Veteran Finds Greens Peace

FIRST HOLE

Walter Donaldson lowers himself on to a faded, dew-covered picnic table, the moisture seeping through the bottom of his jeans.

He slips on a tattered white golf glove until the tips of his fingers are visible through the cracks.

He slides into a pair of brown golf shoes with the initials VAGC written into the side, and the size 11 1/2 written on the heels.

He picks up a soiled, sour green golf bag filled with mismatched ladies clubs.

With the stare of Tiger Woods and the gait of a king, Donaldson then marches to the first tee.

It is 6:45 a.m.

There is nobody else here.

For 27 years, there has never been anybody else here.

In the early mornings on this tiny nine-hole golf course hidden in a corner of the sprawling Veterans Administration hospital grounds in West Los Angeles, the first twosome is usually Donaldson and his fears.

A man using our gentlest game to battle the turmoil of schizophrenia and addiction.

“Fore!” he shouts into the empty mist.

SECOND HOLE

Today we give thanks for things far more important than games. Yet there is a 55-year-old Vietnam veteran who can remind us of their place.

Sitting in the dining room of his boarding house, Donaldson will give thanks for sports, because he believes a sport has kept him alive.

Donaldson is a golfer, only not like the ones you see on television or at the country club.

He uses clubs and a bag he found in a dumpster.

He plays with balls given to him by patrons at a Pico Boulevard diner.

His ball markers are bus tokens.

His shoes are rentals that the VA finally just donated to him.

And in his entire life, he has only played one course.

For nearly three decades, nearly every day, Donaldson has played the postage-stamp VA public course as consistently as he once heard voices and used drugs.

“With his medication, he behaves like any other person, you would never notice anything unusual,” said Dr. Rochelle Reno, manager of the VA’s Dual Diagnosis Treatment Program. “He just loves golf.”

He plays it in the morning before his daily routine of workshops and therapy in the treatment program.

He might play in the afternoon during a break.

Sometimes he plays four rounds in a day.

In all, he has played more than 6,000 rounds on the same nine holes.

Never once breaking par.

“But I’m getting better, getting closer,” he says.

Donaldson has been around here so long that workers in the rusted Quonset hut that serves as a pro shop ask him to help newcomers and beginners navigate the sometimes confusing track.

One day this summer, he walked nine holes with a teenage boy who was so moved, he wrote me a letter about it.

I phoned the course and read parts of the letter to a man who laughed.

“So,” said Dave Wall, “somebody finally found him.”

The folks here refer to Donaldson as one of their treasures.

On the second hole this chilly fall morning, you can see why.

He hits his tee shot over a hill, into a seemingly impenetrable cluster of bushes.

All these years, and sometimes he still can’t put it on a fairway.

Yet all these years he’s never lost a ball.

“I’ll find it,” he says cheerfully, scurrying down a steep hill and off the course, a 6-foot-5 man hunched over a tiny bag like it was an oversized purse.

“I don’t think so,” I say, a lazy sportswriter standing next to his pull cart.

“I’ll play it,” he says.

“I don’t see how,” I say.

He finds it. He plays it. Knocks it out of the weeds and on to the green.

Because his larynx was partially paralyzed during lung surgery several years ago, his words run together like a stream over rocks. Initially, he is difficult to understand.

But listen long enough, and you figure it out. Listen long enough and you realize he is saying something worth hearing.

He taps his dirt-specked ball into the hole.

“A man can do a whole lot with faith,” he says.

THIRD HOLE

The voices began sometime after the end of the bombing and gunfire.

Donaldson grew up on 74th and Avalon in south L.A., joining the Air Force shortly after graduating from Fremont High because he thought his parents could no longer afford to care for him.

“I thought it would be better if I wasn’t around,” he recalls.

Soon he found himself stationed outside Saigon, listening to battle rage nightly, one of thousands of kids forced to grow up too soon.

“I was just 20,” he remembers. “It was too much.”

When he returned home in 1969 after a year in combat, everything changed. He heard things that weren’t there. He saw things that didn’t exist.

“He came back a totally different person,” says his mother, Annie. “I believe it was Vietnam that messed him up.”

Donaldson’s marriage fell apart, his wife and child remained home in Canada while he returned to Los Angeles to live an itinerant life in shelters and labor camps.

“I don’t know what I was like, but I know it wasn’t right,” he says.

One day in 1975, discovering him incoherent on the streets, his father finally took him to the VA hospital for help.

That day, during tests that would diagnose him as a person with schizophrenia, he wandered out of the large brown buildings to the golf course.

For the first time, his trembling hands picked up a club.

Nine holes and one hour later, he had calmed.

“I hit one ball, and I haven’t stopped since,” he says.

The emotion he felt that first day still erupts 27 years later, on this third hole, when he sinks a 30-foot putt for birdie.

“Ha-ha-ha-ha!” he bellows, his huge mouth opening wide around a thrusting tongue that has been compromised with medication.

He then sticks out his hand, not for a high-five or fist tap, but a gentlemanly handshake, because this is golf.

FOURTH HOLE

His day begins at 4 a.m., in a twin bed nudged into a matchbox room at a board-and-care facility on Pico.

He rises before his four housemates turn on the blaring television behind the paper-thin wall above his head.

He rises before the traffic outside his window fills his room with noise the decibel equivalent of a train station.

There is a stained coffee mug on his nightstand that reads, “I putt better than I drive.”

Next to it is a golf etiquette calendar. Today’s topic: scuffs and spike marks.

He has no phone. He has no car, nor a driver’s license. His disability and social security check, minus his room and board, equals about $126 a month in spending money.

He grabs his clubs out of the corner and boards a bus to a coffee shop named Rae’s. “When the people on the bus see me with my clubs, they call me ‘Tiger Woods,’ ” Donaldson says.

It is the only time that anyone would make that comparison.

At Rae’s, he will drink four cups of coffee for $1.03 and load up on balls handed to him by golfers headed to a country club. After spending a half-hour on the same counter stool, he boards another bus for the VA facility, where he will be the first one to arrive at the course.

There, sometimes in the dark, he waits until somebody shows up so he can sign in.

“I never play until I sign in,” he says.

The patio outside the Quonset hut would never be mistaken for a clubhouse. There are a few weathered chairs and ashtrays, a tiny detached bathroom with a creaky door.

The entire 1,144-yard course, with its tiny green and small fairways, is invisible to most of the golf-mad city.

Just as Donaldson is invisible to them.

He knocks a tee shot alongside the fourth green, and shrugs.

“Out here you’re reminded, it’s about just you and the ball.”

FIFTH HOLE

Donaldson has only four golf shirts and two caps, but one of those caps says it all.

“Golf Is My Therapy” it reads.

“I know that golf has been his lifeline, and I am so grateful for that,” says Dr. Reno. “Every patient needs a passion that lights up his life. Without golf, Walter’s life would be much emptier and difficult.”

Where did it come from?

Donaldson is asked that question as he tees up on a fifth hole that does not have a tee box or markers. After all these years, he knows exactly where to start.

“Golf is struggle, but if you work hard enough, you can achieve something in it,” he says. “I need that. I need something I can work for. Something I can accomplish.”

Golf is the quietest thing in his life. It is the most consistent event of his day. It does not criticize or judge.

Golf is one of the few things that allows Donaldson to be happy with who he is.

Twenty-seven years, and only once has he even stepped on a different course.

It was recently, when he accompanied a group of VA members to an 18-hole course in the Valley.

Donaldson never left the driving range.

“I didn’t feel right,” he says. “It wasn’t me.”

SIXTH HOLE

Late last summer, a teenage boy and his mother stopped by the VA for the best deal in town, a quick round of golf for eight bucks a person.

As they were standing on the first tee, up walked a lanky, gray-haired man with a wandering tongue and mottled speech.

“He said, ‘Mind if I join you?’ ” Margaret Foster Dubbins recalls.

“It was a little scary,” Andrew Dubbins, now 14, says.

Not knowing the course, and not being very good at the game, they agreed to let him join.

An hour later, there were tears in the mother’s eyes.

Donaldson had worked his strange magic.

“It was an amazing experience,” Margaret Foster Dubbins recalls.

Donaldson accompanied them around the course, telling them about his past, giving tips about the game, showing them every nook and cranny in the landscape and his life.

Recounting the round on the drive home, the boy became so moved that the mother encouraged him to write about it.

So Andrew Dubbins, now an eighth-grader at Corpus Christi school in Pacific Palisades, wrote me an essay about his experience.

On the sixth hole during our round, I ask Walter about Andrew.

“What a nice boy,” he says while sinking a par putt. “Young people today, they don’t listen. That was a boy who listens.”

SEVENTH HOLE

With several groundskeepers watching on the seventh tee, Donaldson skulls his tee shot.

He smiles, waves to them, walks toward his ball.

“Golf teaches you to handle anything,” he says.

I walk ahead to my ball. A few minutes later, he joins me. After he sinks his putt, I pull out the scorecard.

“A four?” I say.

“A five,” he says.

EIGHTH HOLE

He has never shot better than a 29 on this par-27 course.

But as Donaldson deftly places his eighth tee shot close to the cup, he mentions that he has done something that few people have done in a lifetime.

And he has done it twice.

“Two holes in ones!” he exclaims.

Both were in 1987. One was in a club tournament, the other was during a daily round. In neither case did he save the ball.

“The club gave me the ball when I started the round,” he says. “After I finished, I turned it back in. It was their ball.”

NINTH HOLE

At the edge of the ninth tee box is a club-handle monument to the course’s former golf volunteer instructor, Anthony “Tony” Costello.

He first showed Donaldson the game. He has since died. Before Donaldson tees off here, he walks to the monument, puts his hands around the club handle, and bows his head.

“This game saved my life from destruction,” he says. “I will never forget the man who taught me.”

He finishes the round by sinking a 40-foot birdie putt, howling in glee, shaking the hand of his playing partner.

When the round started, I thought I could beat this crooked old man by a dozen strokes.

Turns out, he beat me by five.

I tell him this as he sits back on a picnic bench and carefully sticks his borrowed shoes into his dumpster golf bag.

“Oh yeah?” says Walter Donaldson, looking confused for the first time this morning. “I didn’t know we were keeping score.”

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com