Men in Green (29 page)

We talked about the 1983 British Open, about what Hale did on the fourteenth hole of the third round, when he “whiffed” a tiny putt, maybe six inches long. Whenever it is written about or discussed,
whiff
is the word people use, but it's not really correct. Irwin attempted to backhand that putt in, as many players do. His downswing actually stopped when he stubbed the putter head into the turf short of the ball. He counted that stroke without any hesitation or discussion. Irwin could have claimed it was an aborted swing and that he did not intend to hit the ball. That claim likely would have saved him a shot. “It would never even have occurred to me to do that,” Irwin said. “I was trying to hit it.” He finished second, a stroke behind the winner, Tom Watson.

We went through his three U.S. Open wins. When he talked about the '74 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, Tom Watson's name came up. (They were in the final group on the final day. Irwin shot 73 and Watson shot 79.) When he talked about the '79 Open at Inverness, Sandy Tatum's name came up. When he talked about the '90 Open, Mike's name came up.

For some reason, and despite a vague plan I had going in, I suddenly didn't feel like reviewing the history of Hale's relationship with Mike, or revisiting Hale's commentary. Mike had already figured out what Hale had just told me, that he was compulsively driven. That quality will cloud a man. What was there to add?

I did ask Hale about his enduring quote, on national TV, right after the playoff: “God bless Mike Donald. I almost wish he had won.” I always thought that was a genuine and gracious comment. Mike was always dismissive of it. I asked Hale why he said it.

Hale considered my question in an instant, smiled thinly, and said, “
Almost
.”

It was, you could tell, something he had said before. He paused briefly and then summarized the whole thing in one familiar sentence: “The cold, harsh reality is that I won and Mike didn't.”

Looking to solve one of the ongoing mysteries, Mike and I went to see Raymond Floyd, Golf Ball's old boss and the man who pulled Ken's ball out of the final hole of the 1964 U.S. Open. We went to see him at his new home in a spiffy golf development called Old Palm, just a mile or two south of the PGA of America's headquarters in Palm Beach Gardens.

Raymond looked like a movie star. He was seventy-one, trim and tan, with smooth skin and no gray hair. I had never seen him look better. He told us he gets a daily home massage.

He showed us his book collection, an inviting group of titles separated into three categories: art, golf, and baseball. One of the baseball books was
The Boys of Summer
, the Roger Kahn classic in which the author catches up with some of the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers long after they made their final outs. I started to mention something about the book to Raymond but quickly changed gears. Raymond loves baseball and the Chicago Cubs in particular, but Kahn's book—that is, its actual contents—did not appear to interest him.

He was leading an expensive life. The house in Old Palm was spacious and beautiful and seemed to enjoy the services of a daily housekeeper, who tiptoed through the house with plastic bags around her running shoes. Raymond also had a summer home in Southampton and a farm in Vermont. He had memberships at Seminole and Shinnecock Hills, among other places. How he got so rich, I could not tell you. I mean, how many people have
two
vacation homes? I never would have guessed that Raymond Floyd, with his Palm Beach tan and manicured nails, would be someone to own a gentleman's farm, but people will surprise you. If Raymond was making cheddar cheese up there in the Green Mountain State, good for him.

He remembered pulling Ken's ball out of the final hole at the '64 U.S. Open. “He was a zombie,” Raymond said. “He was shaking it in the hole there at the end. I had tears in my eyes when it was over.”

I asked, “Could you hear him say, ‘My God, I've won the Open'?”

“No,” Raymond said. “I didn't hear him say that.”

We talked about Ken and Arnold and Ken's obsession with the '58 rules dispute at Augusta.

“He blamed Arnold forever,” Mike said.

“That's because he's Italian,” Raymond said. “It's part of his culture. It's a way of life, really.”

Raymond called Arnold “my mentor.” He told us a story about how he wore madras plaid pants one day at the Masters, and Arnold told him madras plaid was not appropriate for Augusta National. Raymond banished
all
madras plaid from his wardrobe from that point on.

He had such a long career. He was on the scene when Arnold was at the height of his powers and he was there when Greg Norman was at the height of his. The names coming out of his mouth were the ones who lured me into the game: Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Johnny Miller, Curtis Strange, Tom Weiskopf, Gary Player, Lee Trevino, various others. He wasn't name-dropping. He was remembering his life and high times.

We turned to Dolphus Hull. Raymond talked about Golf Ball's ability to read greens and players. He said that Golf Ball could get him straight for a round by making a single suggestion or comment. “He was loose, like his body,” Raymond said. “He kept me loose. Those old black caddies like Golf Ball were very observant. If I was off, Golf Ball would say, ‘Man, what you done with your swing today?' If the ball was starting left, he'd say, ‘Man, put that ball back in your stance.' ”

I asked Raymond the question I needed to ask: Had he ever seen Golf Ball's house in Jackson?

“I picked him up once there.”

“At his house?”

“No. I've only been to Jackson one time. Didn't get past the airport. I flew in private, met Golf Ball at the airport, brought him to a senior event, I think in Birmingham. That must have been in the mid-nineties. He couldn't work anymore, but it was a chance for him to say hi to the guys.”

“So you were never at his house?”

“No.”

Ball had said another thing altogether. He had Raymond staying overnight in his house. He had him playing little gambling games with the other guests at his welcome-home party. He was specific. The two stories were in obvious conflict.

Maybe Golf Ball had a fantasy. Regardless, I don't doubt for a minute Ball's recollection of how he joined the circus in 1963. Eight caddies, two cars, his mother's words rattling in his head:
Don't forget to send me back some of that money
.

Raymond wasn't always a private-plane guy. He drove the tour all through his early years, sharing a highway with Ball and a gang of others, the whole bunch of them running toward their dreams.

“We were Gypsies,” he said.

•  •  •

Mike played his final tour event in 2006, at the Honda Classic. His place in the field was a parting gift from Cliff Danley, the tournament director, who was making his own farewell that year. Cliff had started working for the tournament as a volunteer in the early seventies, when he was in his mid-twenties. In those days, the event was named not for a Japanese car manufacturer but for an American entertainer, Jackie Gleason.
The Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic
. Inverrary was (and is) a period-piece 1970s Fort Lauderdale country club that Jerry Ford played often, hatless in the Florida sun, his collars flapping as he rode shotgun in a Rolls-Royce golf cart owned and operated by Gleason, who was the king there.

Sometime after 2006, with the tournament being run by Jack Nicklaus's people, the Honda Classic turned into a high-profile event. Some of Jack's extended neighbors, including Rory McIlroy and sometimes Tiger Woods, started playing in it. It was given a new lineup spot, batting first in the Florida Swing. It had found a long-term home on a better course. The marketing budget exploded. Jack brought star power, spruced it up, made Honda an international event.

But before all that, Honda was the kind of local event—like the much older stops in Hartford and Fort Worth and Honolulu—on which the tour was built. It was a perfect tournament for Mike, and he played in it every year between 1981 and 2001. In the years when he wasn't exempt, Cliff got him in. Yes, he was playing favorites. Cliff once told me that of the hundreds of players he had met over the years, none made a bigger impact on him than Mike.

•  •  •

One warm winter night, Mike, Cliff, and I met for dinner at Il Bellagio, a popular restaurant at an outdoor mall in the heart of West Palm Beach. The restaurant is not as fancy as it sounds, and over the years Mike and I have had many leisurely meals there, always on the outdoor patio, overlooking a series of hyperactive fountains and various chain stores devoted to the good life, American-style. These dinners were an opportunity for us to marvel at the health of the American economy, or at least a segment of it, and to settle the issues of the day.

But on this night, with Cliff as our third, the focus was the tour. That is, the tour that Cliff came up on. Cliff was a tournament administrator with no use for the word
metrics
. He didn't do focus groups. His stock-in-trade was relationships, and his most significant gift was the ability to read another person's motives and needs. Cliff, who was in his mid-sixties, was only twenty-four when Jackie Gleason gave him a delicate assignment: chaperoning the Great One's lady friend at his tournament. He did it well. He kept the cart out of lagoons only he could see. Cliff had a set of skills that are not taught at the Harvard Business School.

Some time after our outdoor dinner on that warm winter night, I called Cliff and asked what I could not in front of Mike: How did he get Mike into the 2006 Honda, when Mike was fifty and not even a regular presence on the senior tour? How—and why?

“It was an emotional, acrimonious time,” Cliff said. The lid was coming off quickly. “I knew it would be my last year running the tournament. The tour was making changes. A new board was coming in, and I was going to be out of a job. I was going to be fine, but I was worried about my staff. Would they be able to land on their feet?”

It's always like that, isn't it? The manager gets fired, and the pitching coach takes his kids out of parochial school. He knows he could be next.

“We had six exemptions,” Cliff said, spots in the field for friends of the tournament. “I didn't care about five of them. I knew I wanted one of them to go to Mike. People used to call Mike a journeyman, but I prefer
consummate professional
. That's really what he was. And he was before that 1990 U.S. Open, during that Open, and after it.”

What an insight. Medinah in '90 might have changed the way Mike thought of himself as a golfer. But the experience didn't change him, not at his core.

The Honda tournament gives the players brand-new Hondas to drive around for the week. Courtesy cars. Cliff can tell you, chapter and verse, where these courtesy cars have been left and in what condition. He has known players who asked for courtesy cars for their wives, nannies, girlfriends. He knows the players who used the backseat as a recycling bin for Anheuser-Busch products. Mike had no interest in driving a Honda courtesy car. For one thing, Honda was a home game for him, and he was perfectly content driving his own car. More to the point, he figured the tournament was already giving him enough. Throughout his career, Mike was critical of tour greed, especially in his four years on the Tour Policy Board. It's in his nature not to grab free stuff. But he also understood that a measure of modesty would serve the tour well in leaner times.

“There are people who will tell you that Mike is blunt,” Cliff said. That put it mildly. “But to me, he was just telling it like it is. You ask him a question, he answers it. We'd have lunch, and I'd tell him what I knew and he'd tell me what he knew. And he knew a
lot
.”

That all sounded familiar.

“People have no idea how generous he is. How many caddies he helped, how many people he loaned money to or just gave money to. How he talks to people and tries to help them. You'll never meet anybody with a bigger heart.

“You have to get approval from the tournament board for these sponsor exemptions. I told the board I just needed one, for Mike. I told them: ‘This is personal to me,' ” Cliff said, his voice catching.

He was a large, decidedly earthbound man, hardened by a long series of corporate wars. For years his life had revolved around that golf tournament. As we spoke, his entire history with it, and with Mike, had to be racing through his head. The tournament had brought him a livelihood, standing, friendship. It was to him what Raymond was to Ball.

“Normally, you have to tell your board all these reasons for your candidate, make a case, do all these things. I didn't do any of that. I went in there without my usual line of shit. This was going to be my last tournament, and I knew it was probably going to be Mike's final tour event. They were fine with it. I'm sure the vote was unanimous. They knew what it meant.”