Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  We went through his three U.S. Open wins. When he talked about the ’74 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, Tom Watson’s name came up. (They were in the final group on the final day. Irwin shot 73 and Watson shot 79.) When he talked about the ’79 Open at Inverness, Sandy Tatum’s name came up. When he talked about the ’90 Open, Mike’s name came up.

  For some reason, and despite a vague plan I had going in, I suddenly didn’t feel like reviewing the history of Hale’s relationship with Mike, or revisiting Hale’s commentary. Mike had already figured out what Hale had just told me, that he was compulsively driven. That quality will cloud a man. What was there to add?

  I did ask Hale about his enduring quote, on national TV, right after the playoff: “God bless Mike Donald. I almost wish he had won.” I always thought that was a genuine and gracious comment. Mike was always dismissive of it. I asked Hale why he said it.

  Hale considered my question in an instant, smiled thinly, and said, “Almost.”

  It was, you could tell, something he had said before. He paused briefly and then summarized the whole thing in one familiar sentence: “The cold, harsh reality is that I won and Mike didn’t.”

  Looking to solve one of the ongoing mysteries, Mike and I went to see Raymond Floyd, Golf Ball’s old boss and the man who pulled Ken’s ball out of the final hole of the 1964 U.S. Open. We went to see him at his new home in a spiffy golf development called Old Palm, just a mile or two south of the PGA of America’s headquarters in Palm Beach Gardens.

  Raymond looked like a movie star. He was seventy-one, trim and tan, with smooth skin and no gray hair. I had never seen him look better. He told us he gets a daily home massage.

  He showed us his book collection, an inviting group of titles separated into three categories: art, golf, and baseball. One of the baseball books was The Boys of Summer, the Roger Kahn classic in which the author catches up with some of the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers long after they made their final outs. I started to mention something about the book to Raymond but quickly changed gears. Raymond loves baseball and the Chicago Cubs in particular, but Kahn’s book—that is, its actual contents—did not appear to interest him.

  He was leading an expensive life. The house in Old Palm was spacious and beautiful and seemed to enjoy the services of a daily housekeeper, who tiptoed through the house with plastic bags around her running shoes. Raymond also had a summer home in Southampton and a farm in Vermont. He had memberships at Seminole and Shinnecock Hills, among other places. How he got so rich, I could not tell you. I mean, how many people have two vacation homes? I never would have guessed that Raymond Floyd, with his Palm Beach tan and manicured nails, would be someone to own a gentleman’s farm, but people will surprise you. If Raymond was making cheddar cheese up there in the Green Mountain State, good for him.

  He remembered pulling Ken’s ball out of the final hole at the ’64 U.S. Open. “He was a zombie,” Raymond said. “He was shaking it in the hole there at the end. I had tears in my eyes when it was over.”

  I asked, “Could you hear him say, ‘My God, I’ve won the Open’?”

  “No,” Raymond said. “I didn’t hear him say that.”

  We talked about Ken and Arnold and Ken’s obsession with the ’58 rules dispute at Augusta.

  “He blamed Arnold forever,” Mike said.

  “That’s because he’s Italian,” Raymond said. “It’s part of his culture. It’s a way of life, really.”

  Raymond called Arnold “my mentor.” He told us a story about how he wore madras plaid pants one day at the Masters, and Arnold told him madras plaid was not appropriate for Augusta National. Raymond banished all madras plaid from his wardrobe from that point on.

  He had such a long career. He was on the scene when Arnold was at the height of his powers and he was there when Greg Norman was at the height of his. The names coming out of his mouth were the ones who lured me into the game: Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Johnny Miller, Curtis Strange, Tom Weiskopf, Gary Player, Lee Trevino, various others. He wasn’t name-dropping. He was remembering his life and high times.

  We turned to Dolphus Hull. Raymond talked about Golf Ball’s ability to read greens and players. He said that Golf Ball could get him straight for a round by making a single suggestion or comment. “He was loose, like his body,” Raymond said. “He kept me loose. Those old black caddies like Golf Ball were very observant. If I was off, Golf Ball would say, ‘Man, what you done with your swing today?’ If the ball was starting left, he’d say, ‘Man, put that ball back in your stance.’ ”

  I asked Raymond the question I needed to ask: Had he ever seen Golf Ball’s house in Jackson?

  “I picked him up once there.”

  “At his house?”

  “No. I’ve only been to Jackson one time. Didn’t get past the airport. I flew in private, met Golf Ball at the airport, brought him to a senior event, I think in Birmingham. That must have been in the mid-nineties. He couldn’t work anymore, but it was a chance for him to say hi to the guys.”

  “So you were never at his house?”

  “No.”

  Ball had said another thing altogether. He had Raymond staying overnight in his house. He had him playing little gambling games with the other guests at his welcome-home party. He was specific. The two stories were in obvious conflict.

  Maybe Golf Ball had a fantasy. Regardless, I don’t doubt for a minute Ball’s recollection of how he joined the circus in 1963. Eight caddies, two cars, his mother’s words rattling in his head: Don’t forget to send me back some of that money.

  Raymond wasn’t always a private-plane guy. He drove the tour all through his early years, sharing a highway with Ball and a gang of others, the whole bunch of them running toward their dreams.

  “We were Gypsies,” he said.

  • • •

  Mike played his final tour event in 2006, at the Honda Classic. His place in the field was a parting gift from Cliff Danley, the tournament director, who was making his own farewell that year. Cliff had started working for the tournament as a volunteer in the early seventies, when he was in his mid-twenties. In those days, the event was named not for a Japanese car manufacturer but for an American entertainer, Jackie Gleason. The Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic. Inverrary was (and is) a period-piece 1970s Fort Lauderdale country club that Jerry Ford played often, hatless in the Florida sun, his collars flapping as he rode shotgun in a Rolls-Royce golf cart owned and operated by Gleason, who was the king there.

  Sometime after 2006, with the tournament being run by Jack Nicklaus’s people, the Honda Classic turned into a high-profile event. Some of Jack’s extended neighbors, including Rory McIlroy and sometimes Tiger Woods, started playing in it. It was given a new lineup spot, batting first in the Florida Swing. It had found a long-term home on a better course. The marketing budget exploded. Jack brought star power, spruced it up, made Honda an international event.

  But before all that, Honda was the kind of local event—like the much older stops in Hartford and Fort Worth and Honolulu—on which the tour was built. It was a perfect tournament for Mike, and he played in it every year between 1981 and 2001. In the years when he wasn’t exempt, Cliff got him in. Yes, he was playing favorites. Cliff once told me that of the hundreds of players he had met over the years, none made a bigger impact on him than Mike.

  • • •

  One warm winter night, Mike, Cliff, and I met for dinner at Il Bellagio, a popular restaurant at an outdoor mall in the heart of West Palm Beach. The restaurant is not as fancy as it sounds, and over the years Mike and I have had many leisurely meals there, always on the outdoor patio, overlooking a series of hyperactive fountains and various chain stores devoted to the good life, American-style. These dinners were an opportunity for us to marvel at the health of the American economy, or at least a segment of it, and to settle the issues of the day.

  But on this night, with Cliff as our third, the focus was the tour. That is, the tour that Cliff came up on. Cliff was a tournament ad
ministrator with no use for the word metrics. He didn’t do focus groups. His stock-in-trade was relationships, and his most significant gift was the ability to read another person’s motives and needs. Cliff, who was in his mid-sixties, was only twenty-four when Jackie Gleason gave him a delicate assignment: chaperoning the Great One’s lady friend at his tournament. He did it well. He kept the cart out of lagoons only he could see. Cliff had a set of skills that are not taught at the Harvard Business School.

  Some time after our outdoor dinner on that warm winter night, I called Cliff and asked what I could not in front of Mike: How did he get Mike into the 2006 Honda, when Mike was fifty and not even a regular presence on the senior tour? How—and why?

  “It was an emotional, acrimonious time,” Cliff said. The lid was coming off quickly. “I knew it would be my last year running the tournament. The tour was making changes. A new board was coming in, and I was going to be out of a job. I was going to be fine, but I was worried about my staff. Would they be able to land on their feet?”

  It’s always like that, isn’t it? The manager gets fired, and the pitching coach takes his kids out of parochial school. He knows he could be next.

  “We had six exemptions,” Cliff said, spots in the field for friends of the tournament. “I didn’t care about five of them. I knew I wanted one of them to go to Mike. People used to call Mike a journeyman, but I prefer consummate professional. That’s really what he was. And he was before that 1990 U.S. Open, during that Open, and after it.”

  What an insight. Medinah in ’90 might have changed the way Mike thought of himself as a golfer. But the experience didn’t change him, not at his core.

  The Honda tournament gives the players brand-new Hondas to drive around for the week. Courtesy cars. Cliff can tell you, chapter and verse, where these courtesy cars have been left and in what condition. He has known players who asked for courtesy cars for their wives, nannies, girlfriends. He knows the players who used the backseat as a recycling bin for Anheuser-Busch products. Mike had no interest in driving a Honda courtesy car. For one thing, Honda was a home game for him, and he was perfectly content driving his own car. More to the point, he figured the tournament was already giving him enough. Throughout his career, Mike was critical of tour greed, especially in his four years on the Tour Policy Board. It’s in his nature not to grab free stuff. But he also understood that a measure of modesty would serve the tour well in leaner times.

  “There are people who will tell you that Mike is blunt,” Cliff said. That put it mildly. “But to me, he was just telling it like it is. You ask him a question, he answers it. We’d have lunch, and I’d tell him what I knew and he’d tell me what he knew. And he knew a lot.”

  That all sounded familiar.

  “People have no idea how generous he is. How many caddies he helped, how many people he loaned money to or just gave money to. How he talks to people and tries to help them. You’ll never meet anybody with a bigger heart.

  “You have to get approval from the tournament board for these sponsor exemptions. I told the board I just needed one, for Mike. I told them: ‘This is personal to me,’ ” Cliff said, his voice catching.

  He was a large, decidedly earthbound man, hardened by a long series of corporate wars. For years his life had revolved around that golf tournament. As we spoke, his entire history with it, and with Mike, had to be racing through his head. The tournament had brought him a livelihood, standing, friendship. It was to him what Raymond was to Ball.

  “Normally, you have to tell your board all these reasons for your candidate, make a case, do all these things. I didn’t do any of that. I went in there without my usual line of shit. This was going to be my last tournament, and I knew it was probably going to be Mike’s final tour event. They were fine with it. I’m sure the vote was unanimous. They knew what it meant.”

  I met Mike at the ’85 Honda and I had been to many Hondas, including the one in ’06. Mike’s appearance wasn’t exactly Arnold playing his final Masters (which I witnessed twice). I don’t think Mike felt any heightened emotion about it. He wished he had played better. He was grateful for the opportunity Cliff had given him. It was the 550th and last tour event of his career. He had made 296 cuts and earned $1.97 million.

  Mike did not come close to making the cut at the ’06 Honda. But he came back on Sunday, when Luke Donald won. No relation, and the surname coincidence barely registered with Mike. He came back on Sunday because he wanted to be there when Cliff turned off the lights for the final time.

  • • •

  You have to be brave to answer the Proust Questionnaire honestly. Chuck Will, in his late eighties, and Sandy Tatum, in his early nineties, could do it. Billy Harmon and Mike could, too. When and where were you happiest? What a question. It’s one thing to answer in the privacy of your own mind, and another thing to answer for others to see. Could I do it? No, but I am closer now than when I started this whole thing. Like they say in the self-help section, it’s a journey.

  I can do what we all do: close my eyes and drift. I am now remembering a wet and windy day from the summer of 2010. Mike and I were both in Scotland. He was there to try to qualify for the British Senior Open. I was there to cover the regular British Open, which was in St. Andrews, with its stout cathedral and buckling gray walls. The weather was south of appalling. Second-round play was suspended twice because the wind was so strong that balls would not stay put on the exposed greens. It was like being in Maine: A squall would come through, and with it a drenching rain followed by cat-and-mouse sunshine. The Scottish golf fans were unperturbed. With everyday nonchalance, they put on their foul-weather gear in the distant carparks, hiked to the ancient playfields in their rubber boots, and watched “the golf.”

  Late on that Friday afternoon, Mike and I became transfixed by an odd sight: Tiger Woods and Tom Watson simply standing in close proximity to each other. Watson was in the group behind Woods, but play had ground to a halt and the two groups had nowhere to go as they waited on the second tee.

  Eight months earlier, Woods had run over a fire hydrant in the middle of a November night. In a short burst, everything went wrong for him. People were screaming for his head. Everybody he had ever met seemed to have a lawyer and a publicist. Woods went deep into a cave, far from the cameras that could not get enough of his various casual girlfriends, looking for their fifteen minutes or a payday or something. The manhunt for Woods was frenzied and finally ended with the publication of a hideously invasive photo of Woods at a rehab center. I don’t think any of this is what the Framers had in mind when they defined free speech, and I felt for Woods, no matter what he did to bring it all on himself.

  About the only people showing any decorum or sense right about then were the old boxer Larry Holmes and Big Jack. In their primes, Holmes and Tiger had used the same Las Vegas trainer. When the story was breaking, I tracked down the Easton Assassin for his take on the whole thing. He said, “You’re Tiger Woods—you’re some famous athlete or show biz celebrity, whatever. The girl’s got you in the corner. She’s in your face. You’re like, ‘No, no, no, I can’t do this. I got the wife at home.’ But she’s pushing and pushing, and finally you give in. It don’t mean nothing. It’s just thirty seconds. But it feels so good you want it again and again and again. They’re a toy to play with. And that’s all you are to them. You give them some money and they go away.” He was encouraging people to take a deep breath. Nicklaus was, too. He said, “It’s none of my business.”

  Elsewhere the message seemed to be that Woods had somehow let us down. The fog of sanctimoniousness would have halted play. Tom Watson was especially critical, telling the world (via CNN) that Woods needed “to clean up his act.” He complained about Woods’s on-course comportment and how it didn’t measure up to the standards of their golfing forebears.

  And there at the Old Course, where golf has been played for six hundred years, Woods and Watson stood near each other, saying nothing, making no eye contact, each staying i
n his corner, slightly bent in the heavy sea air. Finally, after a wait that seemed to last for an hour but was actually not even ten minutes, the coast was clear and Woods played off number two.

  “Man,” Mike said, “was that weird.”

  The weather conditions were not improving, but Mike and I, following the code of lunatic golfers everywhere, decided to go play. We left the Old Course around six P.M. and made the back-road drive across Fife to a golf course in the tiny seaside village of Elie. It’s an unusual and windswept layout, with sixteen par-fours and two par-threes on a pale-green peninsula of linksland. It’s one of my favorite courses anywhere.

  Mike and I, as a twosome, had balls in the air a little before seven. Summer golf in Scotland. Like most private courses there, Elie is happy to have paying visitors, especially for evening play, but there was nobody around to collect our green fees. Okay: We sneaked on. The opening hole goes uphill and downhill, and there’s a giant periscope on the first tee for the purpose of making sure the coast is clear. We didn’t need the periscope. The place was deserted.

  On a short into-the-gale par-four, Mike smashed a driver and then a 4-wood and was still maybe eighty yards short of the hole. Score was meaningless in those conditions. There were only upwind shots and downwind shots and tending to our running noses between shots. It was nearly ten P.M. when we got to the eighteenth tee.