Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  Every legend on my list, even if he or she has never read the Rules of Golf, understands the wisdom of this passage from the first page:

  Golf is played, for the most part, without the supervision of a referee or umpire. The game relies on the integrity of the individual to show consideration for other players and to abide by the rules. All players should conduct themselves in a disciplined manner, demonstrating courtesy and sportsmanship at all times, irrespective of how competitive they may be. This is the spirit of the game of golf.

  In any system of belief, an unshakable faith can be instilled at a tender age. There are surely people who accept the importance of golf’s rules as an act of blind faith. But it is much more common and much more powerful to find religion on one’s own.

  In August 1972 Mike played in the fifteen-and-sixteen-year-old division of the Crutchfield Invitational, a junior event in Sebring, Florida. Mike won. He was seventeen. He won his age division and every age division. Had he been honest about his age and played as a seventeen-year-old, another kid could have had the pleasure of being named the fifteen-and-sixteen-year-old champ. Over time, that tournament became a do-the-right-thing wake-up call for Mike. His career has had various moments when he called penalties on himself that only he could see. Don’t give him a medal. All he was doing was playing golf by the rules.

  In the spring of 1976, 1977, and 1978, I was on my high school golf team at Patchogue-Medford High School on Long Island. (I am still embarrassed about voting for myself for captain.) Our season began in late March, and the courses were raw and unkempt. We played under a local rule by which we were allowed to lift, smooth, and place our balls in sand traps. The purpose of this rule was to get relief from animal dung, hoof prints, rocks, sticks, and the general detritus of winter. One raw day, I was playing in a nine-hole match at Timber Point, a beautiful old bay-front public course. On the eighth hole of a close nine-hole match, I was in a greenside trap. I lifted, smoothed with my foot, and placed. However, I placed my ball not in the smooth pathway I had created but on a little ledge just above the path. In other words, I had teed my ball up to make my bunker shot easier. I cheated. Man, is that hard to write.

  In 1986, when I was caddying for Mike at the Colonial in Fort Worth, he was grinding it out in the second round, trying to make the cut. On the par-three eighth hole, Mike hit his tee shot in a greenside bunker. I got to the bunker ahead of him and saw there was a rake in it, some distance in front of Mike’s ball but in his line of sight. On tour, rakes are typically left outside bunkers. I picked up the rake. The sand was soft and the rake left an indentation. I smoothed it out with the rake.

  Mike started yelling, “You’re testing, you’re testing!” His face was red. One of his caddie-yard nicknames was Mad Dog.

  The caddie, by the rules, is an extension of his player. A player cannot “test” the surface from which he is about to play. Raking a bunker before playing a shot was testing. Mike called for a rules official. I went into a hole.

  Mike Shea, a PGA Tour rules official and a former player, arrived by cart. Mike told Shea exactly what I had done. Shea had a reputation for being a stickler, for going out of his way to call penalties on players. But without hesitating, he said there was no problem with my action. I didn’t know why, and Mike didn’t, either, but he was in the clear.

  Shea’s ruling gnawed at me for decades: Was it fair? Had Mike Shea, for reasons I could not fathom, given us a break? That prospect was troubling. The rules cannot allow for a break. Mike made the cut on the number. It was a quiet weekend all the way around.

  Years later, I asked David Fay, by then the retired executive director of the USGA, about the ruling Shea had given Mike. When he was running the USGA, David spent many hours during U.S. Opens sitting in the NBC broadcast booth, ready to answer any rules question that might arise. David’s presence, sitting in those elevated green plywood boxes with Johnny Miller and Dan Hicks, had the effect of putting a human face on the USGA, not an easy thing to accomplish. David’s presence, even if it was subliminal, helped make the rules a central character in the story unfolding below, as they must be.

  David knows golf’s rules like you know the route home. His first instinctive answer was that Mike should have received a two-shot penalty that day at Colonial for my bunker-raking with Mike’s ball in it. That was his second answer, too, after checking in with a fellow rulesman.

  Several days later, I heard from David again, by e-mail. He wrote that he had been troubled by the whole thing and dug out a copy of the 1984 rulebook, the one in use in ’86. He found something called Exception 3 to Rule 13-4. It reads: “The player after playing the stroke, or his caddie at any time without the authority of the player, may smooth sand or soil in the hazard, provided that, if the ball still lies in the hazard, nothing is done which improves the lie of the ball or assists the player in his subsequent play of the hole.”

  I was that caddie, smoothing sand without the authority of the player. Nothing I did improved Mike’s lie or assisted him in his play. Shea knew what Mike and I did not: Exception 3 to Rule 13-4 from the 1984 rule book. My raking was fine.

  “That destroys the mercy-on-the-hapless-caddie angle,” David wrote. “If Shea had determined that your action had improved Mike’s lie, he would have nailed Mike with two shots and you probably would have been sacked at the conclusion of the round, if not right on the spot. Ain’t the rules of golf entertaining?”

  • • •

  In the space of eight months in 2013, Tiger Woods incurred penalties on four different occasions. The first one was in Abu Dhabi in January, where he took embedded ball relief in a sandy area covered with vegetation, with the approval of his playing partner. But you can’t take embedded ball relief from any sandy lie, and he was given a two-shot penalty, which caused him to miss the cut. The second was at Augusta, when he dropped incorrectly after his third shot on the fifteenth hole in the second round hit the flagstick and ricocheted into a pond. That resulted—after the most torturous half-day in the history of golfing jurisprudence—in another two-shot penalty. The third episode came at the Players Championship in May. On the fourteenth hole in the final round, Woods drove it into a pond that runs down the left side of the fairway. Under the rule option he chose to use, Woods was required to drop within two club lengths of where the ball last crossed that water hazard. With the ball in the air, Mark Rolfing, an NBC reporter who was standing on the tee, indicated that Woods’s ball last crossed the hazard about seventy yards in front of the tee. Footage of the shot from a blimp seemed to confirm that. Immediately after hitting his shot, Woods looked away in disgust, his head spinning left, typical body language for a shot that is, as the players say, dead. A ball that has a chance to stay dry you typically watch. But in consultation with his playing partner, Casey Wittenberg, Woods dropped about 230 yards in front of the tee, not seventy. Woods’s drop had Wittenberg’s stamp of approval, which absolved Woods of any wrongdoing, at least on a technical level. But it looked to me (and others) like an outrageously bad drop.

  Four months later, Woods was playing in an event called the BMW Championship in Lake Forest, Illinois. On the first hole in his Friday round, Woods hit his ball over the green, and it came to rest in a wooded area. Nobody was around except his caddie, Joe LaCava, and a cameraman from PGA Tour Productions. About one third of Woods’s ball was submerged in forest dirt. The ball was leaning against a cigar-shaped twig. You can see this clearly if you’re looking at the footage shot by the cameraman, but only with the benefit of super magnification. In other words, only when you see it as Woods saw it, with his head about two feet above his ball as he started to attempt to remove that twig.

  There’s an old tour player who likes to say that your ball is like a bomb in those situations. If your ball moves, you have detonated it. Every serious player watches his ball like a hawk when removing what the rule book calls loose impediments. That week the field took 20,646 strokes, and the slim volume called the Rules of Golf was ri
ding herd on every last one of them. It has to be that way.

  When Woods came in from his round, a veteran PGA Tour rules official, Slugger White, who is married to Joe LaCava’s cousin, added two shots to Woods’s card. The first one was assessed because Woods caused his ball to move, and the rules require a golfer to play a ball as it lies. (That’s the starting point of the rule book; the rest is commentary.) The second shot was for not moving his ball back to its original position. When a player causes his ball to move inadvertently, the rules require him to move it back.

  Woods argued that the ball did not move. He said the ball “oscillated,” a word found in the rules to allow for situations in which the ball moves and returns to its original position.

  White could have chosen to accept Woods’s explanation. He didn’t. And that, I think, has proven to be far more damning to Woods than anything the New York Post ever said about him at the height of the stiletto-parade craziness.

  It does not matter that the ball barely moved and that its new position would have no impact on the chip-out Woods was about to play. It does not matter that it would be nearly impossible to move the ball back exactly where it had been. As Woods likes to say, “Rules are rules.” Without strict adherence to them, tournament golf would be chaos.

  When Slugger White added the two shots, he was doing for Woods what Woods would not do for himself. That is beyond rare.

  Woods, hot, didn’t talk to reporters that day. But he did the next. He had this exchange with Doug Ferguson, the AP’s ubiquitous golf writer:

  FERGUSON: It looked like on the video that it dipped down, but I didn’t see it dip back up.

  WOODS: As I said, from my vantage point I thought it just oscillated and that was it.

  FERGUSON: On the video you didn’t see any difference?

  WOODS: They replayed it again and again and again, and I felt the same way.

  FERGUSON: It’s kind of weird when Slugger would say one thing and you would say another, and doesn’t it usually fall on the side of the player?

  WOODS: I don’t know, but I went from five back to seven back real quick.

  Ferguson dug into the heart of the matter with that third question, and Woods’s evasive answer is revealing. Broadly speaking, yes, by tradition the player’s word is the final word. (The phrase honest judgment, in another context, appears in the rule book.) The assumption is that the player will fill in the squares of his scorecard with complete accuracy, which is to say with complete integrity. In this case, Slugger White stepped in for the player.

  These are subtle things. We’re talking about a ball perched on a twig in the woods and how Tiger Woods handled it. I know Tiger does the grand gestures of his public life well, and that he does a lot of good for many people. For whatever reason, I am far more interested in a person’s littlest gestures, the ones that we don’t readily see. My view is that Tiger got it wrong when he was over his ball, got it wrong in the scorer’s trailer, got it wrong when he discussed it later. He put himself ahead of the game and his fellow competitors. Maybe it was just a bad day. We all have them. But what I fear is that Tiger Woods, the man who carries the mantle of the game, wrote a book that day.

  What the rules do is make every golfer equal under the law. By being slavishly devoted to the rules, a golfer shows both respect for the game and consideration for his or her opponent. That’s the fundamental reason why the game remains civilized when much of the world is not.

  When the Venturi-Palmer dispute first emerged, I paid barely any attention to it. Like many others, I figured the statute of limitations had expired on the case (1958!) and that there was no way to sort through the actual facts from such an old crime scene. But after our dinner with Ken, I saw it in a different light. I saw it just like I saw the incident with Woods and his ball in the trees, as a moment when there’s a weird confluence of events and true character gets revealed. Whose character, in the case of Arnold and Ken, I could not then know.

  Billy Harmon lived down the street and a world away from Ken Venturi. Billy—youngest kid brother of Butch Harmon—had been one of my favorite people in golf for years. Mike knew him far better and far longer and felt the same way. Billy had caddied for Mike in 1990 at Augusta, when Mike shot 64 in the first round (and a higher score in the second). They both have the gift of candor, among some other similarities. They were well matched.

  Billy’s father, Claude Harmon, had been the longtime pro at Thunderbird, the oldest of the California desert country clubs. Going back to the fifties, Ken used to hang out at Thunderbird, and he never got along with Claude. Ken once said to me with bizarre pride, “I got Claude Harmon fired at Thunderbird.” When Billy heard that, he said, “Ken thinks he got my father fired at Thunderbird? My father got himself fired at Thunderbird.” He was saying that his father was a drinker who never quit. Billy was a drinker who did. In his sober state, he enjoyed shocking people with his candor.

  Mike and I went to see Billy, a teaching pro, the day after our night with Ken. After the intensity of that evening, seeing Billy felt like poolside lounging. Mike and Billy were like long-lost brothers, each in command of subjects an outsider could never know. The doublespeak being perfected by tour bureaucrat X. The utter bullshit being espoused by swing guru Y. The unplayable greens on a new course designed by architect Z. I’ve never been around two people who collapsed time more efficiently.

  Twenty minutes into their reunion, they were revisiting the eighteenth hole of the second round of the ’90 Masters, when Mike’s drive went dead left, bounced off a restroom roof, and into a cement flood-control drain. Spectators saw Mike’s ball disappear. Mike called for an official.

  “So here comes P. J. and he’s got David Eger with him, riding up in a cart,” Billy said.

  Two rules officials. Not ordinary. The officers of the law were P. J. Boatwright, Jr., an officious, well-pressed USGA rulesman, and David Eger, an unsuccessful tour player who had become a golf administrator.

  “And the first thing Mike does is look at Eger and say, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ ”

  Mike actually likes David Eger. (It’s a short list.) But Mike, as was his wont, had the red-ass, and for no logical reason he felt that Eger would make his life harder at that moment.

  Boatwright assessed the situation and decided that Mike’s ball was in a hazard, no different from being in, say, a pond. That meant he would get a one-shot penalty.

  “And Mike says to him, ‘A hazard? How the fuck can it be a hazard? It’s not even marked!’ ”

  Mike wanted a free drop, not a one-shot penalty. After all, it wasn’t his fault that the course had a cement drain as a secret obstacle. It wasn’t like the drain was part of Alister MacKenzie’s brilliant strategic design. They were playing the eighteenth at Augusta National, not the final hole at a putt-putt course featuring a clown’s nose.

  Mike got nowhere. Boatwright had all the cards and all the power. And if he needed backup, Eger was right there.

  • • •

  I first met Billy in 1985, when he was a real tour caddie and I was having a fling. That same year Billy met his wife, Robin, at the Pleasant Valley Country Club outside Boston when the tour touched down there in September. Robin was a Tufts grad and a Rhode Islander, and her father was a golf nut and a doctor. Billy was working for the veteran tour player Jay Haas, likely best-known then for being Curtis Strange’s college roommate. The apex of their short and irregular courtship came when Billy and Robin left Providence and drove west for about two thousand miles. They hit Tucumcari, New Mexico, found a motel, got some sleep, and then carried on, bound for California. For a long while, Billy’s life was right out of a certain Lowell George song, Robin riding shotgun and playing the drums.

  I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari

  Tehachapi to Tonapah

  Driven every kind of rig

  That’s ever been made

  Driven the back roads

  So I wouldn’t get weighed

  And if
you give me

  Weed, whites, and wine

  Then you show me a sign

  I’ll be willin’ to be movin’

  Anyone who saw Billy in those days, regardless of whether he was drunk or high or both—or sober, for that matter—will tell you the same thing: There was an elfin spirit about him, and he never lost it.

  Billy was lucky. He never got in a car wreck. He never got his face smashed in a barroom brawl. When he quit drinking, he called as many of his former girlfriends as he could find and apologized for any ungentlemanly behavior he may have committed under the influence. The response was always the same: You were a nice drunk, Billy.

  I recall seeing him early one morning at a diner near Endicott, New York, during the ’85 B. C. Open. Jay Haas, his boss, was at that same counter, as was another caddie, “Gypsy” Joe Grillo. Everybody was laughing about something. Wherever Billy was, it seemed like a party was about to break out.

  Tiger’s near-perfect swing and extraordinary record under Butch Harmon, circa 2000, are points of brotherly pride for Billy, but the oldest and the youngest of the brothers could not be more different. There’s a lot of posturing with Butch, and he takes himself very seriously. Nobody would accuse Billy of doing that. As a caddie, he had the innate and necessary ability to roll with the punches. He loved to hang out and talk. The game was in his bones and probably his soul, although he was dismissive of anybody who tried to turn playing golf into any sort of religious experience.

  In Billy’s adult life, a term used loosely here, a certain type of golf student has sought him out because what he teaches is tried and true and what he says is not sugarcoated. He follows in the tradition of Hogan, who famously said, “The secret’s in the dirt.” Hogan meant lighted driving ranges, empty fairways at dusk, high school football fields early on Sunday mornings. People really did teach themselves golf at such places once. Not today’s titanium-headed game. Yesterday’s persimmon game, the one that lives on in Arnold’s barn.