Jack Sheehan recounts how unexpected athletic success put him on a path he would not have taken

Sunday, Oct. 28, 2007 | 7:17 a.m.

When I was 8 years old a neighbor kid talked me into jumping off the roof of his house. He landed safely, but I sprained my ankle and wrenched my back. That ended any desire I might have harbored to parachute, rock climb, or walk tightropes in the circus.

Although the great aerialist Karl Wallenda is famous for musing, as he pointed to a stretched rope above him, "Up there is life, the rest is waiting," he neglected to mention that high winds and a rough landing on the hood of a Chevrolet would kill you.

I played all the glory sports as a kid and did fairly well at them, but when I got to high school - a macho, all-boys Jesuit prep school - the tryouts for football and basketball necessitated being timed in sprints the first day of practice. The good Jebbies didn't need a stopwatch when I got in my crouch. A grandfather clock would have done nicely. In freshman P.E. the 35 guys in our class were timed in the 100-yard dash. I finished 34th, inching at the tape a kid who suffered from polio. If his metal brace hadn't locked at the 75-yard mark, he would have nipped me as well.

So anything involving heights or foot speed was eliminated from my list of recreational pastimes. Yet like most kids I coveted attention and the approbation of my father, who had been an excellent swimmer in college and was a low-handicap golfer.

My first trip s to the golf course with him, at age 7 or 8, were not to teach me the game but to caddie for him. By the second nine I had usually resigned from pulling his handcart and would ride horsey-style on his golf bag while he dragged me around. Dad soon realized that it might be easier on him and his ailing back if he just put me in a starter series of lessons with other kids.

With golf I discovered a sport that rewarded eye-hand coordination without penalizing for lack of foot speed or jumping ability. And at the very first lesson the instructor, an assistant club pro named Arnie Johnson, singled me out from the other kids to demonstrate the proper way to take the club back and hit solid drives. (Of course I hadn't divulged to him that I had been watching golf on TV and taking practice swings for weeks in our back yard with a sawed-off club a neighbor had given me. The pro just thought I was a natural.)

It was love at first pat-on-the-back. I had found a sport in which I could keep my feet on the ground, match scores with others my own age, and in time get my father bragging to his captive audience of dental patients - all harnessed in and numbed-up with nowhere to escape - about his kid's exploits on the links.

Even though excelling as a young golfer back in those pre-Tiger times in the 1960s didn't carry nearly the prestige that it does today, especially with the opposite gender, winning regional tournaments and qualifying for national events was tall cotton to my parents' circle of friends and provided the attention I craved.

Looking back on it from this distant point five decades from the day I took up the game, I find it somewhat remarkable that nearly every significant move I've made in my personal and professional lives is connected to that odd activity of chasing a dimpled spheroid across a pasture.

My choice of college, the University of Oregon, was predicated on an offer they extended to avoid tuition while daily I took the infamous "good walk spoiled." My choice of a course of study, English literature, which I made at the start of my junior year, was a preferred alternative to my original selection of economics and business administration. An adviser who studied my grades for the first two years of college suggested that if I didn't switch majors immediately I would lose my student deferment, and instead of idling down the verdant fairways of the Pacific Northwest I'd soon be working on my wedge shots in the rice paddies of Vietnam.

My first job choice, at Spokane's Spokesman-Review newspaper as a sportswriter, was made because I was golfing pals with the sports editor and he juiced me into the position ahead of dozens of other applicants with journalism degrees who knew far more about inverted pyramid writing and font styles of headlines than I did. And two years after that first crack at scribbling for a living, my move to Las Vegas was predicated as much on the fact that I could spank the nugget year -round in blissful weather as it was on the freelance writing possibilities available in a town that never sleeps.

Sure enough, about 15 years after settling in to Las Vegas, having penned hundreds of newspaper and magazine stories, wouldn't you know I was offered a book publishing opportunity that was connected to - what else ? - golf.

G.P. Putnam's & Sons gave me and PGA Tour player Peter Jacobsen, who had also played golf in Duckville, an opportunity to write a book that was intended to let casual golfers inside the ropes of the world of professional golf. That venture, titled " Buried Lies, " opened other doors to the publishing and literary world and opportunities that never would have been possible if my father hadn't given me the chance to find my passion so many years ago.

My 11-year-old son , J.P. , asks me all the time how he should make his living in this big , cold world of ours, and we talk about it constantly. So far his choices have shifted from professional fisherman to sports broadcaster to his most recent preference: land developer, because, he says, "those guys make a lot of money."

J.P. asked me the other day why I chose golf as my favorite sport and writing as a profession. I told him it had a lot to do with the fact that I was a horrible runner and couldn't jump over a coffee can, and that I stunk at math and science. He got a confused look on his face.

Maybe this column will help him understand that sometimes career choices happen more by fate than by choice.