Ciener Botanical Garden (215 South Main Street, Kernersville), courtesy of Audubon North Carolina’s Bird Friendly Community Coordinator Kim Brand. To register:
(336) 996-7888 or cienerbotanicalgarden.org.

Toque-n of Affection

Burners are on, pans are sizzlin,’ spatulas are raised. Yes, it’s that time again: Men Can Cook takes place at on September 24 at 6 p.m. at the Coliseum Special Events Center (1921 West Gate City Boulevard, Greensboro). Line up to sample hors d’oeuvres, meats, sweets, sides and more from various chefs — some amateur, some professional, all of them fellas who have a desire to dish it out while serving the community. The event, which also features a silent auction, benefits the Women’s Resource Center, whose mission is to promote the self-reliance of women by meeting unmet needs, holding educational programs and workshops. Tickets: (336) 2a75-6090 or
womenscentergso.org.

Love, Not War

Opposing views of war erupt in the bedroom when an idealistic young Bulgarian woman (Raina) hides a Swiss mercenary and war skeptic (Buchstil) during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian war, the backdrop for George Bernard Shaw’s popular comedy, Arms and the Man. Deemed Shaw’s wittiest by author George Orwell fifty years after the play’s debut, Arms was Shaw’s first commercial success. We wish Triad Stage similar success when it launches its 2016–17 season with a revival of Arms and the Man September 11–October 1 at the Pyrle Theatre (232 South Elm Street, Greensboro). Tickets: (336) 274-0067 or triadstage.org.

A Time to Read

Winston-Salem’s BookMarks Festival of Books and Authors has outdone itself again. Expanding from three days to four, the event kicks off on Thursday September 8th at
7 p.m. with a keynote opening event with Azar Nafasi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books at Hanesbrands Theatre (209 North Spruce Street, Winston-Salem), continues on Friday the 9th with three “Eat & Greets” at various locations around town, before the free festival on Saturday the 10th in front of the Rhodes Center for the Arts. The roster of scribes on hand includes Annie Barrows, John Hart, Terry McMillan, Simon Goodman, Davis Miller and on and on. Capping off the weekend is an address from the master of the legal thriller, John Grisham. And that’s just the beginning. BookMarks is currently scouting locations for an independent bookstore, which it hopes to open in 2017, another way to spread education, outreach . . . and a love of books. Tickets and info: (800) 838-3006 or bookmarksnc.org.

The Feminine Mystique

Remove the slogans and taglines, and a hundred years of advertising images paint a different story than intended. Falk Visiting Artist Hank Willis Thomas does just that in Unbranded: A Century of White Women 1915–2015, opening at Weatherspoon Art Museum (500 Tate Street, Greensboro) on September 3. Revealing how corporate ad campaigns have marketed products to women and created a perception of women’s social roles, the exhibition addresses larger themes of virtue, beauty, power and desire. The exhibition will be on view until December 11.  Info: (336) 334-5770 or
weatherspoon.uncg.edu.        

The Way of All Flesh

The art of bodypainting has been an accepted art form throughout most of the world for at least a half-century, but only in the last decade has America gotten in on the act. Much of that overdue interest is due to Reidsville couple Scott Fray and Madelyn Greco, who from 2011–2014 captured an unprecedented five world titles in five categories. They have since made the leap from competitors to presenters at The North American Bodypainting Championship, which for years called Atlanta home — until this year. Starting September 24, the event’s main competition comes to the Greensboro Coliseum Special Events Center, with ancillary events, such as live painting, a film festival and an awards gala taking place for the remaining five days at the Carolina Theatre, Revolution Mill and the Millennium Center in Winston-Salem. It is expected to draw as many as sixty artists from five continents and twenty countries, including current and past world champions, who will compete for a share of the total purse of $15,000. Proceeds go to benefit the Chelko Foundation, which seeks to empower women through art. Tickets: livingartamerica.com. —Ogi O.

Swords and Ploughshares

“War! What is it good for?” Before you answer “absolutely nuthin’” and say it again, think again. Armed conflict has been a muse for countless works of art, literature and, as the lyric of this anti-bellum Motown hit suggests, music. Examining the role of conflict in culture, and giving nod to the centennial of the United States’ entry into World War I is the interdisciplinary initiative, “Imagining War and Peace” for the 2016–17 academic year. It includes a broad scope of courses on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, medieval love and war, and Trojan war narratives, concerts, lectures and films, from Platoon to The King of Hearts and much more. For a complete listing of events and information on a mobile app and social media tie-ins, go to http://warandpeace.uncg.edu

Walkin’ Man

By Jim Dodson

After two years of being sidelined from a severe injury, I recently underwent knee surgery and began walking to work in the mornings again and with our dogs in the evenings.

Frankly I’d forgotten how good it feels — how walking through a busy world at a neighborly pace provides useful time to think and helps one notice important small things right in front of your nose. 

“I tell people that I walk for sanity, not vanity,” says my friend Dennis Quaintance, the Greensboro hotelier who has been a dedicated daily walker in historic Green Hill Cemetery for years. “A walk helps me make sense of the world.”

The health benefits of a daily walk are also amply documented, and I’ve even managed to drop a dozen pounds since I resumed my regular walks three or four weeks ago. Soon I hope to be up to walking a complete golf course again, just in time for my wife and me to slip away to Scotland later this month.

In some ways my involuntary removal from golf prompted a true awakening. I probably took the ability to walk for granted and am both relieved and resolved to be back cruising the world on two feet.

Ditto my new friend and fellow golfer Kevin Reinert.

We met last Father’s Day at a family golf event I host annually for the Pinewhurst Resort, a gathering of like-minded souls created around a surprise best-selling book of mine called Final Rounds, a story about taking my father back to England and Scotland, where he learned to play golf during the Second World War.

On the first night of the event I typically welcome 125 or so folks from around the country and give a little talk aimed at setting a lighthearted tone for golf and fellowship.

After this year’s opening dinner, a fit-looking fellow about my age came up to say hello with his wife, Jean.

“This is my first year here,” explained Reinert, offering me his hand.  “I just want to say thank you for saving my life.”

I smiled, waiting for the punch line.

But there wasn’t one.

“No, seriously,” he said, “your book on Ben Hogan inspired me to get up and teach myself to walk again.”

And with that, he told me an absolutely extraordinary story of courage and one man’s resolve to put his shattered world — and legs — back together.

It was a beautiful evening a year ago this October when Kevin Reinert put his golf bag on a trolley at Greensboro’s Starmount Forest Country Club, hoping to get in a quick 18 before meeting Jean at a special fundraiser at the club. “It had been raining for days,” he remembers, “but the weather had suddenly cleared. It was a beautiful evening.”

Reinert, 62, is a retired Air Force colonel who spent almost 30 years working in recruiting and public affairs for the Air Force and Air Force Reserve. He was the administrator responsible for overseeing public affairs for 35 different Reserve units around the United States and the men who helped transform the Reserve’s recruiting profile.

Eleven years ago, Kevin and Jean, who met and married while both were captains on active duty in 1985, relocated from Georgia to Greensboro, where Kevin went to work for The Brooks Group, a leading sales management consulting firm. Before being deployed to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, Jean Reinert taught nursing at UNCG and returned from active duty to become nursing administrator for Cone Health.

“Greensboro was a place we fell for in an instant,” Reinert explained. “It has everything, great restaurants, theaters, wonderful people and a location that was perfect for us — the mountains in one direction, the coast in another. Our kids were grown and doing their thing, and North Carolina really felt like home.”

But all of that changed in an instant as Reinert pushed his golf trolley toward Starmount’s beautiful finishing tee.

“There was a group ahead of me, just out in the fairway, when my phone went off alerting me to incoming messages. I looked down, thinking it might be Jean, as I walked toward the tee. That’s when I heard this ferocious sound. I looked up but I didn’t quite register what I was seeing.”

What he saw was a Kia Rio with smashed side mirrors barreling directly toward him over the course’s cart path.

“I had just enough time to try and jump out of its way. So I jumped, hoping — I don’t know — that maybe I’d land on the hood and roll over the top like you see guys do in the movies. I didn’t get high enough,” he notes with a laugh.

The car struck him at the knees and knocked him over the hood and roof before barreling on. Reinert was tossed 30 feet from the site of impact, landing on the tee. The car was estimated to have been traveling anywhere from 35 to 45 mph, driven by a man who was on a violent robbery and mugging spree, trying to outrun the police. He managed to get one hole farther before the car went out of control and wound up in one of Starmount’s meandering creeks. The driver set off on foot, commandeered another car and was later apprehended.

“My first thought, as I lay there, was a kind of stunned disbelief. I saw that one leg was lying at a 90 degree angle from my body, and when I tried to lift myself up, my arm wouldn’t function.”

Workmen from a nearby residence hurried over, calling 911. The group ahead also rushed back. Reinert asked one of the golfers, a fellow member named Mike Corbett, to find his phone and call his wife. “Jean was over at UNCG and thought I said I’d been hit by a golf cart. She hurried over and actually got there before the ambulance did.”

Owing to heavy rains, the EMS unit couldn’t reach the spot on the course where Reinert lay, but head professional Bill Hall hurried out with a flatbed cart just as a fire unit arrived with a rescue board.

“They got me on the board and Bill drove me back to the parking lot, where the ambulance was waiting. It was a bumpy ride and he kept apologizing. I was probably close to being in shock but joked to him that he’d better not charge me for a cart because I’d walked the course. He thought that was funny. I also told him that if I’d parred the hole, I probably would have shot 87. He couldn’t believe I was conscious and making jokes. But I knew I was in pretty bad shape.”

Both Reinert’s knees were crushed. He’d suffered a shattered femur, a broken tibia, a broken right ankle and a fractured right humerus bone, the upper bone of the arm. “There was a deep cut on my face but, amazingly, no head injuries,” he said. “I was conscious the whole way, already wondering if I would be able to walk again.”

The next morning he underwent six hours of surgery. This was followed by four more surgeries over the ensuing weeks. “The doctors couldn’t give me a clear prognosis or even tell me if I would ever be able to walk or referee or even play golf again.” Besides golf, one of Kevin Reinert’s other pleasures was a budding avocation as a college-level lacrosse official.

After 18 days in the hospital, he was sent home.

He began therapy three days a week that continues to this day.

“The hardest part was just not knowing what was ahead. I sat and tried to watch TV, but the news was so discouraging I decided to turn it off and read books instead.”

An old pal from Long Island who taught him to play golf during their college years together at Adelphi University sent him a box of books, one of which was Ben Hogan: An American Life, my biography of professional golf’s most elusive superstar.

At the height of his success, while returning home from a golf tournament in Arizona, Hogan and his wife, Valerie, were struck head-on by a Greyhound bus that shattered Hogan’s legs and nearly killed the star golfer. His obituary, in fact, went out over the Associated Press wires before it was learned that he was actually hanging on in a rural Texas hospital. Doctors advised Hogan he would likely never walk again, much less play championship golf.

“Frankly I was really down before those books arrived, worried that I might not even be able to walk and play golf,” Reinert admits. “There were real similarities in our stories. I was so moved by his determination to somehow get back to the game — to simply walking — I vowed to myself that I would do the same.”

In 1950, at Merion Golf Club outside Philadelphia, Ben Hogan did indeed come back, capturing the U.S Open on a pair of legs that had little circulation — widely regarded as one of the most heroic comebacks in sports history.

Kevin Reinert made his own big comeback, too. One evening last May, family and 60 or so friends turned out to watch him finish playing Starmount’s 18th hole. “I was blown away so many folk came out to watch,” he said. “Everyone had been so encouraging. I’d made so many new good friends. The support I got from complete strangers was incredible. I simply wouldn’t have made it without them — especially my wife and children. My daughter LeeAnne, who is also a nurse, really pushed me at times.”

Son Phillip, an Air Force flight engineer working at the Boeing factory in Seattle, was also present to play that final hole with his father. He’d flo wn home the day after the accident on air miles donated by Mike Corbett.

Reinert was wearing a cap given to him by a friend that cleverly read: I Was Run Over By A Car On The Golf Course. What’s Your Excuse?

Another gifted cap read Starmount 18: The Toughest Hole in Golf.

“It was very emotional for us all,” he says. “Made even more amazing by what happened before we teed off.”

On the facing hill, a Scottish bagpiper strolled out in full ceremonial regalia and began playing “Amazing Grace.” Another new friend offered to be Reinert’s caddie.

“Somehow I made bogey on the hole, which allowing for my handicap let me write a par on the card,” he explained to me as we played Pinehurst No. 4 on the first day of the Father’s Day golf fest.

It was his first full round of golf since the accident and he did very well indeed, shooting in the low 90s with both legs wrapped in athletic supports, just like Hogan.

The next day, he even walked mighty Pinehurst No. 2 with a caddie.

“This was one of the greatest weekends of my life,” he told me later. “It feels good to be back.”  OH

Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@ohenrymag.com.