Men in Green (3 page)

You probably don't know the name Joe Gergen. Joe Gergen was a sportswriter and columnist on
Newsday
when I was a kid. He covered the Mets, the Jets, the Knicks, and the Rangers, and he wrote like a dream. At the 1986 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, typewriters dying but not yet dead, I sat behind Gergen in the press tent. On U.S. Open Sunday he wore a colorful short-sleeve shirt patterned with flowers, and he wrote up Raymond Floyd's win with one guy on his left elbow and another on his right. Three writers on deadline, and every five minutes they tilted their heads and laughed about something. It was Father's Day. Do you think he minded working? Not one bit. His story in the next day's paper was excellent, and I wanted to be him. Joe Gergen is not likely a legend to you. Why would he be? But he is to me. I'd die without people like that in my head.

•  •  •

A note here about Mike Donald, the legend with whom I have the most personal history. I met Mike in 1985, when he was playing in the Honda Classic and was paired with Brad Faxon, for whom I was caddying. Over the next six months—as a fledgling caddie with a plan to write my first book—I saw Mike here and there. My boss, Bill Britton, would play in practice rounds with Mike, one of his closest friends. Or they'd hit balls and look at each other's swings. Or I'd see Mike on Friday afternoons, standing in front of that week's giant scoreboard, pointing at names, counting scores, calculating where the ax—the cut number—would fall. His nickname was Statman.

In '86, I caddied for Mike for one memorable week, at the Colonial tournament in Fort Worth. That week was a semi-disaster and included a mortifying rules question for which I was responsible. All in all, not my best week. My main purpose in Fort Worth was to promote the aforementioned book. I should have told Mike that when I sought his bag for the week. I now realize the week was doomed before I even arrived. It's embarrassing for me, looking back at it. Talk about young and dumb.

By the high standards of tour play, Mike was considered average in every category except three: chipping, putting, and intensity. In '89, after playing in more than three hundred tour events and having posted more than twenty top-ten finishes, he won the Williamsburg stop, the Anheuser-Busch Golf Classic. He was thirty-four and had his first tour win.

That win got Mike into the Masters for the first time, the following April. He shot an opening-round 64 in the '90 Masters, one shot short of tying the course record. Two months later, Mike played in the U.S. Open at Medinah. Hale Irwin shot a final-round 67 to come in at 280. About two hours later, in the final group of the day, Mike made a par on the seventy-second hole to post 280 as well. Their Sunday-night tie meant an eighteen-hole playoff the next day. After those eighteen holes they were still tied, which meant for the first time a U.S. Open would be decided by so-called sudden death. The next winner of a hole would be the champ. Mike and Hale went to the first tee for the ninety-first hole of the championship.

I can't imagine anybody (outside of Hale Irwin's immediate family) not pulling for Mike in that playoff. He was the classic underdog, and who doesn't cheer for an underdog? Hale Irwin was already in the pantheon, by way of his '74 and '79 U.S. Open wins. What Irwin was attempting to do, at age forty-five, was impressive. But it paled in comparison to Mike's quest. In the 1955 Open, Jack Fleck, a club pro from a public course in Iowa, defeated the great Hogan in a playoff. Mike was another lunch-bucket pro trying to knock off a legend in the most demanding event in golf.

I was working that Sunday, covering a Phillies matinee, and watched good chunks of the fourth round in the manager's office at Veterans Stadium. I watched the Monday final at home on a day off. What Mike did that day was raise expectations, for himself or anyone with middling skills, in any trade or craft or profession. Watching Mike made you realize that past performance really doesn't always predict future results. Mike was going toe to toe with Hale Irwin! All the while, watching the events unfold on ABC, we could not know that the best was still to come: Mike in defeat. There was a moment at the end of the playoff that screamed at me. Irwin made a twelve-foot birdie putt to win. He had his third Open. He had become the oldest player ever to win an Open. He was dancing around. And there was Mike, holding out a hand in a manner that was just so . . .
dignified
.

Our friendship began for real five years later, when I was writing a piece about him. Mike told me about accepting an offer to play in Sweden soon after that U.S. Open for a thirty-five-thousand-dollar appearance fee and all expenses paid for Mike and his parents. “To be honest, I felt like a whore,” Mike told me with my notebook open. Who is that honest? After the '90 U.S. Open, he never revisited that level of play. I sat amazed, with the five-year anniversary coming up, as Mike tried to analyze what had happened to his game and to him.

Had Mike won in '90, I'm sure our friendship never would have developed as it did. You can't have a real friendship with a winner. You come into a person's life after the prize ceremony, you'll always be a Johnny-come-lately. I expressed this to Mike once, and he said, “If I had won, you wouldn't have been interested in writing about me.” He's probably right. At
SI
, my assignment is often to write the loser. I like it.

Mike played the circuit hard, as hard as anybody. For years he played thirty to thirty-five events a year. He had a true grasp of the tour and how it worked, and the other players knew it. Even though he never finished higher than twenty-second on the annual money list, he was at the center of the game. Tiger Woods drops in and drops out when it suits him. Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els, Rory McIlroy, they all do that. Mike was
on tour
. He was at-large.

In various ways, we could not be more different. I am trusting and Mike is suspicious. Yet Mike tends to overshare and I underdo it. He watches everything and I read, too narrowly. He understands the stock market in ways that I do not. He is profane and I'm not, or at least not at Mike's level. I see gray in everything and Mike
tries
to see things in black or white. Mike likes the windows up and I like them down. But we have significant similarities, too. We're both good tippers. We both have good memories. We both like to try to figure things out.

When he was fifteen, Mike skipped school and caddied in the 1970 Coral Springs Open, near his home in Hollywood, in South Florida. He can tell you what Hale Irwin and Lee Trevino did that week and that Palmer stayed in a house on the course sponsored by Westinghouse known as “The House of the Future.” (You could turn a light on and off in it by waving your arms.) Mike remembers Palmer wearing a baby-blue shirt with dark-brown pants and wondering whether that was a good match. He of course remembers who won: Bill Garrett. Mike was his caddie, and Garrett paid Mike a fortune.

I once asked Mike, “Did you do anything to help Garrett at all?”

“
Noooooooo
,” Mike said. “Shit no. I carried the bag!”

One day I was looking at my legends list and thinking about the start of my tour. What the hell was I actually looking to do? Write something longer than six hundred words. Explore friendship. Have an adventure. Try to understand the lives and times of craftsmen I admired. Rekindle my boyhood excitement.

As a reporter I work solo. It's a rewarding and lonesome way to proceed. I'm not even sure why, but one day I found myself asking Mike if he wanted to join me on the tour's first stop. I would have asked him if he wanted to sign up for the whole thing, but Mike, like me, avoids commitment. Plus, I couldn't know if there would be a whole thing. Anyway, we both do most everything on the fly. We've had many excellent meals, rounds of golf, and ballgames over the years with little advance planning, if any.

Mike said yes. No questions, just yes. He caught a flight to Philadelphia, and we hopped in my car and drove clear across Pennsylvania, off to see Arnold Palmer, in Latrobe. You got to start somewhere, right?

My Outback, the old gal, broke through the 184,000-mile mark on the way there.
Cele-a-brate good times, c'mon!
I warned Mike that the horn, with a mind of its own, could go off at any time, but he's been around beaters all his life. He wasn't fazed.

The trunk was a little crowded, what with the yard-sale tennis rackets and the Kadima paddles, a swimsuit, running shoes, a baseball glove, various cases from Bonnie Raitt CDs, and emergency reading material, plus a golf bag and various stray clubs. (Have at 'em, smash-and-grabbers. I warn you, though, that 6-hybrid is lousy into the wind.) Then there were Mike's clubs, concealed in a traveling coffin. Christine, underwhelmed by the car's aroma and trying to talk me into an upgrade, had told me more than once, “It's like a locker room.” Actually, she could have dropped the word
like
. Mike had no problems with it. I've seen his car.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike yawned before us, the portal from the congested Eastern Seaboard, where I have spent my life, to the wide and open Midwest. Neil Oxman likes to say that Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between. The fact is once you're west of Harrisburg you might as well be in Ohio.

We stopped for gas at a drive-off plaza. A college volleyball team was there from one of the rural state schools, tall wispy athletes in flip-flops boarding their team bus on a warm, still evening. You could feel their giddiness across the macadam. They were on a road trip, too.

Along the way, Mike asked, “Who's signed more autographs than this guy?”
This guy
is Mike's all-purpose pronoun. Here it meant Arnold.

We mulled it over. Cal Ripken signed all night and he played in 3,001 regular-season games alone. Bill Clinton and Phil Mickelson are inveterate signers. But Palmer had been signing for a half century, one tournament after another, one testimonial dinner after another, one golf course opening after another.

“Nobody,” I said. “Nobody could be close.”

“Nobody!” Mike said.

Mike is not an autograph collector, but for years on behalf of a friend he had been trying to get all the living British Open winners to sign a poster of the Old Course. It had become a scavenger hunt for him. By the time of our trip to see Arnold, Mike had a vacancy for Roberto De Vicenzo, the Open winner in '67, and several others. He got Palmer one year at a senior event in Houston and Woods one year at Doral, in the players' locker room. Tiger recognized Mike, and Mike opened with the perfect question: “Tiger, do you sign posters?” Tiger was fine with it. I was nervous as Mike was telling me the story. I've seen Tiger be churlish at such requests, particularly with tournament officials. But I imagine with Mike it was different. I think Woods respects any pro who has worked hard, tried his best, and made a living at the game. That's what Woods has done.

Palmer has the knack of making autograph seekers feel good about themselves. George Clooney, I think, has the same skill. In a
New Yorker
profile, Clooney once talked about the post-autograph moment, when the recipient feels exposed and vulnerable. Clooney's goal, he said, is to show autograph seekers “a path back to their normal selves.” How nice. Palmer would never analyze the transaction in such depth, but he instinctively does just what Clooney describes. As Palmer signs, he often says, “Nice to see you.” His signature is heavy, inky, curvy, legible. It's a beautiful signature. It's part of his trademark.

At one point the Outback conversation morphed into: “Who's
bigger
than this guy?”

Your answer is going to depend on your age, the influence of your father-in-law, various other factors. Two of Palmer's rough contemporaries, Ronald Reagan and John Wayne, were vastly bigger figures on the American landscape, but they were dead. Joe DiMaggio, Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby, Johnny Carson, Paul Newman, the same. But among the living? As a pure American icon? Who was bigger than Palmer? Ali. Maybe Magic Johnson. Maybe Warren Buffett. There must be others. But not many.

Arnie (as my late father-in-law called him) held particular appeal for anybody who ever shopped at Sears. He looked and acted like a man who followed all the rules of middle-class life, mowing his own lawn and taking out the trash. But we knew that wasn't really the case, and that's the part we liked best. We knew that if Arnold suddenly had an urge to visit the Playboy Mansion, he likely got in his plane, flew to Chicago, had himself a big time, and made it back home in time for breakfast with Winnie and the girls. If you watched him in his prime, or if you've seen the clips, there's something almost lawless about his play. But his respect for the game, and the accuracy of his scorecard, was never questioned. Well, that last part should be amended. There was one murky episode, in many, many years of play. But other than that, we're talking about pretty much a spotless career. Arnold was a man who was respectful to his playing partners, warm to his fans, accommodating to the writers, a man who complained about nothing.