Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  Neil, Jaime, Mike, and I had an outside lunch after our round at the Cricket Club at which Mike told a series of life-on-tour stories. He has a thousand of them. The obese groupie he had for a while who brought him nothing but bad luck and missed cuts. The eightieth birthday party he attended for the ornery tour caddie Lee Lynch, only to find out later that Lynch was sixty-four. The time Mike played in a twosome with Bob Gilder and Gilder walked to the next tee while Mike was standing over a three-footer for par.

  “You make it?” Gilder asked on that next tee.

  The etiquette—the responsibility, really—is to stay put and watch the other player finish.

  “If you had fucking stuck around to see, you’d know!” Mike said.

  Mike was taking us to a faraway place, the tour when it was still rough-and-tumble, and Jaime was grateful for it. He has an appreciation for travel in all its forms. His Mexican-born mother, Theresa, left high school without graduating, but she learned a lot about American culture by watching On the Waterfront, The Hustler, and Requiem for a Heavyweight, among other classics. (At fifty, she received a college degree.) Jaime would watch with her, absorbing language.

  Jaime has a superb ear for quotes. Johnny Miller once told him: “It’s not what you accomplish in life that matters; it is what you overcome.” Jaime could relate. He used it, remembered it, and shared it with Tiger. Jaime had no reason to think the quote made any particular impression on him. But a couple of years later, when Woods was delivering his post-scandal live-on-CNN mea culpa, Jaime was surprised to hear Woods use that quote. Standing before somber blue curtains in a ballroom at the Stadium Course clubhouse, Woods said, “I once heard—and I believe it is true—it’s not what you achieve in life that matters, it is what you overcome.” Woods, in a dark place, was seeing the wisdom in something that Johnny Miller had told Jaime and Jaime had told him. It speaks well for Woods.

  • • •

  At our after-golf lunch, Jaime didn’t do much talking. Or any, really. Neither did I. Neither did Neil, and that’s saying something, because Neil can take over any meal. At one point Jaime was about to say something in response to Mike, but he never got the chance. Mike sort of ran over him. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something wasn’t right. Mike had played poorly that day. He has rounds where he’s counting down the holes left to play, and that had to be one of them. He knows what it’s like to play golf at the highest level.

  As he left, Mike mentioned that he had left a pair of shoes in Fred’s locker at Rolling Green. I said I could get them back to him.

  “No, just have them throw ’em out, okay?” Mike said.

  That was typical of Mike—he never wants to inconvenience another person. But the way he said it was curt. Something definitely was not right.

  Curtis Strange was next up next. I wondered if Mike was still on the bus.

  I am aware that several golfing mysteries have developed along the way. I’m going to take a brief break in the action to take inventory.

  • Did Ray Floyd really spend the night at Golf Ball’s house in Jackson, as Ball said?

  • Did CBS really decide not to air that made-for-TV match when Mickey Wright and Barb Romack defeated Arnold Palmer and Dow Finsterwald, as Mickey said?

  • Did Venturi really tell Palmer he was violating the rules when he played two balls that day on twelve at the ’58 Masters, as Ken said?

  • And who on earth filled out Fred’s application for the 1979 U.S. Open?

  The most thorough account of the incident on twelve that I have read is Herbert Warren Wind’s SI game story in the issue dated April 21, 1958. But it has a significant omission: It never cites the actual rule that governed the action that Sunday. As I was trying to make sense of this cold case, it occurred to me that you had to have the exact language of the rule at your fingertips to really understand the dispute. I did not. I again turned to David Fay, the retired USGA executive director.

  And David turned to the Rules of Golf. That is, the 1958 edition, unchanged since ’56. He sent me a copy of the relevant page. The handwritten heading, the oval underneath it, the star in the margin, the wobbly underlining of the key passage, they’re all his.

  The complainant (Ken Venturi) maintained that Arnold failed to announce his intention to play two balls before he played his first. But the ’56 rule book covers that situation: “Should the competitor fail to announce in advance his procedure or selection, the score with the second ball shall be his score for the hole if played in accordance with the Rules.” On that basis, I could not see how Ken’s complaint had any merit. It is true that later the language of this rule changed in a way that would have prevented Palmer from doing what he did. But can a player be required to abide by a rule that doesn’t yet exist?

  Regardless of all that, fairness is the fundamental principle of the rule book. Even Ken said that Palmer should have been given embedded ball relief. Had there been no special provision in the rule book, the Augusta rules committee—essentially, Bobby Jones—almost surely would have allowed the three Palmer made on the second ball to stand, because that would have been the fairest way to resolve a confusing situation. The starting point is that Arnold was entitled to embedded ball relief and didn’t get it.

  The rules can be complicated, but they usually have a sound logical basis. As a player and a broadcaster, Ken was not noted for being a rules expert, which makes him like most other players and broadcasters. This circumstance—playing a second ball in a disputed rules situation—seldom comes up and is something most pros know nothing about. I asked David Fay for his opinion: Did he think Ken actually told Arnold that he had proceeded incorrectly, right there on the spot, as Venturi maintained in his book and elsewhere? David’s real-world experience took over: “There’s no fucking chance.”

  Arnold got a bad ruling and dealt with it in a sensible way. I know that sounds like I am taking sides. What I am trying to do is sort through the known facts and reach a sensible conclusion. When I started to understand that, I started to realize that the incident wasn’t about Arnold at all.

  In Ken’s telling, Palmer ignored both his caddie and Venturi, made that par on the second ball, followed up with an eagle on thirteen, then marched on to a one-shot win and an open lane to the good life. He then spent the next half century and counting being Arnold Palmer every single day, and he had a hell of a good time doing it. He stole the life that should have been Ken’s. And Ken was not going to forgive him for that. Not ever.

  I thought it was coming, and come it did: Mike said he was unsure about joining me when I went to see Curtis Strange. I wasn’t getting much of an explanation, and I wasn’t looking for one. Curtis and Mike were exact contemporaries, and the sense I got was that Mike felt it would be weird, sitting in Curtis’s house asking him how he won this tournament and that one. I could see it. I wondered, though, if there was something else going on.

  They were both born in 1955 and they had played in many of the same college and amateur tournaments. They had qualified for the senior tour at the same time. In between, they had played the regular tour together for years, although Mike will tell you his tour was different from the one Curtis played. Different hotels and restaurants, different equipment deals, different events (at times), different Thursday-Friday pairings, different results. Mike won once. Curtis won seventeen times, two of them Opens. Maybe Mike didn’t need a reminder of those scoreboard tallies.

  Not that Mike wasn’t proud of his career. He was. Mike’s first coach at Georgia Southern, who took away Mike’s scholarship after one year for poor play, wrote a book about the psychology of golf. Many years later, he sent Mike a copy with this inscription: “To the man who went the distance.” Mike had given it his best shot. What more can you do?

  How it all plays out for any two people will never be the same, not in golf and not in anything else. At Memphis in 1987 Mike was standing behind the eighteenth green on Sunday, tied for the lead with four other guys and hoping for a playoff and
his first tour victory. Curtis, in the last group, made a birdie on the final hole to win by a shot. Curtis was good at golf, better than Mike and most everybody else who ever played the game. Under pressure, he got even better.

  The 1990 U.S. Open is best remembered for Hale Irwin’s old-man win and Mike’s gritty effort, but Curtis was exposed there, too. He had come to Medinah trying to win a third straight Open. When he didn’t, a piece of him died. He never won again, on any tour. In Latrobe, Arnold had told Mike and me about what it means to lose the edge. Arnold had said that it had happened to him, to Big Jack, to everyone. In other words, Curtis and Mike and Mickey Wright and Randy Erskine and a thousand others. You have the edge, and then—poof—it’s gone. Medinah, in a manner of speaking, was a cemetery for Curtis and Mike both. There’s an unusual safe-travels exit sign at Medinah: ALLAH BE WITH YOU. Mike mentioned it to me once. Maybe it means more to him than he can know. After that sign, you’re in suburban Chicago. And where do you go from there? What do you do when the edge is gone? How do you play out the rest of your life, as a competitor and as a man?

  Mike and Curtis shared more than a birth year.

  • • •

  In the end, Mike decided to come. I didn’t ask why. He flew from Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta, changed planes, and flew to New Bern, North Carolina, where he stayed overnight in the Courtyard Marriott. I drove from Philadelphia, picked up Mike in the old Subaru, and we headed to Curtis’s home in Morehead City, in coastal North Carolina, about fifty minutes away.

  Maybe Mike just wanted to see Curtis again. He had always liked him. He liked the way he played. He liked the no-nonsense way he carried himself (even if he did talk about himself in the third person now and again). To me, Curtis was a golfing god. When I was in high school, he was the dominant college golfer on the dominant college golf team. I don’t know why, but those elite amateur and college golfers, whom I knew only from the occasional magazine article, seemed more unreal to me than Jack and Co. I would be going to college soon enough. But my college experience would never be anything like their college experience.

  In the car, Mike was killing me with passive indifference.

  “You want to get breakfast here?”

  “I don’t care.”

  No conversational question I posed did anything to engage him. The New Bern to Morehead City drive seemed longer than the drive from Mobile to Jackson. Something was wrong.

  • • •

  At Curtis’s house, everything was fine. It’s a rustic, nautical home by a creek that leads to Bogue Sound, which Curtis crosses regularly in his boat, Lady Sarah, on his way to the Atlantic Ocean, where he pursues large fish in deep seas with the zeal with which he once pursued golf. Curtis and the actual lady Sarah have two sons, both long out of the house, and three grandchildren.

  I was struck by how quiet and still the house was, but maybe that was simply because Sarah was out, and the children and grandchildren, frequent visitors, were not there, either. When Sarah and Curtis got married, she was twenty and he was twenty-one. They had met as students at Wake Forest and had been through the wars of real life together: breast cancer (her), depression (him), the vagaries of a playing career that had many ups and some significant downs. Sarah was beloved on tour in the same way Barbara Nicklaus was. They were warm and caring. They softened their husbands’ edges. Sarah and Barbara wouldn’t tell you that, but their husbands would.

  For a number of years, Curtis had been doing on-air work for ESPN. At one point, speaking of the seemingly unnatural swing Tiger Woods was then making, Curtis asked Mike, “When did the golf swing get so complicated?” He showed Mike swing-sequence photos from his days at Wake. “It was too loose, too erratic,” Curtis said. Mike nodded knowingly. Too loose and too erratic, but still he beat everybody.

  Working with Jimmy Ballard, Curtis narrowed his stance, changed the path of his downswing, and tightened his whole move. He was looking to hit fairways and greens. He made almost radical changes, and he did it in about a day. It took intelligence, maturity, and nerve to make such significant changes. That’s what I felt. Curtis felt otherwise. “I’d have given that new swing about six weeks,” he said. “If it hadn’t worked, I’d have tried something else.”

  Curtis and Mike seemed happy to talk about old tournaments and old players. I stayed out of the way. Mike was waggling a beautiful persimmon-headed, steel-shafted fairway wood, and Curtis said, “Lemme see that thing.” He likes to have things in his hands.

  Curtis talked about how bored he gets, standing on the range hitting balls, and how frustrated he was by his poor play in senior events. He knew what a struggle it was for Mike just to get into those tournaments. When I thought about it later, I realized that the Champions tour, the professional circuit reserved for players fifty and over, can get right in a guy’s head, even though it is barely a blip on the sporting landscape. That tour for old guys is right there, telling a veteran player about the state of his game, which he may or may not want to know at that point in his life. Nobody ever asked Dwight Gooden at fifty why he couldn’t strike out twelve in eight innings anymore. But tour players are expected to pretty much maintain their peak level of play for the simple reason that a few of them are able to do so. It all makes you appreciate the wisdom of Ben Hogan when he said, “I am the sole judge of my own standards.”

  Curtis and Mike knew people who had won repeatedly and made fortunes on the senior tour. Some were Hall of Famers, like Hale Irwin and Bernhard Langer. Others were not, like Dan Forsman and Jay Haas, Curtis’s Wake Forest teammate and Billy Harmon’s close friend. The few golfers who are nearly as good at fifty as they were at forty are outliers.

  At the time of our visit, Curtis had played in 115 Champions tour events over nine years and had just six top-ten finishes. You never would have predicted such modest results when he turned fifty. During those same years, Mike had played in only twenty-five events. On the regular tour, Mike played in thirty-eight events in 1988 alone. In the 1980s, nobody played more events on tour than Mike, and nobody won more money on tour than Curtis. Each, in his own way, was a big part of the show. What would possibly top that?

  • • •

  Mike told Curtis the story Ken Venturi had told us, how Curtis had challenged Ken over his critical commentary in the final round of the ’85 Masters. That was when Curtis hit those shots into the water on thirteen and fifteen while contending in the final round. In Ken’s telling, Curtis poked him during a heated discussion, and Ken said that if Curtis ever did that again he would slug him.

  “That never happened,” Curtis said.

  Mike explained that he was just repeating the story Ken had told us.

  “Did you believe him?” Curtis asked in his pointed way.

  “No,” Mike said, trying to be a good guest.

  The truth is, at the time Ken told us the story, we had no reason not to believe it. It sounded plausible. Ken and Curtis were both hotheads. Over time, though, I was becoming less sure of Ken’s stories, and I know Mike was, too.

  Curtis said that he and Ken never had any sort of conversation about Ken’s Sunday commentary in ’85.

  “Honest to God, on a stack of Bibles,” Curtis said. “Nothing.”

  • • •

  Curtis went to Wake Forest on an Arnold Palmer Scholarship. Sometimes Arnold would visit campus for a tournament or homecoming and play with the team, and Curtis and his teammate Jay Haas would try to get in a game with him. Curtis’s father, Tom, played in six U.S. Opens and was a prominent club pro in Virginia and West Virginia. He knew and liked Palmer. Early on, Palmer was a Wilson guy, and so was Tom Strange. When Arnold started his own line of clubs, Tom signed on with him. Curtis remembered his father having dinner with Palmer at Venturi’s U.S. Open. For some years, Tom Strange wore golf shirts with the Arnold Palmer umbrella logo sewn on them. Curtis grew up on Palmer. As a touring pro, he played Arnold’s tournament at Bay Hill every year. Curtis would seek out Arnold at Augusta, hopeful that the four-ti
me winner might unlock the secrets of the course for his fellow Demon Deacon. Curtis didn’t get far. “Arnold didn’t say a whole lot,” Curtis said.

  Curtis talked about Jack, too. Curtis got paired with Nicklaus at his first Masters, in 1975. Jack was at the height of his powers. Curtis was a college golfer on vacation. He was petrified. “I’m standing on that first tee Thursday with Jack Nicklaus and I’m over my ball and I’m saying to myself, ‘Hold on, left hand, you’re going for a ride.’ ”

  In other words, he would grip the club hard with his left hand and barely at all with his right and thereby eliminate the chance of hitting an ugly snap hook. Curtis smoked his opening tee shot and then spent the next eighteen holes watching a Nicklaus exhibition in which the Golden Bear nutted eighteen tee shots, pured eighteen second shots, and posted the easiest 68 Curtis had ever seen. Nicklaus hit every green and each of the par-fives in two and took thirty-six putts. No bunker shots. No chip shots.

  Nicklaus went on to win by a shot over Tom Weiskopf and Johnny Miller in one of the greatest Masters ever. Curtis saw up close Nicklaus’s classic forged MacGregor blade irons and MacGregor woods, packed in Nicklaus’s shiny green-and-white MacGregor bag. In those days, MacGregor was in a class by itself.

  Curtis played Wilson clubs in college and as a young pro but MacGregor clubs in his professional prime. He won his two U.S. Opens carrying twelve MacGregor clubs. After his second Open win, Curtis signed a massive ten-year deal with MacGregor. But Curtis believes that Nicklaus, who owned a piece of the company, wanted him out. He never understood why. His new contract was not even two years old when a MacGregor executive started negotiations to buy Curtis out.