Men in Green

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by Michael Bamberger

The summer tan kind of announces itself in that description, doesn’t it? You could tell Polly was very aware of herself physically. Then and now.

  “We started following Ben, and my father said something to him about his golf and Ben said, ‘Is that your daughter?’ On Thursday, my father and Ben had lunch. On Saturday night, Ben and I had dinner in the clubhouse. He was very charming, very interested in me, a perfect gentleman.”

  She was going into a dream state as we sat there. Her crowded days didn’t allow her to reflect often on her years with Ben. She seemed to live an in-the-moment life. There was something distinctly purposeful about her.

  I asked, “Did it seem to you like you and Ben were in totally different places in life?”

  In the summer of ’74, Polly’s next big thing was homecoming. (She was voted queen.) Ben’s next thing was the Tournament Players Championship.

  “No, it didn’t,” Polly said. “I never even thought of that.”

  Two weeks after they met, Polly stayed with Ben at the Southern Open in Columbus, Georgia. She remembers the words a player used to needle Crenshaw: She’s jailbait. That was in September 1974. By January they were engaged.

  The first half of the 1975 season was a long slog of mediocre play for Crenshaw. In May he took Polly to her senior prom. In June she graduated from Hamilton High, and Ben had his first good tournament of the year, finishing a shot out of the playoff at the 1975 U.S. Open at Medinah. The next week he and Polly were married.

  By the time Crenshaw won the ’84 Masters they were separated. Polly spent that week on a yacht in the Caribbean, doing shots of tequila and lines of coke and whatever else young beautiful people on a yacht in the Caribbean did in the eighties. Her second husband, the father of Polly’s daughter, was on that boat. He later took his own life.

  Ben won the ’84 Masters by two over Tom Watson. The great Severiano Ballesteros, the defending champion, helped the new winner into his club coat in Butler Cabin.

  Crenshaw had won the tournament he wanted most when his marriage was breaking up. He won his second Masters in 1995, days after burying his golf mentor, Harvey Penick. How unpredictable are these artist-golfers? I am thinking of Seve, Walter Hagen, Bobby Jones, Phil Mickelson, Payne Stewart. Crenshaw.

  “Ben was always a such a nice guy,” Polly said. “But there were three of us in that marriage. Ben, me, and Ben’s golf. It was like his mistress.”

  Her life surely looked easy if you knew it only from TV. But real life, of course, is not an afternoon picture show on CBS. All the other tour wives were older. Polly had not earned the things she had except by way of her good looks. In the years when her high school classmates were going to college and easing into adult life—finding jobs in a tired economy, trying to keep four retreads on a used car, serial dating—she was married and living in the cloistered dream world of professional golf. At times she pinched herself. But often she was bored. She was closer in age and temperament to the caddies. She liked hanging with them, and the feeling was mutual.

  Polly remembered Barbara Nicklaus as a warm and regal presence and Jack as a polite but standoffish one. She adored Arnold, “even if he might hug you a little too hard and a little too long.” She described a mad, manic ride to an airport with Tom Weiskopf on a Friday afternoon when he had missed a cut. Tom was a drinker then, too. You could smell the booze in her stories.

  Ben, Polly said, lost faith and interest in her during the last years of their marriage. He knew his wife had an alcohol and cocaine problem, and he made it clear he was not going to have children with her. She responded predictably. Sobriety came much later for her, long after their divorce was final, and after her second husband, Jack Price, committed suicide. When I saw Polly, she was working as a personal trainer, doing some acting and modeling, training for a triathlon, practicing yoga, and taking life one day at a time. She sold real estate in and around Austin under the name Polly Price, and sometimes under the name Polly Crenshaw Price. It was, she said, her legal name.

  She has wondered what her father was thinking and doing on that Tuesday in August 1974 when he brought his daughter to the Westchester Classic in her cutoff shirt and shorter shorts. She was up for adventure that day, even if she could not possibly have imagined where it would lead. The way she described herself, she was not a young seventeen-year-old. Still, she was seventeen. Her father, worried about his daughter’s future in an unpromising economy, was making a bet that she could secure it on her good looks. It’s happened before.

  Polly struck me as someone who had thought a lot about the vagaries of life and had come to terms with its setbacks and successes.

  “Those years that I was out there with Ben, I think that was a different tour,” Polly said. It was midafternoon, and the lunch crowd had thinned to nothing. Polly had that move where you shake your head just slightly and your hair does a dance all its own. “It wasn’t corporate,” she said. “It was about people. I think the commissioner—Deane Beman, right?—wanted a family atmosphere. We stayed at the same hotels. There were a lot of charter flights, all the players and their families together, going from one tournament to the next. There wasn’t the really big money like there is today. It was much more like family. It really was. When I was out there, that tour was my family.”

  Get up everybody and sing.

  The 1975 U.S. Open at Medinah, on the eve of Ben’s marriage to Polly, turned out to be Crenshaw’s best chance to win the national championship. His game, stylish but wild, didn’t lend itself to the annual USGA grindfest. The reason the U.S. Open is both weirdly boring and great is because no tournament makes more demands on every aspect of a player’s game, physical and mental, including the ability to plod along. If you win one Open, you’ve had a career. Winning two is freakish. Beyond that, you’re on the mountaintop. Two men have won three Opens, and four giants have managed to win four.

  The first person in the four-timers club was Willie Anderson, who died at thirty-one in Philadelphia and is buried a few miles from my house. The second was Bobby Jones, who is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, a half-wedge from the Six Feet Under Pub and Fish House, where there’s a house drink called the Bobby Jones, which I have sampled in the name of research. The third was Ben Hogan. The fourth was Jack Nicklaus, who also had four second-place finishes. Tiger Woods won his third in a playoff with a double stress fracture in his left tibia, which lore and newspaper shorthand have turned into a broken leg. Hale Irwin won his third at forty-five, in his 1990 playoff with Mike. That sixsome is a list of golf’s best thinkers. Just playing in a U.S. Open is exhausting, let alone winning. Curtis will tell you that. No tournament will do more to dull a player’s edge. Arnold will tell you that.

  Hogan kept the edge about as well as anybody. That is his mystique. He won his first U.S. Open in 1948. Eight months later, early one foggy February morning on a narrow bridge in West Texas, a Greyhound bus plowed into Hogan’s Cadillac. The only thing that saved Hogan’s life was that he threw himself on his wife, Valerie, to protect her. Had he not done that, the Caddy’s steering column would have impaled him. The accident mangled his body and caused it to wither, and still he kept the edge. Likely, it got stronger. He won U.S. Opens in ’50 and ’51 and ’53. The man was an original in every way.

  In his ability to get his ball to follow directions, Hale Irwin is likely as close to Hogan as any golfer after Hogan and before Woods. (Feel free to make an argument for Nicklaus and Trevino and possibly Nick Faldo.) Irwin notched the first of his twenty tour wins in 1971. He won forty-five times on the senior tour. He was never an exciting or charismatic golfer. That was not his purpose. What he was, what he has been, is the ultimate golfing machine.

  Irwin made a memorable first impression on me. I saw him in person for the first time at the 1985 Honda Classic. I was caddying for Brad Faxon, and Hale Irwin played through during a practice round as a singleton. Killer was caddying for Irwin, and Irwin was all business. It was a perfect spring day in Florida and the man was grinding.
Plodding. Brad was watching closely.

  For some time, Mike and I had wondered whether we should see Hale together or if I should see him alone. Naturally, I was leaving it to Mike.

  Over the years, oddly and inexplicably, Hale had been less than gracious when he spoke publicly about his win over Mike at Medinah. The final straw for Mike came in a 2010 interview Hale did with Golf magazine twenty years after the fact. When the interviewer asked Irwin what stood out for him about the playoff, he went straight to Mike.

  IRWIN: His one big mistake. I’m down one. We get to the tee on eighteen. All day, Mike was using this metal-wood to hit fairway after fairway. He couldn’t miss. I’m thinking, Mike, hit the driver! Hit the driver! And I’ll be darned: On eighteen, he pulls driver and hooks it in the trees. I’m asked about the greatest shots I’ve ever seen. Well, Mike hitting driver was the antithesis of that. All he needs is to hit one more fairway and green to win. But he didn’t. He made bogey. We tied. On the nineteenth hole, I hit a sand iron to ten feet. The rest is history.

  INTERVIEWER: [Post-victory] you said, “God bless Mike Donald. I almost wish he had won.” Why?

  IRWIN: I felt for him. He had the U.S. Open won several times, but the moment escaped him. He didn’t embrace it. Maybe he didn’t see himself taking home that trophy. I wanted it. Deeply.

  INTERVIEWER: What separates major winners from guys who don’t close the deal?

  IRWIN: Some of it is luck—a good or bad bounce from the golf gods. Also, Nicklaus, Watson, Trevino—they weren’t locker room guys. They showed up, did their job, left. Mike was happy telling stories in the locker room at regular events. But regular events are very different than a Masters or U.S. Open.

  Mike read the interview and was livid. In the next issue, this letter ran, above Mike’s name and below the headline HALE NO!

  I read with interest the interview with Hale Irwin in the June issue, particularly the parts about his win in the 1990 U.S. Open at Medinah in a nineteen-hole two-man playoff. I’m the guy he beat. In the interview, talking about the eighteenth hole of the playoff, Irwin says, “I’m asked about the greatest shots I’ve ever seen. Well, Mike hitting driver was the antithesis of that.” He describes himself rooting for me to pull driver on that eighteenth tee and not the metal wood he says I had been hitting well all day. I can’t even imagine thinking like that, hoping for a guy to make a mental blunder. But the most ridiculous part is that Hale has it wrong. I didn’t hit my MacGregor Eye-O-Matic driver there. I hit my metal wood, a TaylorMade twelve-degree Original One. You can see it plain as day on the tape. Hale’s standing right there. I pull-hooked it, it finished in the left rough and I made bogey. It was a bad swing. But it wasn’t, as Irwin describes it, bad judgment.

  Anyway, when I think about the greatest shots I’ve ever seen, I think of the drawing 2-iron with a cross wind that Hale hit to ten feet on sixteen in our playoff. That shot was pure class.

  Mike wasn’t done. There was a senior event in Birmingham, Alabama, right at the time the interview was published. After playing in the tournament qualifier, Mike left a letter for Irwin in his locker, taping it from a top shelf so it would be at eye level when Irwin opened the door. Mike concluded with this: “In the future, when you’re talking about me, get your facts straight and your arrogance in check.”

  Mike was in his car, in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express on the east side of Birmingham, when Irwin called him.

  “I’m shocked,” Hale said. “Shocked by the venom.”

  They spoke for maybe twenty minutes. Hale suggested that they have dinner. Mike wasn’t interested, and the conversation ended.

  After he hung up, Mike realized he hadn’t really said what he wanted to say. He called Irwin back, and they arranged to have an early breakfast at the tournament clubhouse the next morning. This time Mike did most of the talking, and the essence of his message was this: Hale, you’ve got the crown and all the jewels. It’s twenty years later, and I don’t get what you’re doing. Medinah was one of the great weeks of my life, and every time you go negative on me, it’s like you’re stealing from me. And I don’t like it.

  When Mike revisited that breakfast conversation for me, I asked how Hale had responded to it all.

  “He was sorry about being wrong about the driver. He said, ‘I always thought you hit driver there. I wish I had known.’ He didn’t have much to say about the other stuff. But he had already talked. This was my turn. He did say one thing. He said, ‘You know, Mike, the way I see it? A champion is a champion. You either win or you don’t.’ ”

  • • •

  I saw Hale at a senior event in Boca Raton, held on a newish development course called the Old Course at Broken Sound. I introduced myself, told Hale about my project, and presented him with the exciting news that he was on my legends list. Hale said he could see me the following week, across the state in Naples, at a tournament being played there. He was matter-of-fact but polite. He’s given a thousand interviews. It would be no big deal to give one more.

  At Broken Sound, Wayne Levi was working on his putting, with his wife standing behind him. The same Wayne Levi who was at the back of the van at the Kemper Open in 1979. Now, thirty-five years later, his wife was giving him advice on his stroke and Wayne said, loudly enough to be heard easily by others, “I can make ’em here, I can’t make ’em out there.” In 1990 he won four times, but sooner or later, everybody loses the edge. Even Hogan. If there was ever an exception to that, it was Irwin.

  Mike played in the Tuesday qualifier for the Naples event, the week after the tournament at Broken Sound.

  “How’d it go?” I asked him. I try not to do that. Usually I am able to look up the scores before we talk, but this time I had not.

  “Eighty-five,” Mike said. “Played with Gary Hallberg. He shot eighty. We finish and he says, ‘Are we gonna turn these in?’ I’m like, ‘I’ve got no problem turning it in.’ It’s an embarrassing score. But it’s what I shot.”

  Mike had a sore right hand, and I asked if that had contributed to his poor play.

  “That had nothing to do with it,” Mike said. “I hit it so bad it was a joke. I got no speed, no idea where it’s going. I had to hit five provisionals.” That is, emergency shots in case you are unable to find your original ball. “I found four of ’em. Otherwise, I would have shot ninety.”

  I told Mike I was seeing Hale in Naples. He said, “You should probably just go see him yourself.”

  • • •

  With almost every other legend on my list, I had various paths to the person. We knew the same people, or I had intersected with said legend at an event or on a story. That was not the case with Hale Irwin. I had never even talked to him. I met him in the locker room at the TwinEagles Golf Club in Naples and followed him to a quiet spot in a massive, cold ballroom where breakfast was being served for the players and the pro-am participants. I told him that Mike was also one of my legends. I felt he should know.

  I asked Hale how he started in the game. Successful golfers are asked that question to the point of boredom, but Hale took right to it. He told me about putting on sand greens as a kid, getting $2.75 to caddie and paying $2.25 golf fees. He described a solitary childhood. The Irwins had no TV, and the family moved from Missouri to Kansas to Colorado. I didn’t ask him the Proust Questionnaire classic—“When and where were you happiest?”—but I’m sure he was answering it. Hale had played football and baseball in the fifties and sixties and liked it. But teaching himself golf—no instructor, no teammates, no gambling games—brought him the most pleasure. That was happiness for him, to be alone on a golf course, figuring it out all by himself. Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner, once asked Warren Spahn how he learned to pitch. The great lefty said, “Hitters taught me how to pitch.” Hale’s instruction was equally direct: The flight of his ball taught him how to play. “I loved hitting it where you were supposed to hit it,” he told me.

  When he first got on tour in 1968, Hale was stil
l learning how to play. “What I realized was that body type dictated swing. I saw Jack Nicklaus, with those tree-trunk thighs, and I realized he hits the ball with his lower body. I remember the first time I saw Arnold Palmer coming out of the shower, seeing how big he was through the chest, how muscular. I realized that that’s how he hits the ball, with his chest. I figured out for myself that there was no one swing. There was a swing for your body.”

  That was a telling phrase: I figured out for myself. When I asked Hale who his closest friend on tour was, he said, “Dale Douglass was very nice to me.” The subtext was clear: I didn’t need friends. Not on tour, anyway. Hale’s friends were at home. On tour, his most meaningful relationship was with the golf ball at his feet.

  Hale said, “I didn’t get on the tour thinking, I hope I can make it. I am a compulsively driven person.”

  Another interesting phrase. I would say Tiger Woods is a compulsively driven person, and that Hogan was. Palmer, Watson, and Mickey Wright were, too. Big Jack? Hard to say. Probably not.

  Hale spoke with genuine affection about his first driver—cut down to size by his father, who put a tape grip on it—a club on display in his locker at the World Golf Hall of Fame. He talked about going to his first golf tournament, the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills, where he saw Ben Hogan practicing with brand-new balls. He’d never seen anybody do that. Hale had just turned fifteen. Somebody gave him a sleeve of brand-new balls that week. U.S. True Blues. He never used them.

  Long before that morning in Naples, I knew about Hale’s extreme competence at golf. Everybody in golf respected his game and was impressed by how he had maintained it, like a vintage race car that always turned right over. But until that day, in that cold ballroom, I never had any sense of how lodged the game was deep within him. It made him more likable for me. The odd things he had said over the years about Mike seem incongruous. In his own way, he was a soul golfer.

  We talked about the 1983 British Open, about what Hale did on the fourteenth hole of the third round, when he “whiffed” a tiny putt, maybe six inches long. Whenever it is written about or discussed, whiff is the word people use, but it’s not really correct. Irwin attempted to backhand that putt in, as many players do. His downswing actually stopped when he stubbed the putter head into the turf short of the ball. He counted that stroke without any hesitation or discussion. Irwin could have claimed it was an aborted swing and that he did not intend to hit the ball. That claim likely would have saved him a shot. “It would never even have occurred to me to do that,” Irwin said. “I was trying to hit it.” He finished second, a stroke behind the winner, Tom Watson.

 

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