'Best' accomplishments bring on mixed emotions

What's the best thing you ever did?

This isn't a moral question. I'm not talking about right or wrong, or good or evil.

It's about doing something and trying to do it better and better. Like being a golfer and trying first to break 100, then 90, then 80 ...

Or writing a book, and then writing a better one and then one that's even better.

9th hole, Sun City Peachtree

Or improving at something and achieving a personal best. It took me five years to break 100 and another four or five years to break 90.

By the time we moved to Georgia, I had been playing golf for more than 15 years. Playing regularly on the same course, a course suited to my game, I reached the point where at my very best, I could break 80.

On my very best day, I played nine holes and came within one shot of a par 36. I shot eight pars and then bogeyed the ninth hole. The great irony there is that the ninth hole is the one I par most frequently of all.

That was a wonderful two hours, but I have equally wonderful examples that took much longer.


When I was a senior in high school, I was one of 10 people selected to prepare to appear on a Washington-area quiz show called "It's Academic." We practiced once a week at lunchtime with the idea that when it came time to be on the show, three of us would be selected to appear with one additional student selected as an alternate.

Al;l year long, from tryout to selection, I was second best. The guy who was first was significantly better than I was. My best memory of the experience was an evening I spent at my good friend Gary Oleson's house -- Gary was one of the 10 -- with his dad quizzing us out of the Almanac.

Gary and I in 2017

I certainly wasn't any smarter than he was. Gary was fourth out of 804 in our class and went to Princeton. He knew all the answers to the same questions, but my answers were beating his by a second or two almost every time.

"I think I hear an echo," his father said.

Anyway, I was one of the three selected to be on the show, and shock of shocks, our superstar got stage fright and clammed up.

Of the three of us on the air, I think I scored about 80 percent of our points and we won.

I got most of our points the next week too, but I missed a couple of questions and we finished second.

Best of all, Gary is still my friend, 56 years after we first met in the spring of 1963. He introduced me to the lovely Cheryl Newman, who I dated for three months the next year.

He also introduced me to the music of the great Phil Ochs in the mid 1970s and he was one of my groomsmen for my ill-fated first marriage.

I can think of two other "bests" of which I've written before -- the one quarter I earned a perfect 4.0 by never cutting a class and my 1987 year in Greeley, Colo., where I worked 70 hours a week all year to see what I could accomplish.

If there's a sad thing about the last two, it's that I saw what I could do and then didn't do it again.

Some guy never learn.