Checking Off The Boxes With The Jankowskis

Andrew Jankowski watches dad Jim's chip on 18.

HANOVER – It’s not unusual to have father-son teams teeing it up in the Tommy Keane Invitational tournament, the annual end-of-July clambake whose namesake served as Hanover Country Club pro and Dartmouth golf coach from 1922-66.

It’s not unusual to have a few Dartmouth alums in the field, and there’s even the occasional team made up of former Big Green players.

Only Jim and Andrew Jankowski check off every last one of those boxes. Oh yeah, and one more. Wife/Mom Shari also graduated from Dartmouth.

Jim played ice hockey and golf at Dartmouth before graduating in 1981. Andrew considered one of the Division III NESCAC schools where he might have been able to play hockey and golf, but in this age of sport specialization instead followed his father’s footsteps and teed it up for the Big Green, graduating in 2013.

Father and son share a moment on 18.

Jim made his TKI debut in 1979, its fourth edition. Andrew had to wait until 2008 when he turned 18, although that was hardly his first Tommy Keane rodeo.

“My mom had me out here in the backpack when I was six months old,” he said after Team Jankowski finished off a two-over-par 72 to earn a spot in the Championship flight. “There came a point when I started counting down the years until I could play.”

“He was counting the years and I was counting the years,” said Jim, who played his first few Keanes with classmate and former Dartmouth basketball player Jim McGannon, and then paired up for many years with former hockey teammate Rich Ryerson.

Jim, who lives in New London, missed a couple of Keanes when he lived in Toronto in the early 1980s but has been a regular with just one exception ever since.

“I was in Ireland with Rich Ryerson and (former teammate and current Dartmouth hockey coach) Bob Gaudet, so that was an excused absence,” he said with a laugh. “I think that’s the only one I’ve missed since the mid-‘80s.”

Andrew, who drove up from his home in Providence, R.I. for this year's event, is pretty sure that streak will keep going.

“We’ve played in a good number of father-son events,” he said, “but this is the family staple, and it has been for as long as I can remember. I worked from New London yesterday and then came out and played nine holes to get ready. This is my vacation.”

The Jankowskis were invited speakers for the Keane dinner banquet Friday night and sitting under the tent behind the clubhouse after finishing his round Jim sketched out what he planned to say.

“To me what makes this unique is you’ve got things that you do with your family, like Thanksgiving, or you’ve got things you do with your friends, like college reunions every five years,” he said. “Here you have families getting together, and you have a lot of friends getting together. You’ve got a good, serious-but-friendly competition. You put all those together and you’ve got something really special.

“It was 37 years ago I played my first TK. How do you imagine that you are going to spend every year here in Hanover at the end of July with the family, and playing with your own son? You just can’t imagine that, with so much stuff going on these days. But this has a permanent place in our family. The last weekend in July, this is where we are always going to be.”

DIVOTS
While Jim Jankowski made it to the semifinals of the Championship flight twice with other teammates, the first time he advanced to the finals was with Andrew two years ago. The Jankowskis lost that match to the father-son team of Shane and Nick MacDonald, 2&1. They will square off in Saturday's morning around against Mak Lyford and Zach Temple.

Hanover High School grads Nate Choukas and Benny Hayes, who made it to the Championship flight final last year, shot 29-35–64 to earn medalist honors Friday. They had threes on the first seven holes and eight birdies on the day . . . Seven teams were in the “march” for the last slot in the Championship flight. The march lasted well over an hour with Brendan Doyle and Ethan Gage earning the privilege (?) of taking on the No. 1 seeds Choukas and Hayes . . . Match play in four flights begins Saturday morning. Teams winning their morning and afternoon matches will square off in the semifinals Sunday morning with the championship matches slated for Sunday afternoon.

The 18th green was a mob scene during the "march" with a large group looking on from the tent. (Click photo to enlarge.)