What if I said to you, “bear, rock, tree, bush, camo?”

What would you think of — a hunting trip, maybe?

Then I would say, “gator, nail, core, bone”, and now you might get confused.

When you hear someone say, “Something in name only,” it usually describes a person or a thing that doesn’t have the characteristics of that name.

Well, that is exactly what I ran into last week. There were a whole lot of names being thrown around that a casual bystander would have thought to be insulting.

But, to get the real meaning of those names, I have to go back to the beginning.

It was the summer of 1983. I had been living in Lansing, Michigan for about five years. Five years before that, I was living in St. Louis, Missouri, working in the customer service department for a large shoe company. One day, my boss, who sat only 15 feet away from me in a glass office, called me on the phone. That was odd — as I said, he was only 15 feet away.

He said, “Greg, come in here. I have something to tell you.”

Oops! What did I do wrong? Did a customer complain about my service? Was I going to get fired?

My boss said, “You got your bags packed?”

I said no, but I could pretty quickly.

He said, “You are going to Michigan!”

I asked how long I would be gone.

He said, “You don’t understand, we are sending you to Michigan. You are going to be our new sales rep for the entire state.”

Naturally, I was excited. That was what I was working so hard for, a sales job, because that’s where the big money was.

But Michigan? I was from the Wyoming, Nebraska region, and all I knew about Michigan was that it was a bunch of smokestacks with Fords and Chevys spitting out the bottom of them. So I packed up my wife, seven months pregnant, and my 2-year-old son, looked at a map and saw Lansing sat nearly in the middle, and off we went.

That was 1978.

We quickly found an apartment in East Lansing, and, as luck would have it, the apartment next to ours was filled with college guys, all about 20 years old. I was only 25 at the time, so they didn’t bother me with their late-night antics, and, in fact, I was soon involved in many of those myself.

In the new job, I was on the road a lot, leaving my wife and now two small children alone in the apartment. And who always came to the aid of my family when I wasn’t home? Those same college guys, and for that I remain forever grateful. Besides, most of them were golfers, as I was, and so it began.

A couple years passed and one these new friends graduated and went into the Army. We all missed him. His name was Cor. How could we get Cor to come back and visit us? We decided to have a golf tournament and called it the Cor Open, knowing he couldn’t refuse to come to a tournament named after him.

It worked.

We asked his father and uncles to come, too. We had a great weekend.

Now what?

We decided to do it again the next year, and the next year, then the next year.

Then another call from the home office came in. I was getting promoted to a larger sales job and would cover Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. There were painful goodbyes and, for me, the Cor Open was a done thing, although I remained on the invitation list for the next 34 years, telling my buddies each year that I would attend when I retired in Michigan.

That time is now.

Last weekend, I headed down to East Lansing after a 34-year absence. Would I remember all of them? Could I reconnect? What would they look like? Who would be there? Who wouldn’t be there?

Turns out, nearly everyone was there. Maybe you know them. Their names were Bear, Rock, Tree, Camo, Bushmaster, Gator, Nail, Cor, Cordaddy, Bone, and S — yes, simply S.

As we arrived at the golf course, there were the high fives and hugs, handshakes, and bloody Marys. It was like I was never gone. The bonds that were formed out of friendship were as strong now as they were decades ago.

Who cares what their real names are? The nicknames given to us by each other so long ago had lasted a lifetime.

What does it mean to “be in name only?”

Well, in this case, it meant the world to me. The three-and-a-half-hour drive home on Sunday gave me the time to think about that a lot.

It’s not what you have or how much you have. It’s all about who you know, and who you choose to be your friends.

Choose wisely and you will be rewarded with life’s riches.

I was lucky. That tiny little temporary apartment on East Jolly Road changed my life forever.

And Michigan a bunch of smokestacks?

Sometimes you can be so wrong and things can turn out so right.

Who won this year’s Cor Open? I don’t know. I don’t care.

On my scorecard, we all did!

Greg Awtry is the former publisher of the Scottsbluff (Neb.) Star-Herald and Nebraska’s York News-Times. He is now retired and living in Hubbard Lake. Greg can be contacted at gregawtry@awtry.com.