John and Steve Espinoza

Father Builds Golf Course for his Disabled Son

By Kevin VanValkenburg

On days the pain in his back and legs is too much for Steve Espinoza, he lies in bed and thinks about how blessed he is.

Forget about faith. He gave that up long ago, the night his son Mike was killed in a car accident coming home one night from work. No, Steve stopped talking to God right about then. After all, hadn't he been tested enough? Hadn't he already lost his daughter to a heart defect? Wasn't his only surviving son, John, going to struggle with Down's syndrome for the rest of his life?

But he believes no one is luckier. On these days Steve Espinoza knows John will come in, tell him how much he loves his father, how much they both miss Mike, and how they'll work on their golf course as soon as Steve gets better.

"Folks laugh at first when I tell them we've got a golf course at our house," Steve says. "But they come out here, look around and say 'By God, it's an actual golf course!'"

It seemed like a simple enough idea two years ago. The Espinozas weren't looking to recreate Augusta National in Eureka, Mont., after all. They were just looking for a little healing. And damn it, wasn't that the way it worked in the movies? Didn't Kevin Costner make Ray Kinsella heal his pain with his father, simply by building a baseball field? "We still cry every day about Mike. But look at all this," Steve says, gesturing toward the hand-built greens and low-cut fairways in his yard.

But don't start the story there. That would be like tossing a book into the air, only to let it land open and to begin reading from the middle. You must leaf back to the begining, go back to the day not long after Mike died. The day John helped the Espinozas start living again.

The golf clubs had just sat there, gathering dust in Mike's room, like Mike's Magic Johnson posters, and his pictures from the Shrine Game. An all-state football player, Mike Espinoza was the son every father wants to have. Kind, intelligent and possessing the ability to whip your butt on the football field or wrestling mat. It had to be John who found them, the younger brother who so worshiped his older sibling, who brought those clubs to his father and helped them heal together.

"He says to me 'Dad, I want to learn golf!'" Steve recalls, beaming. "So we took him out in the yard and hit a bit. Sure enough, he could really hit the ball!"

It was no easy task. Blind in one eye, John didn't have much depth perception to see how far to hit a ball. Because of his Down's, John lacked the ability to turn his wrists when he swung the club as well, further complicating things. "My brother Danny and I tried everything," Steve says. "We tried to teach him all sorts of the right ways to swing. Finally, we just said, 'John, hit it however you feel best.' And he took off from there."

Funny thing was, the backyard wouldn't hold John in anymore. Golf shots were ricocheting off pine trees, bouncing off the house, denting cars. Eureka's Tiger Woods was trapped in his own back yard, busting it up at the seams.

Maybe, just maybe, if everyone could see how important golf had become to John, they wouldn't care if he was a bit too slow on regular courses. That it didn't matter if he didn't quickly have a grasp of every meticulous rule golf demands of its participants. That's what Steve would think to himself on those days he wanted to take John to Buffalo Hills in Kailispell, Mont., or Whitefish Lake in Whitefish, Mont., but then thought better of it. Steve knew how the world worked. It wasn't fair that way, but too bad. It wasn't fair God took two of his children away, but he was dealing with it.

"A lot of people aren't very patient with the handicapped kids who play golf," Steve says. "We wanted to make a place where that wasn't the case."
So he began searching. Searching to find out how golf courses are built. His arms and back didn't hurt every day. Steve felt great for the first time in a long time. Those days of serving in the Vietnam jungles as a gunner in 1st infantry outside of Saigon seemed much further away. The memories were more distant of the time he and his buddies felt the helicoppter turning around, a thousand questions running through their heads. Where are we going, the young marines yelled. Back to Saigon, the Army said. It's called the Tet offensive. Here Steve would see his his best friend die in his arms, and he would be exposed to the Agent Orange that still eats up his insides... . All that was forgotten in the dream of a golf course.

"After our daughter died, my wife and I went to he doctor and told him about what happened in Vietnam," Steve says. "We said, 'If we have any more children, are they going to have birth defects?' And he said, 'Your chances are one in a million.' Then John was born with his handicap. But hey, things happen for a reason, right?"
A green became a reality. Steve found a course that was selling leftover bentgrass, the same stuff they play with at the U.S. Open. Soon, John was reading the breaks, stroking putts for as many as 10 hours at a stretch.

The green became the inch. But Steve Espinoza wanted the whole mile. One night while Steve's pride over John's ability was brimming, he mentioned that if he could just remove some of the trees on his property, he might well have a fairway. No problem, said the friend. We'll have those down right away; you can use our bulldozer. "I asked him how much, and he said, 'Well Steve, it's $50 an hour.' I said, 'I'm sorry, I just can't afford that. He said, 'Hell Steve, all I want is to get to play on your course when it's done.'"

Steve's wife, Juana, wasn't thrilled over the thought of people pouring into her backyard to play golf. A private woman, she worried that maybe Steve was building this up into something it wasn't.

"It's good for John," Juana says, giving you the sense she doesn't share Steve's unabashed enthusiasm for the project. "I just kind of like to be alone or be with family."
Yet the course construction went on. One fairway became two, and two became four. Steve and John are on the Internet each day, searching for numbers to call, people to ask if they can give anything to help build this course.

"I got in touch with David Jacobson in Seattle, (PGA Golfer) Peter Jacobson's brother," Steve says, getting more excited with each word. "He does a lot of work with handicapped kids. I tell him about all the stuff we need to maintain a golf course. Lawn mowers, sprinklers, even clubs. David says, 'Give me a list. I'll see what I can do.' Everybody wants to get involved with this. It's amazing."

It starts to snowball. Every day they can, Steve and John work on the course. Steve's brothers start to help. People in the community get curious, and want to contribute.

Hey Steve, need some extra seed? Steve, I hear you and John could use this golf cart. If you can make it run, it's yours.
One day, the Espinozas look around and they've got nine legitimate golf holes. No matter that you have to use two of the greens twice. No matter than only two of them stretch as far as par 4, and even then we're talking about a 250-yard par 4. It's a golf course. It's John's Golf Course. The sign at the start of the property even says so. Par 29. Sweet back road Eureka course ,where deer and cattle still chew up the greens,

"It's not a professional golf course," Steve says, "but it's ours." And with each chapter in the story the legend grows. Steve called over a hundred golf courses around the country, asking them to give anything they could to help out? It's true. Don't forget about the time Steve went to buy a lawnmower that said $250 on the price tag. Never mind that some sales clerk had forgotten to write an extra zero in there. $2,500 the mower cost. Maybe Steve was just too nice of a guy to say no to. They honored the $250 price anyway. All told, Steve estimates he's been given nearly $100,000 worth of parts and labor to build his course. All because people just want to help a good cause. Sure, he's sunk $5,000 of his own money into it. Calls across the country make the Espinozas' long distance bill read like a novel. But people listen. People want to help. Because, Steve says, they see John and want to get involved.

And damn it, if that wasn't enough, how about a dog named Zing that will chase after golf balls all day? As if this tale didn't have enough twists, Zing, the yellow labrador retriever learns to ride for hours on John's cart, galloping after each errant shot John lets her chase.

"Ping has a golf club called Ping Zing," John says quietly. "We were going to get a dog named Ping, but now we just have Zing."

Look at the Espinozas now, and you'd almost forget how tough it's been. Look at Steve and John out in the yard, Steve yelling with jubilation each time John hits a great shot. He came just inches from a hole-in-one the other day. Watch them as Juana stands on the deck, and you'd almost forget how much pain they've had.
But no. A golf course can't cure everything. Mike's varsity letterman jacket still hangs in the front room, reminding them of how quickly tragedy can rip your heart out of your chest, stomp on it and laugh in your face.

"John said to me the other day, 'Dad, if we'd have just gotten Mike some sunflower seeds, he'd have never fallen asleep at the wheel,'" Steve says, eyes getting moist as he speaks. "We don't even know what really happened that night. Two boys were killed, one survived. There's talk that someone else besides Mike was driving. The one kid who lived won't talk. He's moved out of the state. I don't even know where he is. Don't want to know. It hurts too much."

So who's to say it's not true, like John believes, that Mike is looking down on him? There is too much about his brother he loved for him not to watch over him. John still remembers watching Laker games from the Forum, just the three of them. Steve, Mike and John. John wanting so bad to be like his brother. The All-American son, a full-ride scholarship to Jamestown University to play football. No, now Mike is coming home, wanting to make money in real estate. A second later he's gone. Dead at 25. His family left to celebrate his birthday alone each year. John will still wear Mike's football jersey out to play golf often. His e-mail password remains the same as it has forever: Mike58, his brother's football number.

"John always asks me, 'Dad, dad, am I as good as Mike?'" Steve says now, the tears much tougher to hold back. "I tell him 'Of course you are John. You're better than Mike in so many ways. You're an amazing son.'"

There are still those days Steve can't get out of his wheel chair. Vietnam was such a horrible place, it still eats away at his body. But you won't find bitterness here. Steve knows the inevitable. Someday, that wheel chair will be permanent. Someday there will be no golf with his son. That's why he built a deck that goes all the way around the house, so that he can still watch John once his legs give out for good.

Even with all that, there is no bitterness. And after all, no one treated Steve poorly when he returned from the war. No one told him he hadn't served his country. Wasn't Steve just going on instinct anyway? His brother was in the Army. He only looked up to his brother in the same way John looks up to Mike. Joined the Army to be just like him. Steve and his brother will work on the golf course when they can, their bond still strong after all these years, much like Steve's sons, even in death.
In the small town of Eureka, Steve Espinoza falls only slightly short of saint status. Everyone is welcome on John's Golf Course; the sign at the beginning of the property even says so. Even Jehovah's Witnesses get invited in. Steve has been known to spend the entire Sunday talking them up at the dinner table, smiling and making sure they're comfortable. Yes, of course he's told them about how he lost faith, and stopped talking to God. But they keep coming back, and Steve keeps listening. His kindness so genuine, only when you witness it do you actually believe it.

There are no rules at this course. The stuffiness that golf considers so essential to its sport feels about at home as Pope John Paul might feel at the Playboy mansion sipping Mai Tais with Hugh Heffner. Bad lie? Kick it somewhere you can hit it from. Hit a poor shot? Hit another. Hit 10 balls if you like. Zing will run and get them for you. Here, it's about learning what's great about the game.

"We invite all sorts of handicapped kids to come play up here," Steve says, his grin getting bigger with each word. "We don't want to baby sit people, but let them come and learn the proper stuff about golf. How to not step in someone's line. Not talking when someone is hitting. Mostly though, we just let 'em go out there and hit with John and have a great time."

And it's on these days, the ones where Steve Espinoza can barely get out of bed, when he stands on his deck and watches John swing so smoothly with his left-handed clubs. Watches him almost hit a hole-in-one, only to have the ball barely lip out of the cup. Where he plans more holes for the golf course, bigger greens, better fairways.

He doesn't think about the hurt he's had. The people he's lost. The son and the daughter he gave back to God, whom he can't believe in anymore. He won't ask himself how John, only 22 years old, will take care of himself when he and Juana are gone.

He'll only think about John. How in his real-life Field of Dreams, it will a golf course, and not a baseball diamond. He'll watch as John pulls back his club and tears into the little white ball, sending it spinning across the yard, only to find the green almost 200 yards away. He'll find love for family in that shot. For Mike. For his wife. For John. For himself.

He'll find himself blessed.