A Golfer's Life (30 page)

He chewed on that for a few seconds, then sipped his drink and snorted. Usually, a Drum snort meant he thought your idea was so utterly ridiculous he sometimes wondered why he wasted his time sharing oxygen space with you. This time his snort meant he thought,
Well, kid, maybe you’ve got something there
.

Because his newspaper didn’t want to foot the expenses, Drum was accompanying me to Britain on his vacation time, and for some mysterious reason a foolish editor at his paper even told him not to bother to file a story. The irony of that, of course, is that when it appeared that not only was I contending for the lead in the Open but also might
win
it, his bosses were begging him for a dispatch from the frontline. Drum was a wily old cuss, though. I believe he made them really grovel for a while, running up their phone bill to boot, before he gave in and agreed to go back on the clock and write something about my first trip to the British Open.

I’m not entirely certain he was the first to write about the idea of a modern Grand Slam, though. That’s because when we stopped at Portmarnock en route, I’m certain he spread the idea of the new professional Grand Slam among his colleagues in the British press. So one of them was probably the first to actually write about the concept. Still, it was Bob who effectively first planted the seed that later grew.

I was immediately impressed by the rough links I discovered at Portmarnock and by the knowledgeable and interested crowds that roamed by the thousands up and down those windblown Irish dunes. Strange as it may sound, the style of golf was more like the kind of golf I’d played as a boy, when the courses were mostly ungroomed and fairly simple in design and nature, and I found that the reserved nature of
the galleries—which annoyed some Americans and made them feel unwelcome—was actually a bonus for me. There was no shouting or carrying on, only polite sustained applause when you earned it by making a superior shot. They clearly loved the game for the game’s sake and were a tough crowd to please, so pleasing them became a motivating factor for me.

Sam and I were the eventual winners, but a couple other things stick out in my memory of that week. To begin with, this was where I began my strong relationship with the wonderful British golf press, making a host of new acquaintances I would come to regard as good friends: men such as Pat Ward-Thomas of the
Manchester Guardian
, Leonard Crawley of the
Daily Telegraph
, Peter Ryde of the
Times
, and Henry Longhurst of the
Sunday Times
. The elegance of their reporting was exceeded perhaps only by their passion for the purity of the game. Their deep respect for the game’s traditions set a wonderful stage for reporting on the tournaments, and they were a tremendous influence on both Winnie and me.

Pat Ward-Thomas became a particular favorite. Consider this well-turned snippet from his frontline dispatch in
Country Life
magazine, detailing our first interview one evening after I’d shot a miserable 75 and left Sam holding the bag at Portmarnock:

While I was busy “coldly” trying to fashion destiny and impress the Canada Cup crowds, Winnie was being squired all about Dublin by the elegant Chris Dunphy, an American blue blood who more or less ran Seminole Golf Club in those days and traveled in the higher echelons of British and American society. (It was Chris who eventually introduced us to the Duke of Windsor and his wife, Wallis. The Duke and I became pretty chummy, though his wife struck me as a bit flighty.) While I was trying my best to figure out the mysteries of linksland putting, Winnie was happily gallivanting through Dublin’s famous linen shops and woolen mills with Dora Carr, Irish amateur star Joe Carr’s wonderfully hospitable wife, and taking afternoon tea at Teddy O’Sullivan’s Gresham Hotel with Chris Dunphy.

My first glimpse of St. Andrews one afternoon the following week wasn’t exactly the religious experience I’d hoped for. To tell the truth, the sight of the Old Course links didn’t exactly overwhelm me with fear. In fact, I thought it was probably as easy a golf course as I’d ever seen. Of course, this is exactly what most Americans think the first time they lay eyes on the place.

After my first practice round on the Old Course, I felt certain that my initial impression was correct—that the course wasn’t all that difficult and could be mastered fairly easily if you avoided the gorse and stayed out of the fearsome pot bunkers. The wind off the Firth of Forth was usually frisky,
but my tee shots were typically low-boring affairs that stayed below the currents that tortured higher ball-strikers and rolled a long way when they landed on the firm, wind-cured turf. This meant that, under certain circumstances, I could come close to if not actually drive several of the par-4 holes. I liked this quality about linksland golf quite a lot.

As I discovered, though, it’s only after successive rounds at the Old Course that you begin to realize the subtle brilliance and high degree of difficulty the most famous golf course on earth throws at you. Bob Jones wasn’t particularly impressed by the course his first time around it, either, but he eventually became such a devoted student of the course that he compared it then to a “wise old lady, whimsically tolerant of my impatience, but ready to reveal the secrets of her complex being, if I would only take trouble to study and learn.”

I couldn’t put it any better than that. Study and learn. That’s exactly what you have to do to try to prevent the Old Course from beating you.

Luckily, I had a good tutor to guide me through my lessons. Tony Wheeler, Wilson’s representative in Britain, introduced me to a young, gangly, chain-smoking former St. Andrews junior champion named Tip Anderson, who knew his mind and the mysterious ways of the Old Course.

I suppose you could say Tip was your classic Scotsman—as stubborn as he was smart, not likely to suffer fools who didn’t heed his advice. Despite our two strong personalities, we got along well from the start, though he wasn’t the least bit hesitant to convey his disapproval if I overruled his opinion on a shot. Sometimes we must have sounded like an old married couple squabbling gently in the fairway or rough. At times, I confess, I’d get so annoyed with his hard-headedness I’d look at him in exasperation and remark, “Hey, Tip, I play this game myself. I
think
I know what I’m doing.”

He would give me that deeply pitying look of his, perhaps
shake his head, and look at the horizon as if to say, “Well, lad. There’s no’ much I can do to help you now, if you won’t mind ol’ Tip.”

While I was busy qualifying for the Open on the adjacent New Course, firing 142 to easily make it into the tournament, trying my best to learn the eccentricities of the huge undulating greens and quirky bounces of links golf, Winnie was busy discovering the rustic charms of British hotel life just across Links Road on the second floor of Russacks Hotel. Figuring that midafternoon was an excellent time to slip down to the communal bathroom on our floor and have a nice hot, private soak in the tub, she was nearly flattened by a large semi-naked gent with a handlebar mustache who came barreling out of the bathroom. He apologized brusquely, but by then it was too late. Poor Winnie fled back to our room and shut the door in horror, refusing to risk another tub bath for the balance of the week.

I opened the 100th British Open with a round of 70 and followed that with a 71. This was something of a disappointment but not the end of the world. Kel Nagle was two behind leader Roberto de Vicenzo at that point, and Peter Thomson, who had won the tournament four times in the 1950s, was back with me at 141. The British Open traditionally started on Wednesday and finished with two rounds on Friday—so professionals could be back in their shops for the weekend. A few years later, the fourth round was moved to Saturday, and it wasn’t until my business agent Mark McCormack convinced the Royal and Ancient in 1980 that American television would pay a lot more money to have the event spread over the weekend that the final rounds were moved to Saturday and Sunday.

After a third-round 70 enabled me to pick up five strokes on Roberto in the Friday morning round, I walked off the course to have a sandwich with Pap, Harry Saxman, and Winnie,
feeling confident that the afternoon round might bode extremely well for me. Thanks to Tip, I’d managed to avoid the steep-walled bunkers and was playing better than my score indicated. I could feel myself getting into the right frame of mind to mount a charge the same way I’d done it at Denver a few weeks earlier.

Unfortunately, the golf gods had other things in mind. Just about the time we settled over our lunches, the skies above the links blackened and the rains blew in off the Firth of Forth. I mean it
rained
. It rained like I’d never seen it rain before, coming in wild gusts and torrents. Watching it pour, I remember assuring Winnie and Pap that a British Open had never been canceled because of inclement weather—nor had one ever finished on a Saturday, to that point. I was chomping at the bit to get back out there and catch the leaders. Aussie Kel Nagle had overtaken Roberto to lead with 207. I was at 211, four strokes back, but I felt the championship was well within my striking range.

I was deeply disappointed when I got to the first tee, dressed for the tumult and primed to play, and found that the afternoon round had been postponed, and furthermore was now scheduled to be completed—for the first time ever—on Saturday.

For what it’s worth, I always thought, and still feel, that the postponement hurt my chances of winning that first British Open I’d played in. For the most part, because of my inexperience on linksland courses, I played conservatively—and that wasn’t my style—which may also have cost me a bit. But in fairness it was really the infamous 17th or Road Hole that doused my hopes of completing the third leg of our newly created modern Grand Slam. The legendary 475-yard hole gave me fits all week. The first two days I reached it in regulation only to three-putt both times; and the same thing occurred in the Friday morning round before the historic washout.

By the time I reached the Road Hole’s tee on Saturday afternoon, I’d cut Nagle’s advantage to one shot and felt the tournament was mine to win. Perhaps because I was so pumped up, I overshot the 17th green on my 6-iron approach and wound up with my ball sitting on the pebble road behind the green. This time, however, I made perhaps my best recovery shot of the tournament, running the ball up the little bank and close enough to the pin to sink the par putt. I followed that with a massive drive and birdie at 18. Nagle, playing directly behind me, still one stroke ahead, needed par 4s on the last two holes to maintain his lead, and he got them. But it was really the Road Hole that wound up telling the tale. For the tournament, I had ten putts there to Nagle’s four. Kel was such a gracious competitor, you have to give him all the credit in the world for hanging tough at the end.

Needless to say, I was disappointed that any hope of a Grand Slam was now gone, although I remember telling myself that an “American” Grand Slam was still possible, assuming I went home and captured the PGA Championship at Firestone in a couple of weeks. But frankly, our British Open experience had been everything I’d hoped it would be. The galleries had been so informed and so welcoming, the press so thoroughly engaging and entertaining (One of my fondest memories of the week was the hilarious pounding that defending champion Gary Player took from the tabloid press when he appeared on the first tee of the opening round wearing slacks that had one white leg and one black one. That fashion statement prompted an indignant scribe to pronounce that he looked more like a court jester than a dignified Open champion.) that the entire atmosphere so strongly reflective of the good things I felt about the game, that when Pat Ward-Thomas and Henry Longthirst—oops, I mean to say Long
hurst
—urged us to go on to Paris for the French
Open at St. Cloud, Winnie and I quickly consulted and decided to do just that.

We said so long to Pap, Bob Drum, and Harry Saxman and flew to Sculthorpe Air Base outside of London, where George Vogel, a U.S. Air Force major from my hometown, graciously offered to put us up in officers’ housing for the week before the French tournament. We had a simply grand time of it. While I played golf and talked airplanes with the Air Force guys, Winnie shopped in London and saw the sights. Finally it was time to head over the Channel, and even that proved a memorable adventure. The Air Force insisted on flying us to Paris and arranged for us to go aboard a military C-47 cargo plane. While I sat up enjoying the ride with the pilots, Winnie sat dutifully strapped in on a hard galvanized seat in the cargo area, her bottom cushioned by a folded parachute, as we bounced through a fierce thunderstorm. Many Tour wives, I can tell you, would have filed for divorce after such a wild ride, but as usual Winnie bore it all with good grace and humor, her heart intent on a week in Gay Paree!

I remember getting to the hotel, which was somewhere near the famous Paris Opera, and immediately hustling out to the tournament site, the St. Cloud Golf Club in the city’s suburbs, where we had supposedly been preregistered by our friends in the British press corps. We walked into the club’s dining room to get a bite of lunch and ran smack-dab into an unfriendly American socialite named Louise Chapman, wife of Dick Chapman, the top amateur player from Pinehurst, who smartly informed us that there was no possibility I would be allowed to play in the French Open. Her remarks didn’t sit well with me at all, but they didn’t seem to faze Winnie. She was already enjoying herself immensely, examining the menu and trying out her café French, while I stormed off to
the tournament office to find out what the hell Louise Chapman was talking about.