A golf course marshal was dying. Then he felt his best friend’s paw

This is a golf story. And the story of a veteran. And a prison story. And a health story. But really, this is a dog story, so let’s start there.

After all, Tommy is a good boy.

Will you be the first to melt the floppy ears of the three-year-old yellow lab? Or the big black snout? Maybe it’s the tail that never came with an off switch? But there’s no arguing that the ever-knowing, ever-understanding, ever-reassuring brown eyes are his conduit to earning a pat on the back. Or under the chin. Or to get something tasty; alligator jerky is preferred.

The eyes give you that look. You know that one. It connects. It binds. Doggos like Tommy never wander off. They are always present.

And Hank Ford desperately needed that inseparability.

These days it’s at their home, about a half hour north of Denver, or at Hank’s job as a volunteer marshal nearby. Coyote Creek Golf Coursethe two talk. Hank will say words, and Tommy will turn and listen. When Hank is stressed, Tommy tries a few moves. There is a push of the dog’s head into the chin. And if that doesn’t work, there’s a jump from the dog to the lap. In the end everything will be forgotten.

“You just can’t help but lose all the aggression you have,” Hank said, “when there’s a goofy-looking dog looking down on you.”

So Tommy is a four-legged wake-up call.

In more ways than one.

For twenty years, HANK said he was awake. On August 1, 1989, he entered active duty in the Marines, serving in Desert Shield and Desert Storm in Iraq, and on deployments in the Adriatic. Four years later, following a shortage of military personnel, Hank enlisted in the Army, where he served another four years. From 1997 he served in both a prison and the Army Reserve, including a return to the Middle East, before retiring in 2009. Those are the dates. But this is what it all felt like:

Buzz. Always a buzz.

Followed by silence.

And a void. When diagnosed with PTSD, Hank looked for adrenaline, and even during normal calm golf he found it. Rounds went like this: tee off and then hit the drinks cart. Occasionally he was asked to leave the clubhouse. He said he walked to the course but walked back “shattered.” “And yeah, I mean, alcohol became a good friend,” he said. “You know, I realized I could drink at 8 in the morning and no one could tell me not to. And it would wash your mind away from the things you were thinking about.”

There were also fights. One of these got him the job as volunteer marshal at Coyote Creek; his work in prison helped him solve an incident, and the course got him on board. Only he said he was looking for trouble, not just reacting to it. “I was driving around looking for the guy who had a small can of beer, because we didn’t sell the can. And I got into it with some drunks where maybe we should have called the police and let them handle the problem. But no, I wanted to handle it.”

“So it got to the point where the professional called me one day and said, ‘You know, I don’t think you do very well in public.’ And I said to him, ‘You know, I agree. I agree.’ And I walked away.

“And now I really had nothing to do.”

Of course you know where this is going. This is a dog story, remember.

Hank initially had reservations about the suggestion of a service dog. You want to be strong. But there is also strength in numbers. He admitted. Then he was tackled, after Tommy, star student of Dogs Inc., and his trainer came to Colorado a little over two years ago.

“The doorbell rang,” said Hank, “and I opened the door and she warned me, she goes, I gotta tell you, he’s a big dog, he’s a big dog. And open the door, and here’s this little 60-pound Labrador. Because my dog, my hunting dogs were 100 pounds. They were big. And she told me to sit in the chair. I sat in the chair and she said, call his name and I’m going to let go of his name. Leash.

“And he just jumped on my lap and just started licking me because he’s a licker. I started feeling it right away.”

‘It’ never went away. ‘It’ has grown. Hank, 54, and Tommy go everywhere together. Grocer. The couch. They watch football; Henk is one Green Bay Packers fan, and Jordan Love touchdown passes are heralded with his shouts and Tommy’s ‘zoomies’. Eventually, Hank also reconnected with Coyote Creek. And that’s where you fully see what’s happened since Hank and Tommy got together. There is peace. Golfers, Hank said, want to see him. Friends, he said, have never seen him laugh so much.

You then ask:

Did Tommy save Hank’s life? Did he wake him up?

He says yes. He says he did. He says he “turned the lights on” for him.

Then Tommy woke him up again.

HANK WANTED A DOG TO GET HIM OUT OF BED. After he retired, he said he would go to sleep at 2 a.m. and roll out around noon. Not anymore. Still, the trainer checked his request again. And Hank now understands the doubt.

“Every morning he jumps up on me and his elbows go straight into the bladder and he just looks at me: time to get up.”

However, on February 7 of this year, that was not enough.

Tommy barked too.

And planted.

And jumped even more.

To get. Upwards.

“I mean, he was panicking,” Hank said. “And I thought, leave me alone. I didn’t want to get up. I was really, really tired. And there’s really no reason for that.”

“And I’m thinking, well, he needs to go to the bathroom. I’m not going to make him suffer. He’s never, in all the time I’ve had him, woke me up at night and said, let’s go outside. He’s never done it. He’s never done it. He waits. And then at 6:45, 7 o’clock, it’s, hey, let’s go. But that morning it was way out of character. And he didn’t bark. And he barked at me. He did everything he could.

“So I finally get up and I stumble to the back door. I opened the back door. I was like, okay. I said, go out. And the term for them to go to the bathroom, you say, ‘Busy, busy.’ I’m like, ‘Get out there, get busy, get busy.’ He wouldn’t go. And he looks at me and then he starts jumping up. And when I’m gone for a while, he jumps up and we stand nose to nose. You know, he jumps up and taps me on the nose. He jumps down and does it again.

“This time he’s doing it on my chest.”

When Hank started to wake up, he said he felt dizzy. His heart felt ‘funky’. He touched his carotid artery and felt four or five strokes at once. He found a blood pressure cuff given to him by the VA and checked it – 115 over 150 with a heart rate of 171, “and I thought, whoa, because that’s not good, and I said it couldn’t be good. So I’ll do it again. Same numbers.”

He left Tommy.

He went to the hospital. The counselors panicked, he said. A nurse told him he had AFib, short for atrial fibrillation. according to the Mayo Clinic“is an irregular and often very fast heart rhythm.” Clerks worked to resolve it. He called his wife Maria. She was coming. He also asked her to bring Tommy. She did. At this point in the retelling of the story, Hank became choked up.

There was his dog. Again.

“She comes through the door,” Hank said, “he pulls the leash out of her hand and jumps into bed with me and lays his head on my chest. And you can see his head was tilted a little bit. And then he just relaxes a little bit.”

“He said, it was like, you are where you need to be.”

Later, a doctor told Hank that because he wasn’t waking up at home, he might have had a stroke or not woken up at all. But because he had arrived at the hospital, he was able to leave within a day.

A story, right?

A golf story. And the story of a veteran. And a prison story. And a health story. Everyone hears what happened. Friends, neighbors. Local media. National media.

But really, this is a dog story, so let’s end there.

You are curious:

What would Hank say to Tommy?

Something like this.

“I tell Tommy he’s my best friend and I thank him all the time, you know, because he’s in my life and saved my life. And you can tell I’m choking up when I say it. But I tell him every day. I do. I do. He just gives me a little twist in the head, like he’s doing now.”

From a chair, Hank called for Tommy to jump on his lap. He did.

“Give me a hug. Please. Come on, buddy.”

“Who is your best friend?”

Editor’s Note: For more information about Dogs Inc., Click here.

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