Men in Green (2 page)

After one practice round, I found myself sitting in the back of a camper-van set up for the week in the parking lot of the Quail Hollow Country Club. Three touring pros—Randy, Doug Tewell, and Wayne Levi—were the real occupants of that camper-van, but nobody was chasing me away. Wayne Levi's denim golf bag was parked outside, standing up on its own. A rap session, tour-style, was under way. To this day, it all seems so unlikely. A fourth pro, a lanky man named Don Pooley, came by with his wife, and Randy said, “The Pooleys!” It was like a golf commune.

Randy Erskine's golf skill was like nothing I had ever seen, not up close. But his two-day total—150 shots, each of them accounted for on scorecards and sworn to with his signature—left him outside the cutline. His presence would not be needed for the Saturday and Sunday rounds. He made nothing that week, not on the greens and not in the way of a paycheck. Still, he stayed around to prepare for the thirty-six-hole U.S. Open qualifier that would be played on Monday.

People were talking about how the United States Golf Association had essentially forced Arnold Palmer, who hadn't met any of the automatic eligibility requirements for the '79 Open, to play in that qualifier. In other words, the USGA, in its hard-boiled wisdom, had not given a special exemption to the game's most popular and revered player, who was then chasing fifty. There were people who were offended by the way Palmer was being treated. But Palmer was registering no such complaint. He would not put himself above those who had to qualify.

Randy allowed me to use the second bed in his Holiday Inn room that weekend. (Amazing.) When we showed up early on Monday morning at the Charlotte Country Club, we found out that Randy would be playing right behind Arnold Palmer himself.

“Great,” Randy said. “We gotta play in his wake all day.”

I felt he was feigning frustration, and noted his use of
we
. Randy Erskine was a touring professional in the vicinity of Arnold Palmer. How could that be anything but good?

There were at least a hundred people following Palmer that day, but it was never anything like bedlam. Palmer's hair was already silver and his skin was bronzed. Palmer made it—he played his way into the U.S. Open. Randy did not. Still, he paid me one hundred dollars for the day. (Half that would have been generous.) He wasn't playing in that week's tournament in Atlanta. The week after that was the U.S. Open at Inverness in Toledo, Ohio, and he had just failed to qualify. But he would be playing the following week, in the Canadian Open. He said I could work for him in Canada.

And here I was, thirty-something years later, back in Charlotte, heading to Augusta in the name of
Sports Illustrated
. I got myself from Wilkinson Boulevard to Billy Graham Parkway to I-77 and motored my way south. I could not identify my old motel. Maybe it was gone.

I found myself thinking, for the first time in forever, about that long-ago Monday morning at the Charlotte Country Club, Arnold Palmer arriving in a shiny white Cadillac from a dealership that bore
his name. He emerged from his grand chariot. Everybody inhaled. Time stopped. Arnold Palmer, in the flesh.

•  •  •

In October 2012 the Ryder Cup was played at Medinah, outside Chicago, and my assignment for the magazine was to help Davis Love III write a deadline first-person piece about his experience as Ryder Cup captain, a task that would be fun if the Americans won and challenging if they did not. Late at night, after the first day of the three-day competition, I was in a downtown restaurant by myself at a table with a paper tablecloth, and I found myself writing names on it. The names came to me quickly. I marked one column
LIVING LEGENDS
, the other
SECRET LEGENDS
.

LIVING LEGENDS

Arnold Palmer

Jack Nicklaus

Gary Player

Ken Venturi

Tom Watson

Curtis Strange

Fred Couples

Ben Crenshaw

Hale Irwin

SECRET LEGENDS

Sandy Tatum

Jaime Diaz

Billy Harmon

Neil Oxman

Dolphus Hull (aka Golf Ball)

Randy Erskine

Cliff Danley

Chuck Will

Mike Donald

Maybe I was subconsciously filling out lineup cards for a National League game, I don't know, but when I was done I had two columns with nine names each for a total of eighteen—golf's holy number.

During dessert, I decided to add Mickey Wright to the Living Legends list. The Big Three of the modern American golf swing are Ben Hogan, Tiger Woods, and Mickey Wright, and the list just didn't look right without her. (The first golf book I read was
Power Golf
by Ben Hogan, published originally in 1948. It was a hardcover, and I read it outside with a club in hand. Where my mother found it I have no idea.) When I added Mickey, I took off Gary Player, a nod to symmetry more than anything else. That move, unintentionally, made the list all-American. Seventeen American men and one American woman.

The Living Legends were all players. The Secret Legends list included a club pro, a teaching pro, a tour caddie. A tournament director in his sixties, a TV producer in his eighties, a former USGA president in his nineties. They had all shaped my life. They all, in different ways, had driven deep stakes into the game long before I started poking around in it in the mid-1970s. Because of that, they were all elder statesmen to me—even Fred Couples, less than six months older than I.

Later, I got out a map and put a little check mark by each legend's hometown. Before long, I had red marks in Pennsylvania, Michigan, California, Texas, Virginia, Ohio, and some other states. I concocted a vague plan to try to see each of them, notebook in hand, wherever I might find them. I got a little shiver. Does anything give a man more of a sense of purpose than a list?

My combined list had built-in problems. I didn't know if Golf Ball was alive or dead. Fred was impossible. (Likable but impossible.) Palmer could be a challenge to interview. Mickey Wright didn't even come to the USGA museum for the dedication of its Mickey Wright Room. Nicklaus was far more interested in his work as a golf-course architect than in revisiting his old playing days.

Still, it was a good list. In that great episodic TV show of my youth—American Golf in the '70s!—all eighteen had a role. Bit or starring or in between, they were all there.

My plan, to the extent that I had one, was to pack these questions in my Target knapsack, along with my Lipitor and my hearing-aid batteries and my notebooks. “What was it like? Who did you hang with? How does then look to you now?” Or ditch all that and steal a question from the Proust Questionnaire in
Vanity Fair
: “When and where were you happiest?” A difficult question to answer, at least honestly. I wondered if I could answer it myself.

•  •  •

I have heard Palmer, Nicklaus, and Watson all say the same thing, each in his own way:
I wouldn't trade places with Tiger Woods for all the money in the world
. Gary Player, too. “Do I wish I had Tiger's access to private jets?” Player once said to me. “Yes. Do I wish I could have played with his equipment? Yes. But would I trade any aspect of my career and life for his? No.”

I don't believe that things were better, to use a phrase Woods started using when he was about twenty-six,
back in the day
. I don't think that for a minute. I like flying in smoke-free planes and playing at clubs that would not have had me back in the day. But you are not going to convince me that Dustin Johnson is a more interesting person than Lee Trevino. You're not going to convince me that
The Big Break VI: Trump National
on Golf Channel will have anything like the staying power of Gene Littler versus Byron Nelson at Pine Valley on
Shell's Wonderful World of Golf
. You're not going to convince me that any sport-centric website is going to cover the game with the depth that the
New Yorker
did when Herbert Warren Wind was writing just a few golf pieces a year for the shiny weekly.

Dip into various golf events from Herb's era—Roberto De Vicenzo of Argentina losing the Masters in '68, for example—and you'll find that Herb covered it at length, in depth, and with humanity. Yes, you had to wait a few weeks, or longer, to get his story, but it was worth the wait. His work has held up. I read Herb's story about Di Vicenzo signing an incorrect card twenty years after the fact. It's some piece. As for the editors who signed off on its title, they knew what they were doing: “Rule 38, Paragraph 3.”

Or, if you like, 38:3. Golf's rules come up in the game's various write-ups, with citations that look like chapter-and-verse biblical references. Maybe your eyes are rolling. The fact is, the rules are the spine of the game, at least when it is played seriously. I am nothing like an expert, but I do have an abiding interest in how the rules govern play. Maybe this interest in laws and their application is in my DNA. My grandfather's main hobbies were collecting stamps and studying Jewish law, and his brief, one-column obit in the
New York Times
ran with this headline:

When I read
The Great Gatsby
for the first time, I noted with interest that Fitzgerald made Daisy's friend Jordan Baker an elite golfer who once was accused of cheating: “At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken.”

Whenever a rules dispute comes up, you might ask yourself: How would Roberto have handled it? De Vicenzo blamed nobody but himself at that '68 Masters. He said, “What a stupid I am.” In word and deed, he was saying that a golfer is responsible for his scorecard. Any society with an underlying respect for rules is off to a running start, provided the rules make sense. It helps keep things civil.

Along those same lines, golf has a weird ability to foster camaraderie. Most of my enduring friendships have come through golf. The modern golf tour, if you can even use the word
tour
anymore, strikes me as lonely. (Must be all that money.) But I don't think it was for Arnold and Gary and Jack. Gary Nicklaus, Jack and Barbara's third son, is named for Gary Player, because the older Nicklaus boys had so much affection for “Uncle Gary.” I will never let go of that moment in May '79 when Randy Erskine and his buddies were sitting in the back of that camper-van, fixing their backswings and plotting their futures.

It was no great shakes, 1979. A swamp rabbit attacked Jimmy Carter during a presidential fishing trip in Plains, Georgia. But it was a good year for golf. In that same state, in the same month, Fuzzy Zoeller won the Masters in a playoff over Ed Sneed and Watson, Nicklaus missing out by a shot. (Herb Wind's account reads like a thriller.) Big Jack was at his peak, and Arnold was still at it. Trevino won the Canadian Open in '79. Younger players—Tom Watson, Seve Ballesteros, Ben Crenshaw—were taking over center stage. Watson was a latter-day Huck Finn with a Stanford degree. Seve was a Spanish artiste. Crenshaw was a matinee idol. The low amateur at the '79 U.S. Open at Inverness was Fred Couples, in his first U.S. Open. Curtis Strange, already famous for his collegiate play, won his first tour event in '79.

I would like to point out that my legends have nothing to do with the modern penchant for celebrity worship. You can become a celebrity overnight. My legends have a serious body of work behind them. John Updike, referring to Ted Williams, famously wrote, “Gods don't answer letters.” No, they don't.

The Ted Williams reference (you may know) relates to his refusal to take a curtain call after the final at-bat of his career, a home run into the Red Sox bullpen at Fenway. Williams courted nobody. Why would he need the Boston baseball writers when he
owned
the box scores? Maybe a piece of his humanity got robbed along the way, going through life the way he did. If you read the books about him, it sounds that way. Regardless, his lifetime batting average was .344. You can't have everything.

Tiger Woods has some Williams in him. He'll look right through you. I started covering Tiger when he was an amateur, and it's been an honor, writing up his golfing exploits. I am well north of a quarter-million words on Woods and counting. What luck: I was able to write about one of the most dominating athletic careers ever as it unfolded. Still, I would have enjoyed it much more had there been expressions of warmth from the man, hints of humility. I wish he would acknowledge that the game has given him far more than he could ever give it. Maybe he doesn't think that—I wouldn't know. One of my goals here is to see for myself whether Arnold and Jack and the rest really put the game ahead of themselves, or if that was a myth handed down to me by sportswriters happy to god-up the ballplayers.

Only a fool would try to dismiss what Woods has accomplished. (The most common method is to diminish his competition.) When Woods won the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, that was his fourteenth major, and he was only thirty-two. Who wouldn't want to write up all
that
?

But I can say without even pausing that writing about other golfing lives has been far more meaningful to me. Arnold and Nicklaus and Watson spring right to mind, though I arrived on the scene long after their Cold War heydays. Collectively, they owned about thirty years of American golf, starting in '58, three decades when Tom Carvel was the voice of summer and you could play street hockey with his rock-hard Flying Saucers.

While we're kicking this theme around, I should explain the concept of Secret Legends: your Mike Donalds, your Neil Oxmans, your Billy Harmons. We all have our own, and here are others from my catalog: Hilome Jose, a Haitian artist; the guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, whom I have heard dozens of times; Ed Landers, a Martha's Vineyard fisherman discussed with hushed awe when I lived there. All men devoted to doing a difficult thing well. Craftsmen. You surely have a list of your own.