Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  “Crenshaw says to me, ‘Ball, what do you do if you love a girl but she don’t love you?’ ”

  Crenshaw was talking about his first wife, Polly, from Westchester County, in suburban New York City. That marriage ended in 1984, the year Crenshaw won his first Masters.

  I remembered Polly Crenshaw from the mid-1970s, when she and Ben were newlyweds. She was spectacular, with long blond hair and big white teeth. Golf’s Farrah Fawcett. I figured she came from great wealth. How else did she get into the clubhouse of the Westchester Country Club, where Ben Crenshaw was lucky enough to meet her? Polly Crenshaw. She was from another world.

  “If she don’t love you, you gotta let her go,” Ball told Crenshaw.

  “I believe you’re right,” Crenshaw said, in Ball’s recounting of it.

  “I know I’m right.”

  Mike said, “Did you know Polly’s in Austin?”

  Crenshaw had spent his life in the Texas capital.

  “What?” Ball said.

  He knew, immediately and instinctively, what Polly Crenshaw’s presence in Austin would mean for Ben. What empathy. Why wasn’t she in New York? She was a New Yorker. Ball was in Jackson and Mike was in South Florida. What the hell was Polly Crenshaw doing in Austin thirty years after she split on Ben? But that’s where she was.

  “Well I’ll be goddamned,” Ball said.

  • • •

  Ball had a plain intelligence and an uncommon dignity.

  “Excuse me,” he said at one point in our visit, responding to sounds that you could not readily ignore. “My colostomy bag.”

  As a man, he was credible. As a storyteller, I couldn’t say. Was Raymond really wearing nothing but his visor when he showed up at that hotel door? Not likely. We were visiting a man in his stuffy second-floor bedroom in the Hinds County Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. We were hearing the stories of his life.

  “Raymond was like a brother to me,” Ball said. “I called Maria ‘Sis.’ ” Once, when Ball had gone a record time without getting fired, he said to Raymond, “You and me is married now.”

  Ball was like Arnold. Both men were so comfortable talking about their true loves and high times. Arnold and Winnie had ventured out together. Raymond and Ball had done the same.

  Ball once said to Raymond, “See you got yourself a white boy caddying for you now.”

  Raymond said, “He can’t caddie your shoes.”

  Ball would never drive another yellow Pontiac, just as Arnold would never fly another Citation X. Ball had accepted with grace the things he could not change. He said, “I’m in the best place for me.” The gospel according to Ball.

  Near the end of our visit, I asked Ball if he still had golf clubs.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got ’em in my house here.”

  “You have a house here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anybody living in it?”

  “Yeah, the girl who took care of me when I got sick. She’s living in it.”

  “That’s awfully nice of you,” Mike said.

  “She saved my life,” Ball said quietly.

  I asked Ball when he was last in that house.

  “Last year,” Ball said. “I went home for a night. They had a party for me. Raymond was there. He came up for it. I don’t even know how he knew they was having a party.”

  “Raymond was in your house?” I asked.

  Ball’s house was on Lyndon B. Johnson Drive, in a poor black section of Jackson grandly called Presidential Hills.

  “Yeah,” Ball said. “He was playing these little gambling games. He was kind of handing out money. He stayed overnight.”

  Mike and I were both amazed. How often does a rich white guy, accustomed to the finest everything, stay as an overnight guest at a black friend’s house in a neighborhood with forty-five-thousand-dollar foreclosure homes? If Golf Ball’s story was true, it was incredible. If it was not true but Ball believed it was, that was something, too.

  Sometime after visiting Golf Ball in that nursing home I had a moment of clarity. The spine of the tour experience has always been the game and its challenges, which are exacerbated when playing for cash prizes and trophies. Right alongside all that is the call of the road, crisscrossing a country so great in girth and diversity that it can support hundreds of Holiday Inns, each one somehow unique. But our philosopher in Jackson was showing us, in the example of his life, that none of it would mean much of anything if you were doing it alone. In the end, I think what Golf Ball was really doing, in that visit Mike and I had with him, was making a serious nod to the institution of marriage, tour-style. And when I say marriage, I mean a committed relationship between two people in which each person, motivated by love, tries to improve the other person’s life on an ongoing basis. I know, I know: very idealistic.

  How sex figures into the whole gestalt of tour life, I don’t know. It’s there because it must be. Whenever you have winners and losers—in sports, in the arts, in business, in politics—isn’t an undercurrent of the whole thing that the winners enjoy more and better sex? The reason Tiger Woods was so effective selling Buicks for years is because he was playing against type. Here was an incredibly successful athlete—a light-skinned black man with a welterweight’s body playing Bobby Jones’s old game—who could be using his exalted status to get anything he wanted. And all he wanted was to drive a brand of safe, sexless family cars.

  My writing hero, Roger Angell, revisiting his life at age ninety-three in a New Yorker essay called “This Old Man,” unearthed this gem from Laurence Olivier: “Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.” Well, the golf tour will keep you young like little else, and careers on it can endure for decades. (Then you hit fifty and start all over again.) The Ponte Vedra promotional department tried its best to paper over man’s baser instincts with a painfully bland marketing line: These guys are good. The truth is that the PGA Tour is closer to the NBA than any of us would realize. In other words, loud music, various drugs, sex in all the usual forms: straight and gay, consensual and forced, committed and casual, purchased and proffered, consummated and unconsummated. Golf requires restraint, and for some players its discipline will show up in their sex lives, one way or the other.

  I’m not going crazy with this whole carnal theme, and you shouldn’t, either. When Ball said to Raymond, “You and me is married now,” that was a comment devoid of sexual innuendo. Ball was expressing friendship, happiness, security, love. Mike and I both felt what made our visit with Golf Ball such a rich experience was the reservoir of appreciation he showed for the life he had lived and what it had given him. He loved the caddies, the players, the action, Jackie in her short shorts, that yellow Pontiac Grand Prix, the game itself, the road and its twists, his caddie-yard status, Raymond.

  • • •

  After seeing Ball, I felt compelled to write to Mickey Wright. I knew she didn’t want to talk about golf, but I wondered if she might want to talk about friendship. I wrote her a short letter and sent it off by U.S. mail. I heard back by e-mail within days. Here, just slightly edited, is what Mickey wrote. Note her precision and her avoidance of the first-person pronoun. That is, I.

  Hi Michael,

  Nice to hear from you. I never was much into networking, so didn’t really have many relationships outside of the golfers. They were like family, though never spent a whole lot of time with them off the course.

  A few friendships have lasted down through the years. Girls whom I consider close friends and talk with quite often are Peggy Wilson, Kathy Whitworth, Pam Higgins, Mary Bea Porter, Betsy Rawls, Sandra Spuzich, and others occasionally, such as Sherri Steinhauer and Marilynn Smith.

  It’s interesting; never talk with non-golfers about golf. Only other pros who have been there seem to know what it’s all about.

  My dearest friends outside of golf are a couple, Max and Gertie White, from Angola, Indiana. They lived across the fairway from us for twenty years and they were the only people I ever gave golf lessons to on an
extended basis. They’ve now moved back to Indiana and we miss them very much.

  Went out and hit a few wedges the other morning for the first time in years. The 78-year-old muscles hollered at me but it was fun, as is always the case. Was working on my grip and ball placement. Some things never change in golf. Seems strange looking at those big faces and having the long shafts hit you in the stomach. The new 6-iron is the length and loft of my old 4-iron. New game out there.

  If you still have any questions that you think would be helpful to you, please feel free to send them along.

  Hope this finds you well and enjoying life one shot . . . oooops, meant one day at a time.

  Mickey

  Later, Mickey and I had a long phone conversation. She told me about her father, who had played football at Michigan. He graduated in 1908 and from Michigan’s law school two years later. He then moved to Southern California. By horse. “My father told me, ‘You’d pass someone on the road, you’d tip your hat and move on.’ It was still the Wild West.”

  Arthur Wright became a prominent lawyer in San Diego, a gambler, a man-about-town. “Every time he got married, he asked me for permission,” Mickey said, not counting the marriage to her mother. “I never said no.” Even when she didn’t like the new gal, and that was every time.

  Mickey’s father had custody of her every weekend, and he would take her to horse races, prizefights, card games. A youth well spent. She adored him. Mickey went to Stanford for a year and left to play the brand-new LPGA tour. Her father staked her with a thousand dollars. It was all she needed.

  Mickey seemed equally fond of her mother, Kathryn, a Georgia belle with an independent streak who followed her first husband, a newspaperman, to California. (Mickey’s father was Kathryn’s second husband.) For two years, mother drove daughter, a promising junior golfer in an era when there was no such thing as professional women’s golf, from San Diego to Los Angeles for a weekly golf lesson. One hundred twenty-five miles and three hours to get there. Half-hour lesson. Then back. The teacher was Harry Pressler from the San Gabriel Country Club. The instructor, I should say. Pressler told his students what to do. He believed the swing was a series of correct positions, and young Mickey followed his instructions precisely.

  She talked about golf in San Diego in the late 1940s and early 1950s, studying Gene Littler’s swing and watching Billy Casper make greenside shots “that make Phil Mickelson’s short game look like a child’s.”

  She had a crush on Tom Watson. She talked about him following her at an LPGA event when he was a young player and she was an old one. “He shook my hand and said how much he liked my golf,” Mickey told me. “He gives me goose bumps.”

  Mickey never knew Venturi, never even met him. I could guess what she thought of him as a TV commentator, because she had no use for pretty much anybody who talked about golf on TV. She watched a lot of golf but always with the volume off, unless the commentator was Renton Laidlaw, an Englishman who worked European Tour events. She preferred the European Tour.

  She loved Hogan. She admired Nicklaus. Her indifference to Arnold was obvious, though she never said anything explicit. She had met him a couple of times and didn’t feel like he made much effort.

  Mickey told me about a made-for-TV event where Palmer and Dow Finsterwald played Mickey and Barbara Romack in an eighteen-hole match on the Desert Inn course in Las Vegas, with each hole playing as a par-three.

  “It took all day to film,” Mickey said, still annoyed a half century later. “Barb and I won, and CBS never aired it.”

  • • •

  Peggy Wilson’s golf mentor, Harvey Penick, of the Austin Country Club and author of The Little Red Book, was the opposite of Harry Pressler. Harvey’s approach to teaching golf was to work with the clay. His adjustments were never wholesale. His emphasis was on the short game, the power of positive thinking, and reducing golf to its essence. His pet phrase—take dead aim—is a swing thought for the ages, but it means nothing if you don’t have sound fundamentals.

  Mickey first met Peggy in 1957, when Peggy attended an exhibition Mickey was giving in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Peggy grew up on its outskirts, in the country. Several years later, Mickey was visiting Betsy Rawls in Austin when Betsy was getting a lesson from Harvey. At that point, Peggy was divorced, teaching physical education at the University of Texas, working for Harvey and taking lessons from him, too. A divorced woman in Mississippi had few options back then, Mickey said. That’s why Peggy moved to Texas. Mississippi represented the rural life. Peggy wanted something different. She wanted the golfing life.

  In 1962 Peggy made it to the tour. Mickey was already a legend, and Peggy, though the same age, was just starting out. None of that impeded their friendship. They became practice-round partners and traveling partners. The drives were often long and usually fun. “We were helping each other out,” Mickey told me.

  Mickey described how Peggy shared important qualities with Mickey’s mother: independence, humor, an excellent family recipe for fried chicken. Mickey appreciated how Peggy had grown up: “They were poor and didn’t know it.” That’s because Peggy’s family always had a productive garden, a fat pig, ample firewood, and water in the well.

  Mickey and Peggy had been living in the house in Port St. Lucie on the Sinners’ Course since 1974. They used to do a lot of fishing, but that stopped a long time ago. They were both in their late seventies. They played cards, cooked, watched golf with the sound off, read their novels and newspapers, managed their investments, e-mailed their golf jokes to friends. They led quiet lives, and time unfolded for them without the intruding rush of the modern world. “She takes care of me in my illnesses and I take care of her in hers,” Mickey said.

  Life in their house likely wasn’t very different from the lives unfolding in a thousand other houses in Port St. Lucie, except in this house the occupants were two older women who had won eighty-three LPGA events between them.

  “We’re best friends,” Mickey said. “Best friends forever.”

  I wondered if Mickey even knew that it was a phrase of modern culture. Either way, what a nice choice of words.

  Ken Venturi died just eleven days after his Hall of Fame induction. Death came up often in our interviews. He spoke of the death of his parents and the location of their gravesites. Chirkinian’s death, two months before his Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Sinatra’s slow death by bladder cancer, complicated by heart problems. Clifford Roberts’s death by suicide.

  It was only after Ken’s death that I learned Fred Venturi was not Ken’s biological father. His biological father, as described to me, was a San Francisco Irishman with a drinking problem whom Ken never knew. Fred married Ken’s mother, Ethyl, and raised Ken as his own. By DNA, Ken was Irish-American through and through, but by identity he was an Italian-American of the old school. I don’t think his place in the Italian American Sports Hall of Fame will be in any sort of jeopardy from this revelation. Frederico Venturi was Ken’s father. That was how Ken treated him, and that was how he treated Ken.

  Jim Nantz spoke at Ken’s funeral, tapping the coffin on his way to the pulpit. He told a Ken-at-dinner story.

  “An unsuspecting waitress comes to the table and says, ‘Can I get you guys a cocktail?’

  “Ken looks at her straight-faced. ‘I’ll have a Diet Dr Pepper.’

  “ ‘Sir, we don’t have Diet Dr Pepper.’

  “ ‘Then I’ll have a Crown Royal on the rocks.’ ”

  On the punch line, Nantz signaled in the air like a first-base umpire making an out call. It was a telling bit of imitation. All his life, Ken used his arms and his hands in conversation like a conductor to help combat his stutter.

  A few weeks later, when the U.S. Open was at Merion, there was a dinner of former champions. Glasses were raised to Ken. Many of the people at that dinner—Arnold, Jack, Watson, Lee Trevino, Curtis Strange—knew something about the man. They didn’t know all the details, but they broadly knew there were difficult, dark t
hings that Ken Venturi had carried right to his final resting place. They knew that Ken was a man who could not let go.

  That champions dinner—Mike was one stroke away from attending—was described by various people as a disaster. From what I heard, the USGA president, Glen Nager, overdid everything, including his own role. Arnold was overserved. Someone thought it would be a good idea to seat Watson and Woods next to each other. The logic was that Tom Watson would soon be captaining a Ryder Cup team that Woods would be anchoring. But they had nothing to say to each other and sat there like underwater boulders.

  In the Open itself, Woods finished twelve shots behind the winner, Justin Rose, who shot one over par for the week. The U.S. Open was played ten miles from my house on a course I have played many times, but it didn’t feel like a home game. With all the people and commotion and through pouring rain I could barely recognize the place. A highlight of the week was reading Rick Reilly’s column about the private house that got turned into player hospitality and how the owner’s son held the TV remote hostage. Our son, Ian, made some college spending money collecting trash at Merion, biking to work in the predawn dark. When I brought him a slicker in the first morning’s driving rain he barely acknowledged me. A statement of independence if ever there was one.

  A couple of days after that Open, there was an ALS fund-raiser at an old Philadelphia course, Whitemarsh Valley, where a tour event used to be played. Bruce Edwards, Tom Watson’s longtime caddie, died from ALS in 2004, and Watson has been devoted to the cause of finding a cure. He has raised millions of dollars in Bruce’s name and immersed himself in the science of the disease. He knows the doctors who have devoted their careers to researching it. Bruce was by his side for the best times of his life. He could lift Watson’s mood. You know what it’s like: You’re driving along and suddenly “God Only Knows” is on the car radio and everything, courtesy of Brian Wilson, seems better. Bruce was like that for Watson. He was his balm.