"In a field littered with silver-spooners and prodigies, Wedel’s story resonates most."
/Just an incredible piece of work by Ryan Lavner to put together Frederick Wedel's story on the eve of the Pepperdine junior's semi-final U.S. Amateur match after a resounding victory over Nathan Smith.
Besides rooting for Wedel because he's a Pepperdine Wave, it's worth nothing he's seen the darkest, strangest sides of life. Wedel carries a strange kind of burden playing for himself and his dad, who started him in this crazy game and who now is bedridden because of a freak, and heartbreakingly innocuous incident.
He was 10 when his dad (also named Fred) kept itching what he thought was a mosquito bite on his neck. It turned out to be a staph infection in his spinal cord, and a few weeks later he was paralyzed from the neck down.
A normal childhood was no longer possible. For three years, Fred spent most of his days in a car, driving an hour to and from the hospital, where sometimes all his dad could do was listen.
“I really didn’t handle it well,” he said. “I just kept having hopes that maybe one day he’d walk again, that we’d figure it out. Eventually I realized he wasn’t going to walk again. It threw me into a dark place for a while.”
An eighth-grader without a father figure, Wedel rebelled. His family split apart. He got kicked out of private school. His golf game suffered without the man who taught him how to play with a cut-down 7-iron at age 3.
And now he's in the semi-finals of the U.S. Amateur.
NBC picks up the weekend coverage from 4-6 p.m. ET. You can follow the matches at the official website. Pete Kowalski previews the two semi-final matches here.
**A heartbreaker of a loss, but still a fine performance to go 19 holes. Ryan Lavner's account.
