P.G.A. Spells Death

by James Y. Bartlett

  But in 1957, change was very much in the air at the PGA. Since the end of the Second World War, the championship had been losing ground with golf fans. Ben Hogan, the cock of the walk in golf after the war, played his last PGA Championship in 1948. Like many of the touring pros of his day, Hogan didn’t like playing in the dog days of August heat. He also didn’t like match play, where one round against a nobody who started sinking putts could send you home.

  And the way the tournament was set up back then, a player who made it into the finals or quarterfinals could expect to play more than 200 holes, all in the August heat.

  Another reason the PGA lacked big-name talent in the field was the PGA’s own rules. First, in order to be eligible to play, a golfer had to be an official member of the PGA of America, and to attain that membership, you had to serve a five-year apprenticeship, working part-time at a country club selling shirts, giving lessons and schmoozing with the members.

  Five years! And in 1957, there were a handful of young, up-and-coming golfers trying to earn a living on the PGA Tour circuit. Guys like Arnold Palmer and Mike Souchak and amateurs like Billy Joe Patton and a 17-year-old Jack Nicklaus were not allowed to play the 1957 PGA Championship because of the apprentice rule.

  Of course, the PGA of America also had a ‘Caucasians-only’ membership rule until 1963, but that’s another story.

  So the 1957 PGA Championship had a weak field, at an unknown golf course (which had contributed the usual $40,000 to the PGA in order to get the tournament) held in the heat of the summer. Also, there was no national television or radio coverage. It’s no wonder the PGA lost its shirt.

  All of that helps explain why the board of directors of the PGA voted later in 1957 to change the format of the event from match play to medal. They also had TV cameras in place in 1958 at the Llanerch Country Club in Haverford, Pennsylvania. They also made sure golf’s matinee idol, Arnold Palmer, was in the field. He didn’t win. In fact, Arnie never won the PGA Championship, although he finished second a bunch of times.

  It would be another ten years, in 1969, that the PGA Tour officially split off from the PGA of America and went on to become one of the most successful and wealthy sports organizations in the world.

  Today, the PGA Championship continues to search for relevance in the world of golf. It still has a weak field, because the PGA of America insists on reserving thirty or so places in the field to the club professionals in its ranks. It’s moved the play dates from the heat of August to the cooler weather of May now, creating a major season that runs from the Masters in April through the Open Championship in July. And it appears to still be open to awarding the tournament venue to the highest bidder, which this year was Conrad Gold and his worldwide resort and club chain.

  But it’s still one of golf’s four major titles. And that means the competition will be fierce, the tension on Sunday afternoon unbearable, and the winner will hold special place in golf’s ongoing history.

  “Arnie never won the PGA?” Billy Ray Bosworth said to me. We were in our greenside booth above the 16th green. It was Thursday afternoon. The PGA Championship had been underway since just after 6:30 that morning. We were on the air.

  “Nope,” I said. “Total choke job.”

  I heard Ben Oswald start yelling in my ear.

  “My executive producer is yelling at me,” I told the viewers. “Apparently he thinks that Arnold Palmer should never be criticized, may he rest in peace.”

  “Well,” Boz said, “He was kinda The Man.”

  “I agree,” I said. “He was also one of the nicest men I ever met. But he never won the PGA, nice guy or not. And he had his chances. Finished second in 1964, 1968 and 1970. But he never delivered the final round heroics he needed.”

  “But he’s still The Man, right Hacks?”

  “Sure, sure,” I said. “If that makes you feel better.”

  We continued doing our Boz and Hack show on sixteen. I noticed many of the players went with three woods or less off the tee on the hole, trying to find the sliver of fairway between the water on the left, and the sand and thick rough down the right. Then they had to work a mid-iron into the small green, water left and behind, two deep bunkers on the right.

  There were a lot of balls in the water. Boz began imitating submarine klaxons…dive, dive, dive…every time a ball splashed. The soundtrack of our golf tournament was beginning to sound a lot like the Hunt for Red October. Ben Oswald, who I had noticed was yelling at us a lot less than normal, told Boz to knock it off. “Can the sound effects, you moron,” he said on the intercom at one point, late in the afternoon. “You sound like you’re in seventh grade for Chrissakes.”

  The sun was making its way over to Buffalo when we finally went off the air. Shadows drifted across the fairways and the color of the water took on a weird hue: half pink, half orange. When our monitor went black, we packed up, climbed down the ladder and made our way back to Television City. There was a mandatory post-round production meeting.

  I was exhausted. You might think sitting on your tuckus for six or seven hours talking about golf and golfers would be easy, but it’s not. I was drained. I wanted a cold beer, a hamburger and Mary Jane to rub my shoulders. In roughly that order.

  The talent gathered in our trailer, falling into the chairs set around a big conference table. Everyone else looked beat, too. Ben Oswald finally strolled in. He looked like he was ready to go another ten rounds with Muhammad Ali.

  “OK,” he said, sitting down at the head of the table. “That was pretty good. Kenny and Kelsey? Good job on the fairways today. I heard a lot of good insight. Van, Jimmy? Nice work. Tight. As to you two clowns at sixteen? …”

  “Thanks, Boss,” Boz said. “We’ll try to keep the quality high throughout the weekend.”

  “Quality?” Ben said. “I’ve had five calls from the network today, since we went on air. Four of them were passing on complaints about language from religious leaders. I think you offended every one of the world’s major religions.”

  “Who was the fifth call from?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “You said you had five calls,” I said. “Four were from various padres complaining about Boz.”

  “Hey!” Boz said. “You were there, too!”

  “So who was the fifth one from?”

  “The head of IBS,” Oswald said. “He was laughing. Said you two guys were very entertaining.”

  “What did you think, Ben?” I asked.

  “Do you care?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “You’re the television guy. You’ve been doing this for decades. If you think we’re screwing up, I want to know.”

  He sat there silently for a bit. Everyone was watching him. I was expecting an Oswaldian explosion without parallel, and felt my lower colonic entrance slam shut.

  “I can’t stand your act,” he said, finally. “It goes against everything I’ve ever believed about good TV. You are brash, mouthy, you’ve made yourselves the story, not the golf. You insult the traditions of the game. You insult the warriors who have gone before us. You’re snarky, impolite, smart-assy. I can’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t fire both of your butts.”

  He stopped.

  “But…” I prompted.

  “But it seems to be working,” he said, dropping his head in defeat. “The preliminary numbers are in, and the fans are eating it up. Fuckin’ nighttime comedians are riffing off your stuff. Social media has gone crazy. Clips of you guys are getting tweeted and retweeted by the millions. You’ve gone viral.”

  There was a silence in the room that lasted for a few seconds.

  “So is this a good time to ask for a raise?” I said.

  Van Collins, the old man of the group, who had been listening quietly with his head bowed, snapped his head up and stared at me. Sitting next to him, Jimmy Williams’ face broke out in a grin. Then Van began to laugh, a deep baritone sound that came from his gut. Jimmy joined in
, and pretty soon, everyone at the table was howling. Boz pounded me on the back.

  Ben Oswald sat there, silent, staring. He looked like he wanted to grab something or someone by the neck and start choking the life out of it. But after a couple minutes of laughter from the crew at the table, he couldn’t help himself. He began to laugh, too.

  25

  Later that night, I called home. I’d had my beer (and a couple extra) and a burger and now I needed some wifely contact.

  “So, how’d you like the show today?” I asked her.

  I heard a long deep sigh. “You’re kidding, right?” she said. “I spent all day with my band of merry fourth graders, who all think they’re as smart as fifth graders already because it’s the end of the school year; I had to take Vickie to a play date; I had to bathe, feed, and re-bathe DJ and he has a cold, and now I’ve got a couple hours of packing boxes left. And you want to know if I spent any time sitting around watching golf on TV?”

  Her voice was beginning to rise in timbre. It hadn’t yet reached the shriek stage, but it was getting close.

  “I withdraw the question,” I said. “Besides, you know it went well. I wouldn’t have asked, otherwise.”

  “Good for you,” she said. She sighed again. “I’m sorry, Hacker,” she said. “It’s just been a long day.”

  “Completely understand,” I said. “I’ll be home late Sunday, and we haven’t got another broadcast for two weeks. So I’ll take over the packing and moving part.”

  “That will be a big help,” she said.

  “DJ call out my name yet?” I asked.

  “Not so I can tell,” she said. “He did say ‘blaaaad” today. That’s pretty close.”

  “Kid’s a freakin’ genius,” I said. “Mensa material for sure.”

  She laughed. I liked that sound. Mary Jane had a wonderful laugh.

  “So, no new murders today?” she asked, a mischievous tone in her voice.

  “Not yet,” I said. “But there’s still a couple hours left in the day.”

  She yawned. Loudly.

  “Why don’t you go to bed?” I said. “Try again tomorrow.”

  “Good idea,” she said. “I was going to start packing up some of DJ’s picture books first. The only one he’s heavily into at the moment is Goodnight, Moon. I’ve started to hate that one.”

  “Screw the picture books,” I said. “Get some sleep.”

  After we said our good nights, I decided to wander down to the inn’s restaurant and bar for a nightcap. IBS had booked most of the rooms in the place, so I figured there’d be some friendly faces in the lounge.

  I was surprised to find the place mostly empty. It was a little after ten and there were maybe eleven people in the place. Most were are tables, finishing up a late meal with coffee and dessert. There were three people sitting at the long wooden bar. Two guys, who I didn’t recognize, were sitting together at one end watching a ball game, but on the far end there was just one young woman, sitting alone. Jenny LoBianco. She was staring into her half-finished pint of beer.

  I slipped onto the chair next to her.

  “Hey, Jenny,” I said. “Mind if I join you for a quick one?”

  She turned her head and looked at me. Her eyes were shadowed, her face strained. Then she shook her head and forced herself to smile.

  “Oh, hi, Hacker,” she said. “Sure.”

  I ordered a shot of Bowmore from the barkeep and when it arrived, I held it up. She picked up her beer and we clinked.

  “That history segment came out pretty good,” she said. “Oswald was pleased. He even told me that, if you can believe it.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I hope he’s feeling OK. If Ben is handing out compliments, he must be sick.”

  She smiled. “True enough,” she said.

  “You have any ideas how we can make the next one better?” I asked.

  Her back straightened and her eyes brightened.

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do,” she said.

  “Lay it on me,” I said, and sipped a little of my peaty Islay scotch.

  For the next ten or fifteen minutes, Jenny LoBianco reeled off a dissertation on how to improve Hacker’s History. She started with describing the demographic breakdown of our audience and how we could direct our segment to appeal to that demographic. She had a few topics in mind that we could develop for future segments and described how they should look and sound and feel. She spoke in the strange language of television production, all framing shots and cutaways and white values and other stuff I had no idea what she was talking about. I bounced a few ideas back at her, and she liked a couple of them. When I next looked up, it was past eleven.

  I drained the last of my second wee dram.

  “Shooter was right,” I said.

  “About what?” she said.

  “That you were sharp,” I said. “You really get this TV stuff. I’ll ask Ben if he can assign you to work with Tony and me. Produce the segment. I think the three of us would kill it.”

  She beamed at me. “That would be great, Hacker,” she said. “I’d love to.”

  I motioned to the bartender to bring me the bill for both our drinks, and she began gathering her stuff to go upstairs to bed. She had a small purse next to her on the bar, sitting on top of a stack of yellow legal pads, file folders and a big leather-bound notebook. When I saw it, I did a double-take.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “That notebook looks familiar.”

  She looked at it, then picked it up and held it in her hands.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It was Arnie’s. I like having it around. It reminds me of him.”

  “Where did you get it?” I asked.

  She held the notebook, rubbing its nubby surface as if it were an old friend.

  “He left it at my place,” she said. “That night …”

  Her voice caught, and she couldn’t speak for a bit. She was remembering.

  “After work, we went to my place,” she told me. “I didn’t have anything in the apartment to eat, so he said he’d go out and pick some stuff up at the Fairway. Some wine. Something we could have for dinner. He …he never came home.”

  Her head dropped, and she began to weep, quietly, head down so no one could see.

  “So when he left the market, he wasn’t going to his apartment, he was heading back to yours,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I live about five blocks from him, just off West End Avenue. I told all this to Jefferies at the NYPD.”

  “Did you tell them you had Arnie’s notebook?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t…didn’t want to give it up. I-I just like having it near. It feels like he’s with me.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Have you looked inside? Maybe there were some notes or something that might be important to lead back to whoever did this to him.”

  She shook her head again. “I’ve glanced through it. I can’t see anything relevant,” she said. “Arnie made a lot of lists, and there are many of them on almost every page. But there was nothing I could see.”

  “Can I take a look?” I said. “Maybe I can see something you didn’t notice. New set of eyes.”

  Jenny shrugged and handed the notebook over. I opened it. It was your typical office organizer—the heavy leather case opened to a week-by-week calendar, with lines for each hour of the day and space to add more notes. There was probably an alphabetized phone list in the back. A couple of straps and compartments on the inside cover provided places where he could have inserted a calculator and maybe his cell phone. Everything in its place and a place for everything. The motto of those office organizer types.

  The calendar pages were covered with lots of scribbled notes. Arnie seemed to have been a very well-organized fellow. As Jenny said, he made lots of lists. Most of the entries had something to do with work. Some I could tell were directions and suggestions from Ben Oswald. But there were other notes jotted down
by themselves—phone numbers, one or two words underlined or circled that meant nothing to me. I flipped through the pages to the day he was shot. He had had an eight o’clock breakfast with someone named Hillary and lunch with Ben Oswald.

  Down near the bottom of that day’s column, he had written “6—dinner with JLB.” Jenny LoBianco.

  Just above that, I read another entry: “4:30—D” followed by a question mark.

  “Who is ‘D?’” I asked her. “Dave? Debbie? Don? She shook her head.

  “No idea,” she said.

  “He didn’t come in that night and tell you anything about his day? Who he might have met with?”

  She smiled. “No,” she said. “He mainly wanted to kiss me. Then he asked what I had on hand for dinner. Said he was starving. We looked in the fridge, and he volunteered to go get us something. He left and I took a shower.”

  She stared off into the distance, remembering that terrible night.

  “I waited and waited,” she said. “When he didn’t come back, I thought something had come up at work. He often got late night calls and had to go fix some problem or other. I called, but there was no answer, his phone went to voice mail. So I eventually ate some cereal and just went to bed.”

  Her head dropped, and tears began to flow again.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “It must have been awful.”

  She nodded, silent.

  “I didn’t find out what happened until I went into work the next morning,” she said. “Everyone was stunned. People were crying. It was awful, one of the worst days of my life.”

  “Because no one knew you two were dating,” I said. “That must have made it worse.”

  “Arnie wanted to keep it secret,” she said. “He just didn’t think an intra-office romance was a good idea for someone in his position. He had plans.”

  “Plans?”

  She smiled, a bit sadly. “Arnie was ambitious,” she said. “He knew about all the stuff going on with the network, all the negotiations about the new golf contracts. He wanted to move up.”

  “Like into Ben’s job?” I asked.