Chasing Greatness

by Adam Lazarus

  “I should have just swallowed my pride and gone on and played. But I felt everyone was wondering if I was as good as my word, so I had to stick by my guns.”

  He refused Masters invitations in the spring of 1970 and 1971 before finally returning the next year, but he never truly contended for the title: Never slipping on a Green Jacket didn’t surprise Trevino, because Augusta’s great length and wide-open spaces weren’t “conducive to my style of play.

  “That was the greatest mistake I’ve made in my career,” he later admitted.

  Part of Trevino’s appeal—both to fans and to corporate sponsors, whether Wrangler jeans or Dodge Motor Cars—was that he was the real deal, an authentic everyman. A decade earlier, Arnold Palmer had fit this image: the Steeltown kid who worked at an exclusive country club rather than belonging to one as a member. After more than a decade of raking in the millions, Palmer obviously could no longer pass as everyman. He drove and endorsed Cadillacs, owned (and flew) a private jet, built condominiums and golf resorts, and dressed impeccably sharp.

  Many Americans could no longer relate to that aspect of the new Palmer persona.

  “You look at my galleries. You’ll see tattoos. Plain dresses,” Trevino observed. “I represent the guy who goes to the driving range, the municipal player, the truck driver, the union man, the guy who grinds it out. To them, I am someone who worked hard, kept at it, and made it. Sure, I go out of my way to talk to them. They’re my people.”

  Trevino’s genuine proletarian image—undersized, paunchy, a homegrown swing, all traits the Sunday duffer could relate to—fostered a lucrative marketing strategy of its own. When Bucky Woy set out to sell his client to the Blue Bell clothes company, his “sales pitch would be: ‘If Lee Trevino, with his short, dumpy figure, looks good in Blue Bell jeans, just think how good you’ll look.’ Blue Bell bought it, handed Lee a lucrative, six-figure contract, and began producing and marketing a Trevino line of pants, shirts, and hats.”

  With Woy’s encouragement, details of Trevino’s personality and home life also became part of his appeal to the press, consumers, and corporations. He fed off his ethnic and class heritage, Archie Bunker style, cracking politically incorrect jokes about himself and his family. Poor Hispanics like himself were known in Texas as “Mexicans,” he quipped, but once he became rich he became a “Spaniard.” After his 1968 U.S. Open victory, he joked, “Yeah, I been married before, but I get rid of ’em when they turn twenty-one.” And on more than one occasion at tournaments he told galleries and reporters, “Naw, I didn’t bring my wife here. Do you take a hamburger to a banquet? I didn’t take a six-pack to Milwaukee, did I?”

  Trevino may have fed one-liners to captivate a crowd and merchandise a brand image, but for all his financial success, his private life was a mess, especially compared to that of other elite golfers. While Palmer, Player, Nicklaus, and Billy Casper exemplified steady domestic bliss, Trevino described his marriage as “shaky” and his jokes about his wife only made it worse. In truth, he hardly saw Claudia enough to escalate the frictions between them. He shared a roof more often with his business manager than with his family, and he never truly let go of the marine R&R lifestyle: drinking, carousing, flirting with young girls, and staying out late with his buddies.

  Trevino could win every tournament imaginable, but he would still never fit in with the family-focused, politely prosperous country-club image projected by the Big Three.

  Even Trevino’s most pedestrian personal habits reflected an erratic, unhealthy lifestyle.

  “You’ll seldom see Trevino eating bacon and eggs for breakfast, a sandwich and soup for lunch, steak and a salad for dinner,” Woy observed. “Here’s the kind of food Lee might eat on any given day: two pounds of grapes, a gallon of ice cream, and six dozen cookies—all things he wanted and couldn’t enjoy as a boy.”

  With his cadre of endorsement deals and his “regular guy” image, Trevino had branched out of the sports world and into popular culture. While on the East Coast to play in the Westchester Classic in 1970, he was invited to appear on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, which still taped in New York City. Though he often told reporters he was not a hard drinker, he downed more than a few Scotches at a nearby bar before heading to the green room at NBC Studios. Once there, for the first time in his life, he drank cognac ... a lot of cognac. To the dismay of the usually unflappable Carson, an inebriated Trevino wandered onstage before the live studio audience.

  “I was stumbling, falling-down drunk on national television,” Trevino remembered. “Elaine Stritch, the actress, was on the show with me and she didn’t have one of her all-time-great performances either. She got off on me pretty good, saying she liked little Mexican guys because they made wonderful elevator operators. To show her she couldn’t outwit me, I propositioned her before millions of people.”

  Afterward, an embarrassed Trevino headed south on the New Jersey Turnpike to get as far away as possible from Westchester, finally stopping at a hotel when he could stay awake no longer. He missed his opening tee time Thursday morning; the press simply reported that he overslept. Recognizing that her husband was burned out and possibly on the verge of a breakdown, Claudia scheduled an immediate vacation for them in Acapulco.

  Though the Tonight Show debacle was the closest Trevino ever came to “crashing and burning,” his heavy drinking continued without interruption during the early 1970s and became, by his own admission, a way of life. Having five Scotches during a rain delay at the tail end of a round in the Atlanta Golf Classic was typical of his professional conduct, as was showing up to a tournament hungover or still drunk.

  Whether he was sober or not, the most remarkable feature of Lee Trevino, Class A professional golfer, was that his exceptionally steady game rarely suffered from his off-the-course implosions. He struggled in the second half of the 1969 season due to a knee injury and was unable to win after January. But in 1970, he received the Vardon Trophy for the lowest stroke average on tour, and in 1971, he recorded one of the finest seasons in the history of modern golf.

  Trevino started the 1971 season slowly, dropping out of three early-season tournaments (another increasingly common feature of his whirlwind personal life). But he won two spring tournaments and posted three runner-up and three additional top-five finishes in a ninety-day stretch. Heading into the seventy-first U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club outside Philadelphia, Trevino—with $135,110.10—ranked second only to Nicklaus in earnings.

  At Merion, where Bobby Jones clinched the Grand Slam in 1930, Trevino was as consistent as he had been three years earlier at Oak Hill. Had it not been for an ugly triple bogey at the sixth hole on Friday, the “Happy Hombre” would have again fired par or better in all four rounds of a U.S. Open. Trevino and Nicklaus finished in a tie after seventy-two holes, but Trevino stared down Nicklaus in a Monday-afternoon, eighteen-hole play-off to decide the championship. Trevino saved his best for last, cruising through Merion’s back nine to shoot a 68 and a three-stroke victory in one of the most memorable U.S. Opens in history.

  “Yes, this one is more rewarding,” he told the press. “Someone, Mr. Walter Hagen, I think, once said that anyone can win the Open once, but only a great player can win it twice.”

  It was fitting that Trevino would show such reverence for Hagen. Half a century earlier, Hagen, also a two-time U.S. Open champion, had boldly challenged the sharp line of class distinction at elite, private country clubs in both the United States and Great Britain. He, too, enjoyed an excessive lifestyle that didn’t seem to faze his game. And Trevino, who earlier in his career had relied on mind games to gain an edge in high-stakes gambling matches, complimented Hagen as “a helluva psych artist” for his dramatic displays of confidence before every match.

  Trevino’s brilliance did not end in Philadelphia. Nine days after his victory at Merion, he headed north of the border for the 1971 Canadian Open. Trevino began the final round two strokes behind former Masters champion Art Wall Jr. Playing one group ahead of Wa
ll, Super Mex immediately made up the deficit by holing out a wedge for an eagle on the first hole. Trevino—who would score a five under 67—and Wall spent the rest of the July Fourth Independence Day battling neck and neck across Montreal’s Richelieu Valley Golf Club. With a sudden-death play-off needed to determine the winner, Trevino dropped an eighteen-foot, left-to-right sidehill putt on the first play-off hole to take his second national championship in as many weeks.

  The next day, he left Montreal for Southport, England, and Royal Birkdale, the site of the one hundredth British Open championship. Trevino probably felt more at home at Birkdale than at the aristocratic American settings of Baltusrol, Merion, and Augusta National, and not simply because he had played Birkdale so well during the Ryder Cup two years earlier. During the long week leading up to the final round, the British press educated their American associates about the intersection of golf and social class.

  In comparison to the other six British courses that rotate the Open championship, Birkdale, said one English reporter, “is the worst of the lot ... Not in terms of space, cordiality, clubhouse access, hotel rooms and the things that helped produce the record crowds, but in terms of enchantment, charm, playing quality and tradition. ‘Birkdale is what you might call nouveau riche,’ said one journalist, referring to the fact that the course only got started in 1889.’” When Arnold Palmer—the son of a greenkeeper from blue-collar America-won his first British Open title there, he fit the Birkdale profile.

  While Trevino’s transition from indigent kid to Horizon Hills upstart blended perfectly with Birkdale, his celebrity was beginning to weigh him down. A six-to-one favorite (defending champion Nicklaus was four-to-one), Trevino became slightly annoyed by catcalls from a few rude spectators who cheered when he missed putts during round two. He also grew more than “a little testy” when the curious British fans crowded him as he tried to sharpen his stroke on the practice green.

  But Trevino played through the annoyances at Birkdale, shot 70 or better each day, and won his third National Open championship in four weeks.

  “This is the most fantastic day of my life,” he told the press. “To be established as a world-class player you have to win one of the big ones staged outside the United States. I think from now on that I must be regarded as world-class.”

  Trevino was world-class, and not just on the golf course. The $13,200 check he earned pushed his winnings over $200,000 in prize money for the season, breaking Billy Casper’s all-time earnings record in 1968, with more than four months remaining in the 1971 season. How Trevino spent that money soon earned more attention than how he won it. He donated more than one-third of the paycheck ($4,800) to an orphanage in Formby, the small Merseyside town in northwest England.

  “When I win a championship of this stature, I have the feeling that the man upstairs is looking after me and I want to give something back,” Trevino said. “I wanted to do something for the kids like me who had a difficult start in life.”

  This was not the first time, nor the last, that Trevino flashed his philanthropic side. He visited sick children in hospitals and competed in numerous charity pro-ams, including several in Puerto Rico, with his outgoing Hispanic friend Juan “Chi Chi” Rodriguez. Trevino had also donated $5,000 of his winning paycheck from May’s Memphis Open to the local St. Jude hospital, and even handed over his entire purse from his 1969 World Cup team victory (with Orville Moody) to a Singapore caddie scholarship. Years later, on the Senior Tour, Trevino earned $1 million for a hole in one at an event and promptly gave half to the St. Jude Children’s Hospital.

  Perhaps his most memorable gesture came in February 1968. With a heavy heart, Trevino won the 1968 Hawaiian Open—just his second PGA tour win-two months after his close friend and frequent motel mate on tour, Hawaii’s Ted Makalena, drowned in a freak swimming accident in Waikiki Beach. Trevino set aside $10,000 of his $25,000 payday to create a trust fund for Makalena’s children.

  “It was such a tragedy—a fine young man with a wife and three kids wiped out in a matter of minutes,” Trevino said. “I had to figure it simply was his time to go. The Lord wanted him and there is nothing more you can say.”

  Trevino often spoke like a golf mercenary, perpetually chasing prize money and endorsement deals. He was also notorious for being a spendthrift (“I could give him $15,000,” Claudia told the Pittsburgh sportswriter Myron Cope in 1968, “and he’d blow it in a week. Money means nothing to him”). So it was not surprising that his public obsession about making a million dollars overshadowed his low-key philanthropy. Professional golf’s version of Robin Hood, Trevino not only instilled pride in poor and minority communities as a sporting hero; he looked after those who had once been poor children like him.

  “The world’s a funny place ...” he said with trenchant irony. “When you have no money, no one will do anything for you. If you become successful and pile up enough money to buy anything you want, people deluge you with gifts you don’t need and try to do all kinds of things for you.”

  WHEN HE RETURNED TO AMERICA, Trevino’s star radiated nationwide. He was on the cover of Newsweek and Time magazines and both Dallas and El Paso honored him with “Lee Trevino Day.” In addition to collecting a second straight Vardon Trophy and PGA Player-of-the-Year awards, he was named Sports Illustrated’s “Sportsman of the Year,” edging out, among others, boxer Joe Frazier, who that March had handed Muhammad Ali his first loss to become heavyweight champion of the world.

  Trevino was arguably as good in 1972, winning three PGA events and successfully defending his British Open crown by holding off Nicklaus with a memorable downhill chip on the seventeenth green at Muirfield. Even more heroic was his play a month earlier in the 1972 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. A serious bout with tracheobronchitis, an infection of the windpipe and bronchial tubes, could not keep him from competing, even though he spent several days in the hospital immediately beforehand, and his doctor urged him not to play. Loaded up with painkillers and antibiotics, Trevino pulled within one of the leader after three rounds but ran out of stamina during the cold, windswept playing conditions of the final day.

  Trevino had been tremendous on the course that year. But off the course, personal melodramas drained his time, energy, and peace of mind.

  Trevino broke his two-year Masters boycott in April, but a ticket mishap prompted tournament police to attempt to throw his caddie, Neal Harvey, off the course during a pretournament practice session. Trevino confronted the police and threatened to withdraw if Harvey was not allowed to caddie. This embarrassing public controversy only fueled the behind-the-scenes drama, as Trevino was already on thin ice with Masters chairman Clifford Roberts after refusing Roberts’s invitation for coffee one morning by saying, “Just tell Mr. Roberts I don’t drink coffee.”

  Later that August, Trevino arrived in Boston only the night before the U.S. Industries Classic began at Pleasant Valley Country Club, and didn’t have time to play a practice round. With Nicklaus absent, a high finish by Trevino would spring him back into the race for the 1972 money title. But after shooting a first-round 74, he had to be helped by marshals to a waiting car, with a high fever and a virus infection. Trevino returned to the course the next day, fought through the pain and blur, and finally recovered well enough to shoot a closing round 68, the second-lowest of the tournament. He finished in a tie for nineteenth.

  More health problems festered in late October, as Trevino broke a blood vessel jogging near his home in El Paso. Again, the incident did not stop him from competing the following week and placing second in the Texas State Open. What did prevent him from finishing another autumn event, however, was his increasingly volatile temper. At the Sahara Open in Las Vegas, Trevino became so angered by slow play on the tenth hole that he marched off the course and withdrew from the tournament. Almost immediately, he regretted his decision, and he actually asked tournament officials to impose disciplinary action. He was fined $850.

  “The damage has been done so the apologies [h
e telegrammed Sahara tournament officials to apologize] don’t do any good,” Trevino told reporters. “But I know that one hour after I had done this, I would have given $5,000 if I could have walked back out there and resumed play.”

  A strong end to the 1972 season helped Nicklaus distance himself from Trevino and everyone else in earnings and victories. With second place in earnings all but locked up, Trevino, who had competed in thirty-one PGA tournaments during the year (compared to Nicklaus’s nineteen), stunned the family with a decision late in November.

  After wrapping up a golf instructional television series, he returned to El Paso to spend Thanksgiving at home.

  “I’m usually on the road playing tournaments this time of year. I decided it was time for a break, time to relax with my family and kind of get to know my wife and kids again,” he told a local reporter. “I just hope no one asks me to carve the turkey. It’s been so long since I’ve done it, I hardly remember how. For the past five years I’ve been eating bologna sandwiches for Thanksgiving.”

  As Trevino settled down a bit with his family, he tried rededicating himself to golf. He vowed to give up drinking and jogged all winter. He dropped twenty pounds. Though he liked what he saw in the mirror, he didn’t like what he saw on his scorecards.

  “[Losing the weight] ruined my swing, and I got moody,” he said. “Now I’m going back to enjoying the game and enjoying myself. If I put a big score on the board, well, I’m just not going to worry about it.”

  The “ruined” swing manifested itself in his missing his first cut in over a year at Riviera in January’s Los Angeles Open. Although at first Trevino remained unconcerned by his struggles, the press and his beloved fans, dubbed “Lee’s Fleas”—two groups that had usually shown him unconditional support-speculated about the decline in his performance. That did not sit well with Trevino.