It hits him that none of it was bringing his son back.
“But then I catch myself,” Hafer said.” I’m doing all this because of Brian. And I start to realize, ‘Man, you are so blessed. You have a real opportunity to turn something as tragic as losing a son into something as positive as helping someone else’s son — or daughter — save their lives.”
Although Hafer has always been a low handicap golfer with a pretty nice swing, the real beauty of his golf is the way he — along with so many folks who help him — uses the game to help promote and fund the Brian Hafer Foundation.
And that’s just what they’ll be doing Monday at Dayton Country Club with the annual Brian Hafer Foundation Outing. It includes an afternoon golf scramble, a wine tasting and then a buffet dinner and an auction of sports memorabilia and tickets, airline flights, Disney trips and much more.
The event will also feature guest appearances by some name athletes, including former Cincinnati Bengals kicker Jim Breech, a veteran of 14 NFL seasons, and current U.S. Olympic heptathlete Chantae McMillan, who trains in Kettering and is on the cover of the much-talked-about ESPN the Magazine Body Issue, the annual celebration of athletic bodies sans uniforms, which hit the newsstands three weeks ago.
As for Brian Hafer, he wasn’t just Bill’s only son, he was, as Dayton lawyer and Brian’s cousin Kyle Duwell once put it, “a rock star.”
He was 6-foot-5 and 225 pounds, good looking (his mom Velvet had been Miss Miami Valley), a good dancer, a good talker, a real charmer.
He had been a stellar prep athlete — a four-year basketball starter, quarterback of the football team, golfer with a 330-yard drive — who went on to play college basketball at South Alabama and Florida Institute of Technology. He was the co-founder and front man of a popular Florida band that opened for groups like Toots and the Maytals and The Wailers.
He eventually returned to Dayton, where he had a wife, a young daughter, a good job, had taught handicapped kids, was about to coach an Alter basketball feeder program and was active in his Miamisburg church.
But through it all he also had a lengthy battle with drugs that began when he got hooked on pain pills following a high school injury. That led to cocaine, then heroin. Along the way there were overdoses, stints in rehab, long periods of sobriety and hope.
But on an October night in 2009, Brian died in the bathroom of a Miamisburg apartment after taking a cocktail of drugs that included heroin, cocaine, Vicodin and other prescription meds. Police had to knock down the locked door and Bill found him with the needle in his hand.
Brian was 33.
The loss crushed the family — including Brian’s older sister, Laura, now a grade-school teacher in Dayton — and it took an especially hard toll on Bill, who had been a longtime bailiff at the Montgomery County Common Pleas Court and was a budding artist.
Finally, some family members and friends decided on an impromptu golf outing to get Bill out of the house and possibly raise some funds in Brian’s name.
Bill not only embraced the idea, he now spends almost all his time working toward building the foundation, which has taken a special interest in helping children throughout the Miami Valley, especially those in the Dayton Public Schools, make good decisions and stay away from drugs and alcohol.
The Hafer Foundation lends support to the First Tee Program of the Greater Miami Valley — which teaches golf and life lessons to kids from southwest Ohio — and to the Girls On The Run program that dovetails running and mentoring area girls from the third to eighth grade
It helps the Secret Smiles organization that is dedicated to families in need and it pays for a scholarship each year to the nationally-recognized Father Martin’s Ashley drug and alcohol treatment program in Maryland.
Now Hafer hopes to expand the Foundation’s communal reach and help deal with the heroin epidemic in the Miami Valley.
“Since my son died as a result of a heroin and prescription drug overdose, I thought how appropriate it would be for us to take an aggressive posture and see what we could do to help,” he said.
He said he contacted Ohio State Rep, Jeff Rezabek (R-Clayton) as well as Blue Cross and Blue Shield and a couple of Dayton city commissioners to see what the Foundation could do.
“It’s all in the early stages, but the first step could be this new drug they put in all the police cruisers,” he said. “When police come across a person going down from an overdose, they can administer it and it literally brings them back.”
He was talking about the rise-from-the-dead drug called naxolone, an anti-overdose medicine administered with an atomizer. Many police cruisers around the nation are equipped with the kits, which Hafer said cost about $30, and some police forces have had stunning results with it.
Police in Quincy, Mass., figure they have saved 173 lives with it.
“If we could provide that, that would be a stepping stone to something positive,” Hafer said.
While Monday’s golf scramble is sold out, people can still attend the 6 p.m. wine tasting, dinner and auction (tickets are $25), which includes memorabilia from many of the area’s college and pro sports teams.
Hafer did portraits of former Centerville High School and Ohio State stars A. J. Hawk and Mike Nugent, both of whom are now Cincinnati Bengals. The pair autographed the pieces at training camp Thursday and Nugent was especially enthused about his likeness.
To find out more about the foundation or to donate, visit brianhaferfoundation.com.
And that brings us back to that trip to the driving range the other morning.
“We want to help save children,” Hafer said. “And now Brian is helping us do that.”
In that way, his son has come back.
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