Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  “Hogan proceeded to hit a most magnificent iron shot to the second green, and we followed him to it. He was approximately twelve feet from the hole. Hogan stood over that putt for quite a considerable time and then he walked away from it. He conferred with Venturi. What they said I could not hear, but later Venturi shared with me their interaction. Hogan had told him that he could not bring the putter head back, to which Venturi said, ‘Ben, nobody gives a shit!’ ”

  Tatum laughed his throaty laugh, a laugh that sometimes ends in a worrisome cough. He had told the story just as Venturi had told the story. As the TV detectives say, it checked out.

  Tatum had mixed feelings about Venturi. He described how much he loved Venturi’s swing, which was almost immodest in its beauty. Some golf swings draw looks just as surely as some sweaters do.

  “He had that childhood stammer, and it was terribly difficult,” Tatum said. “It left a hole in his personality, made him very inward. It impaired his socialization as a young man because communication was such an ordeal for him. The solitary nature of golf was his salvation, but it also impeded his growth. There’s always been a quality of self-absorption with Ken, no question. But he has also, as a grown man, plugged that hole, quite effectively and admirably. The ’64 Open was one of the great moments in the game, to win like that, after his game had nearly deserted him. And then the second career at CBS? Given what he had to overcome, it was nothing less than astonishing.”

  What a powerful phrase, given what he had to overcome. Sandy’s speech was often rich in meaning. It’s hard to imagine any other ninety-something man analyzing another old man’s life with such insight and empathy.

  Harding Park, the bucolic San Francisco public course that Ken had grown up playing, was one of Sandy’s hangouts, too. The Harding clubhouse, where Venturi’s parents worked behind the pro shop counter, had morphed into the Frank “Sandy” Tatum Clubhouse. In the early 2000s, Sandy oversaw the restoration of the course to its circa-1954 glory.

  Sandy was already a veteran of marriage, fatherhood, and the law when Venturi played in that famous four-ball match at Cypress Point in ’56. Tatum knew all four players and the two men, George Coleman and Eddie Lowery, who had set it up. He knew Sam Snead, Bobby Jones. Tom Watson. He knew Tiger Woods, his fellow Stanford Cardinal, although that relationship, to the degree that there was one, started to deteriorate after Tatum urged Woods to stay at Stanford and graduate before turning pro. (Woods quit school after two years.) Between what Sandy saw firsthand and what he gleaned from Bobby Jones and Jones’s contemporaries, Sandy could account for nearly the entire 125-year history of American golf.

  Sandy set up the course for the USGA at the 1974 U.S. Open, the first one Hale Irwin won. That tournament became known as the “Massacre at Winged Foot.” Palmer didn’t even put ’74 on his could-have-won-it list, but had he shot a final-round 70, even par, he would have finished in a tie for first. His closing 76 dropped him all the way to fifth. Usually, if you start Sunday in contention and shoot 76, you will finish in oblivion. The joke was that caddies looking for balls in the rough went missing themselves. The greens were dying of thirst.

  There were columnists and players who thought that the USGA had created such misanthropic conditions in response to the final-round 63 Johnny Miller had shot the previous year in the Open at Oakmont, one of the hardest courses in the world. That sounds like human nature, but Sandy told us it was not the case. To paraphrase the Hebrew National hot dog ads that were popular then, Sandy was answering to a higher authority. That is, par.

  Sandy was asked during that ’74 Open if he and his USGA committeemen were trying to humiliate the best golfers in the world.

  “No,” Sandy said. “We’re trying to identify them.”

  They succeeded. Among the top-ten finishers that year were Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Tom Kite, Lou Graham, and Hale Irwin, who won with a score of seven over par. Some gang.

  In 1979 Irwin won his second U.S. Open and Tatum was presiding over it as USGA president. In the opening round that year at Inverness, in Toledo, one of the pros, Lon Hinkle, decided to play the par-five eighth hole by hitting a 1-iron into the seventeenth fairway and a 2-iron second shot to the eighth green from there. He two-putted for an easy birdie.

  Tatum admired the ingenuity but not the bastardization of a true unreachable-in-two par-five, to say nothing of the resulting disruptions to play on the seventeenth. Early Friday morning, Tatum oversaw the planting of a giant spruce in an attempt to stop Hinkle from taking his shortcut.

  “The players complained,” Sandy said. “ ‘You’re changing the course, you’re changing the course!’ I said, ‘We’re rectifying a problem.’ ”

  Tatum spent that Friday on the eighth tee to quash any possible revolt. He watched as Hinkle teed his ball on a scorecard pencil and launched a shot over what was already being called the Hinkle Tree. It was such a delicious little contretemps and an insight into the mind-set of the pro. Whatever the course will yield, the pro wants it to yield more. The players often have a love-hate relationship with courses and their designers, and also the inept, ignorant bureaucrats—you’ve already seen P. J. Boatwright and Cliff Roberts and now Sandy Tatum in action—who attempt to administer and regulate play. Somehow Tatum rose above this lowly status to become an admired figure in the game.

  Frank D. Tatum, Jr., wasn’t really a blueblood, not in the Boston Brahmin sense of the word. Sandy grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in the Los Angeles of Chinatown. He went to public school, and his father was a real estate broker. But there’s something about a USGA affiliation. It imposes formality on a person. Maybe it’s the blazer.

  One of Sandy’s brothers, an actor who worked under the name Warde Donovan, was married for a time to Phyllis Diller. (No, he was not Fang, the ineffectual manager-husband who was a gag in her act.) Tatum had his own brushes with Hollywood. He told us how as a teenager he saw Howard Hughes and Katharine Hepburn playing furtive golf at the Wilshire Country Club in Los Angeles, where his father was a member. Those sightings gave Sandy a secret bond with the great screen beauty. He never forgot her red lipstick. It was more than he could stand.

  Sandy fell just as hard for golf. As a boy he would bike to Wilshire after school with his clubs on his back. When he played two balls (with hickory-shafted clubs), one ball would represent Bobby Jones and the other Walter Hagen. The great amateur and the great professional. He loved their dress, their manners, their play. (He saw them in newsreels at his local movie house.) Then, in 1931, Bobby Jones played an informal exhibition match at Wilshire with two pros and Charlie Seaver, a noted amateur. (His son Tom enjoyed a career in sports, too.) Bobby Jones in person was overwhelming to young Sandy. Seeing Jones that day sent him down a path he followed for the rest of his life.

  In the early 1970s, Tatum was visiting Augusta National when a subtle conversation began to unfold amid a small group of well-placed members. Tatum knew where it was going: He was rising in the USGA hierarchy and he was a good golfer with an attractive wife. He was deemed club material, and the men were gauging his interest in joining. Tatum demurred. He offered the most irrefutable of excuses: He couldn’t afford it, with six children to feed and clothe and educate. Plus the club was far from home. Everything he said was true. But it wasn’t the whole truth.

  Sandy knew about the intraclub power struggle at Augusta National during the final years of Bobby Jones’s life. Bobby Jones wanted his son, Bob Jones III, to succeed him as club president. Cliff Roberts, the club’s chairman, was opposed. With Jones physically incapacitated by his spinal disease, though mentally unimpaired, Roberts took over the reins at Augusta National. He somehow rendered Jones powerless at the club he had cofounded. That was Sandy’s sense of it. Jones was his hero, and thinking about his final years left Sandy feeling queasy. Jones died in December 1971. Bob Jones III, his namesake son, died two years later at forty-seven. Roberts was not invited to either funeral, which Sandy described as the “u
ltimate expression” of how the Jones family viewed Clifford Roberts.

  “I saw how Roberts treated Jones and his son and I found it troubling,” Tatum said. “It was singularly unattractive, the way Roberts managed the club. I knew I would never want to be a member of a club over which Roberts was presiding.”

  In Sandy’s Mount Rushmore of golf, he has busts of Jones, Hogan, Palmer, and Nicklaus. When I asked Sandy about Arnold, he said, “What Palmer conveyed to me, and doubtless to millions of others, was that there was more to life than being the greatest golfer of all time.”

  Palmer was not the greatest golfer of all time, even though he looked like he might be when he won all seven of his major championships in quick succession between 1958 and 1964. But he had the longest, most successful afterlife in the history of sports. Tatum offered an insight into how that happened. “Palmer had a sexual charisma that was really quite remarkable, and I say that looking at him from a masculine, heterosexual point of view. But boy was it ever impressive. And the affection that women had for him was nothing less than astonishing.

  “Many years ago, a friend of mine won a two-week trip with Palmer and two others as part of some sort of contest. It was a major advertising campaign underwritten by one of Arnold’s sponsors. The trip was to result in a promotional film of some kind. They went to Asia and Australia. They had a great time. When my friend returned, he remarked that it was just incredible how the men, wherever Palmer went, were drawn to him, and how the women swooned in his presence. Quite attractive women, I might add.”

  • • •

  In 2012, when the U.S. Open was being held at Olympic, Sandy was asked to write a piece for the USGA program. He analyzed an imaginary field for the 2045 U.S. Open. He predicted that half of the 156 players would be black, thirty players would be from China, and twenty would be from India. In his crystal ball he saw twenty female players competing, maybe a half-dozen openly gay players, and one or two transgender players. The USGA killed the piece.

  I once said to Sandy, “Wasn’t I lucky to come of golf age in the seventies?”

  You know the drill: Watson, Nicklaus, and Trevino at the height of their powers; Palmer hanging on; Curtis and Crenshaw and Seve rising. The plaid bell-bottoms giving way to Sansabelt. The tour wives in their crazy hats and headbands. Some guy in a Budweiser T-shirt yelling freeee-BIRD while a long putt rolled on, hell-bound for the hole. That decade was Tatum’s decade, too. He was at the epicenter of the game then.

  “Yes, you were,” Tatum said. “But the fifties were better.”

  I asked why.

  “Hogan, Nelson, Snead.” The American triumvirate.

  “What was it about them?” I asked.

  Without pausing Sandy said, “They came out of the caddie yard.”

  Viewed through that light, it’s interesting that Sandy had such an affinity for Tom Watson, who grew up at the Kansas City Country Club and not in its caddie yard. But Watson also has a toughness and a directness about him that made you forget about his privileged background. His attitude has always been Tell me the bad news now. There is a lot about him to admire, but Sandy loved him, which is something, because I wouldn’t describe Watson as obviously lovable. When he was yipping late in his tour career, Watson once asked Davis Love how he gripped the putter. Davis told him what he did. Watson said, “That’s wrong.” There are a thousand other examples. But Sandy never saw that side of him. Or if he did, he ignored it.

  Tatum and Watson met in 1968, when Watson was in his brief hippie phase and a member of the Stanford golf team. There was a match against an alumni team, and Tatum played for the old guys. Later, and for twenty consecutive years, Tatum and Watson played together in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, either as partners or in the same foursome. They played together all over the United States and in Ireland and Scotland, often wearing rain suits.

  Part of the appeal for Tatum was Watson’s Scottish approach to golf, including his walking speed and his decisiveness over the ball. In Watson’s decade or more of superior golf, starting in 1975, he was golf’s one obvious stoic, the closest thing the seventies and eighties had to a Hogan. He was almost painfully forthright. Watson’s attitude, as Sandy and Herb Wind and many others saw it, was that the game owed him nothing, and whatever the golf course gave him, good or bad, he took it without complaint.

  Consider Watson’s response to the second shot he hit on seventeen in the fourth round of the ’84 British Open. He was a shot off the lead. He was trying to win his sixth Open and third straight. He was trying to do it at St. Andrews. The stakes were high. Watson hit too much club, approaching that seventeenth green, and he hit it too hard and too far right. His ball finished about a yard from a rock wall where there is no free relief. All realistic hope for victory ended with that shoved 2-iron. I have long suspected that his caddie, Alfie Fyles, urged that club on Watson, though Watson has told me that was not the case. With his ball in the air, Watson showed his disgust by taking two steps to his left. You could see nothing on his face. He always hid hurt well.

  For years, it was an open secret on tour that Watson had a drinking problem. Stories would go around depicting Watson at dinner, drinking too much and becoming belligerent and even more of a political and golfing know-it-all. One of his tour nicknames was Carnac II, a play off a Johnny Carson character who had an answer for everything.

  Any addiction, of course, is a personal and tender matter, even when the disease falls to the famous. Tatum would not have discussed Watson’s drinking with me, with my notebook out, and I would not be writing about it here, if Watson had not been public about it first. Some months before Mike and I went to see Sandy, Watson did a Golf Channel interview with David Feherty in which he spoke about his drinking problem. Feherty has talked about how Watson helped him get sober.

  Feherty and Watson were at a golf event one year in Canada when Watson said, “You’re not well, are you?”

  “How do you know?” Feherty said.

  “I can see it in your eyes,” Watson said.

  “What do you see?”

  “My reflection.”

  Alcohol runs through golf like spit tobacco runs through baseball. Watson’s father, Ray, a good amateur golfer himself, quit drinking late in life. Tatum knew Ray Watson long before he knew Tom. “I had been asked to come to Watson’s home in Kansas City,” Tatum said. “It was a gathering of friends and family members who were concerned about Tom’s well-being. The goal was to get Tom to deal with his drinking, which was pervasive, to put it mildly.

  “This intervention was orchestrated by a professional who had been to jail twenty-one times because of his drinking. And this man was remarkably effective. As he began a dialogue, Watson broke down in tears. He acknowledged then the magnitude of his problem. He saw that there were people who could help him find a way out of it. He saw the love for him from the people in that room.

  “There was a vehicle waiting for him. That was part of the program. You didn’t pack or have long good-byes. It called for the participant to get into an automobile and go to a treatment facility, where you do the real work. And that is what Watson did. When I think about it, it is the most remarkable thing I have ever seen him do.”

  • • •

  When I was falling under the spell of the game, Watson seemed always to be on TV. He was the leader through three rounds in that ’74 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, the first I can recall following. He won the ’75 British Open by a shot in an eighteen-hole playoff, wearing a plaid woolen British racing hat. Two years later he was the star of the Duel in the Sun, the pen name for his one-shot win over Big Jack at the ’77 British Open at Turnberry. That’s the most fun I ever had watching TV, and I’m including all those Saturday nights in the seventies when Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett batted first, second, and third. In ’79 Watson lost at Augusta in a three-man playoff.

  Watson wasn’t like other golfers. I imagine that was part of the attraction for Sandy, and I know it was for me. In 1990 W
atson resigned his membership at the Kansas City Country Club because a prominent businessman, Henry Bloch, a founder of H&R Block, had been rejected for membership, and Watson felt there was only one biographical fact that had kept Bloch out: He was Jewish, as was Watson’s wife, Linda Watson, née Rubin. Watson’s son and daughter were Jewish, too. So was Watson’s manager, Chuck Rubin, Linda’s brother. In a pinch, you could count Watson for your minyan.

  You could also count on him to take principled stances. In the 1983 Skins Game, Watson accused Gary Player of violating a rule by removing a small part of a live weed that was behind his ball. Player maintained that Watson could not see what he was doing from thirty feet away. Player also said that he was just trying to determine whether the plant matter was attached or unattached. (The issue became public only because Dave Anderson of the New York Times heard them arguing about it.) Watson could be difficult, impatient, and abrupt. Once, when I was caddying in Watson’s group in the Masters, he asked Dow Finsterwald, an honorary marshal, if there was a backup on the first tee. When Dow couldn’t immediately tell him, Watson said, “You should know.” (To which Finsterwald said, “Okay, Tommy.”) But on matters related to the rule book, on anything related to the spirit of the game and how it should be played, Watson was beyond reproach. Sandy Tatum had been sending out that message from a high place for years.

  A few weeks after our visit with Sandy in his office, Tom Watson was introduced, at a stagy press conference in the Empire State Building, as the new Ryder Cup captain. Watson was asked about his relationship with Tiger Woods. He said, “My relationship with Tiger is fine. Whatever has been said before is water under the bridge. No issues.” It was such a political answer. That wasn’t the Watson I knew and admired. The real Watson—Sandy’s Watson—was the one who came into the press tent after losing that four-hole playoff for the 2009 British Open at the astonishing age of fifty-nine. Watson saw the bummed-out reporters assembled before him and said, “This ain’t a funeral, you know.”