What was happening? What could happen? On this Monday night in late July, in my stifling room, I had been listening mostly to the squeaks of my single, metal-framed bed, but now, the idea of murder had shoved its way in. Two floors below me at the Niagara Gospel Mission homeless shelter, a fight had broken out, and while the participants had been kicked out of the building, that didn’t stop them from taking their beef out onto the street.
This is being homeless, Tom, a 70-year-old mission resident, told me.
You never really close your eyes.
“I hear it up on the second floor,” Tom said. “I face the road, and I hear people yelling and screaming at each other, people arguing.”
For a week, I lived at Niagara Gospel. I waited in line for breakfast at 7:30, lunch at noon and dinner at 5:30, eating donated food off the kind of faded plastic trays found in grade schools. Classes ran in between. The showers had only hot water. My third-floor room had only hot air. By living in their world, I had hoped to understand it and them, to know their wins and losses, which some at Niagara Gospel earn in what feels like an unlikely arena:
A golf course.
“At the Niagara Gospel Mission, you can go from the crack house to the country club,” said John Cooper, the shelter’s executive director.
The Niagara Gospel Country Club.
Tom, who’s been homeless off and on since the 1980s, is the club president. There’s desperation around him at the shelter, a one-time YMCA about a mile from the Niagara Falls in Western New York. There is a sense that this is it. It probably is. Homelessness, of course, is to be without a home, but that’s like saying that to play golf is only to swing a club. There’s so much more — to both of them. What if simple-yet-enigmatic golf was part of what’s needed to rebound? Anyone can play it, and anyone can become engrossed with chasing golfing perfection. There are lessons there. There also is a community trying to understand them — and, man, wouldn’t it feel good to talk to someone about all that, after everyone has previously told you to go to hell? There is peace, too. Putting greens and green grass, and none of the shrieks from the street.
Stick the knife in me!
I want to f—ing die!
The morning after the cries, Tom and about a dozen other men, myself included, piled into a rickety van.
We drove past a grocery store, where a former resident of the shelter had been shot and killed, and past areas where the men could point out meth dealers and pimps. Along the way, they talked Bills football, because most everyone here talks Bills football.
The van pulled up to a golf course.
The homeless were home.
The Niagara Gospel Country Club at Hyde Park.
Darren Riehl
I ASKED PAUL FOR A SHOW DURING A ROUND, after I politely turned down an offer to play. He had promised there would be one and that I would want to write about it. He was right. Twice. On the 8th hole, a par-5, Paul went all Hollywood on me, pounding his tee shot 250 yards down the middle of the fairway before hitting his second shot nearly as far, placing his ball near the green. I hollered after each. He smiled. He whispered that he didn’t know how he had done that.
He loves a saying he’s picked up, though.
“I’ll pray that my next shot is my best shot,” he said.
“I can’t stay with that hole in one.
“I got to move on.”
Before coming to the shelter, Paul lived in a rental car. A home on wheels, but he felt he was spinning only backward. Paul, though, once rented a Mercedes, because, well, just because. “I was homeless, sleeping in a Mercedes,” he said. He used to sneak into a multistory parking garage about a mile from Niagara Gospel, find a spot isolated enough and sleep. Sometimes, he would just think. Mornings were good for that. As far as he knew, no one seemed to mind a 6-foot-2, 50-something man either dreaming or daydreaming while they parked before going to work at the hospital across the street.
“I didn’t want to startle the women because there’s a lot of women working here,” he said.
Before coming to the shelter, all the residents lived somewhere. But somewhere shrunk, either physically or psychologically. Often both. Paul had owned a home, with a porch where he liked to smoke. One night, while checking the mail, he felt an envelope on the side of the mailbox. It was addressed to his wife and written by a co-worker. Paul opened it and found evidence of his wife’s affair. He had also held a job, as an environmental inspector, until the effects of an accident crippled his neck and deadened his legs. He was let go. Eventually, he was living in cars.
Before coming to the shelter, no one wants to come to the shelter. John, the mission’s 35-year-old director, has been spit on at check-in. The new arrivals’ thoughts are bleak. How did I get here? What if even here doesn’t work?
And there’s this, which some residents started asking last July — ironically, given the perception that golf can drive a person mad:
Why am I holding a golf club?
John had been an Army sniper who was so precise with a rifle that he said his beloved Bills had asked if he would patrol their stadium’s roof during games. (He declined, choosing to watch games instead.) His only experience with golf had come while serving, when he had ridden golf carts around courses while stationed in Hawaii. But then he took a lesson about a year and a half ago in the PGA Hope program for veterans and saw all of the things that golf lifers wax romantic about. He wondered whether the game might work as part of a shelter rehab program. He has seen the effects himself.
Niagara Gospel CC was launched in a gym, just over a year ago. On that first day, everyone looked and sounded dumbfounded. “A lot of the comments were, ‘That’s a rich people’s sport,’” John said. “Or, ‘I’ve never even swung a golf club before.’” John went home and told his wife, Liz, that he had mostly been struck by golf balls. Paul said his whole body hurt afterward. They kept going, though. Those around John say he is a thinker — also a pastor, he has written a book exploring how his military background meshes with his religious beliefs — and he talked with Frank Garcia, a longtime teaching pro in the area who has worked in the Hope program. He coaches on his own dime, out of his belief in the program. Frank has also found time for practice sessions and nine-hole rounds at a pair of courses (Hyde Park and Audubon) and a dome (Paddock); the used clubs and balls are all donated.
Everyone knows when Frank is around. He’s hands-on. Legs-on, if need be. Anything in the name of getting shoulders and hips and everything else coordinated to play golf. He’s the program’s wall socket, and everyone is plugged in, maybe more so than anyone else Frank has coached. During the round after the cries outside of Niagara Gospel, Paul played with Frank — whose cheers, after Paul’s shots on the 8th hole, boomed like the Falls.
Then Paul had to hit again.
Next shot, best shot.
More than anything, he said, you can control your thinking. The result becomes irrelevant.
Golf is packed with subtle ideas like that, which isn’t to say that Paul and everyone else are on the recovery road simply because they’ve found the bottom of a few cups.
Two years after coming to the shelter, Paul now works there as the head of the longer-term rehab group. He has his own office. One morning, he even treated me to breakfast at the Why Coffee Shop, a greasy spoon across the street from the shelter. Not that he would normally miss a meal inside the shelter.
Doug is the head cook. He can make frozen chicken tenders taste gourmet. Doug has been a cook since he was 16. He’s also one of the only NGCC members to have played golf before coming to the mission, and he had worked at a couple of golf course kitchens in the area. He treated his late father to rounds at those. Dad taught him how to play, and Dad made him his clubs; club-making was a hobby. A year ago, Doug came to the shelter with those clubs and dumped them inside a locker. He had been out of work. For a while, he lived with his ex-wife, but she threw him out after an argument. He lost contact with his four kids. We went to the trailer home he had lived in before coming to Niagara Gospel, and he said he had attempted suicide a few times.
“I just wasn’t dealing with reality,” Doug said. “I wasn’t there. I was physically there, but mentally I checked out. Got really down on myself, bad depression, and just got away from me.
“But the way I look at it, somebody was looking out for me because I was unsuccessful, obviously, since I’m here.”
Doug said he recently reconnected with his daughter, who wanted to take him out for his birthday. She would bring along his grandson.
John also said he believed Doug could run any restaurant’s kitchen now. John thought he could find employment for anyone in the shelter, but an answer to homelessness isn’t so much “get a job,” it’s “don’t lose it.” Golf, Paul said, reinforces what’s needed to be successful; it’s like a psychiatrist in that regard. The game also offers continuing chances — they’re even called shots! — that can feel plenty good to those who feel as if they’ve run out of them. Doug said the golf course is a good place “to get your mind right.” “It keeps me moving forward,” he said.
Next shot, best shot.
Back in the shelter, I asked Paul what he thought about Monday night’s fight.
He related it to golf.
To his saying.
The two men lost control. He had done that once, too.
“I wish I’d applied that in my life years ago,” he said.
“But I can do it today.”
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I WATCHED TOM TEE OFF IN THE FIRST GROUP DURING A ROUND, after I politely turned down an offer to play. He is, after all, the inaugural winner of the Mission Masters, the shelter’s first-ever “major.” Held in March at the nearby Paddock golf dome, the event featured pitching, chipping, hitting to targets and putting at a mini-golf course. There were scores, too.
“There was only one winner,” Tom said. A grin formed just above a 2-foot-long white beard that has made him a natural fit to be the mission’s Santa.
I played along.
Who?
“That winner was me,” he said. “I did, by one stroke.”
How did all of your fellow members handle that?Paul? Doug?
“Like, ‘Man, I ain’t losing to Tom. OK, I got your number, Tom.’ Paul’s got my number, and Doug’s got my number, and it’s, well, they don’t.
“Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.”
And they can never take that away from you: The first Mission Masters title.
“They can’t take that away.”
Tom’s reward haul was sizable. A coin with a Masters logo. A certificate. A champion’s dinner on the Friday of the other Masters. Pimento cheese dip was the starter. Pizza was the main course. “I go, ’What do we got for dinner back here?’” Tom said, reviewing his menu picks. “‘Whatever you want.’ I go, ‘You got pizza back there?’ ‘Yeah, we got plenty.’ OK, there you go.” In May, he was named the Niagara Gospel Country Club’s first president. Its members wear blue sport coats. Each is presented in a ceremony in a room exclusive to the members. Every member spoke of kinship, something few had felt in years.
Tom talked about his victory as we drove away from a deserted field.
Before coming to the shelter, he once awoke in that field. Walled in by 3-foot weeds, he panicked. He figured out where he was; it was a few blocks from a bar where he spent his days, from its opening at 8 a.m. until its closing at 2:30 a.m., every day, for years. But what happened? Did he get to the field by himself? Did somebody drag him? Tom went to the place where he had been staying, showered, then came back to the bar, where he thought the owner might have answers. Tom had been sitting in his usual corner, where he downed drinks even though he’d walked in already two bottles deep.
The owner offered him his “breakfast.” A shot and a beer. That day, Tom declined them.
Before coming to the shelter, something had happened to everyone there. But to reach being without a home also means that no one wants you in theirs. Amanda Aykanian, a homeless services researcher at the University at Buffalo, said that when someone is forced out onto the streets, they have been refused. By family. By friends. Perhaps the rejection was self-inflicted. Still, you have been forsaken. Everyone Tom could think of didn’t care if he sat in a bar all day — or woke up in some field.
“A lot of people think, lose job, lose apartment, under a bridge, homeless shelter,” John said. “But these guys are coming from, like, hey, I slept on this couch before I got to that point, but then I stole drugs from this person or I stole money from this person. Or they were doing something and I was a witness to some crime or whatever it is.
“And then they leave that and then they literally have nowhere else to go because all relationships in their lives have crumbled to a point where no one will take them in.”
And if you’re someone like Tom, who said he had been living on and off the streets for the past 40 years?
That feels like walk-right-past-you alienation.
“I always say 9.5 million people a year come here to watch water fall off a cliff,” John said. “But they’ll walk right by someone made in the image of God, someone who should be loved, someone who should be cared for, someone who’s a person. They got a story, they got a name, and so what that does to someone is imagine thousands of people every single day making eye contact and seeing you and then looking away.
“That’s what they face here because there’s so many people that come from around the world every single day, thousands of people are doing that to you. No one will even make eye contact with you. What that does to your psyche. No one, no one cares. That’s what it screams, right? No one cares.”
Forty years after Tom woke up in a field, we returned to it. The bar no longer stands. Looking back on his time on the streets, Tom started to cry. No one wanted him. But if he wasn’t vigilant, everyone on the streets would. Those strung out on alcohol and drugs hunted easy targets. He could have been mugged, beat up or shot, or all of the above. To sleep, he would seek abandoned cars and houses — anything with a door and roof. Occasionally, he gave up and collapsed on benches.
Living that way, Tom said, you think: Why don’t I just curl up and die? Others warned him about the Niagara Falls: Whatever you do, don’t stare. “With the sound of the water, how powerful it is, yeah, it gets you thinking to do something drastic. But if I get to that point, I got to walk away because I know exactly what if I don’t — I’m going to be like a few people that don’t survive.”
Six years ago, Tom left a small motel room that he had found on the cheap but could no longer afford, loaded up a shopping cart with clothes, a flashlight, batteries, a computer and some CDs — Bob Seger is his favorite — and walked four miles to Niagara Gospel. Today he works there, at the reception desk and the donation room.
Tom also plays golf.
At first, that was hard. There’s a loveable grumpiness to him, and when he first tried golf, he was especially lovingly grumpy. “Oh no, oh no, not me, not me, it’s not going to be my gig,” he said. Frank, remembering Tom’s first swings, imitated his voice: “He was so dang, it was funny, you know. ‘Errrr. Thaaaat’s noooot my gaaaame.’ I go, man. So he went from this guy that was like, if golf was a drink, he was drinking poison, to the greatest drink in the world.” In the shelter, Tom will often wear a black T-shirt emblazoned with the saying, “Never underestimate an old man with a golf club.” Jokingly, on golf days, he says he’s going “clubbing.” “Not going out to the nightlife. None of that. Straight to the golf course.”
He’s the Mission Masters champion. The first one, you know?
On the day after the cries outside Niagara Gospel, as part of an NGCC outing, Tom played in a best-shot scramble group with shelter donor Yogi Schiller, a retired business owner and a member of the prestigious Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester. When Yogi heard about the program, he called it “genius.” His round with Tom reflected that. They used a few of Tom’s shots and a few of Yogi’s; Yogi’s putt on the last hole gave their foursome a birdie. Tom and Yogi shared a cart together.
A homeless man who once passed out in a field. And someone whose home course has hosted major championships.
Partners, like neither had ever had.
“Here we are, we played and we’re, you know, kibitzing on the golf course as far as, ‘OK, where do you think this is going to go, whose shot are we going to take?’” Yogi said. “So there’s an understanding that there’s a group dynamic and they’re part of the group dynamic. And then afterwards, you saw that people were sitting together and they weren’t necessarily sitting in a, you know, ‘You’re this, you’re that.’
“They’re being together.”
My room at the Niagara Gospel Mission.
Nick Piastowski
A FEW DAYS AFTER THE CRIES OUTSIDE NIAGARA GOSPEL, another resident, Renard, was on the driving range. He commanded me, the reporter, to swing. I said no. He asked again. No. He’s the story, I told him, and, Renard will tell you, it’s remarkable that he’s still around to tell it.
He wears reminders. Four bullet holes. A tattoo that reads “Thug Life” on his right forearm. He had been in gangs in the ’90s, when “the crack epidemic was out there.” He once was shot over a drug deal gone bad. Family members begged him to leave, but the money and the lifestyle felt fast, and his name had gotten out. “A bad guy,” he said. A night working at a restaurant also nearly killed him. At the end of a shift, his boss made drinks, and while driving home in his ’79 Cadillac, Renard passed out before somehow waking up just in time to swerve out of the way of a few kids, ramming his car into a pole instead. He broke multiple bones and lost teeth.
The accident might have scared him straight, but it didn’t.
“I went right back out to the street,” Renard said. “Kept calling my name.”
Today, he is sure that most everyone he ran with is dead. For stretches as he got older, he lived in and out of rooms and shelters. Last September, Renard was staying with his daughter in Ohio, not long after his son had been killed at a party. His parents had also died; he came to his mom’s funeral wearing a shoe with one of his toes sticking out. “That’s pretty low,” he said. He had stopped drinking, but he craved a bottle. He said he felt like giving up. On his phone, he typed “rehab homeless shelters.” Then he boarded a Greyhound for Niagara Falls, where he had never been.
He now has found some peace, which he had never really had, at another place he had never been: a golf course. His game is still developing, but you can tell that mishits don’t bother him. As part of a skills challenge during one round, he relished outdriving some of his competitors — with a putter. At Niagara Gospel, he now manages the floor below where I stayed. Golf, Renard said, “did something” to him. “I told Frank that I’m a football player,” Renard said. “And he groomed me into a golfer. But changed a lot in me. Peace, the whole atmosphere of golfing, is wonderful, man.”
Perhaps more than anyone else at the shelter, Renard could relate to the men shouting outside on Monday night. He’s been there.
Stick the knife in me!
I want to f—ing die!
Golf is only a small piece of the club members’ lives, and all of whatever brought them there is ever present. John is optimistic but not naive. A game can’t possibly alleviate every deep-rooted issue. There will be problems. What happens when they leave the shelter, a day that will come for everyone? “What happens to someone when they first become homeless are several things, but then the longer someone is homeless, those things all compound,” said Aykanian, the researcher. “And I think the longer you’re homeless, the more difficult it becomes to exit homelessness.”
What happens if there are more shouts? Or, more frighteningly, what happens if the two men return to the shelter?
John said he thinks they will. He said he hopes they will.
A Niagara Gospel Country Club member will talk to them. Maybe Renard. He’s been there, he’ll say. Homeless. Hopeless. Violent.
Today, he’s mellow. He’s kind. But he can still shout. I heard him. It was booming.
I eventually relented to his pleas. On the range, I hit a few balls. Driver in hand, I struck what I thought was a respectable shot. I was ready to move on.
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