Better-Than-Most Boy

Gus Adamopoulos packed a lot into life, including his version of a famous putt

The boys who knew him are now men who remember him.

Jim Adamopoulos was reminded of this last week. At a gym not far from his home in western Massachusetts, a stranger approached and told him a story.

The stranger’s adult son had been rushing to go to work and asked his father to retrieve his wallet. Something fell out of the billfold, a worn youth-league basketball card printed more than a dozen years ago. The young athlete on the card wasn’t the wallet’s owner.

It was Gus Adamopoulos.

With Thanksgiving approaching last year, Jim Adamopoulos got on the phone to order a fresh turkey from a farmer in Ludlow, Mass., where he lives. His sister was coming to town and would cook. Adamopoulos hadn’t come to close to finishing the spelling of his 11-letter last name when he was interrupted.

“I know you are,” the farmer said. “My son still talks about your son.”

Gus Adamopoulos, age 9, after winning a golf tournament. (Courtesy Jim Adamopoulos)

Jim Adamopoulos is 65 years old. Tall and lanky, he still looks like the basketball player he has been most of his life. He played full-court hoops until just a few years ago, when the ACL in his right knee went on a fast break, the sound so loud another player in the pickup game thought it was someone’s head smacking the hardwood.  

I have only known Jim a couple of years but spoke to him for the first time in the mid-1990s when he was teaching journalism at Central High School in Springfield, Mass., where, as I found out later, he often was called simply “Mr. A.” Jim called me at Golf World magazine, where I was a senior editor. One of his students, a young man who sometimes struggled with schoolwork, had to write a report.

The teenager loved sports and knew about Tiger Woods. I had a written stories about Woods. Jim thought researching the soon-to-be iconic golfer would motivate the teen to apply himself and asked if I would talk with the student on the phone about Tiger and what it was like to be a sportswriter. Jim’s recollection, crisper than mine, is that I had a good conversation with the student, who embraced the assignment because of the subject matter.

Nearly a quarter century passed before I met Jim through a former longtime magazine colleague and friend, Tim Murphy, who had retired and moved from Connecticut, where he had resided and worked, to Massachusetts, where he settled about 30 minutes from Jim’s home. In one of our catch-up calls, Tim mentioned having played part of a round with someone named Jim Adamopoulos at Westover Golf Course in Granby, Mass., where both men play regularly. When Jim discovered that Tim had worked for many years at Golf World, he had mentioned the long-ago phone call between his Central High student and me. Tim relayed this brief interaction and told me that Jim played a lot of golf. It would be a while before I found out one of the reasons why.

Jim and his wife, Helen Stefanyszyn, were the parents of a daughter, Ava, when Helen was expecting their second child in the fall of 1999. They hadn’t decided on a name when Jim suggested one of his uncles, Gus Stambakis.

“He was a Greek immigrant who ran a corner story in New York City,” Jim says. “When I was a kid, I felt like he was the best person I knew. He just emoted purity and goodness.”

Decision made: Ava’s little brother was named Augustus John Adamopoulos. This Gus would have a lot in common with the man for whom he was named.

Smart. Generous. Athletic. Gus was all those things.

“Gus was real,” Jim says. “He was so real. The kid was just different.”

Gus loved sports, was handy at anything he tried. But basketball and golf, his dad’s passions, turned out to be his too.

Players several years older than Gus loved having them on their basketball team because of his talent. Not only was he good, but he made those around him better. He could shoot and pass. He was smart on the court.

The newspaper in Springfield, The Republican, sponsors a junior golf tournament. Gus signed up as soon as he turned 6, the minimum age. The entry form was old-school, clipped from the sports pages and mailed in. The parents of almost every one of the very young entrants filled out the form for their children. The tournament organizer could tell Gus, taking care of business the way that he did, completed the form himself.

The youngest competitors played three holes from a 150-yard marker, some of them with a parent as caddie. “I made him carry his own little bag,” Jim says. “I let him have ownership of things.” Before Gus teed off on the first hole, when he was 8, he surprised his father by telling him that driver was too much club. He hit a different club pin high.

In addition to the junior event, the newspaper sponsors a hole-in-one contest, each golfer getting a couple of shots to see how close he or she could hit it. Jim brought Gus one twilight. On his second swing to a one-shotter over water, he hit it closer than anyone had and presently was going into the pro shop to use his winner’s $75 shop credit.

“You know,” father told son, “this is not that easy.”

Gus and Jim Adamopoulos during one of their frequent rounds together in Massachusetts. (Courtesy Jim Adamopoulos)

Gus played in sneakers, unlike most of his peers who were outfitted in golf shoes. His mother, a talented fashion designer, first in New York and later in Massachusetts, wondered if her son shouldn’t have golf-specific footwear like the other kids.

“When he breaks 40 for nine holes, he’ll get golf shoes,” Jim countered.

In July of 2010, Jim and Gus were in one of their favorite spots, the Adirondacks, playing golf at Saranac Lake while Helen was with Ava at a basketball tournament. Gus played poorly on the front nine of the Seymour Dunn design, shooting 50. He got it going on the back, in the right direction but a bit shy of his goal.

“Three strokes from the shoes,” Gus said after putting out on the 18^th.

About a month later, on Aug. 17, 2010, Gus played in a junior tournament in South Hadley, Mass. As was his custom, Jim let Gus have his space and do his thing, arriving at the course only near the completion of the round.

Standing greenside at the closing uphill hole, Jim watched a ball land on the putting surface and check. He watched his brown-haired son head toward the ball and mark it. He watched him finish the round and win the 10-12 age group.

Gus had lofted his approach on the final hole with a 19-degree hybrid. “I smoked it,” son told father.  

Another man standing by the 18^th green, the grandfather of one of the other boys in Gus’s group, told Jim that while his son’s golf had been excellent, his demeanor around his fellow players—supportive, selfless—had been the best he had ever observed at a junior tournament.

If there was sunlight left for a sporting activity, Gus wanted to utilize it. Gus convinced his dad they should finish an already-good day with some fishing in their kayak on Norwich Lake, a 122-acre spring-fed body of water in Huntington, Mass.

On that sunny late-summer afternoon, the serenity of the setting was shattered in a devastating violent instant. A motorboat piloted by Steven J. Morse, towing a water skier and estimated to have been traveling 35 miles per hour, beared down on the Adamopoulos’s watercraft, giving them no time to avoid the collision.

Gus suffered mortal injuries to his upper body. A 9-1-1 call was made at 6:30 p.m., and he was pronounced dead less than 2 ½ hours later despite frantic life-saving efforts, including from his father, who sustained a deep gash to one of his legs.

Hundreds of people attended Gus’s funeral six days later in Ludlow.

“This was as senseless as any death can be,” Jim said in a eulogy read to the mourners by a friend, reported The Republican. “As we all know, 10 years is a tragically short time to frame life. But Gus packed a lot of life in those 10 years.”

Nearly two years after Gus was killed, a jury convicted Morse of a misdemeanor version of boat homicide and of lying to police. A Hampshire Superior Court judge sentenced Morse to five years in jail. At the sentencing, Judge Daniel Ford said, “In a case like this, there are no words to soothe the pain.”

I played golf with Jim a number of times without his mentioning the tragedy. He knows it is as heavy a topic that a person could bring up, so he doesn’t. His golf is an escape, at least as much as it can be for a man who lost a child the way he did and, eight years later, his wife to cancer. “It keeps me right,” Jim says of the game. He plays dozens of rounds each year with a push cart, wearing tennis shoes, his knees causing him to be particularly cautious when walking down steep slopes. He has some regular golf buddies but enjoys playing with strangers as well. During a New England winter, he’ll drive a couple of hours for sun and an open course, and when he gets there he’ll likely be wearing a white bucket hat with the image of an owl stitched on the crown.

When I first noticed the bird logo, I thought it might be for a club of which I wasn’t aware. But when I asked Jim, he said it was taken from a papier mâché owl Gus had made in school, artwork that was on display in his Springfield classroom. Jim clips a ball marker to his hat that Gus gave him hours before he died.   

The memories of his rounds with Gus are of some comfort. They played a bunch in their short time together, at home and on trips. They viewed lots of golf on television together too, such was their bond. “If I was watching,” Jim says, “he was watching.”

“I remember the first full hole Gus played,” Jim says. “He was running down the fairway like a deer.”

Sometimes Jim carries a well-used Rescue club in his bag. Gus and his mom went in together one Christmas and bought it for Jim. It turned out not to be right for Jim, so eventually it became a reliable weapon for Gus. During an unusually warm day this winter, when Jim came down to play with me, I noticed it as we walked toward the 13^th tee at Fairchild Wheeler’s Red course.

“Gus hit his last full shot with it,” Jim said as I waggled it gently. Given the history I now knew, it felt as if I were holding a club that had been used to win a major.

Once at Westover, when Gus got madder than Jim thought he should, he made him walk two holes without hitting a shot. If there wasn’t time for a full nine or 18, Jim and Gus played a five-hole loop at Westover, the 10^th through the 14^th holes. No. 14 is a tricky par 4 with a creek crossing the fairway in the landing area and a challenging uphill approach.

Jim’s tribute to a joyful moment his son, an avid golfer, enjoyed. (Bill Fields)

In one their frequent outings at Westover, Gus topped his drive off the 14^th tee, then busted a hybrid toward the green. He pitched on, the ball finishing 40 or 50 feet past a flagstick positioned on the front of the putting surface. It was a downhill slider, left to right, not unlike the putt Tiger Woods holed on the 17^th hole at TPC Sawgrass in the third round of the 2001 Players Championship.

“I’m going to make this putt,” Gus told his father as approached the lengthy par attempt.

They sometimes bet an Eskimo Pie, and Jim promised they would detour to Cumberland Farms on the way home that night if Gus sank this challenging putt.

After making his stroke and his ball began tracking toward the cup, Gus called his putt the way NBC’s Gary Koch had described Tiger’s as his ball made its improbable journey into the cup for a par, excitement building as it crept down the slope looking good.

“Better than most. Better than most.”

The guys stopped at Cumberland Farms.

And years later, after everything happened, Jim retrieved a stone from the waters where he and Gus fished on vacations in upstate New York. He had a monument maker inscribe some words and placed the rock in the woods well to the right of Westover’s 14^th green. It is a private tribute, golfer to golfer.

The Better Than Most Putt. A. “Gus” A.

Jim doesn’t need to hear a highlight to hear his son.