Men in Green (33 page)

Jack talked about playing in the 1962 Phoenix Open with Arnold during Jack's rookie year. Arnold was running away with the tournament, and they were paired together in the last round.

“He put his arm around my shoulder and we walked to the eighteenth tee,” Jack said. “And Arnold said, ‘Come on, you can finish second here. You can birdie this hole. Just relax.' It was a pretty nice thing to do. I birdied the hole and I finished second. Arnold won by twelve. He just nipped me, 269 to 281.”

Arnold made $5,300. Jack made $2,300.

“Arnold was very good to me when I first started,” Jack said. “He used to come over and pick me up in Ohio in his plane, and we'd go globe-trot the United States and play exhibitions. In those days, the tour allowed you three weeks a year to play exhibitions, and we'd take eight days and go play eight exhibitions three times a year. That's the only place you'd make any money. You didn't make any money playing golf, but you could make a couple grand or three grand playing an exhibition. You'd play eight of them and put twenty grand in your pocket for the week. That was pretty good.”

“How was Arnold as a pilot?” I asked.

“Well, I guess I trusted him.”

“Was there a copilot?”

“No, just Arnold. He'd pick me up, and we'd go fly around and play exhibitions.”

I loved that picture, two guys in one little plane, golf bags in the back, a map on the pilot's lap as he pointed the nose of his plane to some new place. Ball, speaking loosely here, was beneath them in his yellow Grand Prix, doing about the same thing.

“Arnold made an interesting comment when we were at lunch with him,” Mike said. “He said that if he hadn't won the U.S. Open in 1960, he would have won three or four other ones. He said he won there in Cherry Hills and then he lost the edge.”

“Interesting comment,” Jack said. “I make a similar comment every time I sit down in front of an audience and talk about that 1960 Open. I say the best thing that ever happened to me was
not
winning the U.S. Open in 1960. Because if I had won that Open, I would have been too smug or too self-confident and felt like however I had prepared my game was ready. But I was growing into the game then. Arnold had already won two Masters. He was at the top of the game. He
had
the edge.”

Arnold had the edge and then he lost it. Yes, he won at Augusta twice after that '60 Open, he won two British Opens, he won scores of other events. He needed all those wins to become the public icon known as
Arnold Palmer
. But that day in Latrobe Arnold was not talking about the public person we all know, whose signature was on the front door of a thousand Dunkin' Donuts, in the name of some new tea-and-lemonade combo. That day in Latrobe our host was talking about
Arnie
, as Arnold's father called him, as my father-in-law called him, as Conni Venturi called him. He was talking about himself as the son of a greenkeeper who had U.S. Open dreams for his big-boned boy. Arnold was telling us that something had changed after he won the national open in 1960 at Cherry Hills. After that, whenever he was contending in his national championship, the one that he wanted most, he could not find fourth gear. That's a far from perfect image, because the real issues had to be much more mental than that. But the point is that Arnold had lost the ability to will it in when he needed it most.

Maybe this has all become less meaningful, this discussion of the U.S. Open and edge, even for American players. The game has become much more international, and the prestige of the Masters, with its United Nations of a field, has increased immeasurably. In Jack's day and Arnold's day, the Masters was a nice invitational tournament, but it wasn't a
championship
. Golf's championships were the PGA, the British Open, and the U.S. Open. Jack told us the Masters was a reward for playing well in other events, but he valued his national open far more. “As an American, the U.S. Open to me was the number-one tournament in the world,” he said. Its status was assigned to him on January 21, 1940, in Upper Arlington, Ohio, on the occasion of his birth.

•  •  •

Jack was a plodding player, often annoyingly so. But he was also careful, and he was never involved in any sort of rules dispute. He called penalties on himself in the rare instance when something went wrong, but there was never a time when anybody accused him of being anything less than completely faithful to the rule book. Hundreds of thousands of shots, and never an issue.

“When you start playing as a kid, your dad teaches you good sportsmanship and to live by the rules,” Jack told us. “That's what my dad taught me, and I'm sure that's what Arnold's dad taught him. The rules are the rules. That's golf. I remember when I was eleven years old, I was playing a qualifier for a district junior tournament. We were playing at the Army Depot Golf Course, and I missed one like this.” Jack took his two small, tanned hands and held them about ten inches apart. His thumbs have always had a pronounced curve. “I got mad and I whacked the ball down the fairway. Everybody just stood there.”

It was stroke play. There were, of course, no given putts. Every hole had to finish with the ball at the bottom of a cup. But in his anger, little Jack lost track of that basic fact.

“So then I went down the fairway and played it back up to the green. I ended up shooting eighty-one that day instead of shooting seventy-eight. I was playing with Larry Snyder. S-N-Y-D-E-R, if you use it. We played some junior golf together.”

“Is your memory that good for everything?” I asked.

“I remember things that were impactful,” Jack said.

He continued on the subject of the rules. “This was at Royal Lytham, at the Open in 1979. Fifteenth hole. Final round. There was a bunker about sixty, seventy yards short of the green. I put it in that bunker, right up against the face of it. When I swung, I took the face out and dirt went flying.”

All manner of debris came at Nicklaus. The ball stayed in the bunker. Joe Dey, by then the retired first commissioner of the PGA Tour, was working that Open as a rules official. He had been walking with Nicklaus, with whom he was close.

“I felt something come down and hit me,” Jack said.

It could have been a stone or a clump of dirt or his own ball. In those days, if you were struck by your own ball, it was a two-shot penalty.

“So I turned to Joe and said, ‘Joe, I got hit by something.'

“Joe was right there. He said, ‘The ball didn't hit you.' ”

Nicklaus asked Dey again before he signed his card whether the ball might have hit him, and Dey again said that it had not. So Nicklaus signed. He finished in a tie for second with Ben Crenshaw in the 1979 British Open at Lytham, three shots behind Seve Ballesteros, who won with 283. Jack has never felt sure about the 286 next to his name for that week. He has never felt sure about the scorecard he signed on that fourth round when he failed to get out of the bunker on fifteen on his first attempt.

“It still bothers me,” Jack said. “Because I think that ball might have hit me.”

•  •  •

Near the end of our visit, I attempted to express to Jack what he meant to me, as a golfer, as a model of grace, as a role model. I'm sure he's heard the same from many others. Still, he seemed to appreciate it. This was a serious piece of business for me. Jack gave my life a direction it would not have had otherwise. He helped a gangly kid, not particularly good at anything, find a path to adulthood. I was lucky to have the chance to say it in person to Jack. I could tell he understood what I was trying to say.

“If you go back to Turnberry, to when Tom and I embraced each other, that to me really is what it's all about,” Jack said. “When two people get done, they shake hands and say, ‘Well done.' You say, ‘You beat my rear end. I'll get you next week.' I love that about golf. When I congratulated Tom on his win, I could do it with meaning because I'm the guy he beat. And when I beat Arnold, he'd shake my hand and say, ‘Congratulations, well done.' And I knew he meant it.”

Mike and I had come far. We were now sitting with the greatest golfer ever, and he was discussing his wins and losses and opponents and friends with casual, genuine intimacy.

“Your character comes through in golf,” Jack said. “If you're pissed at the world the whole time, you really can't enjoy your wins, and in many ways you can't really—what's the right word?—you can't really understand the meaning of your defeats. To get beat is very healthy. Particularly when you've really given it your best effort. If you win every time, you don't learn anything. You don't learn anything about yourself. You don't learn anything about the other person. You don't learn anything about the game. You don't learn anything about
life
.”

When we were done, Mike and I walked slowly across the parking lot of Golden Bear Plaza. I was half in a daze. Who today is talking about the lessons learned from losing? Jack Nicklaus has to be as thoughtful, in his plain and practical way, as any world-class athlete has ever been.

Jack had told us about a note he had sent Bubba Watson after Bubba won his second Masters:
You play a game with which I am not familiar
. Bobby Jones once said that of Nicklaus. Nicklaus's father, Charlie, offered Jones to his only son as a role model. Joe Dey, from the PGA Tour and the USGA before that, passed along much of what he knew about Jones to Charlie and Jack, and he knew a lot: When Jones completed the Grand Slam in 1930 at Merion, Dey was there as a cub reporter, covering it for Philadelphia's proper afternoon paper, the
Evening Bulletin
. Four years later, Jones started a tournament at Augusta in his own image. Eighty years later, Rhonda Glenn was in Augusta during Masters week to accept an award at a banquet dinner from the Golf Writers Association of America for outstanding contributions to the game. For that dinner, Rhonda kindly invited me to join her and her people. I sat at a round table up front in a banquet room at the Augusta Country Club with Barb Romack, '56 Curtis Cup cover girl for
SI
. Two months after that Masters, I saw Barb and Rhonda again when the two U.S. Opens, the men's Open followed by the women's Open, were played at Pinehurst. One night at the Carolina Hotel, Jaime Diaz told Rhonda, Barb, and me about a lesson Barb had given him
forty-five
years earlier. The ladies laughed. Eight months later, Rhonda died. Pancreatic cancer. That lifetime GWAA award went to the right person.

As I shut things down here, and finally clean out the back of the car, I realize I have not nailed down every last thing. Fred, for instance. I knew from experience that getting Fred Couples to sit down for any sort of interview is about as easy as getting a rhino into a dental chair. I sent Fred an e-mail through his agent, told him about the legends list and his place on it, and Mike's place, too. Fred got back to me by text, his preferred form of communication. I got back to him, and after that the line went dead. If someday I find out the answer to Mike's question—
Fred, who filled out your application for that '79 U.S. Open?
—I will figure out a way to disseminate the answer. If you hear first, please let me know. It's not easy being a detective in the Golf Division. You need all the help you can get (and I got a lot), and still your work is never done.

•  •  •

After Nicklaus won the Masters at age forty-six in 1986, he took off a week and then played the following week in Houston. Gordon S. White, Jr., covered that Houston tournament for the
New York Times
. He wrote about a tour caddie following Nicklaus as he played and used a phrase that was new to me:
busman's holiday
. In the ensuing years, I have come to realize that the busman's holiday is an elemental part of my life. Actually, I don't know where my work life stops and my recreational life begins. Mike is the same way. Visiting these various legends, secret and otherwise, felt like one long busman's holiday.

For all his verbal intensity, I find being with Mike relaxing. For one thing, he's an excellent storyteller. Somewhere in our travels he told me about going to Portugal to play in the European Senior Tour qualifying tournament. Upon arrival, he hired an English caddie who, he soon discovered, reeked of body odor. Mike suspected his caddie was sleeping outside. After a morning practice round, Mike brought his man to a supermarket and bought him soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste, deodorant. Mike gave him a pep-talk on personal hygiene. That afternoon, when Mike was on the range hitting balls, the caddie returned smelling like a rose. But the next morning the smell was rancid again. Reluctantly, Mike fired the man several holes into the round. Naturally, Mike paid him in full. Mike's philosophy is pay in full and part as friends. I've learned a lot from him.

I find that I don't have to put up any fronts with Mike. What an energy saver. It's helpful that he knows a lot about my everyday life. Nothing has to be perfect in my accounts. I can tell Mike things I can't tell others, in part because he lives a thousand miles away, but also because I know he will understand what I am saying and what I am trying to say. I feel no compulsion to be successful around Mike. What a relief.