Men in Green (17 page)

A taped tribute showed something I had never focused on before: Venturi's well-oiled swing. There were clips from the '64 U.S. Open and black-and-white Masters clips.

Nantz introduced Venturi's two grown sons, noting that the Hall of Fame crystal “needs the fingerprints” of the Venturi family. Out came Matt and Tim. They were both well into their fifties and spoke movingly. Nantz stood beside them, almost as a third brother.

Nantz talked about Ken the way he liked to talk about himself, as a character in a 1950s movie. Venturi, like Arnold and Gary Player and various other legends, came out of the final days of golf's studio system. There were men on high, at the networks and in magazine offices and sitting in press boxes, who created the heroes we needed, and we all went to sleep feeling better. Along the way, the players did their job to keep the whole operation going.

Ken was maybe the last of those stars. He played the part perfectly.
My God, I've won the Open
. Lines don't get better than that. I once made the mistake of asking Ken how that quote got off the final green at Congressional and into the world at large. Did his playing partner, Raymond Floyd, hear it? Did Ken tell the writers? Ken said he did not know, and that was when I realized something:
My God
was the most important sentence in the script, and it did not matter how it got there.

Nantz created a powerful image that night: a triumphant Kenny, healthy and beaming, returning to the Legends Ballroom in twelve months to accept the trophy in person. “The prognosis is still good,” he said. He dropped his voice. Suddenly there was a hint of Texas in it. “He can get through this.”

The broadcaster owned the room. Total silence.

“I really believe that in my heart.”

Mahart
.

•  •  •

It was a wild night, by the tame standards of these velvet-rope affairs. Fred's induction speech was the grand finale. I sat behind Joe LaCava, who caddied for Fred for twenty years before signing up with Woods. Joe lasted because he was more than a caddie, and Fred didn't need a caddie anyhow. With the ball at his feet, he always knew what to do with it. But what Fred did need was a minder, a driver, and a road buddy who shared his interest in fast 40-yard dash times at the NFL Combine. Joe was perfect for all of that. He looked after Fred.

Standing at a lectern with a plant at its base, Fred gave Joe a nice shout-out in a long series. He talked about “Mr. Venturi” and the memorable dinners he had with him and how he would wake up the next morning “so jacked to play golf.” Fred mentioned a few of his mentors, noting especially Raymond Floyd, Tom Watson, and Lee Trevino, who called him Freddie Cupcakes. (Couples quoted Trevino this way: “Cupcakes, Cupcakes, what the hell are you doing?”) Fred tripped for a moment on Trevino's name, a moment of unscripted emotion, and looked away. He seemed a little embarrassed when people started applauding. The applause, when you get right down to it, was part of the TV show. All Hall of Fame inductions are TV shows. But Fred was going way beyond that. He was remembering the clinic Trevino conducted in Seattle when Fred was fourteen, and how they got paired in the Saturday round of the 1979 U.S. Open five years later. Two events that defined his life.

Fred mentioned a few of his contemporaries: Jay Haas and John Cook, who were in the room, and Phil Mickelson and Davis Love, who were not. The first player he mentioned was Mike. “Mike Donald,” Fred said, “who I grew up playing the tour with—we all know Mike.”

Fred had notes on a piece of paper, but his remarks were mostly unprepared. Near the end he said, “I was told to finish with a bang.” He was doing just fine with his kicker until he got to its last sentence. “Thanks for taking a kid from Seattle and putting him in the Hall of Fame.” Then, overwhelmed by the moment and gasping for air, he said, “This is the coolest night of my life.”

He exited stage left with his fists high.

•  •  •

I called Mike after the ceremony and told him what Fred had said. I thought he might be moved by it.

“That's nice,” Mike said.

Yes, Fred had singled him out, but that wasn't going to undo the past twenty years. It wasn't going to change the fact that when Mike's father died in 1996, Mike never heard from Fred. “No call,” Mike once told me. “No card. No flowers. No nothing.”

To Mike, Fred was stuck in adolescence. Mike would tell you he was qualified to make that assessment on the old it-takes-one-to-know-one basis. Mike avoided all the standard long-term commitments that most American men sign on for. Being a husband and a father, owning a house and a dog, anything that might intrude on his golf-first existence. But Mike knew what he was doing. His choices were willful.

Sometime after the Hall of Fame induction ceremony, I asked Mike to explain the essence of his friendship (1981–1993) with Fred.

“We were the same,” Mike said. Working parents, hourly wages, public courses, foam pillows. They had the same view of the world. “We're in a clubhouse, this one time. Sometime in the early eighties. We're watching Curtis get interviewed on TV. Curtis says, ‘That's as good as Curtis Strange can play.' And Fred goes, ‘Could you
ever
in your life say that?' ” People referring to themselves in the third person—Mike and Fred didn't get that.

There were many good times. They may not translate here. In '86, in New Orleans, the Thursday round got rained out, and Mike and Fred hopped on a Southwest flight to Houston, watched both games of the regional doubleheader in the NCAA basketball tournament, and flew back to New Orleans that night. (Louisville over Carolina in the late show—Never Nervous Pervis!) Their decade-plus together was a litany of ballgames in person, basketball games on large-screen TVs, Tuesday practice rounds, salad-bar steak houses, episodes that defy close inspection. You know: the night Fred hid under the bed while the girl's enraged boyfriend climbed through the second-floor window, Mike out front, waiting in a Buick Open courtesy car. That sort of thing.

In March 1992, when Fred was on his way to winning Bay Hill, Mike was invited to go into the NBC broadcast booth to talk about him. Johnny Miller said Fred's game was not well suited to Augusta National because he liked to fade the ball and so many tee shots and Sunday pin positions at Augusta are designed for draws. Mike told Johnny and the vast NBC audience that he disagreed, that Fred could hit the ball any way he wanted, and that he could win on any course he played, including Augusta National. Fred never said a thing to Mike about his unpaid stint in the network tower, but Mike wishes he hadn't done it. Mike knew that Fred didn't like attention, and here was Mike, bringing more to him.

The next month Mike was leading the second-city event in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, through three rounds. On that same night Fred was the third-round leader at the Masters. Fred won and Mike did not. Fred finished first on the 1992 money list. Mike finished 117th. Fred was moving on up. Mike was trending down.

In 1993 Fred and Mike were seldom in the same tournaments or in the same outings. Fred had a new girlfriend. His life was changing. Mike was part of his old life.

“I was struggling,” Mike said. “Fred could have called and said, ‘Let's play a practice round. Let's go to the range and look at your swing.' He never did. The last time he called me was in August of '93. He wanted to know if I could be a witness in his divorce from Deborah.”

As I left the Legends Ballroom on the night of Fred's induction I had the fleeting idea that I might get Mike and Fred and me together in a room, just as Chuck Will and Mike and I had gathered in one and Arnold and Mike and I had gathered in another. That was not going to happen. I once asked Mike if he had any desire to talk to Fred about what had happened to their friendship.

“No,” Mike said. “Let me rephrase that. I would. I would love to have that conversation if I thought Fred was capable of having it. But I don't think he is.”

It wasn't like one was dead to the other. They saw each other from time to time, on this driving range or that one, and had little chats about inconsequential things. For Mike, their friendship was a good memory frozen in time, like Ted Williams's once impressive head in that freezer in Arizona.

On another occasion, I asked Mike what he would want to ask Fred if we ever did a sit-down interview with him.

“I'd ask him, ‘Fred, who filled out your application for that '79 U.S. Open? Who wrote the entry check? Because I
know
you didn't do that yourself.' ”

The drive from Jacksonville, Florida, to Jackson, Mississippi, is much farther than it might sound, but those Southern drives will fool you. In the Northeast, one minute you're crawling through the sooty congestion of the Cross Bronx Expressway, gray apartment buildings practically on top of you, and the next thing you know you're at the Shell station in semi-rural Pawtucket, Rhode Island, breathing the brackish air of coastal New England. In the West, you don't need a map to know that Tucson to San Francisco will take one full day and part of another. But the South is another thing. Who would guess that Jacksonville to Jackson is six hundred miles? After that Hall of Fame induction, Mike and I made the drive.

A couple of hours into the trip, I called Jaime Diaz, my writer friend and secret legend, and he reminded me of “Jackson,” the dueling duet Johnny Cash used to play with his missus. (Johnny: “I'm going to Jackson, I'm gonna mess around.” June: “See if I care.”) I had that song in my head for five hundred miles (no, not quite) of the first stretch of the drive, a long straight shot west on I-10. I had done the drive before and Mike had done it many times. The tour in his day was more Southern than anything else. Our plan was to spend the night in Mobile, hometown of New York Mets Hall of Famer Cleon Jones. That was my plan, I should say. Mike got in the car not knowing or caring where we would spend the night. He is a ridiculously accommodating travel partner. We were getting along fine on our various trips, despite our differences. One of us is a no-meat pacifist who believes it is okay for the authorities to require motorcyclists to wear helmets. The other guy admirably contains his disdain. Anyway, we had, as we often do, a common purpose. On this occasion, we were going to Jackson to see a man called Ball.

Golf Ball had not been easy to find. For starters, as in the case of Conni Venturi, I went in not knowing if he was dead or alive. Mike thought he was still with us but wasn't sure. Some caddies said he had to be dead. Nobody had seen him in years. Golf Ball—Dolphus Hull, to his mother—had worked for Ray Floyd in his prime, Calvin Peete in his, Lee Elder in his. Bunches of others. He was a caddie-yard legend who had won with many different players. But he had done the ultimate fade-away.

I got a break. At a charity tournament on the Trump course in West Palm Beach, I happened to sit down at breakfast next to Arthur Johnson, a large man in a Coogi sweater who once represented Lee Elder and other African-American golfers. Mr. Johnson—he seemed like a mister—told me he wanted to make a documentary about the black experience in professional golf and had been looking for Golf Ball himself. What he knew for sure was that Golf Ball was alive, living in Mississippi, and in failing health. I wasn't looking for a ghost. Johnson thought that Calvin Peete, Golf Ball's boss for years, might know how to find him.

A couple of months later, I saw Calvin Peete walking around the press building at the Players Championship. Calvin had won the '85 Players with Golf Ball on his bag. I was working for Chuck Will as a CBS spotter in the booth at fourteen. Ben Wright called the 8-iron Calvin stiffed on the seventeenth hole on Sunday, over the pond and to a back right pin on the famous island green. Ken Venturi was working the tower over the eighteenth green. When Calvin, a slender and dark man in a Kangol hat, holed out on eighteen, his playing partner, Hale Irwin, gave him a warm hug and a planted a palm on his chest. Irwin then turned around to find Golf Ball and shake
his
hand, a rare player-to-caddie gesture in those days. Venturi, Chuck, Hale Irwin, Golf Ball: four of my legends, right there. By the way, nobody doffed his cap to shake. What an overdone thing that has become.

That week can play like a movie on my eyelids. Golf Ball was even skinnier and darker than Calvin. He was a piece of wire, really, with ropy veins protruding up and down his arms, along his neck, and across his forehead. He carried the bag on his left shoulder and had a cocky strut, with his right arm swinging across his belt buckle with every step. He was often bearded or unshaven, and the whites of his eyes were a grayish yellow. He wore porkpie hats, brim up all the way around. When his man was unsure what to do, he got right in there, standing almost over the ball. He made a strong impression in every way. The man was wired, amped up. I figured he had to be on something. I once told Mike that I found Golf Ball scary. Mike said, “
I
found him scary.” All that made him more of a legend.