Men in Green (10 page)

There's an old tour player who likes to say that your ball is like a bomb in those situations. If your ball moves, you have detonated it. Every serious player watches his ball like a hawk when removing what the rule book calls
loose impediments
. That week the field took 20,646 strokes, and the slim volume called the
Rules of Golf
was riding herd on every last one of them. It has to be that way.

When Woods came in from his round, a veteran PGA Tour rules official, Slugger White, who is married to Joe LaCava's cousin, added two shots to Woods's card. The first one was assessed because Woods caused his ball to move, and the rules require a golfer to play a ball as it lies. (That's the starting point of the rule book; the rest is commentary.) The second shot was for not moving his ball back to its original position. When a player causes his ball to move inadvertently, the rules require him to move it back.

Woods argued that the ball did not move. He said the ball “oscillated,” a word found in the rules to allow for situations in which the ball moves and returns to its original position.

White could have chosen to accept Woods's explanation. He didn't. And that, I think, has proven to be far more damning to Woods than anything the
New York Post
ever said about him at the height of the stiletto-parade craziness.

It does not matter that the ball barely moved and that its new position would have no impact on the chip-out Woods was about to play. It does not matter that it would be nearly impossible to move the ball back exactly where it had been. As Woods likes to say, “Rules are rules.” Without strict adherence to them, tournament golf would be chaos.

When Slugger White added the two shots, he was doing for Woods what Woods would not do for himself. That is beyond rare.

Woods, hot, didn't talk to reporters that day. But he did the next. He had this exchange with Doug Ferguson, the AP's ubiquitous golf writer:

FERGUSON:
It looked like on the video that it dipped down, but I didn't see it dip back up.

WOODS:
As I said, from my vantage point I thought it just oscillated and that was it.

FERGUSON:
On the video you didn't see any difference?

WOODS:
They replayed it again and again and again, and I felt the same way.

FERGUSON:
It's kind of weird when Slugger would say one thing and you would say another, and doesn't it usually fall on the side of the player?

WOODS:
I don't know, but I went from five back to seven back real quick.

Ferguson dug into the heart of the matter with that third question, and Woods's evasive answer is revealing. Broadly speaking, yes, by tradition the player's word is the final word. (The phrase
honest judgment
, in another context, appears in the rule book.) The assumption is that the player will fill in the squares of his scorecard with complete accuracy, which is to say with complete integrity. In this case, Slugger White stepped in for the player.

These are subtle things. We're talking about a ball perched on a twig in the woods and how Tiger Woods handled it. I know Tiger does the grand gestures of his public life well, and that he does a lot of good for many people. For whatever reason, I am far more interested in a person's littlest gestures, the ones that we don't readily see. My view is that Tiger got it wrong when he was over his ball, got it wrong in the scorer's trailer, got it wrong when he discussed it later. He put himself ahead of the game and his fellow competitors. Maybe it was just a bad day. We all have them. But what I fear is that Tiger Woods, the man who carries the mantle of the game, wrote a book that day.

What the rules do is make every golfer equal under the law. By being slavishly devoted to the rules, a golfer shows both respect for the game and consideration for his or her opponent. That's the fundamental reason why the game remains civilized when much of the world is not.

When the Venturi-Palmer dispute first emerged, I paid barely any attention to it. Like many others, I figured the statute of limitations had expired on the case (1958!) and that there was no way to sort through the actual facts from such an old crime scene. But after our dinner with Ken, I saw it in a different light. I saw it just like I saw the incident with Woods and his ball in the trees, as a moment when there's a weird confluence of events and true character gets revealed. Whose character, in the case of Arnold and Ken, I could not then know.

Billy Harmon lived down the street and a world away from Ken Venturi. Billy—youngest kid brother of Butch Harmon—had been one of my favorite people in golf for years. Mike knew him far better and far longer and felt the same way. Billy had caddied for Mike in 1990 at Augusta, when Mike shot 64 in the first round (and a higher score in the second). They both have the gift of candor, among some other similarities. They were well matched.

Billy's father, Claude Harmon, had been the longtime pro at Thunderbird, the oldest of the California desert country clubs. Going back to the fifties, Ken used to hang out at Thunderbird, and he never got along with Claude. Ken once said to me with bizarre pride, “I got Claude Harmon fired at Thunderbird.” When Billy heard that, he said, “Ken thinks he got my father fired at Thunderbird? My father got himself fired at Thunderbird.” He was saying that his father was a drinker who never quit. Billy was a drinker who did. In his sober state, he enjoyed shocking people with his candor.

Mike and I went to see Billy, a teaching pro, the day after our night with Ken. After the intensity of that evening, seeing Billy felt like poolside lounging. Mike and Billy were like long-lost brothers, each in command of subjects an outsider could never know. The doublespeak being perfected by tour bureaucrat X. The utter bullshit being espoused by swing guru Y. The unplayable greens on a new course designed by architect Z. I've never been around two people who collapsed time more efficiently.

Twenty minutes into their reunion, they were revisiting the eighteenth hole of the second round of the '90 Masters, when Mike's drive went dead left, bounced off a restroom roof, and into a cement flood-control drain. Spectators saw Mike's ball disappear. Mike called for an official.

“So here comes P. J. and he's got David Eger with him, riding up in a cart,” Billy said.

Two
rules officials. Not ordinary. The officers of the law were P. J. Boatwright, Jr., an officious, well-pressed USGA rulesman, and David Eger, an unsuccessful tour player who had become a golf administrator.

“And the first thing Mike does is look at Eger and say, ‘What the
fuck
are you doing here?' ”

Mike actually likes David Eger. (It's a short list.) But Mike, as was his wont, had the red-ass, and for no logical reason he felt that Eger would make his life harder at that moment.

Boatwright assessed the situation and decided that Mike's ball was in a hazard, no different from being in, say, a pond. That meant he would get a one-shot penalty.

“And Mike says to him, ‘A hazard? How the fuck can it be a hazard? It's not even marked!' ”

Mike wanted a free drop, not a one-shot penalty. After all, it wasn't his fault that the course had a cement drain as a secret obstacle. It wasn't like the drain was part of Alister MacKenzie's brilliant strategic design. They were playing the eighteenth at Augusta National, not the final hole at a putt-putt course featuring a clown's nose.

Mike got nowhere. Boatwright had all the cards and all the power. And if he needed backup, Eger was right there.

•  •  •

I first met Billy in 1985, when he was a real tour caddie and I was having a fling. That same year Billy met his wife, Robin, at the Pleasant Valley Country Club outside Boston when the tour touched down there in September. Robin was a Tufts grad and a Rhode Islander, and her father was a golf nut and a doctor. Billy was working for the veteran tour player Jay Haas, likely best-known then for being Curtis Strange's college roommate. The apex of their short and irregular courtship came when Billy and Robin left Providence and drove west for about two thousand miles. They hit Tucumcari, New Mexico, found a motel, got some sleep, and then carried on, bound for California. For a long while, Billy's life was right out of a certain Lowell George song, Robin riding shotgun and playing the drums.

I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari

Tehachapi to Tonapah

Driven every kind of rig

That's ever been made

Driven the back roads

So I wouldn't get weighed

And if you give me

Weed, whites, and wine

Then you show me a sign

I'll be willin' to be movin'

Anyone who saw Billy in those days, regardless of whether he was drunk or high or both—or sober, for that matter—will tell you the same thing: There was an elfin spirit about him, and he never lost it.

Billy was lucky. He never got in a car wreck. He never got his face smashed in a barroom brawl. When he quit drinking, he called as many of his former girlfriends as he could find and apologized for any ungentlemanly behavior he may have committed under the influence. The response was always the same:
You were a nice drunk, Billy
.

I recall seeing him early one morning at a diner near Endicott, New York, during the '85 B. C. Open. Jay Haas, his boss, was at that same counter, as was another caddie, “Gypsy” Joe Grillo. Everybody was laughing about something. Wherever Billy was, it seemed like a party was about to break out.

Tiger's near-perfect swing and extraordinary record under Butch Harmon, circa 2000, are points of brotherly pride for Billy, but the oldest and the youngest of the brothers could not be more different. There's a lot of posturing with Butch, and he takes himself very seriously. Nobody would accuse Billy of doing that. As a caddie, he had the innate and necessary ability to roll with the punches. He loved to hang out and talk. The game was in his bones and probably his soul, although he was dismissive of anybody who tried to turn playing golf into any sort of religious experience.

In Billy's adult life, a term used loosely here, a certain type of golf student has sought him out because what he teaches is tried and true and what he says is not sugarcoated. He follows in the tradition of Hogan, who famously said, “The secret's in the dirt.” Hogan meant lighted driving ranges, empty fairways at dusk, high school football fields early on Sunday mornings. People really did teach themselves golf at such places once. Not today's titanium-headed game. Yesterday's persimmon game, the one that lives on in Arnold's barn.

In Hogan's day, a guy had a better chance of fixing himself when things were going wrong because, to borrow a phrase,
he owned his swing
. I'm sure this sounds comically quaint to any youngsters who have made it this far, but this is what Billy believes. You want to get better? Billy will give you the fundamentals. His brothers will, too. The rest is up to you. The flight of your shots will tell you what you need to know. I asked Billy once what he liked best about golf. He said, “The ball in the air.”

That Billy is a member of a clan known as the Harmon Brothers is a meaningless designation in most places, but in certain golf circles it is like saying you're golf royalty. There were four Harmon brothers, all golf pros: Butch, Craig, Dick, and Billy. (And two sisters, not in the biz.) Their father was the winner of the 1948 Masters and the last club pro to win a major tournament. Claude Harmon could flat-out play. For pure talent, of the four sons, Billy was the closest to him.

Claude won his Masters when he stopped off in Augusta while driving from what was then his winter job, at Seminole in South Florida, to his main job, at Winged Foot in Westchester, New York. Later Claude was lured west to Thunderbird, which, like the other clubs where he worked, was an enclave of the rich and the super-rich. The Harmon kids were always surrounded by wealth, even though it stopped at their front door.

Butch taught Greg Norman in his prime, which was why Earl brought Tiger to Butch in '93, when Tiger was seventeen. Butch and Tiger worked together through 2004, when their relationship suffocated under the weight of their collective egos. The breakup did not serve either man well, but you can imagine how thin the air was on their mountaintop.

Craig Harmon, the second oldest of the four sons, was the head pro at Oak Hill, site of various major events, for decades. The third brother, the late Dick Harmon, was a beloved club pro in Houston. Billy, batting cleanup, was for years the ne'er-do-well son, a born golfer who, in his early twenties, lost his desire to beat his opponents. It was the early 1970s, he was at San Jose State, and smoking weed just seemed like so much more fun. Butch had made it to the show as a player. Billy got there as a caddie.