by Dan Jenkins
On one of the days, Cheryl wanted to “experience” Central Park and made me walk through the park from the Plaza up to what they call the Boat Pond. The park was pretty and had more trees and shrubs and large rock formations and elevations of land than I would ever have guessed. I saw some areas that would make good golf holes.
When we arrived at the snack bar at the Boat Pond we were invited to a birthday party for a dog.
The birthday girl was a small two-tone poodle named Brenda. Balloons on strings were tied to a large iron table, gift-wrapped packages of toys and food were being opened for Brenda by humans gathered around the table, and the humans had brought all of Brenda’s friends and neighbors to the party. We were given human cookies and introduced to Emma, Raymond, Webster, Feeney, Collins, Sue—yeah, a dog named Sue—Shelton, Beauregard, and Barbara Jane. All friendly and well behaved. Everything from a Canadian sheepdog to a Yorkshire terrier.
The Dog People. Best New Yorkers I met.
Our nightlife consisted of going to the chic restaurants on Cheryl’s list and going to the theater. Every day when I came home from golfing my ball in Westchester County, I’d barely have time to shower and shave and dress up for my evening out. “Hurry” was my middle name.
The chic restaurants were all noisy and crowded. As best I recall, their names were Millie Vanilla, Metro Luther, Mario Andretti, and Tookie Dondo. Wherever we dined, our waiters turned out to be rude and slow. I assumed they were taking it out on us because they’d never seen us before. For dinner I usually ordered a veal doohickey, hold the pot plant and bath gel. It was a New York experience.
So was the theater.
We went to the hit drama first. It was about a black woman slowly strangling a family of white Southerners to death with a Confederate flag. Why the hit comedy was a hit, we’d never know. We only know we spent two hours listening to a group of fags and lesbians brutally ridicule every straight, hardworking, law-abiding, God-fearing Christian in the United States of America.
Both shows received wild standing ovations as we sprinted out.
We also went to two hit musicals. The first one was great. The songs had tunes I recognized and the dancers danced their asses off, particularly a girl in a yellow dress. In the other hit musical, none of the songs had tunes and the dancers only danced with their arms.
Leaving the theater after that tuneless award-winner, Cheryl made me laugh till I coughed when she said, “I didn’t hear a lot of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ in there, did you?”
We went back to our hotel after the theater that evening and had a couple of drinks in the Oak Bar.
This was the night Cheryl began to act a little affectionate in small ways, and there in the bar she said, “I’m sorry this trip is so expensive. I know it’s costing you a bunch.”
“Aw,” I said, “you can’t put a price tag on culture.”
“Thank you for not saying what you really think,” she said.
“What might that be?” I asked.
Grinning, she said, “That this is turning out to be the most expensive piece of ass you’ve ever had.”
On the heels of that remark, I may have set a Plaza Hotel speed record for a man signing a bar check and hauling a lady up to his room.
It had been a while since I’d helped Cheryl slip out of her duds.
Definitely worth the money.
31
SOMETIMES YOU DON’T KNOW dick. Maybe I was just in a mood to play well in the Buick Classic. That’s what I did anyhow. I shot 70, 66, 70, and 73 for 279. Some other year that would have put me near the top. This time it merely earned me a tie with five Corey Pavins for eighteenth and a check for $38,000. Not to complain about the amount. It helped pay for some of the chic dinners and culture I soaked up on Manhattan Island.
Mitch took credit for what he called my “improved play.” He said it was directly related to his suggestion that I shorten my preround practice routine. I was beating too many balls on the range,
staying out there for an hour or longer, and this might have been making me grow tired on the closing holes.
He said the day of the first round, “We shorten it to twenty-five minutes. We just hit some pitches, some irons, a few woods, some sand shots to see what the sand is like. We in our rhythm. Then all we do is putt awhile and go.”
Maybe the new routine helped. I’d stick with it awhile and see.
I said to Mitch, “I guess the trick will be not to get to the course too early—unless I bring along a book to read.”
Some of our better players don’t like the Westchester tournament or the golf course, and they faze it for those reasons, but I like the tournament and the course for all the reasons they don’t.
I like it because Westchester C.C. is one of the oldest courses on the Tour. It was designed back in 1922 by Walter Travis, who was sixty years old at the time and by then was known in golf circles as “the Grand Old Man.”
Travis was a native of Australia who didn’t move to the United States until he was in his twenties. He didn’t even take up golf until he was thirty-five, but once he did, he won the U.S. Amateur three times and the British Amateur once. He was forty years old before he started designing courses.
Westchester’s course has since been doctored by four or five designers over the years, but it still retains the old-fashioned look of Walter Travis’s day with its blind shots, sharp doglegs, and sporty length—only 6,700 yards—the layout winding through trees and small hills.
Travis designed a lot of other antiques that are fun to play. One treasure is Garden City Golf Club on Long Island—if you can manage to beg your way on. Another is Ekwanok in Manchester, Vermont, which looks like the place where trees were invented. Still another is Cape Arundel up in Kennebunkport, Maine, where one of the hazards during summer months might be a Secret Service detail. And people should know that it was Travis who brought golf to Sea Island, Georgia, when he finished the first two courses there shortly before he died in 1927.
I even like the Westchester clubhouse although guys on the tour laugh at it. It’s eight stories high, bigger than a stack of Wal-Marts, and still reeks of the Roaring Twenties when it was originally known as the Westchester-Biltmore Hotel.
Pals on the Tour complain about the crowds at Westchester, saying they’re too loud and too dumb about golf. It’s a regular-guy crowd. Working stiffs. Cabdrivers, bookies, plumbers, horse players. But I say it’s part of the charm. There’s no other stop on the Tour where we can hear guys in the gallery holler: “Yo, Adrian, there’s Freddy Couples, show him your tits!” . . . “Yo, Shark, the three-putt, forget about it!” . . . “You talkin’ to me?”
Wouldn’t surprise me someday to hear a natty guy in the crowd say, “If anybody turns yellow and squeals, my rod’s gonna speak its piece.”
Probably not. Golf would bore “Little Caesar.”
THERE’S THIS about Westchester County: You never know what town you’re in. Cross a road and you think you’re in Rye but you’re in Harrison. Or turn a corner and you think you’re in Scarsdale but you’re in Mamaroneck.
But I knew I was in Mamaroneck, New York, the week of the U.S. Open because that’s where Winged Foot is.
Somebody once called Winged Foot the “Yankee Stadium” of golf. I think it deserves the compliment. For my money, Winged Foot combines golf course, clubhouse, scenery, and history like no other club.
The clubhouse alone lets you know you’ve arrived at someplace big-time and intimidating. It’s built out of rugged brownish, grayish stone, has the world’s greatest outdoor veranda under a candy-striped awning that overlooks the finishing holes. In general it looks as if two stately English mansions have been shoved together. It’s huge, old, multigabled, formidable-looking, important-looking, haunted-looking. To me, that’s what a U.S. Open clubhouse is supposed to look like, including haunted.
A Hall of Fame of Golf has worked in and around Winged Foot’s pro shop. Craig Wood and Claude Harmon, a couple of Masters champions, are
among the head pros of the past, along with a successful Tour player, Tom Nieporte, and Harmon’s lineup of assistants over the years included Jackie Burke, Dave Marr, Mike Souchak, Al Mengert, Shelly Mayfield, Rod Funseth, and Otto Greiner. And all that says nothing about the fact that Tommy Armour was a longtime Winged Foot member.
Both 18-hole courses at Winged Foot, the West and the East, were designed in the early 1920s by A. W. Tillinghast, or “Tillie the Terror” as he was known—my pick over Donald Ross and Alister Mackenzie as the best of your “Golden Age” architects.
Tillinghast, who enjoyed his fame, his cocktails, and hanging out with Broadway celebs, wrote the pilot film on protecting greens with bunkers when he did those layouts at Winged Foot. He carved both courses out of the trees and foothills and craggy boulders of an area only thirty-five miles north of Manhattan, and labeled both of them his masterpieces.
Tillie believed greenside bunkers should be blended into the landscape and they should be irregularly designed—large, small, steep, steeper, shallow, curving—and punishing. The shot to a well-guarded green, he insisted, should be the stiffest test on the golf course.
It was a sheer accident that Winged Foot West became more famous than Winged Foot East in the first place. When the USGA awarded Winged Foot its first U.S. Open, the one in 1929, it named the East Course as the site. East is a little shorter, a little sportier. But three holes on East didn’t recover quickly enough from a heavy rainstorm a few weeks before that Open was scheduled, so the championship was moved to the West Course. Then Bobby Jones sank that putt on the seventy-second hole in the ’29 Open—“the greatest putt in the history of golf”—and went on to win that Open, and this made the West course so revered, the East’s rep has suffered unfairly.
Since then, every men’s major at Winged Foot has been played on the West—the U.S. Amateur in ’40 where Dick Chapman, a club member, local knowledged all opponents, the Open in ’59 where Billy Casper never missed a putt, the ’74 Open where Hale Irwin became a magician with his four-wood, the ’84 Open where Fuzzy Zoeller waved the white towel at Greg Norman, the ’97 PGA where a rainbow greeted Julius Claudius on the final green, and this past Open where Knut Thorssun benefited from one of the dumbest rulings ever made by a U.S. Golf Association airball, meaning rules official.
I’ll get around to that in a minute, but first I’ve got to get this off my basic chest: we’re mainly a zebra-free sport. What I mean is, we don’t generally have to put up with blind, stumble-bum, inconsistent zebras calling pass interference, or holding, or illegal block, or walking, or no foul when it’s clearly a mugging, or any of the other phony shit that’s threatening to kill my interest in football and basketball.
For example, I don’t have to worry that after I sink a thirty-foot putt for a birdie, I may look around and find a yellow flag on the ground. Like some idiot ruled I took too much time, maybe, and I have to putt the ball again, but this time from thirty-five feet, after a five-foot penalty.
Golf does have rules, of course, and we do have officials—our own zebras—to interpret them. But in almost every instance, a ruling that might go against you, deny you relief, or penalize you a stroke happens during play, and you have an opportunity to overcome it before the round is over.
And yet the three biggest zebra deals in golf history occurred after the tournaments were over. Each one had a killer effect on the final result, and one of the cases even added to the lore of Winged Foot.
All of the rulings seem to me to have been pretty close to nit-picking bullshit, but of course I’m an anti-zebra kind of guy.
Love my horror stories about zebras.
The 1940 U.S. Open at Canterbury in Cleveland was where Porky Oliver got shafted. This was the championship eventually won by Lawson Little in a playoff over Gene Sarazen. But Oliver, who started the last round three strokes out of the lead, caught both men with a final round 71 and posted the same 287 total they did. In fact, he finished ahead of them and looked for a while like he might be the winner. But Porky didn’t even make the playoff, thanks to a ruling.
It came to the attention of the USGA that the pairing of Oliver, Ky Laffoon, and Claude Harmon, along with the pairing of Johnny Bulla, Dutch Harrison, and Leland Gibson, had started the last round five minutes ahead of their scheduled tee times.
The reason they started earlier was because they thought they saw some bad weather approaching and wanted to get out on the course before the storm hit. Bad answer, the USGA said. And against the rules to boot. All six were disqualified. Oliver broke down in tears when he was informed that he not only hadn’t tied for the biggest championship in golf, he was DQ’d.
Lawson Little and Gene Sarazen both pleaded with the USGA to let Porky’s score stand and join them in the 18-hole playoff, but the bluecoats and armbands played bluecoat and armband. Not on their lives.
Then there was the sad case of Jackie Pung in the 1957 U.S. Women’s Open on Winged Foot East. Yeah, East. The course that was supposed to have hosted Bobby Jones and them in ’29.
Jackie Pung blazed home late in the final round of that Open with a 72 to overtake Betsy Rawls, the leader, and beat Betsy by a stroke with a total of 298 to 299. But in Jackie’s excitement she made the mistake of not studying her scorecard closely enough before she signed it and turned it in. Her playing companion and marker, Betty Jameson, had accidentally put down a 5 instead of a 6 for Pung at the fourth hole, and Jackie didn’t catch it. The total score was accurate on her card, the same 72 she’d shot, but the bluecoats and armbands deemed the little oversight on Jackie’s part to be such a serious violation of the rules they disqualified her—and Betsy Rawls became the champion.
Although the USGA got soundly beat up in the national press over the incident—it wasn’t like Pung had tried to cheat or anything—their zebras argued that they were given no choice under the rules, which clearly state to this day, “The competitor is solely responsible for the correctness of the score recorded for each hole and the penalty for error is disqualification.”
Finally, there was poor old Roberto de Vicenzo in the ’68 Masters. He blew that sole responsibility thing after he eagled the first hole of the last round for a deuce, holing out an eight-iron, and went on to shoot a 65 to tie Bob Goalby for the green jacket. Except his playing companion and marker, Tommy Aaron, accidentally wrote down a par 4 instead of the birdie 3 that Roberto had made at Augusta’s seventeenth hole, and Roberto didn’t notice the mistake before he signed the card. Well, lo and behold, his card added up to a 66 instead of the 65 he’d actually shot.
If it had been a U.S. Open, de Vicenzo would have been DQ’d in the grand style of Jackie Pung, but at the Masters the zebras wear green coats instead of blue, they can do what they please, and their zebras fumbled around and eventually came up with a “local rule” that let Roberto off with a one-stroke penalty.
It cost de Vicenzo a tie for the Masters and a chance to enter a playoff with Bob Goalby, but he was allowed to keep the $15,000 second-place money, the runner-up’s silver medal, and the pair of crystal goblets for making that eagle deuce.
Not the only example of a golf zebra showing his generosity, however. How ’bout that deal the rules dunce let Knut get away with at the U.S. Open?
32
IT’S A TRADITION AT THE U.S. Open for most of the contestants to complain about the setup of the course—the high rough, tight fairways, unfair bunkers, and severe greens, too slick for the undulations. Doesn’t matter where they play the Open from one year to the next, whether it’s Winged Foot, Oakland Hills, Southern Hills, or some new club, it’s a cinch the layout is going to be cussed at, bitched about, and called everything but a white man’s golf course.
Seems like every year the players forget that Open courses are supposed to be tough, make you think, force you to play more strategically than you do on most of the pushover Tour courses we see.
All it takes is for a “name” player to storm through the locker room and criticize the course in
a cloud of fucks. Immediately dozens of guys adopt the same opinion without even thinking about it.
They think a Cheetah Farmer or a Knut Thorssun is supposed to be intelligent because he’s won some tournaments. But that’s a big misconception about our sport. Cheetah Farmer can’t think past his headlines, and Knut can’t think past his zipper.
The press doesn’t get it. The Irv Klars have never gotten it. They keep asking Tiger Woods how to solve world hunger and the problems in the Middle East because he wins golf tournaments, just like they used to ask Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus what they’d do about Vietnam.
The practice rounds at Winged Foot were barely under way when Cheetah started cussing the layout and saying Ray Charles must have been the architect—old line—and they ought to put a circus tent over all eighteen holes, or better yet, just plow them up and start over. Other antiques.
And Knut. He’s about as original as a Swedish meatball. He’d heard the line somewhere else, to be sure, so I was disappointed to hear guys laugh in the locker room when he said, “It is goofy golf. What it is they need to do here, they need to put a windmill on every hole.”
Har-har. Bang fist on table.
My good pals Buddy Stark and Jerry Grimes even joined the list of complainers. Their games weren’t sharp when they arrived, and then when we made some wagers in our two practice rounds together, and I put some hurt on their money clips, they launched into whining.
Jerry had no trouble finding nearly all of Winged Foot’s greenside bunkers. While he was in the process of wearing out his sand wedge, he said, “This ain’t no National Open, it’s fuckin’ Desert Storm.”