Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  About a month before the induction date, I went to see Nantz in Hilton Head, where he was renting a house when the tour was there. Jim had agreed to write a first-person piece for SI about Ken, and I was going to help with it.

  Jim greeted me wearing blue jeans and a dress shirt. He had been doing waist-up tapings for the induction ceremony. He asked about the lag time between finishing the SI piece and its publication. I told him what I knew. Jim said slowly, “Kenny’s very ill. Right now, whether he can make it to the ceremony or not, it’s touch and go.”

  Life will really throw curves, won’t it? Ken had waited for decades to be elected to the Hall of Fame, but a spinal cord infection had shown up seemingly overnight and he could not shake it. Jim said the PGA Tour would make its private jet available to Ken if that was what he needed to get to his date with destiny.

  He opened up a bottle of wine, one from his own label. He had not stamped his line of wines with his own surname, as celebrity vintners typically do, but dubbed it The Calling. “Have you unlocked yours?” asks the company motto.

  I’ve helped many people write first-person pieces over the years, but I have never worked with anybody who paid closer attention to what he was writing. There was one rewrite after another. In the end, his piece took the form of a letter to Ken. It was tinged with good-bye.

  • • •

  The World Golf Hall of Fame is the centerpiece of the World Golf Village, located off I-95 in northern Florida. The hall is about thirty miles south of Jacksonville’s downtown high-rises and surrounded by a housing development and cart-only golf courses. There’s also a Murray Bros. Caddyshack restaurant and a Renaissance hotel. The induction ceremonies are held in the hotel’s Legends Ballroom. One year Peter Alliss, the English golfer and broadcaster, started and finished by thanking his parents, followed by a quick nod to a Mrs. Weymouth, a boyhood teacher who said in a report, “I fear for his future.” By way of farewell, Peter raised his middle finger high in the air in salute to Mrs. Weymouth and walked off to a standing ovation.

  The day before Ken’s induction, there was an afternoon discussion group amid the new class of inductees, with one notable exception. Ken was in a hospital in Palm Springs. He would not be attending his own induction. What a bummer for him and his family.

  His absence left three living inductees in the house: Fred, Colin Montgomerie, and Ken Schofield, the retired executive director of the European Tour. I had been invited to moderate that warm-up-act discussion group. The inductees waited in a back room, and when showtime came I followed the honorees into a ballroom with maybe two hundred friends and family members, plus Hall of Fame employees and volunteers. The three Hall of Famers and I were on a stage, and right there in the first row, in loafers with no socks, was Ben Wright, the old CBS golf commentator. The man Chuck Will called Bentley. I hadn’t seen him in the flesh in years and years.

  I opened the session by telling blips of stories about the three inductees. For Fred, I stole one of Mike’s stories, going back to 1982, Fred’s second year on Tour.

  Fred and Mike were driving from the Westchester Classic, in suburban New York, to the Buick Classic, in Flint, Michigan. They were heading west across Ohio on I-80 and pulled in to a motel for the night. A sign in the parking lot posted room prices as a filling station does for gas by the gallon: $32 for a single, $36 for a double.

  “Pull ’round back,” Fred said. “Tell ’em you’re a single.”

  Mike pulled around to the back. Fred hid in the car. Mike checked in as a single, even though there would be two guys in the one room. The move saved Mike and Fred two dollars each.

  Fred nodded sheepishly and said, “It’s true.”

  He had signed on for a couple of days of this-is-your-life. Not his kind of thing—he despises attention—but he was being a good sport about it.

  Every inductee at the Hall of Fame has a locker. In the locker reserved for the writer Dan Jenkins are an electric typewriter and copies of his books. Arnold’s is stuffed with golf clubs, shoes, a bottle of wine, sport coats—enough stuff for a yard sale. Hale Irwin’s has his first set of clubs. Mickey Wright’s locker is empty except for a copy of her book, Play Golf the Wright Way.

  Months before the event, two Hall of Fame curators had been assigned to go to Fred’s house on a memorabilia scavenger hunt. They went to Fred’s with low expectations, and understandably so. Fred had put them off for months, and nothing in his personality suggested he was a saver. On the day of their visit, Fred conveniently arranged to have an all-day dental appointment. He turned the matter over, as he has various other personal matters in his life, to his agent, Lynn Roach.

  But when Roach let the Hall of Fame men in, they were stunned. Fred had stuff that evidently had survived his many moves. He had saved a circa-1979 bright red University of Houston golf shirt with a collar so big it looked like the fins of a skate fish. A classic. You could imagine Fred wearing it well.

  • • •

  I had caddied in his groups and had seen him in press conferences but had never been around Fred very much. Just here and there. I would say I got one real glimpse of him. On the Sunday night of the 1999 PGA Championship, after Woods won at Medinah, I was flying from O’Hare to LAX. I was frequent-flyered to first class and happened to be sitting beside Fred (we each had an aisle seat in the same row). I was going to visit Christine’s family in suburban Los Angeles. Fred was living near Santa Barbara at the time. We chatted. An hour or so into the flight, Fred said, “Could you wake me up in like an hour? I’m supposed to call Crenshaw.”

  He needed to make a call to the U.S. Ryder Cup captain to find out if he had been picked for that year’s Ryder Cup team. Ben Crenshaw would be announcing his two picks the following morning. Fred had been on the previous five teams.

  In that period, if there’d been something in his public life known to be important to him, it would have been Ryder Cup golf. Fred loved any sport with a roster, and his Ryder Cup experiences allowed him to be on a team, in a uniform, with guys on his side. For some players, it is a welcome break from the solitary nature of tournament golf. It can remind a guy of playing in college, when golf was fun.

  Fred woke up from his nap without any help and released the whitish plastic rectangular phone from the seat back in front of him. I went to the head to give him space.

  Fred is Italian on his father’s side—he’d be Fred Coppola, had there never been a name change—and his skin is dark, especially by the Sunday night of a tournament week. But when I came back, Fred’s complexion resembled skimmed milk.

  “You got bad news,” I said.

  Fred made a solemn nod. Ben had chosen somebody else. You could see Fred’s surprise and hurt and how much he cared.

  • • •

  The induction ceremony was held on a Monday night in the Legends Ballroom. Dan Hicks of NBC Sports introduced Jim Nantz of CBS Sports, and Nantz talked about the evening’s absent star, Mr. Kenneth Paul Venturi, “son of Fred and Ethyl.” Nantz spoke in fully formed sentences and without notes. He said, “Audiences considered Ken their trusted friend.” If you knew Ken only from his work on TV, and that was how millions knew him, he really was like a friend. For thirty-five years, he was always there.

  A taped tribute showed something I had never focused on before: Venturi’s well-oiled swing. There were clips from the ’64 U.S. Open and black-and-white Masters clips.

  Nantz introduced Venturi’s two grown sons, noting that the Hall of Fame crystal “needs the fingerprints” of the Venturi family. Out came Matt and Tim. They were both well into their fifties and spoke movingly. Nantz stood beside them, almost as a third brother.

  Nantz talked about Ken the way he liked to talk about himself, as a character in a 1950s movie. Venturi, like Arnold and Gary Player and various other legends, came out of the final days of golf’s studio system. There were men on high, at the networks and in magazine offices and sitting in press boxes, who created the heroes we needed, and we all went to sleep
feeling better. Along the way, the players did their job to keep the whole operation going.

  Ken was maybe the last of those stars. He played the part perfectly. My God, I’ve won the Open. Lines don’t get better than that. I once made the mistake of asking Ken how that quote got off the final green at Congressional and into the world at large. Did his playing partner, Raymond Floyd, hear it? Did Ken tell the writers? Ken said he did not know, and that was when I realized something: My God was the most important sentence in the script, and it did not matter how it got there.

  Nantz created a powerful image that night: a triumphant Kenny, healthy and beaming, returning to the Legends Ballroom in twelve months to accept the trophy in person. “The prognosis is still good,” he said. He dropped his voice. Suddenly there was a hint of Texas in it. “He can get through this.”

  The broadcaster owned the room. Total silence.

  “I really believe that in my heart.”

  Mahart.

  • • •

  It was a wild night, by the tame standards of these velvet-rope affairs. Fred’s induction speech was the grand finale. I sat behind Joe LaCava, who caddied for Fred for twenty years before signing up with Woods. Joe lasted because he was more than a caddie, and Fred didn’t need a caddie anyhow. With the ball at his feet, he always knew what to do with it. But what Fred did need was a minder, a driver, and a road buddy who shared his interest in fast 40-yard dash times at the NFL Combine. Joe was perfect for all of that. He looked after Fred.

  Standing at a lectern with a plant at its base, Fred gave Joe a nice shout-out in a long series. He talked about “Mr. Venturi” and the memorable dinners he had with him and how he would wake up the next morning “so jacked to play golf.” Fred mentioned a few of his mentors, noting especially Raymond Floyd, Tom Watson, and Lee Trevino, who called him Freddie Cupcakes. (Couples quoted Trevino this way: “Cupcakes, Cupcakes, what the hell are you doing?”) Fred tripped for a moment on Trevino’s name, a moment of unscripted emotion, and looked away. He seemed a little embarrassed when people started applauding. The applause, when you get right down to it, was part of the TV show. All Hall of Fame inductions are TV shows. But Fred was going way beyond that. He was remembering the clinic Trevino conducted in Seattle when Fred was fourteen, and how they got paired in the Saturday round of the 1979 U.S. Open five years later. Two events that defined his life.

  Fred mentioned a few of his contemporaries: Jay Haas and John Cook, who were in the room, and Phil Mickelson and Davis Love, who were not. The first player he mentioned was Mike. “Mike Donald,” Fred said, “who I grew up playing the tour with—we all know Mike.”

  Fred had notes on a piece of paper, but his remarks were mostly unprepared. Near the end he said, “I was told to finish with a bang.” He was doing just fine with his kicker until he got to its last sentence. “Thanks for taking a kid from Seattle and putting him in the Hall of Fame.” Then, overwhelmed by the moment and gasping for air, he said, “This is the coolest night of my life.”

  He exited stage left with his fists high.

  • • •

  I called Mike after the ceremony and told him what Fred had said. I thought he might be moved by it.

  “That’s nice,” Mike said.

  Yes, Fred had singled him out, but that wasn’t going to undo the past twenty years. It wasn’t going to change the fact that when Mike’s father died in 1996, Mike never heard from Fred. “No call,” Mike once told me. “No card. No flowers. No nothing.”

  To Mike, Fred was stuck in adolescence. Mike would tell you he was qualified to make that assessment on the old it-takes-one-to-know-one basis. Mike avoided all the standard long-term commitments that most American men sign on for. Being a husband and a father, owning a house and a dog, anything that might intrude on his golf-first existence. But Mike knew what he was doing. His choices were willful.

  Sometime after the Hall of Fame induction ceremony, I asked Mike to explain the essence of his friendship (1981–1993) with Fred.

  “We were the same,” Mike said. Working parents, hourly wages, public courses, foam pillows. They had the same view of the world. “We’re in a clubhouse, this one time. Sometime in the early eighties. We’re watching Curtis get interviewed on TV. Curtis says, ‘That’s as good as Curtis Strange can play.’ And Fred goes, ‘Could you ever in your life say that?’ ” People referring to themselves in the third person—Mike and Fred didn’t get that.

  There were many good times. They may not translate here. In ’86, in New Orleans, the Thursday round got rained out, and Mike and Fred hopped on a Southwest flight to Houston, watched both games of the regional doubleheader in the NCAA basketball tournament, and flew back to New Orleans that night. (Louisville over Carolina in the late show—Never Nervous Pervis!) Their decade-plus together was a litany of ballgames in person, basketball games on large-screen TVs, Tuesday practice rounds, salad-bar steak houses, episodes that defy close inspection. You know: the night Fred hid under the bed while the girl’s enraged boyfriend climbed through the second-floor window, Mike out front, waiting in a Buick Open courtesy car. That sort of thing.

  In March 1992, when Fred was on his way to winning Bay Hill, Mike was invited to go into the NBC broadcast booth to talk about him. Johnny Miller said Fred’s game was not well suited to Augusta National because he liked to fade the ball and so many tee shots and Sunday pin positions at Augusta are designed for draws. Mike told Johnny and the vast NBC audience that he disagreed, that Fred could hit the ball any way he wanted, and that he could win on any course he played, including Augusta National. Fred never said a thing to Mike about his unpaid stint in the network tower, but Mike wishes he hadn’t done it. Mike knew that Fred didn’t like attention, and here was Mike, bringing more to him.

  The next month Mike was leading the second-city event in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, through three rounds. On that same night Fred was the third-round leader at the Masters. Fred won and Mike did not. Fred finished first on the 1992 money list. Mike finished 117th. Fred was moving on up. Mike was trending down.

  In 1993 Fred and Mike were seldom in the same tournaments or in the same outings. Fred had a new girlfriend. His life was changing. Mike was part of his old life.

  “I was struggling,” Mike said. “Fred could have called and said, ‘Let’s play a practice round. Let’s go to the range and look at your swing.’ He never did. The last time he called me was in August of ’93. He wanted to know if I could be a witness in his divorce from Deborah.”

  As I left the Legends Ballroom on the night of Fred’s induction I had the fleeting idea that I might get Mike and Fred and me together in a room, just as Chuck Will and Mike and I had gathered in one and Arnold and Mike and I had gathered in another. That was not going to happen. I once asked Mike if he had any desire to talk to Fred about what had happened to their friendship.

  “No,” Mike said. “Let me rephrase that. I would. I would love to have that conversation if I thought Fred was capable of having it. But I don’t think he is.”

  It wasn’t like one was dead to the other. They saw each other from time to time, on this driving range or that one, and had little chats about inconsequential things. For Mike, their friendship was a good memory frozen in time, like Ted Williams’s once impressive head in that freezer in Arizona.

  On another occasion, I asked Mike what he would want to ask Fred if we ever did a sit-down interview with him.

  “I’d ask him, ‘Fred, who filled out your application for that ’79 U.S. Open? Who wrote the entry check? Because I know you didn’t do that yourself.’ ”

  The drive from Jacksonville, Florida, to Jackson, Mississippi, is much farther than it might sound, but those Southern drives will fool you. In the Northeast, one minute you’re crawling through the sooty congestion of the Cross Bronx Expressway, gray apartment buildings practically on top of you, and the next thing you know you’re at the Shell station in semi-rural Pawtucket, Rhode Island, breathing the brackish air of coastal New En
gland. In the West, you don’t need a map to know that Tucson to San Francisco will take one full day and part of another. But the South is another thing. Who would guess that Jacksonville to Jackson is six hundred miles? After that Hall of Fame induction, Mike and I made the drive.

  A couple of hours into the trip, I called Jaime Diaz, my writer friend and secret legend, and he reminded me of “Jackson,” the dueling duet Johnny Cash used to play with his missus. (Johnny: “I’m going to Jackson, I’m gonna mess around.” June: “See if I care.”) I had that song in my head for five hundred miles (no, not quite) of the first stretch of the drive, a long straight shot west on I-10. I had done the drive before and Mike had done it many times. The tour in his day was more Southern than anything else. Our plan was to spend the night in Mobile, hometown of New York Mets Hall of Famer Cleon Jones. That was my plan, I should say. Mike got in the car not knowing or caring where we would spend the night. He is a ridiculously accommodating travel partner. We were getting along fine on our various trips, despite our differences. One of us is a no-meat pacifist who believes it is okay for the authorities to require motorcyclists to wear helmets. The other guy admirably contains his disdain. Anyway, we had, as we often do, a common purpose. On this occasion, we were going to Jackson to see a man called Ball.

  Golf Ball had not been easy to find. For starters, as in the case of Conni Venturi, I went in not knowing if he was dead or alive. Mike thought he was still with us but wasn’t sure. Some caddies said he had to be dead. Nobody had seen him in years. Golf Ball—Dolphus Hull, to his mother—had worked for Ray Floyd in his prime, Calvin Peete in his, Lee Elder in his. Bunches of others. He was a caddie-yard legend who had won with many different players. But he had done the ultimate fade-away.

  I got a break. At a charity tournament on the Trump course in West Palm Beach, I happened to sit down at breakfast next to Arthur Johnson, a large man in a Coogi sweater who once represented Lee Elder and other African-American golfers. Mr. Johnson—he seemed like a mister—told me he wanted to make a documentary about the black experience in professional golf and had been looking for Golf Ball himself. What he knew for sure was that Golf Ball was alive, living in Mississippi, and in failing health. I wasn’t looking for a ghost. Johnson thought that Calvin Peete, Golf Ball’s boss for years, might know how to find him.