Perhaps because TV wasn’t the behemoth it is now – as a kid, we had but three channels and only two shows, “The Rifleman” and “Lassie”commanded my attention – and sandlot baseball was limited by nightfall and winters, you had to search for your entertainment pleasures elsewhere.

For me, they came from those nights when my parents, my three uncles and three aunts would gather around the kitchen table and tell stories. It used to invigorate me to hear how they knew someone whose brother was friends with so and so and could get tickets for all the big games.

Or how my father knew a waitress who was the only waitress Ted Williams would trust and could get me his autograph. (She did, too.)

Or how my maternal grandfather enlisted in World War I at the age of 16, fudging his birth date. He served in Lorraine, enchanted us with words in French, and named my eldest aunt after that region.

Stories enthrall me, especially when they pop into my mind in a most serendipitous manner. Last fall, for instance, when a round of golf with a local amateur legend, Paul Murphy, introduced me to golfer named Frederick Boyd, who picked up on my love of the Monterey Peninsula and told me a lovely story about his chance to play Monterey Peninsula Country Club.

My passion for that area had been in place for years but was cemented exponentially more when a younger son served six years as an assistant pro there. Boyd loved that and while we bounced around to other stories that day, months later what arrived was a heartwarming email.

Sensing that there might be more to the story that would intrigue me, Boyd explained that he visited Monterey so his wife could reunite with a longtime friend. That led another friend to suggest he call a member named Gaynor Chinn, because he’d love to play host.

Boyd did, Chinn was accommodating to the nth degree and in the email it was mentioned how his host had grown up in the Oakland area and was a “Bateman Boy.” The expression “light goes on in Marblehead” entered the story.

Having studied the landscape of Northern California golf – from Marion Hollins to the influence Eddie Lowery had over amateur golfers in San Francisco, to the glory of the San Francisco City Championship, to esteemed names such as Sandy Tatum, Johnny Miller, Juli Inkster, Roger Maltbie, and George Archer – Lucious Bateman had piqued my curiosity one time while studying up on the late and great Tony Lema.

Cheers to Boyd’s email, for when further research was done, what came my way was this quote from Lema, the 11-time PGA Tour and 1964 British Open champion. “Many kids might have made jails instead of pars and birdies if not for Loosh,” he once told Golf Digest.

To know that Gaynor Chinn could speak first-hand to the remarkable mentorship he got from Lucious Bateman made my day. “When I was 13 years old, I spent a lot of time in pool halls and my parent decided that wasn’t so good,” said Chinn.

“Me, my sister, and my mother and father all took lessons from Lucious and I quickly got swept up in his world. I quickly became a ‘Bateman Boy.’ ”

Were the world a different place in the late 1950s, Lucious Bateman might have played on the PGA Tour. But there was that hideous Caucasian-only clause within the PGA of America and so Bateman was left to teach lessons first at Airways Fairways, a driving range across the street from the Oakland airport.

He fixed the equipment, cleaned the balls, but mostly he taught. And, oh, how the kids embraced this gentle man’s patience and commitment. He asked of them one thing, “to give their best,” said Chinn.

The list of those youngsters he mentored included future PGA Tour winners such as Lema, John McMullin, Don Whitt, Dick Lotz.

When Airways Fairways closed, Bateman moved to another driving range, so he never had the luxury of a posh country club setting to teach. But it didn’t matter, said Chinn.

“Lucious was widely respected by club pros, so he’d make some calls and Fridays was his day to take the kids to play 36 holes. He’d pick me up at my house and we’d be off.”

The trips were always inspiring, most memorable being the time they went to Incline Village in Lake Tahoe where George Bayer was the head pro, and another day when the played at Spyglass Hills.

“He’d shoot in the 60s, he always shot in the 60s,” said Chinn. “I could play pretty well, but there was so much more to Lucious than his golf lessons. He was basically everyone’s second dad.”

No surprise given the times, but it was not an easy route for Lucious Bateman. Born in Louisiana but raised in Mississippi, he discovered golf as a caddie at age 17, but World War II called and so off he went into the Air Force.

He settled in the Oakland area to live with a sister, worked at Bethlehem Steel, and re-connected with golf. As an indicator to just how good he was, Lucious once shot the low score in a foursome with Joe Louis, Ted Rhodes, and Bill Spiller, but remember, this is as far as he could go with golf.

Was he bitter? Bateman once told Golf Digest that he was not.

“My mother taught me that everything happens for the best,” he said. “What may seem a tough break often works out the other way. I have no complaints.”

Quintessential Lucious Bateman, said Chinn, who considers his decision in the late 1960s to adjust his college class load so that he had Fridays off to play golf with his mentor to be among the soundest choices he ever made.

“He taught you respect. He taught you etiquette. He put you in your place.”

While he developed into a very nice golfer and still plays the game with great passion at MPCC, the 80-year-old Chinn, a former CPA, considers the highlight to his golf career directly tied to Bateman. “I was a pallbearer when he died (in 1972) and the next year when we had a memorial tournament in his honor, I shot 69 to win.”

Thirty-six years after his death, Bateman was posthumously presented the California Golf Writers’ highest honors. Another award soon came and so, too, did inductions into four different Hall of Fames. There is also a Lucious Bateman Foundation.

Yes, golf can be a slow game. But Chinn knows it is steep in tradition and that Lucious Bateman is a serious part of the Northern California Golf legacy. He’ll tell you the story, too.