Scott Dow

I was born in 1959, growing up about 25 miles west of lower Manhattan in Madison Borough, an awesome place to grow up. Early on, I developed a great love of sports and competition but my first love was baseball, a sport I played competitively in high school, at Bucknell University and right on through my 20s and into his 30s in men's leagues like the Morris County Majors and the Met League. Now, at an older age, my active sports pursuits have been reduced to golf, curling, basketball (I try...) and recovering from the various maladies those activities incur.

Graduating from Bucknell with a BSME in the requisite 4 years in 1981, I embarked on an entirely undistinguished engineering career until, around 1990, I stumbled across the field of vibration analysis on machinery. Having found something that piqued my interest, by 1993 I was the co-owner of a small business that specialized in the technology. I developed training materials and classes so unique and effective that they resulted in invitations to deliver them in exotic locales such as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and England. Teaching is something I love and continue to do.

Although my engineer's brain is governed by logic and reason, I'm governed to at least the same degree by my creative and fun-loving side. My training classes were set up as games that force students to think their way through challenging problems while illustrating important aspects of a complex technology. I also love music, have played the guitar for more than 20 years and love to craft the written word.

The Flem Cup, my first and probably only novel-length book, is my memoir of a remarkable story of a great friendship, an extraordinary annual golf event, the tragedy of cancer and, ultimately, a journey that led me to God's grace and redemptive love. It is a story that I was blessed to be an integral part of, a story that has become more and more remarkable as it has receded into the past, in large part due to the numerous sub-plots running through the event that all had to come together to make it what it ended up being.

There is the story of my great friend, Ian Jennings, the most remarkable man I ever knew. There were the 5 years of the Cup, each year intensely competitive and hard fought. There were the hilarious antics surrounding the event every year, antics like the drink buying scandal, the hot sauce incident and more. There was the creation of a whimsical "news" website that became the source of so many hilarious stories, real and imagined, over the years. There was my own story, the story of someone who looked fine to the world but was broken and lost on the inside. Finally, there was the story of a great friend who showed me the way to hope and redemption in a world often swimming in loss and grief.

The Flem Cup is a truly remarkable tale and it has been my great privilege to be the one to write it. Going through it changed my life and I hope that in some way, great or small, reading it may change yours.