Men in Green (15 page)

My rejection made me realize how lucky I was to talk to her at all in 2000, the year she turned sixty-five. At that point, Mickey had not played in any sort of tournament in seven years and was already leading her own version of Hogan's final quarter century. Mickey and Peggy's home was on the Sinners' Course at the Club Med Sandpiper, and often, in the still of early morning, Mickey would hit forty or fifty balls with a 7-iron off a mat in her backyard into an empty fairway. A course worker—a keen golfer, the father of a club pro—sometimes watched her, awed by her swing and the flight of her ball.

The LPGA player Patty Sheehan was at Mickey's last event, a senior tournament in 1993. Sheehan had never met her fellow Hall of Famer. “Everybody knew Mickey didn't want pictures taken, so I just watched by myself, trying to take it all in,” Sheehan told me. “I had seen old film clips of her swing. It looked the same: very fluid, very powerful—flawless. You could see she was in love with golf and dedicated to hitting a golf ball purely. She had these old clubs, old as dirt, and it was clear they were her best friends.” They were '63 Wilson Staffs, basically the same clubs Palmer took on the road in the winter of '55.

You could sub in Hogan for Mickey in Sheehan's observation and those sentences would still make sense. But Mickey was even more of an enigma than Hogan. Hogan had his golf company. He was at Shady Oaks in Fort Worth every weekday, hitting balls and eating lunch. (Mickey joined Shady in the 1960s in part because she wanted to observe Hogan at close range without being obtrusive. He returned the compliment by watching her.) In 1983 Hogan gave a revealing seven-minute coat-and-tie TV interview with Ken Venturi that has been mined for its many pearls, including this one: “I feel sorry for the rich kids now. I really do. Because they're never going to have the opportunity I had.”

Mickey Wright didn't pursue a life in business when she was done playing, as Hogan had done. She didn't do corporate outings. She gave few interviews. She never married; she never had children. Her private life was private. Were it not for Rhonda's efforts and a 1983 story she wrote for the USGA's late, great
Golf Journal
, Mickey might have faded into complete obscurity. Of course Arnold was interested. They were exact contemporaries and didn't even know each other.

“She doesn't want to talk about golf,” I said. I should have added
with me
.

“Isn't that something,” Arnold said. He was baffled.

“She doesn't play at all,” I said.

“I can't believe that,” Arnold said.

With Mickey's rejection, my legends tour had reached its first impassable road. As your bus driver, I would like you to know that I never considered taking Mickey off my Living Legends list. If anything, I was thinking of adding her to my Secret Legends list.

Once in St. Andrews, I found myself trying to learn more about Old Tom Morris, the longtime custodian of the Old Course. I went to visit a golf historian and actor named David Joy, who gave me Old Tom in full regalia. He had the accent, the beard, the woolly clothes. Most significantly, he understood Old Tom's heartbreak over the death of his namesake son. In not quite the same way, I asked Rhonda Glenn if she could discuss Mickey's life and times with Mike and me, and she was willing.

On that basis, my reporting partner and I saddled up and headed to the North Florida horse country where Rhonda lived, in the town of Summerfield. We went there on a mission, to learn more about the woman who was one part Palmer, two parts Hogan, and, alongside Jack Nicklaus, Bobby Jones, and Tiger Woods, in the foursome of the most dominant golfers ever.

•  •  •

As we approached Summerfield, Mike told me about being at the Hollywood Lakes Country Club, near his home, on a December Sunday in 1968, at age thirteen, when Peggy Wilson won what turned out to be her only LPGA tournament. In the next tournament, Mike remembered that Peggy was playing well until a tee popped up and struck her in the eye. The things Mike remembers.

We arrived at the front door of a tidy, comfortable development home in a gated golf community and met the ladies of the house: Rhonda Glenn, unofficial historian of Mary Kathryn “Mickey” Wright, and Barbara Romack, winner of the 1954 U.S. Amateur over “Miss Wright,” as the papers had it back then. Barb won her Amateur the same year Palmer won his, in 1954. She looked like a woman who knew a lot.

She was wearing a bright pink cashmere sweater over her slender shoulders. Rhonda's blond hair was just splendid. These were women who did not wing it. They both were loaded with energy and charm. Rhonda was in her mid-sixties and Barb was—she'll hate this—done pushing eighty. Mike and I had never met either of our hosts, but we settled into a comfortable conversation almost immediately. They knew my typing and Mike's playing career. We weren't strangers.

Before long, Rhonda was showing us an
SI
dated April 16, 1956. The cover girl, a golfer, had her hair up and braided. Her hands, high above her left shoulder in follow-through, were on a leather grip. She was wearing bright red lipstick and a lively patterned blouse. The headline was barely a whisper:

The brief story mentions that Romack, as a member of the amateur U.S. Curtis Cup team, would soon sail—
sail!
—to England for the May matches. On page 28 of that same issue is Herbert Warren Wind's account of the '56 Masters. “A cool and careful golfer, the slim young man seemed a certain winner when he arrived at the sixty-third tee with a six-shot lead over Middlecoff,” Wind writes midstory.

Wind's cool leader is Ken Venturi. You and I both know how that story ends. Or how it doesn't.

•  •  •

Before long, Rhonda, author of
The Illustrated History of Women's Golf
, was showing us a collection of film clips that documented Mickey's swing through the years. Her swing had changed over time. All of the swings were athletic, but some from the mid-1950s were out of balance and saved by her strength and athleticism. At her peak, Mickey looked like Iron Byron—the USGA ball-hitting machine—if it had soul, style, and a cardigan. Her best swings looked like ones that could repeat forever. There wasn't a moment of inefficiency or eccentricity in them. In the clips Mickey is tall and slender—not skinny—with a wide stance, a low take-away, and a full turn. Her backswing had the rhythm of a cresting wave. Her follow-through was so full that some of the swings endangered her schoolteacher glasses.

Hearing Rhonda talk about Mickey was like hearing Billy Harmon talk about Hogan. In both cases, the admiration was deep and sincere. The initial attraction for Rhonda might have been Mickey's golf, but it went far beyond that. She appreciated Mickey's standards, her nonconformist view of the world, her intelligence, humor, and loyalty. If Mickey was a complex personality—as her unwillingness to attend the opening of her own room at the USGA Museum might suggest—Rhonda wasn't going to discuss that with me. She accepted Mickey as she was. Rhonda once wrote of her, “She viewed golf as a form of self-expression rather than a contest between people.” What a sentence. Rhonda didn't need to god her up. Mickey was on another level all on her own.

Rhonda graduated from Lake Worth High in 1964 and played often at the Palm Beach Par-3, just up A1A from Chuck Will's condo. Her mother worked at that course for thirty years, and Rhonda had all the free-range balls a girl could want to hit. She was an excellent junior player. She first met Barb as a teenager, when Barb was giving lessons on the range there.

“Did Mickey ever tell you what she was thinking at the start of the backswing?” Mike asked Rhonda after we had viewed the Mickey Wright highlight reel. He was an ideal guest, asking questions, offering opinions, grateful for the chance to learn something new.

Rhonda picked up a club in her office and gripped it. Certain hands just look like they belong on a golf club, and that was the case with Rhonda. By way of answering Mike's question, she showed us an old-fashioned hands-first lag takeaway. Just a split second where the right wrist moves before anything else does. That move is the opposite of the up-and-in move Mike was working on daily at the range at Eagle Trace. Mike didn't say a word to Rhonda about what he was doing. We were at the Glenn-Romack ranch in search of Mickey.

In 1966, when Rhonda was nineteen and a student at Palm Beach Junior College, she was invited to play in the St. Petersburg Women's Open. She was paired with Mickey, and they've been friends ever since.

“When I called Mickey to tell her about the USGA's decision to open a Mickey Wright Room, she cried,” Rhonda told us. “I told her we would need some of her memorabilia. She said, ‘It's all moldy.' ”

Rhonda described Mickey as a wonderful cook. She remembered the hearty Southern food that Mickey made in her Port St. Lucie kitchen when Rhonda visited. When Rhonda was talking while the chef was over her stove, Mickey said, “If you don't mind, I can't talk while I'm cooking.”

“She wasn't meek,” Rhonda said. “She visited me once when I was living in Dallas. She drove there from Florida because she liked her dentist there.”

Mickey was in a rush for nothing. She liked driving and didn't like flying. “I had a sports car then, a two-door Mazda RX-7. White. It was a beautiful car. Mickey said, ‘Do you mind if I give it a test drive?' She
squealed
out of my driveway. I'm in a suburban development, and she practically left rubber.”

I asked Rhonda why, after Mickey's competitive career was over, she stopped playing golf entirely.

“Maybe this will explain it,” Rhonda said. “I used to play quite a bit. Mickey was always interested in how I played, and I did play pretty good golf for a long time. Then one day a couple of years ago, she asked me how I was playing. She had not asked for a while. And I said, ‘I'm done. I've quit. I just can't play the way I used to.' And Mickey said, ‘I understand completely.' ”

In 2010 Mickey received the USGA's highest honor, the Bob Jones Award. She did not go to the dinner at Pinehurst to receive it. Rhonda was chosen to accept it on her behalf. We watched a tape of the occasion, Rhonda in her blue USGA blazer.

Later, I read Rhonda's 1983
Golf Journal
piece about Mickey. She and Mickey were on the Southern Methodist University campus. Mickey was visiting one of her old golf instructors. The USGA had invited Mickey to play in the '83 U.S. Open on a special exemption. It would have been something like when Hogan, late in the day, played in the U.S. Open at Olympic in '66 and Sandy Tatum's wife nabbed his cigarette butt.

At SMU that day, Rhonda asked Mickey, “Are you going to play in the Open?”

This is from Rhonda's piece: “ ‘I haven't decided,' she said sharply. There was a sudden bite to her voice and her face clouded. For a moment I sincerely wished that I had not asked.”

Just the question was like a flashback for Mickey. I felt for them both.

At home, I had been collecting various old newspaper clips, courtesy of helpful librarians at the
San Francisco Chronicle
, the San Francisco Public Library, and
Sports Illustrated
. I was focused on one day in particular: Tuesday, April 10, 1956. By way of quick review, this is how I got there.

On Saturday night, April 7, 1956, Ken Venturi—then an amateur golfer from San Francisco with a four-shot lead in the Masters—had a private meeting with the two men who ran the club and the tournament, Bobby Jones and Cliff Roberts. It was there that Ken's vision of his future, as the gentleman amateur with a green coat in his closet, fully took form. On Sunday, April 8, Ken shot a final-round 80, a score that left him a shot behind the winner, Jackie Burke. On Monday, April 9, Venturi flew home, accompanied by Eddie Lowery, to San Francisco. At the airport, Harry Hayward of the
San Francisco Examiner
, along with other reporters, awaited Ken's arrival. On Tuesday, April 10, their stories were published in various newspapers. These were the stories that changed the course of Ken Venturi's life. They poisoned his relationship with Jones, with Roberts, with Augusta National. They were part of a fast sequence of events that forced Ken to abandon the life Bob Jones had prophesied for him on that magical Saturday night in Augusta.

On Sunday, while Ken was trying to win that Masters, Harry Hayward went to Harding Park to see Ken's father and write up the scene there. His story in Monday's
Examiner
could not have been more empathetic. His lede: “Papa Fred was brave—and proud, too—as the final returns were in.”

Hayward's story in the next day's paper begins with four brief setup paragraphs followed by a long series of quotes from Venturi without a single interjection from Hayward. I'll cite here the quotes from the front page of the
Examiner
sports section on Tuesday, April 10, 1956, before the reader was asked to jump to page 8. This is exactly as it ran except the quotes in the paper were in bold: