Men in Green (19 page)

We started talking about the drinking and the drugging on tour in Ball's day. When cocaine was everywhere in the seventies, it was on tour, too. Ball said he stayed clear. “I just liked the pot and the drink. Billy Harmon, man. He'd say, ‘Let's go smoke a joint, Ball. If I don't got one, I know you do.' ”

He told about returning to his hotel room one night and finding it occupied by a fellow caddie and two women. “Them girls was as wide as this bed,” Ball said. “They said, ‘Come on in here, Ball, join the fun.'

“ ‘Nah—that ain't my style.' ”

“You always had those sexy girls with the boots and the short skirts,” Mike said.

“You remember Jackie, she be out with me in that yellow Grand Prix I had?” Ball asked.

Mike said yes.

“She was my girl. We went to this club this one night. We're seeing Marvin Gaye. I come back with the drinks and her head's on the table. And she looked up and laughed. And it was the wrong laugh. I took her back to the room and I turned her pocketbook over and four of them little packets came out. It was the shit. I slapped her upside her head and told her I was taking her to her daddy.

“She says, ‘Don't do that.'

“But I did. I told him. And he says, ‘You should have killed the bitch.'

“I says, ‘No, I can't do that. I love her too much.' ”

Ball told it all in such a matter-of-fact way, but his voice was soft. The memory was so vivid you knew the hurt survived her. Jackie's death sounded like a suicide, but one way or another there was a needle in it. She was found in Ball's car, near a hospital, “her head hanging right out the door,” Ball said.

The yellow Grand Prix. Ball could never drive that car again.

•  •  •

Mike and I were transported. The TV above Ball droned on. He had a private room with almost nothing in it. No books or pictures or cards. It was all in his mind. He was taking us to a faraway place, the old vagabond tour. Mike had caught the tail end of it. Ball had lived it.

Ball worked whenever he could, wherever he could, for anybody he could. He worked every week. He told us about the first time he saw Ben Crenshaw, during the '73 tour qualifying school. Ball said he was working for a rookie named Randy Watkins who was playing okay, but all the while he had an eye on Crenshaw. The qualifying tournament was an endurance test—144 holes, eight rounds, two locations—and it was mental torture, too. Crenshaw won by twelve. The only way you could win by twelve was if you just played and didn't think, and that's what Ben did. Ball had never seen a more natural talent. Every year in that era there was a new nominee as the next Nicklaus, but Crenshaw was the most viable of them. There were guys Ball wanted to caddie for and never did. Bull and Big Jack were at the top of the list. Ben Crenshaw, who learned the game from the legendary Harvey Penick at the Austin Country Club, was right there with them. They were never player and caddie but they had developed a friendship.

“Crenshaw says to me, ‘Ball, what do you do if you love a girl but she don't love you?' ”

Crenshaw was talking about his first wife, Polly, from Westchester County, in suburban New York City. That marriage ended in 1984, the year Crenshaw won his first Masters.

I remembered Polly Crenshaw from the mid-1970s, when she and Ben were newlyweds. She was spectacular, with long blond hair and big white teeth. Golf's Farrah Fawcett. I figured she came from great wealth. How else did she get into the clubhouse of the Westchester Country Club, where Ben Crenshaw was lucky enough to meet her? Polly Crenshaw. She was from another world.

“If she don't love you, you gotta let her go,” Ball told Crenshaw.

“I believe you're right,” Crenshaw said, in Ball's recounting of it.

“I know I'm right.”

Mike said, “Did you know Polly's in Austin?”

Crenshaw had spent his life in the Texas capital.

“
What?
” Ball said.

He knew, immediately and instinctively, what Polly Crenshaw's presence in Austin would mean for Ben. What empathy. Why wasn't she in New York? She was a New Yorker. Ball was in Jackson and Mike was in South Florida. What the hell was Polly Crenshaw doing in Austin thirty years after she split on Ben? But that's where she was.

“Well I'll be goddamned,” Ball said.

•  •  •

Ball had a plain intelligence and an uncommon dignity.

“Excuse me,” he said at one point in our visit, responding to sounds that you could not readily ignore. “My colostomy bag.”

As a man, he was credible. As a storyteller, I couldn't say. Was Raymond really wearing nothing but his visor when he showed up at that hotel door? Not likely. We were visiting a man in his stuffy second-floor bedroom in the Hinds County Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. We were hearing the stories of his life.

“Raymond was like a brother to me,” Ball said. “I called Maria ‘Sis.' ” Once, when Ball had gone a record time without getting fired, he said to Raymond, “You and me is
married
now.”

Ball was like Arnold. Both men were so comfortable talking about their true loves and high times. Arnold and Winnie had ventured out together. Raymond and Ball had done the same.

Ball once said to Raymond, “See you got yourself a white boy caddying for you now.”

Raymond said, “He can't caddie your shoes.”

Ball would never drive another yellow Pontiac, just as Arnold would never fly another Citation X. Ball had accepted with grace the things he could not change. He said, “I'm in the best place for me.” The gospel according to Ball.

Near the end of our visit, I asked Ball if he still had golf clubs.

“Yeah,” he said. “I got 'em in my house here.”

“You have a house here?”

“Yeah.”

“Anybody living in it?”

“Yeah, the girl who took care of me when I got sick. She's living in it.”

“That's awfully nice of you,” Mike said.

“She saved my life,” Ball said quietly.

I asked Ball when he was last in that house.

“Last year,” Ball said. “I went home for a night. They had a party for me. Raymond was there. He came up for it. I don't even know how he knew they was having a party.”

“Raymond was in your house?” I asked.

Ball's house was on Lyndon B. Johnson Drive, in a poor black section of Jackson grandly called Presidential Hills.

“Yeah,” Ball said. “He was playing these little gambling games. He was kind of handing out money. He stayed overnight.”

Mike and I were both amazed. How often does a rich white guy, accustomed to the finest
everything
, stay as an overnight guest at a black friend's house in a neighborhood with forty-five-thousand-dollar foreclosure homes? If Golf Ball's story was true, it was incredible. If it was not true but Ball believed it was, that was something, too.

Sometime after visiting Golf Ball in that nursing home I had a moment of clarity. The spine of the tour experience has always been the game and its challenges, which are exacerbated when playing for cash prizes and trophies. Right alongside all that is the call of the road, crisscrossing a country so great in girth and diversity that it can support hundreds of Holiday Inns, each one somehow unique. But our philosopher in Jackson was showing us, in the example of his life, that none of it would mean much of anything if you were doing it alone. In the end, I think what Golf Ball was really doing, in that visit Mike and I had with him, was making a serious nod to the institution of marriage, tour-style. And when I say marriage, I mean a committed relationship between two people in which each person, motivated by love, tries to improve the other person's life on an ongoing basis. I know, I know: very idealistic.

How sex figures into the whole gestalt of tour life, I don't know. It's there because it must be. Whenever you have winners and losers—in sports, in the arts, in business, in politics—isn't an undercurrent of the whole thing that the winners enjoy more and better sex? The reason Tiger Woods was so effective selling Buicks for years is because he was playing against type. Here was an incredibly successful athlete—a light-skinned black man with a welterweight's body playing Bobby Jones's old game—who could be using his exalted status to get anything he wanted. And all he wanted was to drive a brand of safe, sexless family cars.

My writing hero, Roger Angell, revisiting his life at age ninety-three in a
New Yorker
essay called “This Old Man,” unearthed this gem from Laurence Olivier: “Inside, we're all seventeen, with red lips.” Well, the golf tour will keep you young like little else, and careers on it can endure for decades. (Then you hit fifty and start all over again.) The Ponte Vedra promotional department tried its best to paper over man's baser instincts with a painfully bland marketing line:
These guys are good
. The truth is that the PGA Tour is closer to the NBA than any of us would realize. In other words, loud music, various drugs, sex in all the usual forms: straight and gay, consensual and forced, committed and casual, purchased and proffered, consummated and unconsummated. Golf requires restraint, and for some players its discipline will show up in their sex lives, one way or the other.

I'm not going crazy with this whole carnal theme, and you shouldn't, either. When Ball said to Raymond, “You and me is
married
now,” that was a comment devoid of sexual innuendo. Ball was expressing friendship, happiness, security, love. Mike and I both felt what made our visit with Golf Ball such a rich experience was the reservoir of appreciation he showed for the life he had lived and what it had given him. He loved the caddies, the players, the action, Jackie in her short shorts, that yellow Pontiac Grand Prix, the game itself, the road and its twists, his caddie-yard status, Raymond.

•  •  •

After seeing Ball, I felt compelled to write to Mickey Wright. I knew she didn't want to talk about golf, but I wondered if she might want to talk about friendship. I wrote her a short letter and sent it off by U.S. mail. I heard back by e-mail within days. Here, just slightly edited, is what Mickey wrote. Note her precision and her avoidance of the first-person pronoun. That is,
I
.

Hi Michael,

Nice to hear from you. I never was much into networking, so didn't really have many relationships outside of the golfers. They were like family, though never spent a whole lot of time with them off the course.

A few friendships have lasted down through the years. Girls whom I consider close friends and talk with quite often are Peggy Wilson, Kathy Whitworth, Pam Higgins, Mary Bea Porter, Betsy Rawls, Sandra Spuzich, and others occasionally, such as Sherri Steinhauer and Marilynn Smith.

It's interesting; never talk with non-golfers about golf. Only other pros who have been there seem to know what it's all about.

My dearest friends outside of golf are a couple, Max and Gertie White, from Angola, Indiana. They lived across the fairway from us for twenty years and they were the only people I ever gave golf lessons to on an extended basis. They've now moved back to Indiana and we miss them very much.

Went out and hit a few wedges the other morning for the first time in years. The 78-year-old muscles hollered at me but it was fun, as is always the case. Was working on my grip and ball placement. Some things never change in golf. Seems strange looking at those big faces and having the long shafts hit you in the stomach. The new 6-iron is the length and loft of my old 4-iron. New game out there.

If you still have any questions that you think would be helpful to you, please feel free to send them along.

Hope this finds you well and enjoying life one shot . . . oooops, meant one day at a time.

Mickey

Later, Mickey and I had a long phone conversation. She told me about her father, who had played football at Michigan. He graduated in 1908 and from Michigan's law school two years later. He then moved to Southern California.
By horse
. “My father told me, ‘You'd pass someone on the road, you'd tip your hat and move on.' It was still the Wild West.”

Arthur Wright became a prominent lawyer in San Diego, a gambler, a man-about-town. “Every time he got married, he asked me for permission,” Mickey said, not counting the marriage to her mother. “I never said no.” Even when she didn't like the new gal, and that was every time.

Mickey's father had custody of her every weekend, and he would take her to horse races, prizefights, card games. A youth well spent. She adored him. Mickey went to Stanford for a year and left to play the brand-new LPGA tour. Her father staked her with a thousand dollars. It was all she needed.

Mickey seemed equally fond of her mother, Kathryn, a Georgia belle with an independent streak who followed her first husband, a newspaperman, to California. (Mickey's father was Kathryn's second husband.) For two years, mother drove daughter, a promising junior golfer in an era when there was no such thing as professional women's golf, from San Diego to Los Angeles for a weekly golf lesson. One hundred twenty-five miles and three hours to get there. Half-hour lesson. Then back. The teacher was Harry Pressler from the San Gabriel Country Club. The
instructor
, I should say. Pressler told his students what to do. He believed the swing was a series of correct positions, and young Mickey followed his instructions precisely.