Men in Green (27 page)

I turned seventeen in 1977, the year Tom Watson won the U.S. and British Opens. Big Jack won three times in '77, and some of the other winners that year were Raymond Floyd, Hale Irwin, Ben Crenshaw, and old Gene Littler, my French teacher's swing idol. The country might have been in disarray, but American professional golf was doing just fine. If you wanted law and order, all you had to do was look at the tour money list and watch Frank Chirkinian's Sunday-afternoon golf telecasts on CBS.

Crenshaw particularly resonated with me. His hair had something to do with it. The golf magazines would run pictures of him at impact, his blond hair would be flying everywhere. (My own was a helmet.) When Ben won or was trying to win, Frank Chirkinian would show us pictures of his young wife, the gorgeous Polly Crenshaw. Somehow it got lodged in my head that her family belonged to the Westchester Country Club in New York, where they enjoyed the privileges of wealth and status—poolside phones and that sort of thing. Somewhere I had read that Ben met Polly while playing Westchester, likely at some kind of dinner dance with champagne fountains and a sherbet course after the entrée. I was seventeen, with an imagination that would fill in the blanks.

Crenshaw never realized his collegiate promise. He was supposed to be golf's next Nicklaus, but that never happened. He did, however, win the Masters twice, the first time in 1984. The next year Herb Wind wrote about him in the
New Yorker
. The glimpses we plebeians got of our heroes' lives were different then, and I hung on every word. I remember Wind including a bit about Crenshaw playing in his first USGA event, the 1968 national junior championship at the Country Club in Brookline, and Ben talking about how he would put on a sweater in the New England morning cool. It was all so vivid. I could almost feel the dew on the magazine's shiny pages.

Later that year, I was working on my first book in Patchogue, at my parents' house. To pay for my typewriter ribbons and a new (to me) cherrywood desk, among other necessities, I was selling
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and doing some freelance writing. One magazine piece was about the National Golf Links in Southampton, a course I knew and loved from a few go-rounds as a summer caddie and off-season sneak-on. Nelson Doubleday, then the co-owner of the New York Mets, was a member, and when I somehow got him on the phone to talk about his club he was painfully terse: “It's a private club, and it's none of your damned business.” In reporting the story, I had also called Crenshaw, already a noted architecture buff. One day after I returned home from golf at Bellport, my mother said, “Ben Crenshaw called for you.” She had written down his 512 phone number. Austin, Texas.
Ben Crenshaw
. I called back with tingling fingers. We still had rotary phones.

In the ensuing years, I never spent any significant time with Crenshaw, but whenever I was writing about a course or an architect I'd go to him, and he was always obliging. He was inexhaustible on these subjects.

I wrote the
SI
game story from the 1999 Ryder Cup at the Country Club, when Ben was the American captain and the U.S. staged an unlikely Sunday comeback. If you know about that event, you know about Crenshaw's I-got-a-feeling Saturday press conference and the way he kissed the green on Sunday at seventeen. That came when Justin Leonard made a putt from downtown Brookline and the team started celebrating as if they had already won. (They hadn't.) For an international goodwill team competition, it was way too much. All that was on the captain. He set the tone.

Still, Ben was Ben, and you couldn't stay mad at him for long. When I introduced him to Christine one year at Augusta he was the model of grace. A gentleman golfer of the old school.

I once took Tom Doak, a golf-course architect who does not lack for opinions, to the Philadelphia Cricket Club to play our A. W. Tillinghast course. We're all very proud of it, back at the club. Tillinghast was the genius who designed the courses at Winged Foot, Bethpage, and the San Francisco Golf Club. They're all enduring delights. On the par-four second hole, Doak pushed his shot wildly, and it landed on the roof of an old barn that is part of the clubhouse. In his
Confidential Guide to Golf Courses
, Doak later complained that the course was “cramped.” I believe that statement to be demonstrably false, although now is likely a good time to trot out an old Herb Wind line: You may sooner insult a man's wife than his golf club. In any event, Doak wrote in his book, “I casually pushed my approach shot onto the roof of the men's locker room.” I read his words with burning ears. In my mind, I worked up clever rejoinders. For example:
Your shot was lousy, sir, and it is that repurposed barn that gives the hole its old-time charm, as the Green Monster does at Fenway
. Something like that.

The next time I saw Ben Crenshaw, he said, “You still at the Cricket Club? I love that course.” This next part came without prompting: “I love that number two hole, the way that old barn comes into play.”

It brought to mind a scene from
Annie Hall
. Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, is standing in a movie line with Annie, and some blowhard behind them is prattling on about the scholar and writer Marshall McLuhan. Alvy suddenly produces the real Professor McLuhan, who tells the man, “You know nothing of my work.” Then Alvy looks at the camera and says, “Boy, if life were only like this.”

Ben doesn't use e-mail, so to tell him about my legends list and his place on it, I wrote to him in care of his longtime manager, Scott Sayers. I should have just found Ben at a tournament, told him about what I was doing and Mike's role in it, and asked if we could arrange a visit. But I hadn't done that. I wrote to Scott, who wrote back telling me that Ben was going to pass. He was wrapping up one book and considering another. Plus, he had too many similar requests. My first rejection, unless you want to count Mickey Wright.

I was thinking of Conni Venturi when I decided to try to track down Ben's first wife. You may recall what Ball said when he learned that Polly Crenshaw, a native New Yorker, had moved back to Texas to sell real estate in Austin, where Ben lived with his second wife and daughters: “Well I'll be goddamned.”

•  •  •

Polly suggested we meet at the Four Seasons hotel in downtown Austin. The hotel's front door was manned by a small army, the lobby smelled vaguely of burning mesquite, and the lighting was perfect for deal-making. The Texas State Capitol building was five blocks away.

I first met Polly as many of us did, in the mid-1970s over FCC-approved airwaves. She made a strong impression. Tom Watson had recently been in a British Open press tent recalling his win in the 1980 Open at Muirfield, and out of nowhere he mentioned Polly. He was describing how, while celebrating his victory that Sunday night, he and Linda (Tom's first wife) and Ben and Polly (Ben's first wife) returned to the course, antique equipment and drinks in hand, with “Polly Crenshaw aerating the greens with her four-inch heels.” Is that not the very picture of youthful glamour and half-drunk love?

And here was Polly, in all her late-fifties glory, walking into the hotel restaurant. Hair, jaw, teeth, carriage, looking for all the world like Christie Brinkley's kid sister, making long strides toward my table. You can be sure nothing like that ever happened to me in Patchogue. Or anywhere else.

Everything I thought I knew was wrong. Polly was not from a rich family, and no one in it had ever belonged to the Westchester Country Club. She met Ben in late August 1974 during the Tuesday practice round of the Westchester Classic. Polly was seventeen and about to start her senior year at Alexander Hamilton High in Elmsford, New York. Her father, Bob Speno, sold insurance. Polly had a twin brother and four other siblings. The three girls shared one bedroom. Everybody worked, Polly as a cashier at a supermarket. A checkout girl, as people said then.

Ben was twenty-two and in his first full year on tour. As a star player at the University of Texas, he was about as famous as a college golfer could be. Then he won his first tournament, the Texas Open, as a pro. He was dashing and talented and the world was at his feet.

“Dad said, ‘Let's go to the golf tournament,' ” Polly said. “He loved golf.”

There was more going on than that. Bob Speno had good-looking kids, and he liked showing them off. He knew Polly would attract attention.

“I was wearing a shirt down to here,” Polly said. She made a karate chop about three inches above her naval. “And
really
short shorts. Cutoffs.”

The summer tan kind of announces itself in that description, doesn't it? You could tell Polly was very aware of herself physically. Then and now.

“We started following Ben, and my father said something to him about his golf and Ben said, ‘Is that your daughter?' On Thursday, my father and Ben had lunch. On Saturday night, Ben and I had dinner in the clubhouse. He was very charming, very interested in me, a perfect gentleman.”

She was going into a dream state as we sat there. Her crowded days didn't allow her to reflect often on her years with Ben. She seemed to live an in-the-moment life. There was something distinctly purposeful about her.

I asked, “Did it seem to you like you and Ben were in totally different places in life?”

In the summer of '74, Polly's next big thing was homecoming. (She was voted queen.) Ben's next thing was the Tournament Players Championship.

“No, it didn't,” Polly said. “I never even thought of that.”

Two weeks after they met, Polly stayed with Ben at the Southern Open in Columbus, Georgia. She remembers the words a player used to needle Crenshaw:
She's jailbait
. That was in September 1974. By January they were engaged.

The first half of the 1975 season was a long slog of mediocre play for Crenshaw. In May he took Polly to her senior prom. In June she graduated from Hamilton High, and Ben had his first good tournament of the year, finishing a shot out of the playoff at the 1975 U.S. Open at Medinah. The next week he and Polly were married.

By the time Crenshaw won the '84 Masters they were separated. Polly spent that week on a yacht in the Caribbean, doing shots of tequila and lines of coke and whatever else young beautiful people on a yacht in the Caribbean did in the eighties. Her second husband, the father of Polly's daughter, was on that boat. He later took his own life.

Ben won the '84 Masters by two over Tom Watson. The great Severiano Ballesteros, the defending champion, helped the new winner into his club coat in Butler Cabin.

Crenshaw had won the tournament he wanted most when his marriage was breaking up. He won his second Masters in 1995, days after burying his golf mentor, Harvey Penick. How unpredictable are these artist-golfers? I am thinking of Seve, Walter Hagen, Bobby Jones, Phil Mickelson, Payne Stewart. Crenshaw.

“Ben was always a such a nice guy,” Polly said. “But there were three of us in that marriage. Ben, me, and Ben's golf. It was like his mistress.”

Her life surely looked easy if you knew it only from TV. But real life, of course, is not an afternoon picture show on CBS. All the other tour wives were older. Polly had not earned the things she had except by way of her good looks. In the years when her high school classmates were going to college and easing into adult life—finding jobs in a tired economy, trying to keep four retreads on a used car, serial dating—she was married and living in the cloistered dream world of professional golf. At times she pinched herself. But often she was bored. She was closer in age and temperament to the caddies. She liked hanging with them, and the feeling was mutual.

Polly remembered Barbara Nicklaus as a warm and regal presence and Jack as a polite but standoffish one. She adored Arnold, “even if he might hug you a little too hard and a little too long.” She described a mad, manic ride to an airport with Tom Weiskopf on a Friday afternoon when he had missed a cut. Tom was a drinker then, too. You could smell the booze in her stories.

Ben, Polly said, lost faith and interest in her during the last years of their marriage. He knew his wife had an alcohol and cocaine problem, and he made it clear he was not going to have children with her. She responded predictably. Sobriety came much later for her, long after their divorce was final, and after her second husband, Jack Price, committed suicide. When I saw Polly, she was working as a personal trainer, doing some acting and modeling, training for a triathlon, practicing yoga, and taking life one day at a time. She sold real estate in and around Austin under the name Polly Price, and sometimes under the name Polly Crenshaw Price. It was, she said, her legal name.

She has wondered what her father was thinking and doing on that Tuesday in August 1974 when he brought his daughter to the Westchester Classic in her cutoff shirt and shorter shorts. She was up for adventure that day, even if she could not possibly have imagined where it would lead. The way she described herself, she was not a young seventeen-year-old. Still, she was seventeen. Her father, worried about his daughter's future in an unpromising economy, was making a bet that she could secure it on her good looks. It's happened before.

Polly struck me as someone who had thought a lot about the vagaries of life and had come to terms with its setbacks and successes.

“Those years that I was out there with Ben, I think that was a different tour,” Polly said. It was midafternoon, and the lunch crowd had thinned to nothing. Polly had that move where you shake your head just slightly and your hair does a dance all its own. “It wasn't corporate,” she said. “It was about people. I think the commissioner—Deane Beman, right?—wanted a family atmosphere. We stayed at the same hotels. There were a lot of charter flights, all the players and their families together, going from one tournament to the next. There wasn't the really big money like there is today. It was
much
more like family. It really was. When I was out there, that tour was my family.”