Men in Green

This guidebook is joyfully dedicated to my Philadelphia pathfinders,
Bob Warner
and
Jeannie Hemphill.

We are family.

I got all my sisters with me.

We are family.

Get up everybody and sing!

—“We Are Family” by Sister Sledge Pittsburgh Pirates theme song, 1979

Augusta beckoned, as she does.

I was heading there by way of Charlotte, made one wrong turn, and found myself on Wilkinson Boulevard, pointing for downtown. One wrong turn and my mind went into a drift. All these old-timey motels hanging on. Which one was it?

I was remembering a day from thirty years earlier. More than thirty. It was the night of my brother's college graduation, and I was flying from Boston to Charlotte to caddie in a tournament there, a
professional
tournament, with stars in the field and a big cardboard check for the winner. Fred Graham, one of Cronkite's lieutenants on CBS News, was on my flight, sitting in first class, smoking a cigar. It was Fred Graham, for sure. He had that scar on his chin.

Scars were more common then. When I was growing up—in the village of Patchogue on the South Shore of Long Island in the sixties and seventies—there were still World War I vets on the benches by the VFW Hall with scars both visible and hidden. (We all knew the phrase
combat fatigue
.) My baseball hero, Cleon Jones, had a scar on his right cheek, the residue of a young-buck car accident that had sent him flying through a windshield. I learned about this face-changing mishap in
Cleon
, his 1970 autobiography, which I devoured when it became available at the Patchogue Library. Soon after, in that same library, I found Cleon Jones's phone number in Mobile, Alabama. What a thrill, to look at that exotic 205 area code and imagine the scene on the other end. And in that same vein, here was Fred Graham of CBS News with his positive-ID chin scar. I caught my breath. He was famous, yes, but it was more than that. He was a member of a nomadic tribe—newsmen—a group forever on the prowl, always going to some new place. It was May 1979. I was newly nineteen and looking to join the circus myself. Not Fred's. It was Golf Road that was calling.

Wilkinson Boulevard, when I stumbled on it en route to Augusta all those years later, was just another misstep in a long series of them for me, on the wrong street, likely heading the wrong direction, temperamentally incapable of using a smartphone map. No matter. Little waves of happiness were washing over me.

The accidental tourist: I know the concept well. Here I was, in the throes of middle age, and the song of the road was playing at full volume again. It plays for all of us, doesn't it? My own wanderlust is tempered by a powerful desire to get home, be home, stay home. Those urges were especially strong in the years when our kids were in the house. But they had grown into collegians. (My wife, Christine, once brought home a small sign:
CHECKOUT TIME IS 18
.) And even in our Swim Meet years, the pull of the road was always more than background music. In my line of work—
sportswriter
—if you're home too long, something's wrong.

I've never had a true office job, and in our married life Christine and I have both always been coming and going. Our honeymoon was seven months in Europe during which I worked as a caddie on Europe's professional golf tour. On long drives, Christine read aloud Richard Halliburton's
The Royal Road to Romance
. My parents had the massive Arthur Schlesinger biography of RFK that included a photo of Bobby in front of the King David Hotel—Jerusalem, 1948—when he was twenty-two with a gig as a reporter on the
Boston Post
. A snap that inspires me to this day.

My mother and father left Nazi Germany as children with their parents, and many years later they gave long formal interviews about their wartime experiences. They dressed up for the occasion, which my mother does with ease and my father less so. (His dress shoes all have Vibram soles.) My mother spoke of family vacations in a village near a Czechoslovakian forest in the 1930s and her fascination with the Gypsies on the edge of it, with their dark skin and light feet.

In 1959, when Khrushchev was coming to the United States, Mike Wallace was on TV conducting a contest: What one place should U.S. officials take the Soviet leader to show him the real America? The winner would get a car, and our family—with me on the way—needed one. In my father's entry, he said the American hosts should have Khrushchev throw a dart at a U.S. wall map and wherever it stuck was where he would go, so that Nikita and his comrades back home would understand that democracy thrives everywhere in the United States. How did that not win?

One year my brother was given a globe with raised mountain ranges. That was a big deal. Our father had a collection of Mobil travel guides stacked on a basement shelf. I read them front to back. On our family trips, David would read those accordion Hess and Esso road maps for our father like he was reading the back of a baseball card.

David and I were devoted to the fine print of American life. We will know forever the name Lou Niss, traveling secretary of the New York Mets in the Cleon Jones years. He was in the team photo annually. What a job. Whatever that position actually entailed, I could not know. But he was at-large. In the agate type of the sports section in the
New York Times
, under the heading “Today's Games,” whole cities were in transit: New York at St. Louis, Chicago at Philadelphia, Cincinnati at San Francisco.

All my youthful heroes were at-large: the ballplayers and the golfers, the beat writers and the war correspondents, the musicians and their silent roadies. A nod here to some hits from yesteryear: Peter, Paul and Mary singing “Five Hundred Miles,” Glen Campbell singing “Wichita Lineman,” David Wiffen singing “Driving Wheel.” If you told me any of those songs were conceived on the side of the road, it wouldn't surprise me one bit.

Just came up on the midnight special

Honey, how about that

My car broke down in Texas

She stopped dead in her tracks.

Do you like how Wiffen's car gets the feminine pronoun treatment, as ships and principalities once did? My senior-year roommate called his boat of a station wagon Betsy. Another roommate, a physics major, wanted to be a long-distance truck driver. A high school buddy who shined shoes at the village course where I played in Bellport, one town east of Patchogue, saved his tip money for flying lessons. We were all in transit, at least in our dreams. The touring-caddie thing persisted in me for years.

Golf is a road game. Professional golf, of course, but the game as it is played on Sunday mornings, too. You start in one place, head out, have various adventures along the way, turn around, come on home. Chaucer would have had a field day with it, and Updike did. In one of the most beautiful sentences I know, from a short story for the ages, Updike describes an American banker on a Scottish links: “This was happiness, on this wasteland between the tracks and the beach, and freedom, of a wild and windy sort.”

I am certain of little—I am leery of the overconfident reporter—and at nineteen I knew even less. But I knew what anybody with a TV might know: Every week a group of professional golfers assembled in some new and glamorous place and played a leisurely ball-and-stick game for money and glory. I was never going to be one of those golfers. Even with the advantage of starting young, in gym class at South Ocean Avenue Middle School, I never was much better than an 85 shooter at marshy Bellport, where I knew every hump. (In middle age, I have been besieged with the yips, a putting illness that takes away your desire to write down scores.) But I was aware that the golfers on our family TV all had caddies. That's where I saw my opening and my pathway to the circus.

In the winter of '79, in the long winter break of freshman year, I had a brief stint catching T-bars flung by dismounting night skiers at the top of the Bald Hill Ski Bowl. (Named, we always said, for its distinct lack of snow.) On a Saturday afternoon in late January I was watching the Andy Williams San Diego Open in my parents' living room. If golf was on TV, I watched. (My parents and brother had no interest. I had golf for myself.) At one point, CBS decided to show a journeyman doing nothing more than playing well: Randy Erskine, a reliable voice told us, of Battle Creek, Michigan.

I located this Randy Erskine of Battle Creek as I located Cleon Jones of Mobile. I wrote to him and asked him for a summer job as his traveling caddie. If the phrase
tour caddie
existed then, I doubt I knew it. The letter led to a phone call, which led me to a flight to Charlotte, site of the Kemper Open, on a May evening in 1979, when Fred Graham was sitting up front.

I headed out of the Charlotte airport that night and walked over to Wilkinson Boulevard and found a motel room for maybe fifteen dollars. It had to be the first night I was alone in a rented room. Early the next morning, the lady owner gave me a bowl of Raisin Bran and a tiny glass of orange juice and I was off.

The hair on Randy Erskine's arms was bleached blond by the sun and he kept his heavy watch, along with his wallet and wedding ring, in a purple velvet Crown Royal bag, which he stowed in his golf bag while he played. He had narrow hips that didn't rotate much on his backswing and a big shoulder turn. He used a Ping Pal putter, the same model used by my putting hero, Tom Watson. (Watson, so bold on the greens, made
everything
.) I had brought a tiny tool to clean the grooves on his irons, and that seemed to impress Randy. He played a practice round with a golfer named John Adams.