There’s a scene in Ted Lasso I think about more than I probably should. Ted is playing darts against Rupert — Rebecca’s smug, insufferable ex-husband — and Ted is down to his last throw, facing what should be certain defeat. Rupert can’t resist a sneer, a “good luck” dripping with condescension. He’s spent the whole series treating Ted like a hick who wandered into the wrong job and got lucky.

And that’s the thing Ted finally says out loud: people have underestimated him his entire life. Rupert included. Rupert looked at him once, decided who he was, and never asked another question. If he had, he’d have learned Ted spent every Sunday afternoon of his childhood throwing darts with his own father, until his father passed away when Ted was sixteen.

“Be curious, not judgmental.”

Then Ted throws three triple-twenties and wins anyway. But the win was never really the point. The point is what Rupert lost out on, every single day he chose certainty over curiosity about the person standing right in front of him.

I hold onto that line tighter every year, mostly because grief has a way of making “I already know everything I need to know” feel like the most dangerous sentence in the world. I lost my mother when I was 26. I lost my father in my 30s. There is a version of today where I’m calling my dad right now instead of writing about him, and I don’t get that version. If I let myself sit in it — and on a day like this, I do — I feel robbed. Robbed of decades I was supposed to have. Robbed of a few thousand more ordinary, forgettable Tuesdays I didn’t know to treasure at the time.

But grief, against all odds, is also generous. It hands you back every memory you do have, polished a little brighter, because you finally understand there was never an infinite supply behind it. So today isn’t just sad. It’s full — full of a man I got to know completely, because I never stopped being curious about him.

My dad and golf

My dad is the reason I love this game. Not because he sat me down and explained the rules, but because he just kept showing up. Every week, the two of us, out at Springbrook — the public municipal course in Naperville, Illinois. No pretension, no dress code beyond a collared shirt, just a dad, his kid, and a bag of clubs on a weeknight.

Years later he joined White Eagle Golf Club, the Arnold Palmer–designed course just down the road, and I went from “kid who plays muni golf” to thoroughly, gratefully spoiled.

But it’s not White Eagle I keep coming back to. It’s the Springbrook Club Championship — the wide-open one, open to anyone in the network with a handicap. Fourteen sheets of paper, fifteen names a sheet. A massive field of weekend golfers grinding it out on a public course on a Saturday.

I caddied for him that day. Carried his bag, watched every shot, walked every fairway at his side. And he shot his first competitive round under par.

I was there for that. Of everywhere I could have been, I was standing next to my dad the day he did something he’d never done before. I will hold that one forever.

My dad and tech

The other half of who I am, he built too, just with a different toolkit. My dad was a corporate executive on his way up the ladder at AT&T, eventually running their computer products division — which meant our house doubled as an unofficial test lab. We had AT&T computers around constantly in the 1980s, brought home weekly for evaluation, sent back with notes on what worked and what didn’t. Machines everywhere, all the time, in every corner of the house. My dad never feared new technology. It was his job to push it, question it, and figure out what it was actually good for, and he brought that same curiosity home with him every single night.

If he were here for this AI moment, he’d be completely lit up by it — asking questions, testing things, refusing on principle to judge it before he understood it.

Today

It’s not only Father’s Day. It’s also the closing day of the U.S. Open — this year at Shinnecock Hills. My dad and I were lucky enough to go in person, more than once, chasing Arnold Palmer around a golf course together. Some of my favorite memories of him aren’t even moments we spoke much during — just two guys standing quietly in a gallery, watching a great one work.

So today I’ll watch the final round the way I always have. And I’ll be thinking of you, Dad.

I hope you’re out there somewhere getting in another round right at par. And I hope that someday, a long time from now, I get to join you for a few holes again. Except this time, let’s have that drink together afterward — in the bar up in golf heaven.

One more thing before I sign off. The clip below is one of my favorite things the Masters has ever put out — generations of families, side by side in the gallery, watching the same tournament their parents and grandparents watched. It ends with a grandfather handing his granddaughter his hat. No words needed. That’s the whole point of today, really: the things we hand down without ever making a big speech about it. Golf, curiosity, a love of figuring out how things work — my dad handed all of it to me the same quiet way.