I filled Arnold in on the legends Mike and I had seen: Sandy Tatum, Ken Venturi, Golf Ball, Chuck Will, Jack Nicklaus at the end. I told him about David Fay sending me the relevant page from the 1958 edition of the Rules of Golf and how it was clear that Arnold had proceeded within the rules on the twelfth green at Augusta on the Sunday of the ’58 Masters. Arnold put his thumb in the air. I doubt I was telling him anything new.
In the rounds Mike and I had made, nobody made a stronger impression on me than Golf Ball, in his bed at the nursing home in Jackson. I was awed by his acceptance of his station in life and moved by the obvious pleasure he took in the memory of his tour years, when he was at-large. I asked Arnold if he was satisfied with his life. Arnold did not pause.
“Noooooooo!”
For one thing, he wasn’t piloting his own airplane anymore. For another, he was playing tournament golf only in his dreams, and in those tournaments he never made it to the seventy-second hole. Age had crept into his body and robbed him of his best moves. He didn’t like it.
In the big picture, yes, he had led a rich life. He continued to lead a rich life. He had accomplished so much, in golf and in business. He had married twice and both times well. He had loving relationships with his two daughters. He had true friends and great wealth that did not trap him. He had a good appetite. His older grandson was trying to play his way to the tour and getting closer. But satisfied with his life, as a day-to-day proposition? The truthful answer was no.
I told Arnold about seeing Conni Venturi, about her health issues and how she lived by herself in a trailer park in Napa. Arnold shook his head with a certain sorrow. “Wasn’t Ken paying her?” Arnold asked.
I said that they had been through the alimony wars, but those payments had ended a long time ago.
“How did she support herself?” Arnold asked.
I told him about her various jobs, her movie-star dreams as a girl, and her devotion to local theater as an older woman.
Arnold asked if Conni had ever remarried and seemed surprised to learn that she had not. He remembered her two sons.
“I always thought she was great,” Arnold said. “Just . . . great.”
Arnold was eighty-four, with health challenges of his own. It had been sixty years since he had won his U.S. Amateur on a week off from selling paint. Mike and I were lucky we saw Arnold the day we did, when he relived for us, chapter and verse, those fast weeks when he went from amateur to professional, and from bachelor to married man.
I gave Arnold the pink envelope from Conni, with her handwriting in black ink on its face. It had been burning a hole on my desk at home.
Arnold held the envelope up to eye level, looked at it, gave it a little shake, slid open the top drawer of his desk, and dropped it in.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MICHAEL BAMBERGER was born in Patchogue, New York, in 1960. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, he worked as a newspaper reporter, first for the (Martha’s) Vineyard Gazette, later for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Since 1995 he has been a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Christine.
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ALSO BY MICHAEL BAMBERGER
The Green Road Home
To the Linksland
Bart & Fay (a play)
Wonderland
This Golfing Life
The Man Who Heard Voices
The Swinger (with Alan Shipnuck)
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Copyright © 2015 by Michael Bamberger
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2015
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Interior design by Ruth Lee-Mui
Endpaper map by Elisa Pugliese
Front photograph by James Drake/Sports Illustrated
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bamberger, Michael, 1960–
Men in green / Michael Bamberger.
pages cm
1. Golfers—Biography 2. Golf—History. I. Title.
GV964.A1B34 2015
796.3520922—dc23
[B] 2015001158
ISBN 978-1-4767-4382-0
ISBN 978-1-4767-4384-4 (ebook)
The author wishes to express his gratitude for permission to reprint lyrics from the following songs: “We Are Family” by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, copyright Alfred Music, used by permission; “Driving Wheel” by David Wiffen, copyright Bytown Music, used by permission (David Wiffen); and “Willin’ ” by Lowell George, copyright Naked Snake Music, used by permission (Elizabeth George).
Men in Green Page 25