Willie (32 page)

I think they hired me as executive producer on
Stagecoach
because they thought I could keep Kris in line. But they were wrong. I didn't even try. Kris didn't like the director, he didn't like the script. He didn't like anything about the project except that me and Waylon and Johnny were in it with him. I would send reporters to interview Kris and he would tell them, “Man, what a piece of shit this is. I wouldn't watch this fucking movie if they strapped me in front of a TV set and sewed my eyelids open.”

It was not a happy location. I was called upon twice to make decisions as executive producer. Once was when someone brought it to Johnny Cash's attention that the Indians hired for the picture were being treated shabbily. The first group of Indians hired didn't look like warriors. They were too fat. They couldn't ride bareback and shoot at the same time. So the company hired some fine Indian cowboys off the Apache reservation. But when the Apaches arrived at our location around Tucson, the company wouldn't pay them enough to live on. Some had brought their horses and trailers down at their own expense. They were sleeping on blankets in the brush. I was appointed by Johnny Cash to protest to the company, and the treatment of the Indians improved.

But the movie company was still fucked up. They kept bringing us
out for shots and changing the scenes. We'd rehearse all night for a big scene, and the next morning we would get to the set and they had changed their minds. I was accustomed to all the sitting around and waiting that goes with acting in a movie, and I knew how things could change unexpectedly, but this was ridiculous. It happened every day, over and over.

I got mad and said, “I'll be back at the motel when you need me.” Gator drove me away in my
Honeysuckle Rose
bus. A couple of other buses pulled away behind us; the makeup and wardrobe and production people were breaking for lunch. The director, however, thought everybody was walking off the movie. This kind of shook him up and maybe it helped pull the picture together.

There are a lot of things I'm involved with one way or another, a lot of decisions I have to make—so many that there's no need to start worrying about just one. The more things I get into, the less I worry. There's safety in numbers. Things have a way of working themselves out.

This is not the ideal psychological profile for a movie producer. A movie producer is usually a walking heart attack. The producer and the director are hit with dozens of decisions every day. Robert Mitchum said working in Hollywood was like being nibbled to death by ducks. I know what he meant: the constant changing of minds, rewriting of scripts, changing of people, dueling egos.

I've learned a lot about the movie business since our first
Songwriter
meeting in 1977. I've learned you really can go make a movie with a minimum of problems if you've got good people around you who know their jobs, and you have the production money in the bank. I have also learned this is almost never the case.

Having seen all sides of the movie business now, and learned what everybody is supposed to be doing, I have just about decided that I don't have much interest in producing movies. Having gotten
Red Headed Stranger
off my chest, I don't feel the need to leap out there in Hollywood and ask them to strap my ass full of problems and throw me in the pool to see if I float.

But I do like movie acting and intend to keep doing it. I've learned the secret to movie acting. What is important is to learn your lines and be on time. If you do that, then nobody fucks with you much.

I am tempted to say that in the future I will leave movie-producing problems to people who need them—but if somebody should walk up and hand me the money to make any movie I want to make, play any role I want to play, and produce the picture as well, I'll just say, “Hello problems, welcome home.”

It was the sort of Hill Country afternoon that makes the boys out at the club grin and say, “Well, another shitty day in paradise.”

We were standing on the fourth tee at the Pedernales, soaking up the sunshine, listening to the whirring of the water sprinklers, smelling the wet grass. I had my shirt off and was playing in shorts and running shoes. The fourth hole is a 520-yard par five that doglegs sharply to the right about 260 yards down the fairway. Past the bend in the fairway a dozen deer, led by an eight-point buck, were watching us from the shade of a grove of oak trees. The deer were poised to bound away in the likely event that somebody in our group would nail a drive that carried beyond the turn in the fairway and rattled the branches where the deer were not so much hiding from us as just staying discreetly out of our way.

We love our deer at the Pedernales. A year or so ago, a golf hustler thought he'd show off with a doe that had paused in the middle of a fairway some 150 yards away. He pulled out a 3-iron and said, “Watch this.” He kept his shot low and cracked a line drive that flew straight as a bullet, striking that beautiful doe in the ribs with a thump we could hear back at the tee. The doe hopped up and down, stiff-legged, looking back at us as if asking why nobody had at least yelled
a warning. She ran for the trees, biting her wound. It must have hurt like a bitch. The hustler smiled proudly and asked, “What do you think of that?”

I said, “I think your ass is barred from my golf course, starting yesterday.”

We don't like people hitting our deer with golf balls. We don't like people messing with the wild ducks and geese that land on our ponds. We don't like people chasing rabbits or throwing rocks at our turtles. We feel we are very lucky to be able to satisfy our golf habits in a game park, and that's how we want to keep it.

But back to the fourth tee. I said it was likely one of our group would pound his tee shot past the 260-yard dogleg, because on this particular day we were playing with old friend Lee Trevino, who has won the U.S. Open and the British Open and can carry the load in any kind of match we talk him into at the Pedernales.

Lee drops by the Pedernales when he's in the Austin area to play golf with us and swap needles in Spanish with his longtime pal, Larry Trader. Lee and Larry both grew up learning golf by working as caddies, and they both talk all the time while they're playing.

Instead of distracting them, the continual chatter helps them draw pictures for their subconscious.

Larry will stand up to his tee ball and chuckle as if he is amused at how good he is compared to the rest of us. “I had a dream,” Larry will say. “Oh, I tell you, Will, it was so sweet. I dreamed I just drew the club back and brought it down right through this little slot here”—
whack!
Trader has hammered a drive over the big oak in the middle of the fairway, the ball flying toward the hill that is the right boundary and then turning a bit to the left high in the air and coming down at the spot beyond the corner of the hill where a good bounce will leave him a 2-iron second shot to the green. But Larry has never stopped talking. “Do you call that perfect, or what? Maybe a hair off line? Felt like I caught it on the toe just a touch.” When Larry says he felt like he caught his drive on the toe, you know he has really coldcocked it.

While Larry is still grinning and talking and picking up his tee, Lee will stick his own ball on a peg and say, “That wasn't too shabby for an old man, Traloo, but you never had a dream that you could hit it up with me. I believe I'll just take aim on this little darling and throw it over the top of those three trees on the right and bring it to a stop at the far edge of the fairway on that little patch of grass because it's in the shade . . .”

Somewhere toward the end of this speech, you will hear the loud crack of Lee's metal driver and see the ball taking off and heading toward the spot where Lee, a master of the game, had seen the ball landing in his creative imagination. In golf you call it “visualization.” It's amazing how often visualization works when you can remember to do it. The really good players never forget it.

But the rest of us are liable to get so wrapped up in how we grip the club and how we hold our feet and what to turn first—our hips or our shoulders—that we neglect the vital aspect of creating a mental picture of our ball hitting its target. It's a funny thing about golf. I use visualization in playing music. My creative imagination prints a picture in my mind of where a tune is going, and it goes there. But I can walk onto a golf course intending to visualize a 300-yard drive down the middle, and so many things go through my head—
Keep your eyes on the back of the ball and don't move your head until the ball is gone, and keep your grip real light, like you're holding a tube of toothpaste with the cap off. Make a full shoulder turn but don't forget to turn your hips and get that left knee behind the ball and that left heel off the ground. On the way back down, don't grab the club with your right hand and throw your right shoulder and arm at the ball or you'll come over the top and hit something ugly. Start your downswing with your left knee, plant that left heel and turn your hips toward the direction of the shot and keep your head still. Don't let your shoulders pass your chin until the ball is gone past your left ear. Make a good swing, inside out, full extension of the arms, a big arc, don't try to bash the ball, just swing and the club will do the work. And don't forget to fucking relax!

All this mental instruction has probably taken about twenty seconds, by which time the swing takes place and there's nothing you can do about it. You've also probably lost sight of your target if you ever had one. But every now and then all this action comes together just right and you hit a golf shot that is so beautiful and so graceful that you wouldn't trade it for an orgasm. With a really good swing, something magical happens. It gives you a high unlike anything else. Then one good swing will follow another until you start believing
this game is easy
. That's when you remember that you haven't been thinking about all your tips, so you review your style to see you're still doing everything right—then it all falls apart. What had been so fluid and easy a few minutes ago has once again become almost impossible. Where your club had felt like a feather a minute ago, it
now feels like a shovel. And then, in a sudden revelation, you will see the line unfold before you like a golden path and one-hand a putt thirty feet into the cup to win the Pedernales Scramble match with your pardner, and golf has dug the hook deeper into you.

Golf is not only a game, it is an addiction. You cannot explain the addiction of golf to someone who does not play golf. I have tried, but they simply cannot understand. These are wonderful people I am talking about, too, excellent people in all other ways. People like my wife Connie. It is, in fact, fair to say golf has caused me a great amount of marital discord. Oh yes, that is certainly true.

Since getting my own golf course, I have had a hard time finding an excuse why I can't play golf every day when I am in Austin. I look upon it as going to the dogs with dignity.

Let's return again to the fourth hole, where I started telling this story.

By now the rest of us—this day it was a movie director named Doug Holloway and Reverend Gerald Mann, pastor of the River Bend Baptist Church, and I think the Coach and Bud Shrake might have been a team that day—go down to where Trader has decided to hit a 3-iron for his second shot to the par five. Trader says, “Well, I don't know what to tell you boys except I been practicing this shot for thirty-seven years. Look at what I lay on this little fucker.” He knocks it on the green. To me Larry says, “Sorry, pardner, I left it about ten feet above the hole. Must of caught it thin.”

We move on up to Trevino's ball. He has hit it twenty yards past Larry.

“How long until you turn fifty?” Larry says to Lee, admiring the drive.

“One year, eight months, two weeks, one day, and twenty minutes,” Lee grins. “Man, I can't wait. I'll be like Jesse James.”

“You mean crooked and dead?” I say.

It was a joke, of course. We were talking about Lee joining the PGA Seniors Tour when he turns fifty. But the word “dead” sets him off.

“Hey, dead ain't bad, let me tell you,” Lee says seriously. “I mean, I believe in reincarnation, anyway. But when I got killed by lightning I realized the passage from this life is a tremendous pleasure.” Lee was struck by lightning at a tournament a few years ago. “I was sitting under a tree when the lightning hit. It bolted my arms and legs out stiff, jerked me off the ground, and killed me. I knew I was dead. There was no pain. Everything turned a warm gentle orange color. I
saw my mama, who had been dead for years. I saw other people from my life. It was a newsreel like you've read about—my life passing before my eyes. But it was so pleasant, so wonderful, I felt great. I thought, boy, this dying is really fun. It's when I woke up in the hospital badly burned and in pain that I knew I had come back to life again for some reason.”

“Sounds like you kind of enjoyed being dead,” said Preacher Mann.

“Enjoyed it! Preacher, it was great. There's no reason to fear death. Shit, I wish I was dead right this minute.”

There's really nothing funny about the game of golf itself, but the guys who play it make it the funniest game in the world. The more seriously we take it, the funnier it becomes.

Guys are always talking to themselves on the golf course. It should be to give themselves positive reinforcement, but usually it is to remind themselves how stupid they are. A negative thought will destroy a golf shot before you ever take your clubs out of the bag.

I've noticed two types of regulars at the Pedernales—those who talk to themselves, and those who talk to their golf ball.

Steve Fromholz keeps up a running monologue to himself all the way around. Steve is liable to hit a great shot and follow it with a horrible shot. He will be saying, “Steve, you ought to take this ball out of service for disreputable appearance, but give it one more chance to stay on the playing squad. Just put a smooth swing on it . . . There, you see how easy it is? Steve, you're great, you're a natural . . .” Then he tops one. “You moron! You fool! You idiot! How the hell could you make such a grotesque swing? You're the worst fucking player I ever played with, you asshole!”