They both started crying again.
34
WHEN WE PARTED that afternoon, we promised to stay in touch. I spoke to Beau twice during the fall semester of my senior year in law school. He wanted to let me know that I could play “the National” anytime I wanted. It was his way of inviting me to visit him.
He was clearly a happy man. He and his daughter were spending lots of time together. She hadn’t yet been able to persuade him to leave Augusta, though. As he explained it, he had family ties there, too. So he visited Katharine at the beach, and she came to Augusta.
Beau was also becoming something of a celebrity, and it seemed both to amuse and bewilder him. The media coverage of the USGA exhibit had a kind of watershed effect that surprised both of us at the time, although in hindsight I should have expected as much. As for Beau, he still found it hard to understand why Sports Illustrated would send Jaime Diaz to spend four days with him or why the Golf Channel (on which he refused to appear) was producing a special program about his exploits. The USGA exhibit may have secured for Beau Stedman his rightful place in golf history, but he wasn’t ready to do any commercials for American Express just yet.
He was going to have to get used to the attention, though, because his story was not going to go away. Every day brought more requests for interviews and other demands on his time. If nothing else, it made him appreciate all the years he spent hidden away in his sanctum sanctorum.
Johnny Miller narrated a feature about Beau on an NBC golf telecast and gushed about his playing record, calling his string of victories “bigger than winning the Grand Slam.” Jack Nicklaus generously said in an interview that Stedman must now be mentioned in any conversation about golf’s greatest players. Arnold Palmer was literally besieged with questions about what he recalled of his match over 40 years ago with the diminutive former caddie from East Lake. He allowed that he did, indeed, remember it (although of course he knew Stedman by another name) and said he would welcome the chance to visit with his old opponent again.
The intense national interest in the story prompted the USGA to run the exhibit again in its museum tent at the U.S. Open. Golf Digest and Golf magazines ran competing features in the same month on the lost playing record of Beau Stedman. Numerous golf societies were pressing him for oral histories of his era. The discovery of Beau Stedman was the biggest story to hit golf in years.
We stayed in touch with each other after Far Hills, and he seemed to value my help in sorting through the madness of it all. We even planned to get together over the Christmas holidays while I was home in Birmingham. I was going to drive over and stay with him while we played Augusta together. Katharine would be there, too.
I never got to go. During “dead week” before finals began in early December, I received a phone call from Walter Abercrombie’s daughter, Dolores Smith. She told me that Stedman had just died. She said that Katharine was with him at the time. He had just returned from his morning walk, said he felt ill and wanted to lie down, and passed away. She said that Katharine had asked her to call me.
I flew to Augusta for the funeral. Katharine was teary-eyed but holding up well. She smiled when she saw me. I went up to her and gave her a hug. “I can’t believe this. You guys just found each other.”
“But we did find each other, Charley, that’s the important thing. Dad—I was just getting used to calling him that—knew he didn’t have much time left. But he went out with a bang, didn’t he?”
I nodded. She went on, “And we both got some closure; I think that’s what they call it these days. I know who I am now. We made good use of the time we had. Let’s not have regrets.”
Katharine Leigh was a lot like her father.
There must have been at least 40 mourners wearing green jackets from the Augusta National Golf Club. I knew that it was against the club’s longstanding rule to wear the jackets off club premises. This uncharacteristic public display was the club’s way of paying tribute to its best-kept secret.
Brett Sullivan was there, too. And, of course, I ended up meeting Stedman’s extended family as well. It was obvious that they all loved him. I was comforted to know that he truly had enjoyed as good a life as he claimed.
Katharine took me back to the airport after the funeral. She told me once again how much the public recognition meant to her father at the end of his life.
I looked at her. “It may be sacrilegious to say it in this town, but he may have been the best ever—even better than Jones.”
I hugged her one last time, turned and got on the plane.
On the trip home, I began to reflect on what all of this meant. I have no doubt that it may be years before I fully comprehend it. Still, I managed to figure a few things out.
Beau Stedman taught me many things in the brief time that I knew him, but none more important than focus. He successfully dealt with the harshest adversities simply by accepting them. He did not allow his misfortunes to distract him. I guess he would say that he kept his eye on the ball because that was the best way to play. I have no way of knowing where he learned it, but it certainly allowed him to take full advantage of his other gifts for the game. It also enabled him to avoid bitterness, anger, and other draining emotions that so many others routinely allow to defeat themselves.
I also learned from Stedman that what separates the best from the rest is effort more than talent. Unlike professional golfers, who get a wonderful mulligan called the Senior Tour, few of us get a real second chance to seize the opportunities that we let slip by. No matter how slight our chances, we can’t win if we don’t play.
For that reason, I suspect few of us will ever feel as satisfied when we start adding up our score of accomplishments in life as Beau Stedman did. He gave his best effort and took his talent as far as he could.
One of my favorite cartoons has Pogo declaring, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Beau Stedman never became his own enemy. He never beat himself up over a bad lie, whether it was on the golf course or not. He played the ball as it lay and counted all his strokes. His score was merely the measure of what he had done that day; he never let it define what he was. Regardless of the previous day’s score, he was able to approach the next day’s play with the same optimism.
My favorite coach in high school was fond of saying that you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit. He was wrong. Stedman took the worst that life handed him, dusted himself off, and never took his eyes off the prize. When he encountered an obstacle, he found another way. He may not have won championships the conventional way, but he came away perhaps the greatest champion of them all.
That earnestness of spirit was no doubt the shining feature that so attracted Bobby Jones to him despite the vast differences in their circumstances. When Stedman declared in one of his letters that he would still win his championships, “you wate and see,” he spoke to the very core of Jones’s being.
If anyone sacrificed to conquer his own limitations, it was Jones. So fearful of competition that he vomited before playing, Jones refused to let his own pain stop him from attaining his goals, just as he later refused to yield to a crippling and painful disease even as it destroyed him.
More than anyone, Bobby Jones appreciated Beau Stedman’s spirit. More than anyone, Jones understood Stedman’s refusal to blame others for his misfortunes. And more than anyone, Jones understood that Stedman embodied the spirit that makes golf the greatest game ever invented.
We may be, as some claim, a nation of whiners, self-proclaimed victims who refuse to be held accountable for our own failings. But we are also a nation that has produced more than its share of Beau Stedmans, who reject the selfsame blame-shifting that threatens to become our national pastime and choose instead to play out the life they are given one stroke at a time.
Life drove Beau Stedman underground and out of golf’s major championships. So he found a way to play—and beat—golf’s champions in their own backyards. Life cheated Beau Stedman out of a normal family life, so he mad
e family out of his friends at Augusta.
Golf history will record that Beau Stedman left this world as one of its greatest champions. By any measure, he was just as successful at life. They say that great players answer a bogey with a birdie at the next hole. Beau Stedman answered every one of life’s bogeys with a birdie. Some would say he finished with a course record.
I will always be glad I was able to sign his scorecard.
A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 2000 by Sleeping Bear Press. It is reprinted here by arrangement with Sleeping Bear Press.
THE GREATEST PLAYER WHO NEVER LIVED. Copyright © 2000 by J. Michael Veron. All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
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This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Veron, Michael.
The greatest player who never lived: a golf story / J. Michael Veron.
p. cm.
1. Jones, Bobby, 1902–1971—Fiction. 2. Golfers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3572.E763 G7 2001
813′.6—dc21
00-048632
eISBN: 978-0-307-43421-0
v3.0
The Greatest Player Who Never Lived Page 19