Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  Watson at that Ryder Cup announcement was saying what he needed to say in order to live another day. Watson in defeat at Turnberry was exposed and real. The sun and the wind had left his voice dry and scratchy, and he dropped in that casual ain’t like he knew what real pain was all about. He was saying the events at Turnberry did not qualify. What a sense of balance. Watson had lost, and he was handling it better than we were.

  I asked Sandy once if he ever discussed that Open with Watson.

  “No,” Sandy said. “The subject’s too painful. For me.”

  Drawn by warm year-round weather and the absence of a state income tax, scores and scores of touring pros, TV golf executives, tour caddies, and per-diem PGA Tour officials choose to set up housekeeping in the Sunshine State. Tom Watson, it so happens, is not among them. He thinks people who leave their hometowns—distancing themselves from family members and old friends and familiar ways—are fools. But many other golf people have relocated to Florida, some quite happily. Frank Chirkinian of CBS lived in West Palm Beach for years. His deputy, Chuck Will, lives in South Palm Beach. Tommy Roy, the longtime NBC golf producer, lives outside Jacksonville. Jacksonville Beach has been a magnet for tour caddies. As for players in Florida, the list is endless and includes Woods, Nicklaus, and Palmer. The center of Arnold’s universe may be Latrobe, but his official residence is a modest townhouse in Bay Hill, an Orlando golf community (no gate!) that he helped create. His office is above the pro shop.

  If you know the name Chuck Will at all, it’s likely from seeing it scroll by in the production credits at the end of hundreds of CBS golf telecasts over the course of twenty years, beginning in 1968. Chuck knew all about Venturi, Palmer, Tatum, the Harmon brothers and their father. But none of those people would have known Chuck, not in a meaningful way. Of all my Secret Legends, Chuck Will was the most secret. His work, as Frank Chirkinian’s right-hand man at CBS Sports, had kept him in trailers and broadcast trucks. He wasn’t often in the sunlight. Still, he seemed to know everybody.

  Mike seemed to be having a good time, working the legends beat with me, and he was on board to go see Chuck. The appointed day for our rendezvous was spectacular, nothing but blue skies in every direction, but Mike was willing to take the day off from work. (That is, checking on his investment portfolio and playing Eagle Trace and hitting balls on its range.) We drove to Chuck’s condo together, southbound on A1A through South Palm Beach and along a collection of oceanfront high-rises where you could stop in the lobby and readily get a golf game, a gin game, or the name of a good osteopath.

  I met Chuck at the ’85 Players Championship in the manner that many unemployed caddies met him. I was looking for work, and Chuck hired caddies as casual laborers for weeklong stints at CBS tournaments. When I moved to Philadelphia in 1986 to work for the Inquirer, we would talk regularly and play occasionally, always at Bala Golf Club, a cozy old club for the city’s pols and fixers. The Bala course, in the city limits and near the intersection of City Avenue and Golf Road, is a tiny little thing. But it’s old, and the golf vibe there is deep. Chuck and Frank, who met in Philadelphia in ’48, contributed significantly to the club’s culture. Chuck once told me that Frank’s game was driver in the rough, Ginty 7-wood recovery shot. In other words, not very good. But he did have a fabulous selection of golf sweaters. Chuck was a former club champ at Bala and he played competitive golf. One time he shot 65 in a local tournament when he was supposed to be working at his job as a cardboard-box salesman. Joe Greenday of the Philadelphia Daily News wanted to write him up. Chuck said, “Talk to somebody else.” A golf bum with a conscience.

  Chuck and I were once partners in a money match at Bala, and I found myself apologizing to him for my play. Chuck said, “Are you trying your hardest?” He knew I was. Too hard, if anything. “Then you have nothing to apologize for.”

  We had a good friendship. Then I wrote a story for SI in 1995 that Chuck thought I should not have written, and our friendship went into a deep freeze. The story resulted in the firing of Ben Wright, an English newspaperman whom Chirkinian had turned into a CBS golf commentator. Wright had made a series of inane, sexist, and homophobic comments about the LPGA to a reporter named Valerie Helmbreck from the Wilmington News-Journal. Wright said women’s breasts interfere with their swing. Another of his pearls: “They’re going to a butch game, and that furthers the bad image of the game.” When Helmbreck’s story came out—which she wrote absolutely straight—the New York Post had a field day and a perfect front-page head: THE BOOB ON THE TUBE.

  It was a passing storm until Wright went on TV and trashed Helmbreck’s reputation in an effort to save his own job. Our story in SI was able to show that Wright had made the comments he’d claimed on national TV he did not make. That’s why he got fired. My friendship with Chuck was another casualty of the bombastic interview Wright gave Helmbreck. On that Monday in early March my barren years with Chuck were about to come to an end.

  Chuck still had a home on the Main Line but spent his winters in a first-floor condominium in short, boxy building that fronted Lake Worth. He was at an open door when we arrived.

  Mike said, “You’re looking good, Chuck!”

  It was a statement of fact. Chuck was wearing flip-flops, loose shorts rendered baggier by his stick-figure legs, a golf shirt, and a black sweater vest. His hair was long and his glasses had a purplish tint. He looked like a retired concert promoter. He liked to say that he was never young, but to me he had always been of indeterminate age. It was good to see him. He greeted me not as a long-lost son but something like that.

  Chuck and Mike knew all the same people. Chuck told us about a youthful romance he had with one of the Bauer sisters way back when, and Mike knew exactly what that meant. He knew the Bauer sisters were the LPGA’s original glamour girls in the 1950s, and that Marlene had married Alice’s ex-husband, and that there was a whole weird thing there, and that if you had ever even sipped cocktails with one of the Bauer sisters, as Chuck surely had, you must have had a lot of game. Mike and Chuck both knew the Fred (Couples) you and I do not, the one who no-showed here and no-showed there but would charm you to death effortlessly the next time he saw you. They were both lifers, Chuck and Mike, and they had dug their own trenches. No bullshit could pass in Chuck’s condo on that perfect winter day in South Florida. They both knew too much.

  Chuck had a thousand players in his memory bank. He knew their swings and their divorces and their IRS audits. He knew Palmer and Venturi in ways I never would. He had a name for everybody. He called Ben Wright “Bentley,” Earl Woods “Colonel,” his own father “Admiral,” Cliff Roberts “The Old Man,” Ray Floyd “Junior,” Gene Sarazen “Squire.” (Not “The Squire.” That was common.) He knew Mike as “Statman.” He knew that Mike hung with Lance Ten Broeck (“Last Call”), Bill Britton (“Toy Cannon”), Jim Boros (“Truck”). Chuck knew that Truck, when his tour days were over, had become the pro at the city course in Allentown. Chuck knew close to all. Who was broke, who was stepping out, who was on the first tee Saturday morning with Friday night on his breath. He heard everything the caddies said, stored it all away, and seldom, if ever, used it. But it was there, in reserve. He was Frank Chirkinian’s eyes and especially his ears, which is saying something, because Chuck liked to say that Frank “could hear twice as well as any other person I knew.”

  Over the years I had learned from Chuck that Chirkinian’s general view was that televised golf was part of the network’s entertainment division. Frank, aided and abetted by Chuck, treated the golfers like they were stars in the old Hollywood studio system. Maybe it was a better way. Frank understood that a well-framed single moment could define a player for the rest of his life. Hubert Green, for instance, at the ’78 Masters, Sunday night creeping in, the last man on the last green in his shiny green Sansabelt slacks, looking at a four-foot birdie putt to tie Gary Player and force a playoff. Chirkinian cleared the stage.

  Frank saw sport as theater and the Masters as a play in three
acts, with Thursday and Friday as Act I, Saturday as Act II, and Sunday as Act III. The course was his stage and the players were his actors. Frank stage-managed Hubert’s putt to tie as if it were a scene of improvisational theater. In actual fact, he did that hundreds of times per broadcast. Hubert missed, by the way. CUT TO: Gary Player reaction shot.

  Golf, under Frank and Chuck, was special on CBS, and the Masters particularly so. By saying less, Frank’s commentators said more. He hired drinkers, newspapermen, Englishmen, voices, understaters, and one U.S. Open winner, Kenny Venturi, for whom the Masters represented unrequited love. Somehow we picked up on that, and that added urgency to the proceedings. The message from CBS, from Frank and Chuck and Kenny and Pat and young Jim Nantz and Ben Wright, was that Augusta was a place to celebrate tradition and to practice discretion, manners, and class. Frank understood TV. Chuck understood golf. They were good for each other.

  Chuck and Mike and I sat at a table just off the kitchen in the small apartment Chuck shared with his wife, Kathleen, twenty-eight years younger than he. She put out a big plate of shrimp for us. No matter where the conversation went, it returned to Frank, like those old Central Park rental horses returning to their stable as if on autopilot. We talked about Fred Couples and Venturi getting into the Hall of Fame, and Chuck talked about Frank’s path in.

  “Frank called me when he got the news that he was going into the Hall of Fame,” Chuck said. “He was dying. He said, ‘Charlie, isn’t it a little late?’ ”

  Chirkinian’s induction ceremony came about ten weeks after he died in March 2011. The next month, a lot of the old CBS golf group got together to celebrate Frank’s life and times, but Chuck did not go. It was still too raw for him.

  “I fell in love with Frank, I really did,” Chuck said, “and I worked hard for him, even when I was drinking. I’d have the dry heaves. And then I’d go to work and do the job.” Chirkinian wasn’t going to fire him. Chuck did his job well. He was Frank’s homeboy.

  Chuck described various sodden CBS dinners, commentators half-smashed while on the air, unable to climb the ladder to the broadcast booth without an assist, rehearsals that were a total mess, with Frank’s screaming as the soundtrack. Then four P.M. would come, the red light would go on, and nobody would miss a beat.

  The whole gang was comically profane. As horseshit is part of the lingua franca of big-league baseball, Frank and Chuck and the CBS golf crew of their era kept the word asshole in constant circulation. Chuck told Mike and me the distinction he made between regular assholes, flaming assholes, and gaping assholes. In the week I worked for him, Chuck had called me asshole, no modifier, like it was my name, and I took it as a sort of welcoming. “The one you don’t want to be is a gaper,” Chuck told us. He kept lists of gapers and he kept lists of caddies who owed him money. There was a lot of overlap.

  Chuck knew all the drinkers at CBS and cited them, but Chirkinian and Jim Nantz, both connoisseurs of fine wines, were not among them, even if Chirkinian did buy many bottles of Opus One over the years on his CBS credit card.

  “Live television is a chancy thing,” Chuck said. “Everybody’s on edge. The job is to keep mistakes off the air. So there are things people do to relieve the pressure, and drinking is one of them.” He wasn’t making excuses. Hardly. He was just explaining life on his show.

  Chuck had the highest regard for Nicklaus, in victory and especially in defeat. He liked Palmer. He had many ups and downs with Venturi. He said that when Ken was in a good mood, nobody could be more fun, but he was often cranky and self-centered. “I played golf with Kenny a number of times,” Chuck said. “He talked about himself.”

  He marveled at Palmer’s charisma. He saw people throw themselves at Arnold, a recipe to develop egomania if ever there was one, and to a remarkable degree, Chuck said, Arnold stayed on the ground. His gifts were almost inexplicable.

  “There was a time we needed Arnold to read something for us off a piece of paper,” Chuck said. “He couldn’t do it. It was lifeless. We put it on a teleprompter. He couldn’t read it off that, either. He was like a wood soldier. We did take after take. It was devoid of personality.

  “But then there was Arnold on the course. That was entirely different. You had all these other pros, they’d make a putt and they would maybe tilt their head. Right? And then Arnold Palmer comes along, and this guy was just so expressive. He was the very figure of a man. He exuded sex.”

  Chuck half-cackled at his own observation, surprised by where it had concluded. I was struck that it was so similar to what Sandy Tatum had said about Arnold’s appeal. Chuck didn’t use Sandy’s phrase—sexual charisma—but he could have. Its absence or presence can make or break a TV show. If you ever watched Charlie’s Angels or the NBA finals in the Michael Jordan era or Mad Men, you know what I’m talking about.

  “Augusta made Arnold and Arnold made Augusta, and they both made Frank,” Chuck said. “But Frank would also tell you that he helped make Arnold. He used to say, ‘I put his name up in lights.’ ” Frank invented golf on TV. Chuck wasn’t there at the start, but he was there when it got good. Over time, for good and for bad, golf on TV became golf.

  Chuck told the story of Seve Ballesteros winning the Masters in 1983 and being interviewed by the club chairman, Hord Hardin, in Butler Cabin. On live TV, at the conclusion of another artful Frank Chirkinian telecast, Hardin asked, “Seve, let me ask you—a lot of people have asked me.” He paused. “How tall are you?”

  “And Frank started screaming, ‘He did not just fucking ask that!’ ”

  In the CBS/Augusta National relationship, the club had all the power. Augusta National officials did a lot of dictating and CBS executives did a lot of note-taking. But on this occasion the club had gone too far. Chirkinian later said to Hardin, “Do you want us to continue doing this tournament?” In his threat, Frank was looking for one thing: He wanted the Butler Cabin winner’s interview to be handled by one of his trained professionals, and from that point on it was.

  “I could sit here and cry like a baby, talking about Frank,” Chuck said.

  He turned the calendar back to the Monday after the 1981 Danny Thomas Memphis Classic. Jerry Pate won. Mike had missed the cut.

  “I was hungover,” Chuck said. “I saw Frank. He said, ‘It can’t go on like this.’ He didn’t tell me to stop drinking. He just said the truth: It can’t go on like this. That’s how he changed my life.”

  That was Chuck’s one-man intervention. Chuck figured out there were things he loved more than drinking. Chuck quit the next day, June 30, 1981. The Tuesday after Memphis.

  When we were close to leaving, Chuck addressed Mike and his U.S. Open. He said, “You didn’t win. But you were memorable.” He then said something to me about the fallout from the Ben Wright story. My heart was racing so I’m not sure precisely what he said, but it was something close to this: “Just because we drifted there for a while didn’t mean we didn’t love each other.” It was a mighty thing for him to say.

  Out we went, the three of us, into the fading sunshine of a winter afternoon in South Florida. Chuck stood in his condo’s parking lot in flip-flops, the lenses on his purplish glasses growing darker. I had been struck by Chuck’s ability to talk about friendship, regret, good times and lost chances, love in its different forms. There was something so modern and healthy about it. He had told us that he was eighty-seven. I hadn’t thought of his age, and the number took me by surprise. It had been eighteen years since I had last seen him. Too long, and the years went too fast. Golf on TV. That was his baby. Chuck had seen it grow into advanced middle age. He had seen me do the same.

  One day at Bay Hill with Arnold, I mentioned to him that I was getting nowhere in my efforts to see Mickey Wright. He wanted to hear more. In the years when Arnold owned men’s golf, Mickey Wright was his female equivalent, at least on the course. If there were any justice in the world, she would be as celebrated in golf as Ben Hogan is, for the greatness of her swing and the depth of her accom
plishments.

  Between 1956 and 1973, she won eighty-two LPGA events. At her best, she was as dominant as Tiger Woods was at his best. She won four U.S. Opens between ’58 and ’64 and four LPGA Championships between ’58 and ’63. All the while, she was the ultimate soul golfer (to bastardize a term of surfing). Hogan once said of her, “She had the finest swing I ever saw—man or woman.”

  I was not surprised to be rebuffed by Mickey, politely but firmly, through the good offices of Rhonda Glenn, a longtime USGA media official, historian of women’s golf, and friend of Mickey’s. Even in 2000, for an SI story, Mickey wouldn’t let me see her in person. At least then she was willing to talk by phone. In the intervening years she had made herself less public. She was leading the life she wanted. She and Peggy Wilson, a former LPGA player, lived together in a modest house in Port St. Lucie, on the east coast of Florida, between West Palm Beach and Vero Beach. Mickey read the Wall Street Journal, smoked, played cards, cooked, shared jokes with close friends via e-mail. There was nothing in the world beyond Port St. Lucie that she wanted. She repeatedly declined invitations to do a this-is-your-life studio interview on Golf Channel. She didn’t go to a gala at The Breakers in Palm Beach, an hour by car from her house, to celebrate the LPGA turning fifty. She didn’t go to the USGA Museum in Far Hills, New Jersey, for the opening of its Mickey Wright Room (adjoining the Arnold Palmer Room). My request fell into the black hole of her former life. Others called her a recluse, but I don’t think that’s the right word. She had just moved on.

  My rejection made me realize how lucky I was to talk to her at all in 2000, the year she turned sixty-five. At that point, Mickey had not played in any sort of tournament in seven years and was already leading her own version of Hogan’s final quarter century. Mickey and Peggy’s home was on the Sinners’ Course at the Club Med Sandpiper, and often, in the still of early morning, Mickey would hit forty or fifty balls with a 7-iron off a mat in her backyard into an empty fairway. A course worker—a keen golfer, the father of a club pro—sometimes watched her, awed by her swing and the flight of her ball.