He had forgotten. I was a bit miffed, but people forget appointments on occasion; God knows I’ve done it. The next day when I saw Duval, I said, “Hey, David, I was on the putting green at four o’clock.”
Honestly, I expected him to smack himself on the forehead and say, “Oh God, I forgot.” Instead, he said, “Yeah, I was kind of tired so I just went back to the hotel.”
“So you just blew me off because you were tired?”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“How about, ‘And I’m really sorry I did that and didn’t at least take five minutes to come by the press room [which at San Diego back then was directly above the locker room] and tell you or leave you a message that I was blowing you off because I was tired.’ ”
Duval smiled. “How about if I say it this way: You’re right, I’m an asshole.”
“That’s much better.”
“And you know what?” he added. “I am an asshole. You’re right. I apologize. If you still want to talk to me, how about if I buy you dinner tonight?”
All was forgiven. When we did have dinner and David told me about his boyhood, which included the death of his older brother after David had given him his bone marrow to try to save him, I thought I had a much better understanding of why he tended to keep to himself.
“Being alone was the only place I could find peace after Brent died,” he said. “My family life was chaotic. My parents fought all the time. The one place in the world I was truly happy was alone at the golf course. I could spend hours—I mean hours—all alone in ninety-five-degree heat with my feet dug into a bunker practicing and enjoy every minute of it.
“I still do it.”
Duval was so different from the image he had cultivated it was almost mind-blowing. With the sunglasses and his Southern accent, his penchant for chewing tobacco and the fact that he enjoyed hunting, I would have labeled him a redneck right away. God knows the tour has a few of them. Duval was about as thoughtful as anyone I’d met in any sport.
He found it laughable that some people had labeled him a tour intellectual because he had once quoted Ayn Rand during an interview. “That makes me an intellectual?” he joked. “Come to think of it, in a group that considers USA Today heavy reading, maybe I am an intellectual.”
Duval almost won the Masters in 1998, losing by one shot to Mark O’Meara when O’Meara rolled in a twenty-foot birdie putt on the eighteenth hole. By early in 1999 he had gone past Woods to become the number one ranked player in the world after shooting 59 on the final day of the Bob Hope to come from way behind and win. Woods took back the number one spot and began to completely dominate the game. For a while, Duval chased him: he finally won his first major at the 2001 British Open after finishing second to Woods at the Masters that year, when Woods was completing his Tiger Slam.
That British Open was his last truly great moment in the game. Not long after, he met his wife, Susie, got married, and adopted her three kids. Then they had two of their own children. He moved to the suburbs of Denver, became a very proficient skier, and all but disappeared off the golf map. In 2009, almost from out of nowhere, he finished tied for second at the U.S. Open at Bethpage Black. The oft-asked question that week was “Where has David Duval been for nine years?”
The answer was, in many ways, simple: he had been finding happiness. And once he found it, he didn’t want anything, including golf, to take it away from him.
18
Special Kids and Brick Walls
I’VE ALWAYS ENJOYED SPENDING time with Larry Brown, the man who has coached everywhere at some point in his life. Larry was best described years ago by Tony Kornheiser, for whom he was once a camp counselor: “Larry is completely sincere in absolutely everything he says. Of course, the next day he will say something completely and totally contradictory and be just as sincere.”
Back in 1988 when I was working on A Season Inside, Larry was at Kansas and Danny Manning was a senior. They were—thank God—a big part of the book right from the start, so I spent a lot of time that winter with Larry. Rumors were rife—and correct—that Walt Hazzard was about to get fired at UCLA, a job Larry had left to become coach of the New Jersey Nets in 1981.
“That was my dream job,” Larry said one morning at breakfast. “I loved Mr. [J. D.] Morgan [the athletic director] and I loved Los Angeles. That’s really where I should be coaching.”
When I pointed out that the opportunity to do that again might come at the end of the season, Larry waved me off. “No way. They’d never bring me back.”
Except that they would have. Kansas went from 12–8 and hoping for an NIT home game (I still remember sitting on the bus pulling out of Ames, Iowa, after a loss to Iowa State while Larry asked his coaches if he thought they could get a home game) to winning the national championship. The team was dubbed “Danny and the Miracles” after they stunned heavily favored Oklahoma in the championship game.
Two days later, Larry flew to UCLA to interview for his “dream job.” When he got back, I called him to see how it had gone.
“The people were great,” he said. “They offered me the job.”
“So you’re going to take it.”
There was a deep sigh on the other end of the phone. “You know, it’s kind of a no-win situation,” he said. “I love Kansas, I love the people there, but I love UCLA too.”
“Isn’t that more like a no-lose situation?”
He laughed, turned down UCLA, and then a month later found the perfect solution: having turned down one place he loved to stay at another place he loved, he decided to become coach of the San Antonio Spurs.
That was Larry.
It was also Larry to call almost everyone he had ever met or worked with a “special kid.” He called fifty-year-old men special kids. The only person I never heard him call a special kid was Dean Smith, whom he had played for in college. Like all Carolina people, Larry worshipped Coach Smith.
One year when he was coaching the Indiana Pacers, Larry held training camp in (where else?) Chapel Hill. Dean often came down to watch practice. One night a fight broke out and two players—one was Byron Scott, the other a rookie—really got into it. Multiple F-bombs were dropped before everyone was separated. Larry looked white as a ghost. When practice was over, he ran over to apologize to Dean for what he had heard. Dean waved a hand at him and laughed. “I’ve heard those words before,” he said.
“I’m so humiliated,” Larry said afterward. “I can’t believe Coach Smith heard my players talking that way. I feel terrible.”
He was completely sincere. And the players involved, F-bombs or not, were still special kids.
As much as I like Larry, I got to a point in my career where I got tired of hearing about special kids—especially in big-time college athletics, where the one thing that made most kids special was the ability to play. They could do just about anything else off the field or off the court and it didn’t matter, as long as they could perform, as long as they could win championships, and as long as they were future number one draft picks.
I CAN’T REMEMBER EXACTLY when I knew I’d had enough of the so-called big time, but I can remember the exact moment when I knew I wanted to do a book on the Army-Navy rivalry.
It was at my first Army-Navy game in 1990. I had grown up a big Army football fan and always watched the game on TV. When I was a kid my parents took me up to West Point once every fall for a football game. We would arrive early, go over to the plain to watch the cadets march, and then have lunch before kickoff inside Michie Stadium. I loved everything about West Point: it was spectacular, especially during the fall, and the traditions awed me. What’s more, Army was good.
The Cadets were especially good during a three-year period between 1966 and 1968, when I was just beginning to really understand sports. I was vaguely aware of the fact that Paul Dietzel was considered a big-time coach when he left Army (I would learn later that he had coached a national championship te
am at LSU).
Army went 8–2, 8–2, and 7–3 during those three seasons under Coach Tom Cahill, who was named to replace Dietzel at the last possible minute after attempts to hire another big-time coach had failed. Steve Lindell was Army’s quarterback those three seasons, and they had a superb running back named Charlie Jarvis. In 1967 the Cadets were actually invited to the Sugar Bowl, but the Pentagon refused to let the team go because it was concerned about the image of cadets partying in the streets of New Orleans while there were soldiers dying in Vietnam. To this day that decision remains controversial, especially with that generation of Army graduates.
All I knew was I expected to watch Army in the Sugar Bowl and instead I found myself watching a three-loss LSU team.
Army football fell on hard times in the 1970s, in large part because of Vietnam. There weren’t that many quality athletes who wanted to sign on at the service academies, knowing that they would face a five-year service commitment (up from four) and might very well find themselves in a guerrilla war not long after graduation.
Even though I had gone to Army games as a kid and watched the Army-Navy game on TV every year, I really didn’t have any idea of the intense feelings players from the academies had for football until I was in college. Then it was a fluke incident that gave me my first clue.
In October of my junior year, Duke played at Army. Neither team was very good: Duke would finish the season 4–5–2 and Army would end up 2–9. The game was played on a raw, windy day at Michie Stadium, and Duke pulled away late to win, 21–10. I was covering the game not only for the Chronicle but for the Durham Morning Herald, so I had a lot of work to do once the game was over. And I had to do it fast: the Herald wanted a lead and a sidebar and, since I was traveling with the team, both had to be done before the Duke bus left to go back to the airport.
There was no press box elevator, so after writing the first few graphs of my lead to get a head start, I made my way through the stands and began looking for the Duke locker room. Someone pointed to a door underneath the stands and told me that was where I could find the players.
He was right. Except the players I found were from Army.
Until the building of the multimillion-dollar Kimsey Center in 2005, the Army players and coaches used what was called “the halftime room” to meet (cleverly enough) at halftime and right after games—because it was a little bit of a hike to get to the actual locker room. There was no guard on the door, so I just pulled it open, expecting to find Duke players and coaches.
Instead I found the entire Army team—many of the players in tears—with one of the players (probably either Al Staerkel or Scott Gillogly, who were the captains that season) standing in front of his teammates and giving a passionate speech. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but here’s the gist of it: “We should have won this game. We deserved to win this game. We were better prepared, we were ready, we took the fight to them. How could we lose? This is not right! We are an Army football team and Army football teams do not accept losing this way! Does everyone understand me?”
He went on in that same vein for several minutes while I stood transfixed at the door. No one even looked in my direction. It was, looking back, my first experience with being invisible as a reporter. Part of me was, to be honest, amused by what I was hearing. They had just lost a game to a mediocre team and their record at that moment was 2–3, en route to 2–9.
But hearing the passion in that voice and seeing the looks on the players’ faces gave me an understanding of just how important playing football was to these cadets—none of whom would be pros, none of whom would ever play in a bowl game. It was a scene that stayed with me.
Two years later I found myself working at the Washington Post. Even though my first two years on staff were spent as a night police reporter, I still worked for the sports staff whenever I had free time, and my first experience covering a Navy football game came in 1978. I was actually on vacation early that fall on Shelter Island when George Solomon called me. Bob Fachet usually covered the Midshipmen, but he had another assignment and George wanted to know if I could make it to Connecticut to cover Navy-UConn that Saturday. “Call Tom Bates, he’s the SID,” George said. “He’ll get you a credential and take care of you.”
So I called Tom Bates, who would come to be a close friend over the years. Bates was a graduate of Notre Dame but loved Navy. He was very good at what he did and, to put it mildly, brought as much emotion to the job as the Midshipmen brought to the football field and the basketball court.
Bates told me he would leave me a credential and a parking pass at the team hotel on Friday night. I thanked him and was about to hang up when he said, “Hey, let me ask you a question. Just how old are you?”
I wasn’t sure what the relevance of the question was, but I had gotten used to people expressing surprise that someone my age worked for the Washington Post. In fact, at the end of my summer internship, when he didn’t have any openings on his staff for me, George Solomon had put me in touch with Dave Smith, who was then the sports editor of the Boston Globe.
“He’s got an opening for someone to cover colleges,” George said. “I told him about you. He wants to bring you up there for an interview. I think he’ll hire you.”
That notion thrilled me. If I couldn’t work for the Post, the Globe would be my next choice. (Remember, the New York Times sports section was pretty mediocre in those days.) I often bought the Globe while in college, especially on Sundays, when it had a massive sports section. I also loved Boston. I even knew a girl who lived there.
So I called Dave Smith.
“George is a big fan of yours,” he said. “He sent me some of your clips. When do you think you can come up here so we can meet and talk?”
“Anytime,” I said.
“Perfect. We’ll set it up. By the way, where were you before the Post? He didn’t tell me.”
“Well, I worked on the student newspaper while I was in college.”
“I know that. I mean since then.”
“I just graduated in June and I’ve had this internship at the Post since then…”
“Wait a minute, how old are you?”
“I’m twenty-one.”
“You’re how old?”
“Twenty-one.”
“George didn’t tell me that. Listen, kid [yes, he said kid], get yourself about five years of experience and then call me back. I don’t hire people at the Globe who don’t have any experience.”
With that he hung up. Not long afterward he became the sports editor at the Washington Star. By then I was working full-time at the Post and doing pretty well beating the Star to stories. Whenever I ran into Smith I was really tempted to say, “Gee, Dave, in another couple of years I might have enough experience to work for you.”
Now, a little more than a year later, Tom Bates was asking me how old I was. When I told him, he almost gasped.
“What?” he said. “When did George Solomon start sending children to cover Navy football? Doesn’t he know that we’re good? What is he thinking?”
I was, of course, indignant. “Mr. Bates, I think I’m qualified to cover Navy football. I’ve covered some stories on the metro staff that were a little tougher than covering a football game.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “But don’t screw this up. This is important.”
I wasn’t sure just how important a Navy-Connecticut football game was, but I told him I’d do the best I could. Years later, Tom and I would often joke about that first conversation because it was so Tom. I covered the game and Navy won 30–0 and went 9–3 that season, beating Brigham Young in the Holiday Bowl. So it was important. But I don’t think I screwed up the game story. Or even the sidebar.
By the time I left the Post in 1988, I had covered Navy a lot in both football and basketball. I had covered the David Robinson basketball teams, which was a joy because they kept shocking big-time teams and their roster was packed with players who would fill your notebook in a heartbeat. Th
e closest I think I’ve ever come to losing my cool and cheering on press row was the day Navy beat Syracuse in the Carrier Dome in 1986 in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. In fact, they blew them out of their own building. This was two days after Indiana had lost to Cleveland State and I was still riding a lot of adrenaline and mixed emotions about the end of my season with the Hoosiers. I’m not sure I was ever happier for a team than I was for Navy that day.
Five years later, when I was working for Frank Deford at the short-lived (sixteen months) National Sports Daily, I suggested doing a take-out piece on Army-Navy, focusing on what the rivalry meant to the players. Even then the scene I had witnessed in the halftime room fifteen years earlier was in the back of my mind.
I talked to a half-dozen players from Army and Navy before I wrote the piece. Two stood out, both seniors: one was Anthony Noto, who should have been too small to play linebacker for Army but played it quite well—even though he’d been through more surgeries than I can count. The other was Alton Grizzard, Navy’s quarterback and captain. Grizzard had led a last-minute Navy drive in the rain a year earlier, hurdling two tacklers to pick up a fourth down and getting Navy into position for the game-winning field goal.
Navy’s kicker that year was Frank Schenk—pronounced Shank—and Noto told me that he had spent the summer repeating Schenk’s name to himself every time he got a little bit tired in the weight room. And Grizzard was exactly the kind of person you would expect to be a future Navy SEAL, which he turned out to be. He was tough and honest and was angry at the notion of going through a fourth straight losing season. The Mids were 5–5 and so were the Cadets.
“They’re the same guys we are,” Grizzard said. “They’re tough, they’re smart, they’ll never give up. I respect the hell out of them. And I won’t sleep for the next year if we don’t beat them.”
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