A Golfer's Life (34 page)

The PGA’s rationale for maintaining stewardship of the Tour, of course, was that it had not only created the road
show of tournaments as a way to enable its members to pick up extra income playing in tournaments when their clubs were closed down for the winter. It had also supervised, maintained, and eventually (by the mid-sixties) made the Tour into an impressive and increasingly popular and profitable entity.

The increasingly sharp public debate was about control—who should be in charge of a tour that was growing by leaps and bounds as the popularity of golf exploded thanks to the exploits (among others) of Nicklaus, Player, and me? Should it be the club professionals or the tournament players themselves? Of course, the PGA of America had one answer, and an increasing number of tournament players had another.

As crass as it sounds, the issue was really money—more precisely, television money. For some players the last straw came when, in the summer of 1968, it was discovered that the PGA had entered into “secret” contract meetings for the television rights to
Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf
and the
World Series of Golf
without consulting us. Gardner Dickinson, one of the player representatives on the PGA’s tournament commitee, led an angry contingent of tour stars—including Doug Ford, Jack Nicklaus, and Frank Beard—out the door to start their own golf tour.

They formed a new entity called the Association of Professional Golfers, or APG; hired the PGA’s own fine fieldman, Jack Tuthill, to act as interim tournament director for the fledgling tour; then began the complicated process of trying to bring existing tournament sponsors on board. They were damned effective, I might add. By the year’s end, I believe they had something like twenty-eight tournaments lined up for the approaching season and a tour qualifying school established at Doral in Miami. At one point, Jack Nicklaus wrote a thoughtful essay for
Sports Illustrated
explaining the
revolt and outlining why the move was in the end entirely necessary. My impression remains that the general public was wholly in favor of the split.

I’ll admit that at first I was a bit reluctant to join the rebelling palace guards. For all its warts and arrogance, the PGA of America
was
the goose that laid the golden egg, and I am nothing if not loyal to those who have helped me. Even if on more than one occasion they stood in my way.

The irony, of course, is that Mark McCormack had been battling the PGA for years on my behalf over restrictive contracts and the issue of limiting the participation of foreign players. Mark knew the PGA’s outdated rules were taking lots of money from the pockets of players and, consequently, some worthy charities as well. For example, in July 1964 we had scheduled an exhibition match in Princeton, New Jersey, with proceeds to go to the New Jersey Heart Association. At that time the PGA had something called the “Three Point Rule,” which stated that a player could be off the Tour playing golf for prize money only three times a year while a PGA Tour tournament was in progress someplace else. That week the Tour stop happened to be the Insurance City Open in Hartford, Connecticut, a tournament I had not intended to play. So far, no problem there—I wasn’t violating the Three Point Rule.

Unfortunately, the PGA had another restrictive clause that stated that no exhibition could take place within two hundred miles of a PGA tournament site, a sensible enough edict when you consider the kinds of crowds Jack, Gary, and I—and other stars of the Tour—were capable of drawing for an exhibition match. Since we were told that our exhibition was 202 miles from Hartford, we didn’t anticipate any problem with the Princeton exhibition. The match had been set and advertised, and thousands of tickets were sold.

The day before the match, however, the PGA informed us
that it would have to be canceled. They said that I could not play in Princeton because the site of the Hartford tournament had been switched to another country club in town that was only 196 miles from the site of the Princeton exhibition.

I thought they were joking, and I was baffled and later enraged to learn that they weren’t. The PGA promised I would be fined and suspended if we went ahead with the charity exhibition. At the eleventh hour, Mark tried his best to persuade the PGA to yield, noting that the events were two states apart and that surely they could make a four-mile exception. But his mediation efforts failed. The sponsors of the heart exhibition were left holding an empty bag and had to cancel.

Who was the big loser? Not me. I lost a decent exhibition fee, but the Heart Association and the people of New Jersey, as Mark passionately argued, were the real losers in the absurd dispute. While I believe in strictly adhering to the letter of the law in following the rules of the game, this kind of hard-line, strict interpretation benefited no one.

Now consider the PGA’s muddled thinking on the issue of participation in foreign events and the status of foreign players who wished to play on the American golf circuit. In March of 1961, Sam Snead and I were selected to represent the United States in the Canada Cup matches, scheduled that year to be held in Puerto Rico. But about two weeks before the event, the PGA notified us that I was ineligible to play because—under a PGA rule that involved my position on the money list—I had to either play in the PGA tournament in Memphis that week or not at all.

To make matters worse, the PGA powers that be decided that no foreign player to whom this rule applied could play in the Canada Cup either. Among others, that meant Gary Player couldn’t represent his home country, South Africa, and Stan Leonard couldn’t play for Canada. It was as outrageous as it
was ridiculous, and believe it or not, the People-to-People Sports Committee even appealed to the PGA, pleading that their actions reflected “discredit on the United States and its sporting traditions.”

Those pleas were met with unyielding silence. Jimmy Demaret played for me, Harold Henning played for Gary, and Al Johnston filled in for Stan Leonard.

The absurdity of this rule and other restrictive clauses like it—for example, the insane attempt in 1966 to restrict the number of tournaments foreign players could enter unless they went to a PGA school and became officially approved by the PGA—guaranteed that the revolt Jack and Gardner and the others led in the summer of 1968 would succeed.

As early as November 1963, at a time when the PGA was considering new regulations that would strengthen restrictions on U.S. players playing abroad, entering foreign tournaments, playing in exhibitions, and even appearing on television shows, I wrote a long letter to the PGA exhorting them to consider the consequences of their actions. I pleaded the case that golf was rapidly expanding in popularity beyond America’s borders and that as worldwide interest in the game grew, it could only be good for the game itself and all of us individually to participate in the international growth and act as ambassadors of the game. Golf was much larger than any single organization, I said, arguing that it was not only unfair to restrict American players from playing overseas, but that limiting the exposure foreign players could have on our tour would ultimately damage professional golf in America. After a lengthy and frank airing of my concerns, I concluded with the following words:

The PGA’s lack of response effectively told the tale. The irony of my being hesitant to bolt with the others, of course, is that within a year, my unhappiness with the provincial attitudes and general arrogance of the PGA led me, at Mark McCormack’s urging, to make some serious private explorations into the possibilities of starting a new tour. At that point Mark had convinced me that the restrictive clauses of the PGA bylaws would never hold up in a court of law, and at one point he counseled me to violate an exhibition rule, suffer a fine and suspension, then sue the PGA of America to draw public attention to the situation.

Eventually, a large and well-known corporation proposed a guarantee of $4 million in seed money to sponsor a tour of the game’s top thirty players, the only stipulation being that three of them would be men named Jack, Gary, and Arnold. While some of the game’s other top players might have turned down such a deal, it was believed that an overwhelming majority of the game’s best players would enthusiastically sign on.

If you’re thinking that in theory this sounds a little like Greg Norman’s ill-fated attempt to start a world tour a few years back, you’re right. There are distinct similarities in the concepts, and permit me to say here that in another twenty or thirty years, as golf continues its explosive growth worldwide and corporate interests increase, I fully believe that competing
commercial golf tours will evolve. We may eventually see all kinds of new tours springing up. My greatest hope is that the various existing tours and governing bodies of the game will realize how imperative it is for them to work in concert now—as I believe they are doing—to handle the change properly, lest golf go the route so many other big-time sports have in the past twenty years. Lockouts and strikes and feuds only make players appear as nothing more than greedy bandits and harm everybody in the end.

At any rate, in 1964, like Greg Norman, I was attacked by some in the PGA establishment who circulated rumors that I was simply serving as a front man for Mark McCormack’s secret plan to start a new world tour.

That simply wasn’t the case. But unlike Greg, I mulled over the idea for six or seven weeks and decided the time wasn’t right, and that this was not the proper way to go about gaining our freedom. Despite its arrogance and foolish attitudes, and its history of excluding the handicapped and minorities, I simply couldn’t turn my back on the PGA of America. I knew the revolution had to come from
within
the palace walls.

I
n a nutshell, when Jack and Gardner’s coup d’état happened four years later, at a time when I really did have some clout with PGA members, I saw an opportunity to serve as a bridge of sorts to a better world for everybody. But I chose a role that was far more in keeping with my values and personality.

Leo Fraser, a lifelong club professional who had many close friends, including me, on the Tour, had just taken office as the president of the PGA. Leo was far more open-minded to the idea of compromise and accommodation, and as much as anything else, his more flexible attitude stalled the alternative APG tour before it ever really got rolling. I remember going to see
Leo at Atlantic City in late 1968 for a lengthy meeting, during which we discussed an idea that had been steadily growing in popularity. I was a leading proponent of a proposal to create a new players organization, a separate entity formally called the PGA Tour that would operate autonomously with a board composed of four players elected by the Tour, three businessmen, and the top three PGA of America officials.

Months of sometimes lively debate ensued, but Leo’s essential fairness, good humor, patience, and determination to serve the best interests of the professional game eventually won the day. The rebels abandoned their cause, and the crowning touch came when Joe Dey, the longtime executive director of the United States Golf Association and a man of impeccable credentials, was named first commissioner of the new Tournament Players Division of the PGA—which would soon evolve into the PGA Tour.

Joe’s presence gave the fledgling tour organization the instant credibility it needed. But more important, the birth of a new organization devoted expressly to fulfilling the needs and desires of professional tournament golf brought years of bitter feelings and acrimony to an end. We could finally get back to playing the game we all loved to play—instead of bickering about it. And, despite all the bickering, no one could ever do anything to completely diminish my sheer enjoyment at playing this marvelous game. I’d do it even if there was no money involved, and a lot of players share that view, as participation in the Ryder Cup, the Presidents Cup, and, to a lesser extent, the World Cup suggests.

W
hatever hard feelings I privately nursed about being ineligible for the Ryder Cup of 1959, they vanished in 1961, the moment Winnie and I and the other members of the American squad and their wives walked onto the quiet,
hushed grounds at Royal Lytham and St. Annes Golf Club for the opening ceremonies of seed merchant Sam Ryder’s biennial match between the best players of America and Britain and Ireland. What I remember most was standing with my teammates near the first tee and feeling a lump rise in my throat and tears fill my eyes as the brass band played the “Star-Spangled Banner” followed by “God Save the Queen.”

There is simply no experience in golf quite like being part of your first Ryder Cup opening ceremony, unless perhaps it’s the closing ceremonies after your side has won.

In any case, my second-most-powerful memory from that weekend on the Lancashire coast, just up the road a bit from where I’d won my first British Open at Birkdale in July, involves Peter Alliss, who was my first match in the singles competition. Peter was an elegant man and an accomplished player. As most of the British players did, he shaped his shots for control purposes, from left to right in a controlled fade. I greatly admired the way Peter played the game, with such precision and accuracy, which was almost nothing like my style. And it says something nice about the man’s quiet tenacity that I had to work my tail off simply to halve the match with him. Cordially shaking hands at the match’s conclusion, I think both of us knew we’d been in a dogfight—and would probably be in a few more before things were over.

The highlight of my week came when Bill Casper and I teamed up in the foursomes to defeat Dai Rees and Ken Bousfield, 2 and 1. Counting my singles win over Tom Haliburton, a lovely gentleman, I departed Lytham with three victories, one tie, and 3½ points contributed to my team’s winning total of 14 points.