By Anthony Bosco
My Uncle Frank died earlier this month after a long bout with cancer. He was the patriarch of my family, one of the greatest guys I ever met and the man I have to credit for my first ever hole-in-one.
But let me go back a bit first. My Uncle Frank was born and raised here in Queens, Long Island City to be exact, where he lived with his parents in a little yellow house under the elevated train. He was the oldest of three boys, including my Uncle Bob and, of course, my father, Ron.
They don’t make them like my uncle Frank anymore. He was a Depression-era baby who grew up in post-war America and lived his life as a young man in a working-class neighborhood, the son of first-generation Italian immigrants.
Frank used to tell a story about one of the more harrowing adventures of his youth, when he and a few friends tried to swim across the East River to Roosevelt Island. Uncle Frank was the only one of his friends to actually go through with the dare. He jumped into the water and started his stroke, quickly realizing the current was pulling him south. Before he knew it, Frank was still a good ways from shore and slowly drifting under the 59th Street Bridge.
Roosevelt Island was buzzing by as every muscle in my uncle’s body strained to make it safely to dry land. As he got closer and closer to the island, my uncle noticed someone shouting at him from the approaching shore, an old war vet hobbling on a cane.
“C’mon, laddie, you can make it,” the old man shouted, as my still teenage uncle tried valiantly to traverse one of the world’s busiest waterways.
Just as Roosevelt Island was about out of reach, my uncle grabbed hold of a rock and managed to pull himself to shore just before it was too late. His friends, all about a mile up and across the river, had long since gone, convinced their friend failed to make it across.
Soaking wet, my uncle climbed a stairwell inside the Queensboro Bridge and walked barefoot back to Queens. When he got home, a crowd of people and a few police cars greeted him as well as my grateful and positively irate grandmother.
My grandfather died a young man at 44, long before I was even a glimmer in my father’s eye. And at 12 years older than my dad, uncle Frank became the predominant male figure in my father’s life. Even after my grandmother remarried, Frank’s influence on my father never waned.
Frank was married to my godmother, Jenny, and the two of them had three children, my cousins Frank, Kathy and Richie, all of whom have children of their own now.
By the time I came around, Frank was still very much in his prime. He and my father played doubles paddleball for years at parks all over New York City. In fact, I spent a good deal of my youth at the courts in Flushing Meadows Corona Park watching my father and uncle play.
Frank moved his family out of Queens to Valhalla, N.Y. in the 1970s, but he came back often, if not for paddleball then to visit his family at Calvary Cemetery.
He was always a character, a loyal and fun-loving guy who was never more at home than after playing 18 holes of golf or sharing a Rusty Nail with his friends. After he retired, Uncle Frank spent a lot of time playing golf, a passion he developed at a young age and never lost.
I played a bunch of times with my uncle, who, while never a big hitter, knew how to find the hole. In one column I wrote a few years back, I referred to him as “Frankie One-Putt” because that’s all he usually ever needed.
It was during one of those rounds that I witnessed my first-ever hole-in-one, courtesy of my cousin Richie, who aced the third hole at the Knollwood Country Club.
Frank was diagnosed with prostate cancer nine years ago, something that hardly slowed him down. He kept playing golf and living his life, even though he had this disease eating away at him.
During the last year it got progressively worse. A second cancer popped up and it was only a matter of time. The last time I spoke with Frank, he was in his living room. He was hooked up to an oxygen tank but still in good spirits, talking about how all he wanted to do was play golf again.
He did, playing until it was physically impossible for him. His last days were spent in his home, where his fiancée, Carmen, and his son Rich took care of him.
The day after we buried Frank, Rich and I and my cousins Frank and Brian played golf at Knollwood, just a short drive from my uncle’s home. I bought two sleeves of balls that day stamped with the Knollwood emblem.
A week to the day after Frank was buried I was playing again, for a story I was writing about Queens golf. It was at Kissena, the fifth hole, a 164-yard Par 4, when it happened.
I hit a great shot, perfectly straight and high. I saw the ball bounce once and then disappear at the foot of the pin. Ken Lee, the guy I was playing with, began screaming that it had gone into the hole. I was just too dumbstruck to react.
I walked up to the flag and there it was staring at me, a Pinnacle with the Knollwood mark right on it, a hole-in-one.
That it was a week after Frank was buried, a ball bought at and marked by a club he knew so well and where we both watched his son ace a hole seemed a nice coincidence. But when I reported the hole-in-one after my round, the clerk gave me a sheet to submit to the Metropolitan PGA so I could get an official certificate commemorating the ace. The address, the Knollwood Country Club.
I can’t help but think my hole-in-one was really my uncle playing one last hole. That may sound a little hokey, but that’s fine with me. I’m just glad I knew the man and that maybe that one shot was his way of saying goodbye, if just for a while.
Reach Sports Editor Anthony Bosco at TimesLedger@aol.com or call 718-229-0300, Ext. 130.
