Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  “It hurt,” Curtis said, “because here’s the greatest golfer of all time telling you, ‘We don’t want you.’ ”

  Curtis said he got paid in full and retained the right to sign with another manufacturer, which he did. But it was a weird way to make a great big pile of money all at once, and it was not what he wanted. There are players who view their equipment contracts like Linus viewed his blanket. Sometimes the company-player relationship can make or break a player. Getting bought out by MacGregor certainly didn’t help Curtis’s confidence. For years, and with great success, Curtis had been a prominent son of clan MacGregor. And then he was not. I picked up the persimmon fairway wood that Mike and Curtis had been waggling and saw that it was a MacGregor 4-wood with Jack Nicklaus’s perfect signature stamped on its soleplate. I showed it to Curtis. He smirked and said, “I know.” Hurt has a long shelf life.

  • • •

  One of the press-tent jokes about Curtis was that if you wanted a quote from him, you went to Jay. Jay Haas and Curtis Strange had been friends forever, and I had always thought of them as being attached at the hip. You’d see them playing practice rounds together or talking on the driving range.

  But when Curtis talked about their friendship with Mike and me it was clear that Curtis was far less social than Jay. They had a true friendship, but you could see there were limits. Curtis didn’t really need a best friend on tour, just as Lee Trevino did not. (Trevino called Curtis “The Piranha.”) Curtis told us that Jay often organized group dinners and always invited Curtis, and sometimes he came. But usually Curtis was content to order room service and eat by the light of the TV. That was all news to me, and I think to Mike.

  I asked Curtis how he celebrated his first U.S. Open victory, won on a Monday in a playoff at the Country Club over Nick Faldo in ’88. Mike had asked Arnold a similar question, about his first win at that ’55 Canadian Open. Arnold’s answer had stuck with me: “It was quiet.”

  I asked Curtis, “Who did you celebrate with?”

  “It’s got to be Allan, right?” Mike said.

  Mike was referring to Allan Strange, Curtis’s identical twin, who played the tour briefly and later became a stockbroker and financial adviser. Their father and golfing mentor had died when they were fourteen.

  “Allan flew in that Monday morning,” Curtis said, revisiting his playoff day. “I didn’t even know he was coming.”

  That was telling. Allan figured Curtis had enough pressure on him. He wasn’t going to bother him for a ticket.

  “He got in coming right through the front gate, the security guys all thinking he was me. He was there hours before we started, walking around, drinking beer, and people are like ‘What kind of shape is Curtis gonna be in when he gets to the first tee?’ I saw him. I knew he was there. But we didn’t talk until much later that night.

  “You don’t really celebrate. I didn’t. You do the trophy presentation and then you do a lot of press, then you go into the clubhouse and the members and the USGA give you a champagne toast, and after that you’re on your own. Sarah and I looked at each other like ‘What do we do now?’ We went back to the hotel. It was quiet. When we got there it was past ten, ten-thirty. They served us dinner in the restaurant and we just sort of sat there and looked at each other and giggled. Like ‘Can you believe where this game has taken us?’ We were driving when we first came out, and here I was, the U.S. Open winner.”

  It was quiet. The exact phrase Arnold had used.

  “At like two in the morning, I got Allan on the phone,” Curtis said. “He had left right after I won. He told his buddies, ‘If he had lost, I would have stayed, but he doesn’t need me.’ We talked about what I was thinking about on certain shots. Same as we did after a tournament for years and years. He was always the one person I could really trust to tell me the truth.”

  When Curtis won at the Country Club in 1988, he cradled the trophy as if it were a newborn baby. When he won in ’89, at Oak Hill in Rochester, he cradled Sarah. The first signs of breast cancer had recently been diagnosed.

  The sports psychologists will sometimes tell their golfer patients to imagine lifting the trophy on Sunday night before they play their first shot on Thursday morning. It sounds like a nice idea, but it was meaningless to Curtis and to Mike. Curtis was your classic one-shot-at-a-time player. Mike was not exactly the wish-it-true type, in anything.

  On the Sunday night of the 1990 U.S. Open, Mike got a call from Lynn Roach, Fred’s agent. “I’m going to fly in tomorrow morning,” Roach told Mike, as Mike he remembers it.

  “What for?” Mike said.

  “ ’Cause if you win this thing, you’re going to need help.”

  “Lynn, if I win this thing tomorrow, I do a few interviews and I’m on my way.” All the while he was thinking, Lynn, if I win this thing tomorrow, all I’m gonna need is a limo and a driver and a map to Rush Street.

  Roach didn’t come.

  When he was through with his play on Sunday night, Mike went to his locker in the cavernous Medinah clubhouse. In it, he found a note from Curtis, wishing him good luck in the Monday playoff. Curtis wasn’t rooting against Hale. He admired Hale. In fact, the best rookie advice he received was from Hale: “Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut.” But Curtis understood the moment like everybody understood the moment. David would be playing Goliath for the U.S. Open, and Curtis was standing with David. He was rooting for the underdog. For the guy he played with in the ’74 Western Amateur.

  Writing that note and leaving it for Mike was some gesture, when you think about it. Given the depth of the disappointment Curtis had to be feeling then, at the end of his two-year run as the U.S. Open champion? The exhaustion he had to be feeling? He has spoken about that Sunday afternoon, how he felt something washing out of him when it was all over. Maybe that something was what Arnold would call the edge.

  In any event, leaving that note for Mike was a generous, selfless thing for Curtis to do, and not the kind of thing he did on anything like a regular basis. Maybe it was the first act of the rest of his life.

  • • •

  We wrapped up with Curtis and got back into the Subaru, and Mike picked up where he had left off. It wasn’t as bad as the silent treatment I got at Colonial in ’86, but it felt about the same. The difference this time was that I didn’t know what I had done wrong.

  We stopped for sandwiches and talked about nothing. On the drive to the airport, I stopped making any effort and we drove on in silence. Mike wasn’t even telling me to slow down or warning me about oncoming trucks. The silence was broken only when Mike wanted to point out the next turn.

  I was worried that any true rapport Mike and I had built over the past twenty-five years and on our various stops with the legends had somehow evaporated. I know it was bad, because later I told Christine about it.

  The state of Mike’s golf game could not have been helping. That day at the Cricket Club, Jaime had played better than Mike. For years, Mike had played in nearly every qualifier he could for every senior event, but he was no longer doing that. There was an underlying health issue complicating matters. During a routine test, a cardiologist had found an aortic aneurism and advised Mike to watch it closely. The uncertainty distracted Mike, and his golf took a back seat. Eventually, he received an aortic stent. Everything went well, but the whole process didn’t inspire Mike to go to the range and beat balls. All the while, he was continuing to deal with the aftermath of a long relationship he’d had with a lovely woman in Atlanta, a parting that came despite the deep feelings each had for the other. Life and timing. For a bachelor with no children, he had a lot going on.

  Mike missed tournament golf. He missed the feeling of shooting 69 on a tough course with other tour players and the prospect of a good payday. In 2012 he played in the U.S. Senior Open and got paired with Damon Green, a tour caddie and a very good player. For some reason, the guy bothered Mike, and not in a passing way.

  “Enjoyed it,” Mike said when their thirty-six
holes together were over.

  “Well, I didn’t,” Green said, as Mike remembered the conversation. Green was within spitting distance of the lead after rounds of 68 and 72.

  This is Mike’s version of the conversation, but Green told me it was pretty much as he had remembered it, too.

  “You didn’t enjoy that?” Mike said.

  “No,” Green said. He was Zach Johnson’s caddie and had won the 2007 Masters with him. “That’s not my idea of fun.” Green was wondering if he might have made more money caddying in a tour event.

  “I missed the cut,” Mike said. “And I can’t think of anything more fun.”

  Green told me he was surprised to find himself on the receiving end of Mike’s annoyance. He said he had always enjoyed playing with Mike and hearing his unvarnished views of golf and life. But on this day Green made a comment that crawled under Mike’s skin and got lodged. Mike found Damon Green’s response to his own good play in a major championship to be pretentious, and the game in Mike’s day was anything but. Lee Trevino, Hubert Green, Lou Graham, these were not pretentious men. Damon Green had a big profile on tour and in Ryder Cups and on tournament telecasts. His best paydays as a caddie were likely better than Mike’s best paydays as a player. When Mickey Wright wrote, “New game out there,” she was talking (unintentionally) about Damon Green’s game, the modern game: hard ball, long-shafted drivers with beastly heads, 9-irons that looked like 7-irons. Damon Green was playing smash-mouth golf, and he was good at it. Mike’s game was the old game, the one he shared with Curtis, the one that rewarded power but demanded precision and finesse. Mike was Meyer Wolfsheim in Gatsby, remembering the old Metropole Hotel filled with faces dead and gone.

  And in that scenario—in that mood—who was I? Just some guy going here and there, seeing the high priests, the Kings of Golf Road, asking a bunch of questions about a game that I would never really understand.

  I dropped Mike off at the New Bern airport and pointed the Subaru to Philadelphia. A couple of hours in, I checked Mike’s flights on an 800 number. There were delays in New Bern and in Atlanta. Exactly what I didn’t want to hear. I drove straight through, stopping only for gas. I was eager to get home.

  Remember Barb Romack? Rhonda Glenn’s housemate and friend who played with and against Mickey Wright as an amateur and as a pro? Eightysomething and hot? I am not saying she was a threat to my marriage, but we kind of hit it off. We talked. She knew Hogan, and Hogan liked her. She knew Arnold. She knew them all.

  Fifty or more years after the fact, it was amazing how often Hogan and Palmer would come up in conversation, with Barb, with Billy Harmon, with Chuck Will and Mike and others. David Fay told me a story that Palmer had told him from a practice round at the ’58 Masters. On that day, Arnold and Dow had played a money match against Hogan and Jackie Burke. Palmer and Finsterwald won. The four went into the clubhouse for lunch. Palmer and Finsterwald sat down. Hogan and Burke sat down at an adjoining table. Yes, a chilly move. Hogan said to Burke, referring to Palmer and loud enough for him to hear, “How’d that guy get invited to the Masters?” Arnold played smash-mouth golf, and Hogan could not relate.

  I asked Barb about the match that Mickey Wright had told me about, the made-for-TV event in ’61 at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. That was where, as Mickey recalled it, Mickey and Barb had defeated Arnold and Dow on a course that comprised eighteen par-three holes. Mickey had said that CBS never aired it.

  Barb remembered the day in vivid color. How the format was changed from stroke play to match play at the last minute. She remembered key shots. The extended break between the front nine and the back when Arnold went off for a long lunch while the gals sat around. The presence of Moe Dalitz, an old Jewish midwestern bootlegger and casino magnate who owned a piece of the Desert Inn. Mickey’s extraordinary play.

  “Mickey says CBS never even aired it,” I said.

  “No,” Barb said. “They aired it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, they aired it. Definitely. We won, two up. That gave them a better show! It aired during our Open at Baltusrol.”

  I looked up that Open. It was played on the Lower Course at Baltusrol Golf Club in northern New Jersey, from June 29 through July 1, 1961. Mickey won by six and earned $1,800. Barb finished seventh and earned $350.

  I contacted Robin Brendle, a longtime CBS PR person who has been helpful to me in good times (stories her bosses would like) and bad (stories they would not). In other words, a pro. She and her staff could not find any sign of the actual film in their archives. She did come up with a press release and sent it to me. On June 12, 1961, Robin’s corporate ancestors mailed out this charming hand-typed release:

  Are women golfers ready to meet men club-swingers on equal terms?

  With the ladies invading just about every field of endeavor these days, that question was bound to be asked sooner or later.

  The answer will be revealed when a filmed record of the clash between two women golfers, hard-hitting Mickey Wright and precision-putting Barbara Romack, and two top men pros, Arnold Palmer and Dow Finsterwald, is presented in the “Golfing Battle of the Sexes” on “The Summer Sports Spectacular” series, Thursday, June 29, (7:30–8:30 PM, EDT) on the CBS Television Network.

  The Wright-Romack vs. Palmer-Finsterwald match was played at the plush Desert Inn Country Club at Las Vegas, Nevada. A special eighteen-hole par-three course was constructed for the match with the women accepting no handicap.

  Everything Barb said held right up.

  It’s not likely that Arnold found anything charming about losing to two female golfers. He has miles of televised exploits in his warehouse in Latrobe, in big round metal canisters often bought directly from the networks. But he has nothing from that day at the Desert Inn. As Barb tells it, Arnold in defeat said, “I’m not going to Colonial—they’re gonna laugh at us!” That was the tour’s next stop, in Fort Worth. But he went.

  In subsequent years, when Barb and Arnold ran into each other, Barb would poke Arnold in the ribs and ask, “How’s my pigeon?”

  The show was years ahead of its time. Moe Dalitz was smitten by Barb and Mickey and their golf. He told Barb he wanted to bring an event for “the ladies” to another of his resorts, the Stardust. He wanted the event to be the biggest and the best. “What would you think about me putting up a purse of fifty grand?” Dalitz asked her.

  “Oh, that’s too high,” Barb said.

  But that conversation led to the women playing the 1962 LPGA Championship at the Stardust for a fourteen-thousand-dollar purse, the biggest one they played for that year. The winner, Judy Kimball, earned $2,300. Moe and Barb became buddies. When she was in town, they’d have breakfast.

  “I liked Vegas,” Barb said. “I’d go for three or four days, just to get lost.”

  Over the years, professional golf has lost its off-season. PGA Tour seasons now begin in fall, with the school year, plow right through New Year’s Day, and seem to go on forever without taking a break for coffee. In the heyday of the polyester tour, captured forever in the novel Dead Solid Perfect by Dan Jenkins, there was no fall golf for the game’s elite players. Fall was for hunting and tailgating. In real life, Secret Legends made hay (or tried to) at fall events, but Living Legends were pretty much absent. The late-season events, with B-listers forced to serve as headliners, had the whiff of desperation. There were bunches of guys playing every week in a gasping effort to keep their cards—their playing privileges—for the following year. For every person who had clawed his way in, somebody else, by definition, had been pushed out. It was all very dog-eat-dog, except the antagonists wore Sansabelt slacks and played nice.

  In 1988 Mike was playing his way off the tour. You needed to be ranked 125th or better on the year-end money list to be fully exempt for the next year—that is, to keep your card. After nine months in the eleven-month season, Mike was miles south of 125, the journeyman’s magic number. With the season’s curtain starting to drop he made an emergency late-Sept
ember visit to see his teacher, Gardner Dickinson. Gardner was playing at a senior event in Roswell, Georgia, and Mike received permission to play nine holes with him during a practice round. Gardner saved Mike’s career that day, or at least helped save it. That’s Mike’s view of it.

  “When you come through the ball, I want you to feel like you’re going to cut your left toe off with your hands,” Gardner told Mike in Roswell. That’s a pure Hogan move. Hogan’s swing was so round. He didn’t push the club down the target line. His swing was all turn, turn, turn.

  Gardner worshipped Hogan. He wore the same style of cap Hogan wore, and he knew Hogan’s swing backward and forward. Mike loved Gardner and learned a great deal about Hogan from him. Once, Mike and Gardner were able to get an audience with Hogan at Shady Oaks in Fort Worth. Mike remembers Gardner’s nervousness on their way in. When we were in Latrobe, Mike had asked Arnold about Gardner. “Gardner was a Hogan guy, so we were never that close,” Palmer said.

  Mike started hitting beautiful, controlled draw shots with Gardner that day. Five days later he finished seventh at the Southern Open. He played eleven straight weeks to end the season, earning $118,509 in thirty-eight events for the year and finishing in ninety-sixth place on the ’88 money list. His strong fall play made him exempt for ’89, when he won his one tour event. The victory got him in the ’90 Masters, where he shot his 64. Two months later, he carried his Augusta vibe to Medinah. Mike often speaks of “building a round.” You grind, grind, grind. If there’s a setback, and there will be, you dig even deeper. You fight with what you have, but not more. You’re building a round. Do it often enough and well enough, and ten years in you’ve built a career. Invest wisely, and you’ve built enough of a nest egg that you never have to work again. As long as you don’t have a wife and kids.

  The 1990 U.S. Open is the highlight of Mike’s golf career. Every career has one, and that is Mike’s. We’ve had a hundred conversations about it over the years, how he needed to save one shot on Sunday to win in regulation, how he had Irwin on the ropes in the Monday play-off, how the whole U.S. Open experience was like a drug he found himself craving for the rest of his playing career. At Medinah, and maybe for a month or so after it, Mike felt like he had unlocked the secret to superior golf. It was not some new age power-of-positive-thinking mental trick. He was hitting the ball with more authority by virtue of a different and better swing. There was no “steer” in his shots. The faster he swung, the more control he had. Often golfers are afraid of clubhead speed. Mike couldn’t get enough. His clubhead was coming from the inside on the downswing, striking the ball on a descending blow, and then returning to the inside. It was powerful. Not that he was hitting it so far. He wasn’t. It was powerful because the shots were nipped. His ball was compressed against the clubface. The shots spun, held their line, stopped on command. It was nirvana. It was a fucking joy, is what it was. That’s what Mike would tell you.