Sept. 24, 2010

By Josh Katzowitz

Paul Dillon didn't grow up playing golf. He was into football and baseball and basketball. Sure, he had caddied a little for some spending money when he was growing up, but in reality, he didn't have much desire to play the game.

He finally played his first round when he was 23 years old - by then, his knees were shredded from football, but he still had the need to play a competitive sport.

He found that he liked golf, but when he and his wife started having kids - six in the span of a decade - golf fell by the wayside. He was busy with his job (a packaging systems manager for Union Camp Corp.), with his travel and with his brood of children.

He had fallen in love with golf, but he went 12 years without playing. He was busy with everything. He was busy with life.

"When the kids got to be bigger, they started to caddy, and when they got beyond Little League, we all started to play," said Dillon, who's coached the Fordham golf team for the past 16 years. "I wasn't traveling as much, so I took up the game." He's kept up with it ever since. In reality, though, Dillon doesn't see himself as a former businessman or a former high school athlete. Heck, he really doesn't see himself as a golfer - or a golf coach, for that matter.

In Dillon's mind, he's an artist. Has been his entire life. Will be until the very end.

"My drawing talent was hereditary," Dillon said. "I'd always done that, but I got serious when the kids were grown and on their way. I started thinking about art, and I began to take it seriously. That's what I do now. I don't live on what I make coaching at Fordham. I paint people's portraits."

Dillon might be a very good painter (after all, his work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, and a single lithograph of his has gone for as much as $1,500). But he's also a heck of a story-teller.

And he's right about his artistic talent being hereditary. His mother was a painter, his uncle Alex Raymond created Flash Gordon in the mid-1930s and another uncle, Jim Raymond, drew the Blondie comic strip.

Dillon also has passed along some artistic genes of his own. Two of his sons - Matt Dillon (The Outsiders, Singles, There's Something About Mary) and Kevin Dillon (Platoon, Entourage) - have made it big in Hollywood, and Paul Dillon can tell you stories all day about how they broke into show business.

Just like that, Dillon gets rolling with one of his tales.

"It's not because my wife and I have anything to do with show business," Dillon said. "But Jonathan Kaplan is an important film director, and he had this idea of making a film with non professional actors. It was about Foster City, Calif., which had the highest juvenile crime rate in America. They changed the locale to a city in Colorado, and they thought if they'd hire non-professional kids, it would give it a sense of spontaneity. They auditioned a couple thousand kids. They ended up hiring professional actors in the end, but there were two boys who were not - one was Matt. (Over the Edge) was a well done film, and it enjoyed a lot of critical acclaim. That's how he got started.

"Kevin wasn't looking to go into this business. They were showing a Disney movie that Matt did, and Disney threw a party and the whole family went down. (Author S.E. Hinton's) literary agent was starting a theatrical agency division. They were looking for talent and they met Kevin and were impressed with his personality. Both boys were tremendously fortunate to get the start that they did. That's not to say they're not talented, because they are very talented. The rest of the kids never got into it."

Meanwhile, Paul Dillon coaches golf, and he paints. And he sometimes paints golfers and the people who coach it. Each year, he gives each of his seniors a portrait he's painted of them swinging a club, and he's overseen success at Fordham. Last year, he helped the Rams to seven top-five finishes (including the 2009 ECAC championship), and in 2004, he led Fordham to a school-best fourth-place finish in the Atlantic 10 championship and later received the A-10 Golf Coach of the Year award as a result.

But after decades of playing his trade in the corporate world, it's refreshing that he can earn all the money he needs by coaching golf, playing golf and painting. Liberating, even, for a true artist.

"Oh, it is," Dillon said. "With my painting, I've been able to bend my hours in a way to let me coach Fordham. Just now, I just left the kids' practice. In the morning, we drive to Bucknell for their tournament. But tonight, I'm going to go to my studio and start sketching Bobby Kennedy, because I'm painting him for an auction. I can make my own hours that way."

If only he had gotten out of the business world sooner.

"If I knew I could have made a living doing this," Dillon said with a laugh, "I would have started a lot sooner."