Men in Green (20 page)

She talked about golf in San Diego in the late 1940s and early 1950s, studying Gene Littler's swing and watching Billy Casper make greenside shots “that make Phil Mickelson's short game look like a child's.”

She had a crush on Tom Watson. She talked about him following her at an LPGA event when he was a young player and she was an old one. “He shook my hand and said how much he liked my golf,” Mickey told me. “He gives me goose bumps.”

Mickey never knew Venturi, never even met him. I could guess what she thought of him as a TV commentator, because she had no use for pretty much anybody who talked about golf on TV. She watched a lot of golf but always with the volume off, unless the commentator was Renton Laidlaw, an Englishman who worked European Tour events. She preferred the European Tour.

She loved Hogan. She admired Nicklaus. Her indifference to Arnold was obvious, though she never said anything explicit. She had met him a couple of times and didn't feel like he made much effort.

Mickey told me about a made-for-TV event where Palmer and Dow Finsterwald played Mickey and Barbara Romack in an eighteen-hole match on the Desert Inn course in Las Vegas, with each hole playing as a par-three.

“It took all day to film,” Mickey said, still annoyed a half century later. “Barb and I won, and CBS never aired it.”

•  •  •

Peggy Wilson's golf mentor, Harvey Penick, of the Austin Country Club and author of
The Little Red Book
, was the opposite of Harry Pressler. Harvey's approach to teaching golf was to work with the clay. His adjustments were never wholesale. His emphasis was on the short game, the power of positive thinking, and reducing golf to its essence. His pet phrase—
take dead aim
—is a swing thought for the ages, but it means nothing if you don't have sound fundamentals.

Mickey first met Peggy in 1957, when Peggy attended an exhibition Mickey was giving in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Peggy grew up on its outskirts, in the country. Several years later, Mickey was visiting Betsy Rawls in Austin when Betsy was getting a lesson from Harvey. At that point, Peggy was divorced, teaching physical education at the University of Texas, working for Harvey and taking lessons from him, too. A divorced woman in Mississippi had few options back then, Mickey said. That's why Peggy moved to Texas. Mississippi represented the rural life. Peggy wanted something different. She wanted the golfing life.

In 1962 Peggy made it to the tour. Mickey was already a legend, and Peggy, though the same age, was just starting out. None of that impeded their friendship. They became practice-round partners and traveling partners. The drives were often long and usually fun. “We were helping each other out,” Mickey told me.

Mickey described how Peggy shared important qualities with Mickey's mother: independence, humor, an excellent family recipe for fried chicken. Mickey appreciated how Peggy had grown up: “They were poor and didn't know it.” That's because Peggy's family always had a productive garden, a fat pig, ample firewood, and water in the well.

Mickey and Peggy had been living in the house in Port St. Lucie on the Sinners' Course since 1974. They used to do a lot of fishing, but that stopped a long time ago. They were both in their late seventies. They played cards, cooked, watched golf with the sound off, read their novels and newspapers, managed their investments, e-mailed their golf jokes to friends. They led quiet lives, and time unfolded for them without the intruding rush of the modern world. “She takes care of me in my illnesses and I take care of her in hers,” Mickey said.

Life in their house likely wasn't very different from the lives unfolding in a thousand other houses in Port St. Lucie, except in this house the occupants were two older women who had won eighty-three LPGA events between them.

“We're best friends,” Mickey said. “Best friends forever.”

I wondered if Mickey even knew that it was a phrase of modern culture. Either way, what a nice choice of words.

Ken Venturi died just eleven days after his Hall of Fame induction. Death came up often in our interviews. He spoke of the death of his parents and the location of their gravesites. Chirkinian's death, two months before his Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Sinatra's slow death by bladder cancer, complicated by heart problems. Clifford Roberts's death by suicide.

It was only after Ken's death that I learned Fred Venturi was not Ken's biological father. His biological father, as described to me, was a San Francisco Irishman with a drinking problem whom Ken never knew. Fred married Ken's mother, Ethyl, and raised Ken as his own. By DNA, Ken was Irish-American through and through, but by identity he was an Italian-American of the old school. I don't think his place in the Italian American Sports Hall of Fame will be in any sort of jeopardy from this revelation. Frederico Venturi was Ken's father. That was how Ken treated him, and that was how he treated Ken.

Jim Nantz spoke at Ken's funeral, tapping the coffin on his way to the pulpit. He told a Ken-at-dinner story.

“An unsuspecting waitress comes to the table and says, ‘Can I get you guys a cocktail?'

“Ken looks at her straight-faced. ‘I'll have a Diet Dr Pepper.'

“ ‘Sir, we don't have Diet Dr Pepper.'

“ ‘Then I'll have a Crown Royal on the rocks.' ”

On the punch line, Nantz signaled in the air like a first-base umpire making an out call. It was a telling bit of imitation. All his life, Ken used his arms and his hands in conversation like a conductor to help combat his stutter.

A few weeks later, when the U.S. Open was at Merion, there was a dinner of former champions. Glasses were raised to Ken. Many of the people at that dinner—Arnold, Jack, Watson, Lee Trevino, Curtis Strange—knew something about the man. They didn't know all the details, but they broadly knew there were difficult, dark things that Ken Venturi had carried right to his final resting place. They knew that Ken was a man who could not let go.

That champions dinner—Mike was one stroke away from attending—was described by various people as a disaster. From what I heard, the USGA president, Glen Nager, overdid everything, including his own role. Arnold was overserved. Someone thought it would be a good idea to seat Watson and Woods next to each other. The logic was that Tom Watson would soon be captaining a Ryder Cup team that Woods would be anchoring. But they had nothing to say to each other and sat there like underwater boulders.

In the Open itself, Woods finished twelve shots behind the winner, Justin Rose, who shot one over par for the week. The U.S. Open was played ten miles from my house on a course I have played many times, but it didn't feel like a home game. With all the people and commotion and through pouring rain I could barely recognize the place. A highlight of the week was reading Rick Reilly's column about the private house that got turned into player hospitality and how the owner's son held the TV remote hostage. Our son, Ian, made some college spending money collecting trash at Merion, biking to work in the predawn dark. When I brought him a slicker in the first morning's driving rain he barely acknowledged me. A statement of independence if ever there was one.

A couple of days after that Open, there was an ALS fund-raiser at an old Philadelphia course, Whitemarsh Valley, where a tour event used to be played. Bruce Edwards, Tom Watson's longtime caddie, died from ALS in 2004, and Watson has been devoted to the cause of finding a cure. He has raised millions of dollars in Bruce's name and immersed himself in the science of the disease. He knows the doctors who have devoted their careers to researching it. Bruce was by his side for the best times of his life. He could lift Watson's mood. You know what it's like: You're driving along and suddenly “God Only Knows” is on the car radio and everything, courtesy of Brian Wilson, seems better. Bruce was like that for Watson. He was his balm.

Sandy Tatum flew to Philadelphia from San Francisco for the event. He was nearly ninety-three, and he sat on a plane all day to attend. Secret legend Neil Oxman, one of the event's organizers, paired me with Tatum and Watson. (I half begged him not to, but likely didn't mean it.) The fourth was our friend Jay Hass. (Not Jay Haas the pro golfer; Jay Hass the amateur distance runner.) Johnny Hass, Jay's son and my godson, was our one-man cheering section. On the first tee, shaking like a toddler in a June ocean, I hit about the worst push in history, a shot that went farther right than it did out. “Little quick there,” Watson said, trying to be helpful.

From the start he could not have been more accommodating, to me and everybody else. Part of it was professionalism. The bigger thing was that he cared. The day and the cause mattered to him.

Sandy's first shot was what you might expect from the 1942 NCAA golf champion, seventy-one years after the fact. A fine shot. Jay stepped up and drilled one, 260 yards and right down Broadway, slight draw. Some people are just good in a crisis.

I was calmer by the time I played my second shot from the middle of the fairway on the second hole. I had 153 yards, uphill, into a slight breeze. I had my ninety-nine-dollar mail-order 5-hybrid in hand. I took it slightly outside and hit (pretension alert) a sort of hold cut that started about four yards left of the flagstick and faded about two yards. The ball finished about six feet from the hole. Watson said, “See what happens when you slow down a little?”

A siren sounded as we stood on the second green—a summer thunderstorm was moving in fast—and our perfect day of golf was over. Tom Watson had seen me hit a good shot.

The day got better. The group retired into a clubhouse ballroom. There was lunch, an auction, a Q&A, storytelling. Watson sat on a dais with Tatum and others. They were singing the praises of golf. “We're all here for golf,” Watson said. “It gives us all more than we give it. It is a describer of the human condition. At times we hate it. At times we get so close to that Holy Grail we think we're going to almost touch it. And if we ever think we're going to grab it, it's going to bite us in the ass.”

There was appreciative laughter, and I felt myself falling for Watson all over again. This was Mickey Wright's Watson. This was Tom Watson at the height of his powers, expressing with exquisite plainness an essential part of golf's appeal. Any of us who have attempted to play golf for keeps have experienced what Watson was talking about. All golfers endure the same basic emotional responses. You can take that too far, but as a starting point it's true.

Watson then addressed Sandy and said, “I wouldn't call you a golf nut. I would call you a man who will never give up.”

Tatum ran with that. He spoke of a system, a mental trick he had developed to get through his appointed rounds. “Every time I get over the shot, I have the hope that I'm going to make the shot and the illusion that I will,” he said. “And regardless of the outcome, I use that for the rest of the round. I suggest you work on that. Hope and illusion.”

Then Sandy talked about the most memorable sporting event he had ever attended. He had many from which to choose: Watson's victory over Nicklaus at the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach in '82. Tatum's own '79 U.S. Open, when he planted that tree. Hogan at Olympic in '66. Bobby Jones at his home club in '31. But for his answer Tatum strayed far from golf. He started talking about the 1936 Olympics at Berlin, which he attended as a sixteen-year-old during a summer vacation.

Sandy spoke of the American Olympic team as being “dominated by African-Americans for the first time.” His audience was several dozen middle-aged white men. He spoke of what Jesse Owens did there and the greatness of his feats. He cited the specifics as if he'd read about them in the paper just that morning. He remembered how Hitler offered the Nazi salute “and eighty thousand Germans went absolutely nuts. Even though I was only sixteen years old, I thought to myself,
What is going on here?
” He remembered how Hitler ignored the black American athletes and the “awful whistling” that filled the stadium as German fans expressed their displeasure in the face of Owens's greatness. Sandy talked about Owens's final broad jump, an event that brought another gold medal to the United States and caused more humiliation for Hitler. “Jesse Owens was the greatest athlete I have ever, ever, ever seen,” Sandy said.

He then described Owens's final broad jump: “He hit that board, and I had the feeling he would never come down.” Sandy's boyhood pride in the man, already mighty, swelled wildly during that jump. Watson stared right at his friend's rheumy blue eyes, transfixed.

When we were done, I gave Sandy a ride back to his hotel, the Ritz-Carlton on Broad Street, in the old Girard Trust Building, a likely hangout for the Duke brothers. If you don't know the reference, play is suspended until you watch
Trading Places
.

On the way into town, we stopped at one of my regular pizza places, where they know me as the guy who mixes the regular iced tea with their fruity iced tea and pomegranate lemonade in equal portions. Better, even, than an Arnold Palmer. Sandy was game for trying it and seemed to like it. We talked about this and that. I wondered morbidly if those two holes at Whitemarsh would turn out to be the last time Watson and Tatum played golf together. After all, Tatum would soon be ninety-three, and Watson doesn't play much recreational golf.