I wrote my original legends list at the Ryder Cup in Medinah in 2012, with Watson on the Living Legends side and Neil batting in the Secret Legends lineup. Two years later, Watson was the U.S. Ryder Cup captain and Neil the unofficial captain of the caddies. The gig did not go well for Watson.
After another American defeat, reports emerged of dissension between some of the American players and Watson. The carping, anonymous and otherwise, was unnecessary and unattractive. The real reason the Americans lost was because the European team had better players who played better golf and better team golf. Same as forever. But the lack of connection between Watson and some of his players surely did not help. I could imagine the disconnect. I have seen Watson be cold and aloof with me and with others. A terrible know-it-all. But there’s more to him than that. I am thinking now of the obvious admiration he showed that day at Whitemarsh for his friend Sandy Tatum as Sandy talked about golf and life and his memories of the ’36 Olympics in Berlin.
Ted Bishop was the PGA of America official who had recruited Watson for the job. After he returned home from the Ryder Cup—his Ryder Cup—he told me how disappointed and upset he was with how it all unfolded. He said he had been commiserating with Watson about it. “And Watson said, ‘You gotta talk to Ox.’ And I did. Neil was really the one guy who had perspective on the whole thing.”
Neil understood the Ryder Cup as the players saw it, as the NBC executives saw it, as the reporters saw it, as the PGA of America saw it. He has a profound understanding of conflict, which makes him a natural as an amateur movie critic. It also makes him successful at his day job, where he helps politicians get elected or learn something from defeat for the next time out. Understanding conflict made Neil valuable in the inner-circle cauldron of another acrimonious Ryder Cup. Bishop said Neil cited a list of reasons why that Ryder Cup was over before it began. But to me, Neil’s journey to the team room at Gleneagles was the most amazing thing. It started in that parking lot in St. Louis.
The Ryder Cup at Gleneagles was not the way Watson wanted to close out his competitive career, but ends are never pretty, are they? At best they’re wistful.
When Watson won the Senior British Open at Turnberry in 2003 Bruce Edwards was in serious decline. Neil caddied for Tom that week in Bruce’s name. Bruce’s death, from the same disease that killed Lou Gehrig, came on the first day of the 2004 Masters. Later that day, Watson, with Neil carrying his bag, left an egg salad sandwich for Bruce on the bench by the thirteenth tee, in the most remote part of Amen Corner. That was Bruce’s sandwich, and that was his spot to eat it. Bruce inherited a rooting interest for all Philadelphia teams—EaglesFlyersSixersPhils—from his father, and that rooting interest was one of Bruce’s bonds with Neil. That and coming of age on tour in the doubleknit 1970s.
A few weeks after that Ryder Cup in Scotland, Neil was a host of an event on a rainy, gloomy October night in Philadelphia. His friend John Lahr had written a biography of Tennessee Williams, and Neil had helped arrange for Lahr to speak at Philadelphia’s grand central library. There was a reception for Lahr. Our former mayor Ed Rendell was at the library that night, among other people afraid to say no to Neil. Neil’s devotion to the library is inspiring.
In his introduction, Neil recalled a piece Lahr had written for the New Yorker about Cole Porter. Neil then took a quick detour and talked about working at the Sammy Davis Jr. Greater Hartford Open one year in the 1970s. His man had missed the cut, and on the weekend Chuck Will hired Neil to be a CBS spotter, helping to relay on-course information to Ken Venturi in the broadcast tower over the eighteenth green. Late one day Neil found himself alone with Sammy in the open-air broadcast booth. He asked a question that Sammy could not have been expecting in that setting: “Did you ever meet Cole Porter?”
It is unlikely that anybody else in the library that night could have combined golf in the seventies, Ken Venturi, Cole Porter, John Lahr, and Sammy Davis Jr. into a single two-minute story. John Lahr—son of Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion—came up to the podium, and Neil exited stage left to warm applause. What an image: Sammy Davis and Neil talking about Cole Porter, surrounded by all that golf. This Neil Oxman (to use one of Mike’s constructions) has been on one long, strange trip. It’s hard to imagine him ever getting off the tour bus. Why would he?
Of all my golfing heroes, Jack Nicklaus is the one I admire most. That has been true from the time I started following professional golf closely, which I would date to the 1974 U.S. Open at Winged Foot. (Soon after, my parents gave me Golf My Way, by the Golden Bear himself.) Seeing Nicklaus up close as a reporter has only made me admire him more. The starting point of my admiration is his record, which is freakish, both for its length and its quality. He was a dominating golfer for over twenty-five years. He was the best player of the sixties, when he won seven majors. He was one of the best players of the eighties, when he won another three. The decade in between, he absolutely owned. He was golf’s best golfer in golf’s best decade. In the forty major tournaments he played in the seventies, the legal maximum, Nicklaus had eight wins. He had top-ten finishes in all but four of those forty events. He was the runner-up seven times. Think of what that takes, to bring it again and again and again. (Woods in his heyday had that same quality.) As a golfer, Nicklaus was relentlessly consistent. As a person, the same. I’ve never known him to be anything other than decent.
Some of those second-place finishes left a permanent mark on me. For a Mets fan in my era, the underlying message was that losing was noble. Even when the Mets did win pennants—most notably in 1969 and in ’73, when Yogi Berra managed a club that was three games over .500 to the World Series—they weren’t supposed to. But Nicklaus was not an honorary Met. No one was ever surprised when he won. It was his grace in defeat that made such a memorable impression on me and many others. Jack showed the way to the generation of golfers who came after him.
I could see it in Mike. He watched that winning putt go in on the ninety-first hole at Medinah and stayed put while Hale danced around for a few seconds before he stopped to shake Mike’s extended hand. Mike then went to the hole and retrieved Hale’s ball while Hale continued to celebrate. Those winning balls from majors have a way of disappearing. (I know a collector of them.) Mike instinctively knew that Hale would someday be glad to have it. What presence he showed right then and there. What an awareness of another person. That is almost the definition of courteousness. I’m sure Jack’s example was ingrained in Mike, maybe more than he could know.
I can winnow my feelings for Nicklaus down to one moment. It came during the Saturday finale of the 1977 British Open at Turnberry, on the craggy west coast of Scotland. A heat wave had left the fairways parched, and there were large brown stretches amid the rolling pale green carpets, a color combination that brought to mind my modest home field, the village course in Bellport.
Every iron shot off Turnberry’s firm turf produced a small mushroom cloud of exploding dirt. Over the first three days, Tom Watson, who in April had won the Masters, shot rounds of 68, 70, and 65. Meanwhile, Nicklaus, who had finished second in that Masters, shot the exact same scores. The photo in the Saturday sports section in the New York Times showed Watson and Nicklaus sitting on massive rocks on the beach while a passing storm suspended play. They are in short sleeves and wearing golf shoes with kilties, the little fringed flap that once covered the laces on all your better golf shoes. No minions were hovering. I read the paper in our kitchen in Patchogue and watched the final round on our living-room RCA. We didn’t watch much TV in our house, and never in the holiness of Saturday morning. But there I was.
It seems odd now, but the last round of the British Open was played on Saturdays then, a nod to the Old Course, which is closed on Sundays. (“If you gentlemen dinna need a rest on the Sawbath, the links does,” the Custodian of the Links, Old Tom Morris himself, once bellowed out his window, which looked over his course.) On that second Saturday in July 1977, Nicklaus came to the tee of Turnberry’s par-four eig
hteenth hole trailing Watson by a shot. Watson striped his drive, and Nicklaus pushed his into the right rough. As he came off the tee, Nicklaus slammed his driver head against the firm turf. Golf cannot be played at any level without emotion.
Watson was away and, with those drumstick arms, hit an 8-iron to thirty inches. Thirty inches! The quality of the golf they were both playing was astounding. Nicklaus then smashed an 8-iron out of the heavy rough and onto the green.
The Golden Bear, with his distinctive white-haired Greek-American caddie, Angelo Argea, tending the pin, holed his last-gasp putt for three—from thirty-five feet. Watson, wearing green plaid pants with western pockets held up by a thick white belt, did not fuss. He stepped right in and quickly made his. They both had closed with birdies. Nicklaus had shot 66 and Watson 65.
They walked off the home green bathed in sunshine and applause. Nicklaus, nearly ten years older than Watson, draped his arm around the winner, and Watson did the same to the man he had just defeated, fair and square. That was it for me. That moment.
Is what Nicklaus and Watson did that week at Turnberry—playing four rounds of golf on a sparkling seaside Scottish course in 266 and 265 shots—some kind of artwork? Something you can discuss alongside twentieth-century masterworks like Marc Chagall’s tapestries at Lincoln Center and Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and Mike Nichols’s The Graduate?
In a quiet voice: yes.
• • •
I was almost giddy when Mike and I met in the parking lot of Golden Bear Plaza, on Highway 1 in North Palm Beach, on the still weekday morning in spring when we were on the docket to see Big Jack. Our tour through yesteryear had reached its terminus.
I make no claims that our Mike-and-Mike show had been any sort of epic road trip, like the Dead’s summer tour in ’67. We had made several long hauls, but we did a lot of day-tripping, too. In ’81, when Mike played thirty-five tour events by car, that was a road trip. In ’91, when Christine and I traveled in Europe for seven months as newlyweds, that was a road trip. Mike and I hadn’t been from Tucson to Tucumcari. My wife said it well: “Your thing with Mike was more of a mental road trip.”
If golf is not a form of hunting, it is at least a goose chase. Reporting is, too. I remember calling Mike once as I was driving south on U.S. 17 in South Carolina, on a particularly beautiful and marshy stretch. I was chasing whatever I was chasing, in the name of the magazine, and I felt happy. I don’t say that daily. I gave Mike a status report, and he responded by telling me about being on a practice range at the B. C. Open one year with Bill Britton, who was back out after a prolonged absence. They were hitting balls side by side when Bill said, “I feel alive again.” All our legends had one thing in common: Golf coursed through their veins.
We saw Jack in his office, overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway and the Lost Tree Club, where Nicklaus and his family have lived for decades. Jack sat in his special chair to preserve his ever-recovering back.
Jack was never a tall man, and age and his back issues have rendered him shorter, but we were all at the same height when we sat. Anyway, Jack’s eyes have always been his main asset. He focuses on you. Whatever the opposite of ADD is, he has it. He knew Mike, he knew me, and even though I was excited, I was also oddly comfortable. I think Mike felt about the same. Mike had once told me about an exchange he had with Nicklaus on the practice range at Augusta National, late on Thursday afternoon of the 1990 Masters, after Mike had shot 64. Nicklaus walked fifty yards out of his way to Mike’s workstation and said, “That was a wonderful round of golf, Mike.”
Jack had recently seen Arnold at Augusta, where it was obvious to Jack that Arnold’s walking was more labored than ever because of his back issues. Jack sounded like an osteopath, talking about Arnold’s medical condition. Jack is ten years younger than Arnold but sounded like the older, prudent brother in the relationship.
Jack at one point said, “Arnold is as close a friend as I’ve got.” I think because that sentence is true, and because Arnold knows it is true, Jack was comfortable talking about Arnold in an honest way. Jack made a reference to how good Arnold is in a crowd and at golf-course openings. Both Arnold and Jack had been prominent for decades in golf-course design.
“I don’t want to cut the ribbon or do the cocktail party,” Jack said. “Arnold wants to cut the ribbon. He wants to do the cocktail party. We were always different that way. I’d invite Arnold to dinner, but Arnold would rather go to a party with forty people he didn’t know than go to dinner with one friend. That’s the difference between the two of us. I’m not criticizing Arnold. We’re just different.”
I asked Jack about Winnie. Jack knew her well, and Winnie Palmer and Barbara Nicklaus had logged many hundreds of hours in each other’s company, walking courses, eating dinners, attending PGA and USGA and PGA Tour receptions together, to say nothing of various events hosted by Mark McCormack and IMG.
“Winnie understood who Arnold was and what Arnold was and she understood how to handle him, and she handled Arnold beautifully,” Jack said. “And that’s probably why Barbara handles me the way she does. I think that Arnold had his freedom to do pretty much what he wanted to do except when Winnie said, ‘Arnold, we’re not doing that.’ She let Arnold be Arnold, and then all of a sudden she’d say, ‘We’re not doing that.’ And he responded very well to her. Barbara pretty much lets me be me until she sees me a little offline or out of kilter.”
I asked Jack when he first met Arnold.
“I first saw Arnold in ’54, at the Sylvania Country Club in Toledo, at the Ohio Amateur,” Jack said, ever precise. “I was playing a practice round. It was pouring down rain, and I was the only person on the golf course. When I came in, there was only one guy on the practice range, hitting knee-high nine-irons. It looked like Popeye out there.
“So I sat back and sort of watched from the back of the range for about ten minutes or so, and then I went into the clubhouse.
“I said, ‘I know I’m crazy for being out there in this silly rain, but who is that idiot?’
“ ‘That’s our defending champion, Arnold Palmer.’
“ ‘Oh, that’s Arnold Palmer.’ I was fourteen and he was twenty-four.”
Arnold won that ’54 Ohio Amateur in Toledo. Then he won the U.S. Amateur in Detroit. After that he went to Fred Waring’s Shawnee Inn, on the Delaware in eastern Pennsylvania, where he won the Waite Memorial, met Winnie, and asked her to marry him.
Jack talked about playing in the 1962 Phoenix Open with Arnold during Jack’s rookie year. Arnold was running away with the tournament, and they were paired together in the last round.
“He put his arm around my shoulder and we walked to the eighteenth tee,” Jack said. “And Arnold said, ‘Come on, you can finish second here. You can birdie this hole. Just relax.’ It was a pretty nice thing to do. I birdied the hole and I finished second. Arnold won by twelve. He just nipped me, 269 to 281.”
Arnold made $5,300. Jack made $2,300.
“Arnold was very good to me when I first started,” Jack said. “He used to come over and pick me up in Ohio in his plane, and we’d go globe-trot the United States and play exhibitions. In those days, the tour allowed you three weeks a year to play exhibitions, and we’d take eight days and go play eight exhibitions three times a year. That’s the only place you’d make any money. You didn’t make any money playing golf, but you could make a couple grand or three grand playing an exhibition. You’d play eight of them and put twenty grand in your pocket for the week. That was pretty good.”
“How was Arnold as a pilot?” I asked.
“Well, I guess I trusted him.”
“Was there a copilot?”
“No, just Arnold. He’d pick me up, and we’d go fly around and play exhibitions.”
I loved that picture, two guys in one little plane, golf bags in the back, a map on the pilot’s lap as he pointed the nose of his plane to some new place. Ball, speaking loosely here, was beneath them in his yellow Grand Prix, d
oing about the same thing.
“Arnold made an interesting comment when we were at lunch with him,” Mike said. “He said that if he hadn’t won the U.S. Open in 1960, he would have won three or four other ones. He said he won there in Cherry Hills and then he lost the edge.”
“Interesting comment,” Jack said. “I make a similar comment every time I sit down in front of an audience and talk about that 1960 Open. I say the best thing that ever happened to me was not winning the U.S. Open in 1960. Because if I had won that Open, I would have been too smug or too self-confident and felt like however I had prepared my game was ready. But I was growing into the game then. Arnold had already won two Masters. He was at the top of the game. He had the edge.”
Arnold had the edge and then he lost it. Yes, he won at Augusta twice after that ’60 Open, he won two British Opens, he won scores of other events. He needed all those wins to become the public icon known as Arnold Palmer. But that day in Latrobe Arnold was not talking about the public person we all know, whose signature was on the front door of a thousand Dunkin’ Donuts, in the name of some new tea-and-lemonade combo. That day in Latrobe our host was talking about Arnie, as Arnold’s father called him, as my father-in-law called him, as Conni Venturi called him. He was talking about himself as the son of a greenkeeper who had U.S. Open dreams for his big-boned boy. Arnold was telling us that something had changed after he won the national open in 1960 at Cherry Hills. After that, whenever he was contending in his national championship, the one that he wanted most, he could not find fourth gear. That’s a far from perfect image, because the real issues had to be much more mental than that. But the point is that Arnold had lost the ability to will it in when he needed it most.
Maybe this has all become less meaningful, this discussion of the U.S. Open and edge, even for American players. The game has become much more international, and the prestige of the Masters, with its United Nations of a field, has increased immeasurably. In Jack’s day and Arnold’s day, the Masters was a nice invitational tournament, but it wasn’t a championship. Golf’s championships were the PGA, the British Open, and the U.S. Open. Jack told us the Masters was a reward for playing well in other events, but he valued his national open far more. “As an American, the U.S. Open to me was the number-one tournament in the world,” he said. Its status was assigned to him on January 21, 1940, in Upper Arlington, Ohio, on the occasion of his birth.
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