One on One

by John Feinstein

  “Hey, better watch out for ’Zinger,” he said. “He’s warpathing you.”

  In Sluman talk that meant Azinger was angry about something.

  “ ’Zinger’s mad at me?” I said. “About what?”

  Sluman shrugged. “Something about Heather Farr.”

  I was on my way down the hill to the range when I bumped into Ben Crenshaw. Same thing. “Boy, John, ’Zinger’s really looking for you.”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  I got to the range and saw no sign of Azinger. I did see Tom Watson, who began quizzing me about how the book was selling. As we talked, Azinger appeared.

  “Hey, Paul,” I said. “I heard you were looking for me.”

  “You bet I am,” he said. “I’ve got a major bone to pick with you.”

  “Uh-oh,” Watson said. “Do I need to clear some space?”

  He was smiling. Azinger was not. The range was packed with people. I did not want to engage in a shouting match with anyone in this setting, much less one of the best-liked players on tour. Plus, I still didn’t know what it was about. At least when Deion Sanders had come at me in the Braves’ clubhouse, I knew what the issue was.

  “Do me a favor, Paul,” I said. “Let’s go talk in private.”

  Azinger nodded and we walked to a far corner of the range.

  “What’s this about?” I asked.

  “The Heather Farr quote. There’s no way I said that to you. There’s no way I would say something like that about someone who was dying.”

  “Paul, do you think I would just make something like that up? Do you really think that?”

  “I don’t know what to think, to be honest with you.”

  The good news was I knew I still had the tapes of our conversation.The bad news was they were sitting at that moment in a box in my house three thousand miles away.

  “Look, if you want, I will get you a copy of the tape,” I said. “But this is what happened…”

  I walked him through the conversation, how it had come up, the context, the double bogey at sixteen that day. The look on his face changed.

  “Oh God, I remember it now,” he said. “I remember she was on my mind that day because I did feel bad about losing my temper. I’m sorry. I don’t actually remember the moment I said it, but I’m sure you’re right.”

  He apologized again. I am completely convinced that if I had confronted him in front of the other guys it wouldn’t have come out that way. Later that day I saw Sluman again.

  “Hey, ’Zinger told me he got it wrong, not you,” he said.

  Give Azinger credit: he made a point of telling the people he had told he was angry at me that he was no longer angry at me.

  Which brings me back to Montgomerie at the 2010 PGA. While Gray and Pavin were occupying most of the media, Monty slipped outside. I was standing talking to Brandel Chamblee, who is now my colleague at the Golf Channel. Seeing us, Monty walked over to shake hands and say hello. After a few pleasantries he looked at me and said, “How’s your health?”

  I was completely taken aback. It had never occurred to me that Monty even knew what had been going on with me—that I’d had open-heart surgery fourteen months earlier.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I just have to do a better job with my weight.”

  “Well, I can attest how hard that is,” he said, laughing. “But you need to do it now. You exercising I hope?”

  “Swimming.”

  “Good. Keep at it.”

  He glanced around and said, “Better make my escape while I still can.”

  He shook hands and walked off.

  “Wow,” I said to Brandel. “It never occurred to me for one second that he would have known—or cared—about my surgery.”

  “He is a lot better guy than people give him credit for,” said Brandel, who is right about most things and was 100 percent right this time too.

  THERE WERE TWO GUYS I knew I needed to write about in A Good Walk Spoiled who were not playing the tour regularly and were not going to be members of Team Feinstein: Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.

  I didn’t expect to break any new ground writing about the two of them, but if you are writing a book about golf, how can you not write about Palmer and Nicklaus? From the start, based on reputation, I didn’t think getting time with Palmer would be that difficult. Nicklaus would be another story.

  The first day I was at Bay Hill in 1994, I asked Doc Giffin if it would be possible to get some time with Palmer. Doc has been with Palmer for almost fifty years. He was a newspaper guy in Pittsburgh when Palmer was at his zenith in the early ’60s, and Palmer asked him to come on board to help him field all the various media requests he was getting. That was in 1962. Doc, who is the same age as Palmer, is still doing it and is kept very busy, even though Palmer turned eighty-two in September of 2011.

  You won’t meet a nicer man than Doc Giffin. His answer when I asked about seeing Arnold was simple: “I’m sure we can arrange it. Let me get back to you.”

  The next morning when I walked in, Doc asked me if I would be available Sunday morning to go to Palmer’s house (which is on the grounds at Bay Hill) and talk with him over coffee and bagels. “That way you’ll have some time,” Doc said.

  I actually had a commitment for that morning: since there was an NCAA basketball tournament first- and second-round subregional in St. Petersburg that week, I was shuttling back and forth between Orlando and St. Pete. I had made arrangements with Mike Krzyzewski to meet him after his team’s morning shootaround to talk (this was going on the assumption that Duke would win its first-round game against Texas Southern), so I would have an early column in my notebook if Duke won that afternoon and not be scrambling on deadline.

  That was a convenience. It was nice of Krzyzewski to agree to do it. It was also something I could skip if something more important came up, like the birth of a child or the chance to talk to Arnold Palmer. My guess is Krzyzewski wasn’t exactly heartbroken when I called him, although he gave me a hard time about it. “Golf?” he said. “Golf’s not a sport.”

  “We can have this discussion another time,” I said. “But when you break 70, let’s talk.”

  “For nine holes?”

  Krzyzewski hasn’t played a lot more than nine holes in his life. Golf and swimming were two sports they didn’t play a lot of when he was growing up on Chicago’s South Side. I don’t think he’s passed his swimming test at West Point to this day. When I asked him once what happened to the brick he had to swim the length of the pool with as a plebe, he said, “F—ing thing is probably still at the bottom of that pool.”

  I told Doc that I would gladly blow off Krzyzewski for the chance to talk to Palmer. And so, on a bright Sunday, he escorted me to Palmer’s house at about 8:30 in the morning. This would give me plenty of time to talk to Palmer and still make it to St. Pete for the basketball games that afternoon.

  When we walked in, Doc told Palmer that I had canceled a meeting with Mike Krzyzewski to talk to him that morning.

  Palmer looked at me quizzically. “Mike Krzyzewski?” he said. “Who’s that?”

  So Palmer wasn’t a basketball fan. “Oh, he’s the basketball coach at Duke,” I said.

  “Duke,” he said. “Oh yeah, Duke. They’re the ones whose butt we’ve been kicking the last couple of years. Like every single game. Is that the Duke you’re talking about?”

  He was grinning now, a big-time “gotcha” grin. He was right too: his alma mater, Wake Forest, was in the midst of what would become a nine-game winning streak against Duke, aided immeasurably by the presence of Tim Duncan at center.

  Naturally, I cracked up when Palmer “remembered” Duke. In an instant, I understood the Palmer magic: within sixty seconds of meeting him, I felt completely at ease.

  The next couple of hours were as enjoyable as any I’ve ever had as a reporter. Palmer was relaxed—my guess is he’s always relaxed—and he told story after story about his father and about Ben Hogan making jokes about his swing and
about his relationship with Nicklaus. He talked about trying to get other players to understand that being a celebrity isn’t just about perks, it is also about responsibilities. No one ever understood that better than Palmer.

  He talked about how money had changed his sport and all sports. “I think I was the first guy on tour to have my own plane,” he said. “I bought mine after I won my second Masters. Nowadays, if guys finish in second place in any tournament they buy a plane.”

  Still, he liked the fact that players came to him for advice, even if they didn’t always follow it. Peter Jacobsen had told me a story about the last time Palmer had made the cut at Bay Hill—in 1991 at the age of sixty-one, a pretty impressive feat. Jacobsen had gone out on Friday night and gotten a cake, and all the players had gathered in the locker room before play began to present the cake to Palmer. When I brought that up, Palmer became a little bit teary-eyed.

  “It meant a lot,” he said. “Because the message was that they still respected me and still thought of me as one of them. That was a big deal.”

  After about two hours I thought I had enough—more than enough—and I needed to get on the road to St. Petersburg in order to beat the basketball traffic. I thanked Palmer for the time.

  “Have you got all you need?” he asked. “I’m going down to my workshop to work on some clubs if you need a few more minutes.”

  Okay, you don’t turn down the chance to chat with Arnold Palmer in his workshop in order to beat traffic. So I went downstairs with him and we spent another hour. He worked on some clubs—he showed me what he was doing, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what he was trying to accomplish—and told more stories. He told me that one of his goals was to get the corporate name off his tournament.

  “We needed to do it for the money,” he said. “And Nestle has been great. But it bothers me. Makes me feel like we’re just another tournament. I’d like to do what Jack has been able to do: keep Bay Hill in the tournament name and have a presenting sponsor.”

  Two years later, Palmer got his wish and the tournament became the Bay Hill Invitational presented by a tire company. These days it is the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by a credit card.

  It was noon by the time I left Palmer’s house. The traffic getting to the basketball game was horrific. It was more than worth it.

  AS EVERYONE HAD PREDICTED, trying to pin down Jack Nicklaus wasn’t nearly as simple as asking his right-hand man when he might have some time.

  For one thing, Nicklaus had more than one right-hand man. His version of Doc for years had been Larry O’Brien—known to one and all in golf as LOB. By 1994 LOB was semi-retired and handed a lot of his duties to his son Andy. Both O’Briens were good guys, and like everyone else who worked for him, they lived in fear of Jack. When I first started talking to them about getting some time with Jack, they reacted as if I had asked to be added to his will.

  “We’ll do our best,” was the repeated refrain.

  By the time the tour got to Jack’s tournament, the Memorial, in late May, I had decided the only way to get to Jack was the direct route: just ask him myself. That’s almost always the best way because it is much harder to say no directly to someone than having someone else do it for you. About the only time I go to an agent or a PR guy is if there’s no way to talk to someone directly, or if it is someone who won’t know me from Adam. Nicklaus was in the second category.

  Every year at the Memorial, Nicklaus does a “state of the Memorial” press conference. This is in keeping with his desire to make the Memorial as much like the Masters as possible. He’s even got guys walking around in green jackets.

  Because the Masters doesn’t let the media on the range, the Memorial doesn’t let the media on the range—even though PGA Tour rules say the media is allowed on the range. Recently, the rule at the Memorial has changed: now a media member can be “invited” onto the range by a player. (The Masters gets away with the media ban because it is technically not a PGA Tour sponsored event. It is for that reason that the tour’s rule against playing tournaments at clubs that discriminate—in Augusta’s case, against women—doesn’t come into play the second week in April.)

  Even the players joke about how seriously the people at the Memorial take themselves. One year I was walking the first day of the tournament with Davis Love, Greg Norman, and Mike Reid. From the twelfth green at Muirfield Village, the players walk straight back through the woods to the thirteenth tee. There are no spectators allowed back there, and the caddies don’t walk back either—they go ahead and forecaddie down the fairway.

  I always liked to walk back to the tee in those situations because it was about as private a moment as you are likely to get on the golf course with the players. I have no doubt it was against the rules, but no one ever stopped me.

  On this day, as we walked back to the tee, Norman decided to run to the Port-a-John in the woods. He tossed me his driver as he turned in that direction and said, “Don’t want to risk getting it wet in there.”

  I walked onto the tee with Love and Reid. They both hit their drives and then we waited for Norman.

  “I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you tee up a ball and take a swing with that driver,” Davis said, laughing.

  “I’ll need a lot more than that for bail money,” I said.

  We were laughing as Norman walked onto the tee.

  “Hey Greg, Mike and I think John should pop one out there using your driver,” Love said. “What do you think?”

  “Great idea,” Norman said and actually flipped a ball at me.

  “Greg, I have no desire to go to jail,” I said. “Those green coats would have me arrested before I took three steps off this tee” (not to mention that Norman would no doubt be DQ’d, but that wouldn’t have been my problem).

  “No, they wouldn’t have you arrested,” Norman said.

  “What, are you nuts?”

  “Not at all. Why arrest you when they’ve already had you shot?”

  He had a point.

  On this particular afternoon, when Nicklaus finished his press conference, I approached him as he was walking out. Several other writers were trying to get in postconference “scrum” questions, and Andy O’Brien was trying to keep Jack moving. Finally, when the other guys were finished, I introduced myself to Jack, who looked at me as if to say, “and?”

  Andy jumped in, trying to help. “You remember LOB and I mentioned John to you, Jack. He’s writing a book on the tour…”

  “Why do you want to talk to me?” Jack said. “I’m not much of a player anymore.”

  I knew this was the part where I was supposed to tell him how great he still was, but I chose a different route. “Because you’re Jack Nicklaus. You can’t write a book about golf without talking to Jack Nicklaus.”

  He smiled when I said that. “So how much time do you need?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, giving him my standard answer. “Maybe an hour or so.”

  Nicklaus burst out laughing as if I had just said the funniest thing he’d ever heard in his life. “An hour?” he said. “You want an hour? I don’t think I’ve ever given anyone an hour in my entire life.”

  This was funny, especially since Nicklaus is famous for using up most of an hour at times to answer one question.

  He was looking at poor Andy O’Brien as if Andy had allowed a streaker into the press room. Andy was pale.

  “I think John meant that would be his ideal,” Andy said. “He doesn’t really expect you to give him a whole hour.”

  “An hour?” Nicklaus repeated, still sounding stunned.

  “Look, Jack, no problem,” I said. “Thanks for the time.”

  I turned and walked away.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Nicklaus said.

  “You said you’d never given anyone an hour in your life,” I said.

  “I didn’t say no, did I?” he said.

  “No, but I thought ‘I’ve never given anyone an hour in my entire life’ was a pretty clear answe
r.”

  “Not so. Talk to Andy. We’ll get it set up.”

  So I went back to talking to Andy. I honestly believe he did everything he could to pin Jack down to a time and place, but by the time I got to the PGA Championship that summer—my last tournament before heading home to write the book—I still hadn’t talked to Nicklaus. On Monday morning, I bumped into Ken Kennerly, then one of Nicklaus’s agents, in the locker room. Ken, who had actually been a considerable help to me early in my research, was fully aware of my Quixotic quest to talk to Jack.

  “Did it ever get done?” he asked.

  “No, and I’ve pretty much given up,” I said. “This is my last week before I go home to write.”

  “Let me see what I can do,” Ken said.

  The next day he told me Jack had agreed to talk to me—if I flew back to Palm Beach with him and did the interview on his plane.

  “What if he misses the cut?” I said to Ken. “Worse, what if he plays early on Sunday and leaves before the tournament is over?”

  “Either way, he’ll go straight from here to the airport,” Ken said. “Your call.”

  There really was no call to be made. It was Jack Nicklaus. It was a book on golf. I had to do it.

  The PGA that year was at Southern Hills in Tulsa—a pleasant place in August, if you are preparing to deal with the fires of hell in the afterlife. I checked flights. It would actually be better for me if Nicklaus missed the cut, even though the only way to get back to Tulsa from Palm Beach was to get up at 4:30 the next morning to fly back with a stopover in Atlanta. At least that way I would be free and clear on Saturday and Sunday to focus on the tournament—if I didn’t fall asleep.

  Nicklaus played in the middle of the day on Thursday and shot 79, grinding over a four-foot putt on eighteen. “Didn’t want the snowman [8, as in the first half of 80] on my card,” he said later.

  I called my travel agent and booked my flights for Saturday morning. Not long after Nicklaus finished, I was sitting in the locker room with Jeff Sluman, who had been in Nicklaus’s group that day.