Men in Green (28 page)

Get up everybody and sing.

The 1975 U.S. Open at Medinah, on the eve of Ben's marriage to Polly, turned out to be Crenshaw's best chance to win the national championship. His game, stylish but wild, didn't lend itself to the annual USGA grindfest. The reason the U.S. Open is both weirdly boring and great is because no tournament makes more demands on every aspect of a player's game, physical and mental, including the ability to plod along. If you win one Open, you've had a career. Winning two is freakish. Beyond that, you're on the mountaintop. Two men have won three Opens, and four giants have managed to win four.

The first person in the four-timers club was Willie Anderson, who died at thirty-one in Philadelphia and is buried a few miles from my house. The second was Bobby Jones, who is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, a half-wedge from the Six Feet Under Pub and Fish House, where there's a house drink called the Bobby Jones, which I have sampled in the name of research. The third was Ben Hogan. The fourth was Jack Nicklaus, who also had four second-place finishes. Tiger Woods won his third in a playoff with a double stress fracture in his left tibia, which lore and newspaper shorthand have turned into a broken leg. Hale Irwin won his third at forty-five, in his 1990 playoff with Mike. That sixsome is a list of golf's best thinkers. Just
playing
in a U.S. Open is exhausting, let alone winning. Curtis will tell you that. No tournament will do more to dull a player's edge. Arnold will tell you that.

Hogan kept the edge about as well as anybody. That is his mystique. He won his first U.S. Open in 1948. Eight months later, early one foggy February morning on a narrow bridge in West Texas, a Greyhound bus plowed into Hogan's Cadillac. The only thing that saved Hogan's life was that he threw himself on his wife, Valerie, to protect her. Had he not done that, the Caddy's steering column would have impaled him. The accident mangled his body and caused it to wither, and
still
he kept the edge. Likely, it got stronger. He won U.S. Opens in '50 and '51 and '53. The man was an original in every way.

In his ability to get his ball to follow directions, Hale Irwin is likely as close to Hogan as any golfer after Hogan and before Woods. (Feel free to make an argument for Nicklaus and Trevino and possibly Nick Faldo.) Irwin notched the first of his twenty tour wins in 1971. He won forty-five times on the senior tour. He was never an exciting or charismatic golfer. That was not his purpose. What he was, what he has been, is the ultimate golfing machine.

Irwin made a memorable first impression on me. I saw him in person for the first time at the 1985 Honda Classic. I was caddying for Brad Faxon, and Hale Irwin played through during a practice round as a singleton. Killer was caddying for Irwin, and Irwin was all business. It was a perfect spring day in Florida and the man was grinding. Plodding. Brad was watching closely.

For some time, Mike and I had wondered whether we should see Hale together or if I should see him alone. Naturally, I was leaving it to Mike.

Over the years, oddly and inexplicably, Hale had been less than gracious when he spoke publicly about his win over Mike at Medinah. The final straw for Mike came in a 2010 interview Hale did with
Golf
magazine twenty years after the fact. When the interviewer asked Irwin what stood out for him about the playoff, he went straight to Mike.

IRWIN:
His one big mistake. I'm down one. We get to the tee on eighteen. All day, Mike was using this metal-wood to hit fairway after fairway. He couldn't miss. I'm thinking, Mike, hit the driver! Hit the driver! And I'll be darned: On eighteen, he pulls driver and hooks it in the trees. I'm asked about the greatest shots I've ever seen. Well, Mike hitting driver was the antithesis of that. All he needs is to hit one more fairway and green to win. But he didn't. He made bogey. We tied. On the nineteenth hole, I hit a sand iron to ten feet. The rest is history.

INTERVIEWER:
[Post-victory] you said, “God bless Mike Donald. I almost wish he had won.” Why?

IRWIN:
I felt for him. He had the U.S. Open won several times, but the moment escaped him. He didn't embrace it. Maybe he didn't see himself taking home that trophy. I wanted it. Deeply.

INTERVIEWER:
What separates major winners from guys who don't close the deal?

IRWIN:
Some of it is luck—a good or bad bounce from the golf gods. Also, Nicklaus, Watson, Trevino—they weren't locker room guys. They showed up, did their job, left. Mike was happy telling stories in the locker room at regular events. But regular events are very different than a Masters or U.S. Open.

Mike read the interview and was livid. In the next issue, this letter ran, above Mike's name and below the headline
HALE NO!

I read with interest the interview with Hale Irwin in the June issue, particularly the parts about his win in the 1990 U.S. Open at Medinah in a nineteen-hole two-man playoff. I'm the guy he beat. In the interview, talking about the eighteenth hole of the playoff, Irwin says, “I'm asked about the greatest shots I've ever seen. Well, Mike hitting driver was the antithesis of that.” He describes himself rooting for me to pull driver on that eighteenth tee and not the metal wood he says I had been hitting well all day. I can't even imagine thinking like that, hoping for a guy to make a mental blunder. But the most ridiculous part is that Hale has it wrong. I didn't hit my MacGregor Eye-O-Matic driver there. I hit my metal wood, a TaylorMade twelve-degree Original One. You can see it plain as day on the tape. Hale's standing right there. I pull-hooked it, it finished in the left rough and I made bogey. It was a bad swing. But it wasn't, as Irwin describes it, bad judgment.

Anyway, when I think about the greatest shots I've ever seen, I think of the drawing 2-iron with a cross wind that Hale hit to ten feet on sixteen in our playoff. That shot was pure class.

Mike wasn't done. There was a senior event in Birmingham, Alabama, right at the time the interview was published. After playing in the tournament qualifier, Mike left a letter for Irwin in his locker, taping it from a top shelf so it would be at eye level when Irwin opened the door. Mike concluded with this: “In the future, when you're talking about me, get your facts straight and your arrogance in check.”

Mike was in his car, in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express on the east side of Birmingham, when Irwin called him.

“I'm shocked,” Hale said. “Shocked by the venom.”

They spoke for maybe twenty minutes. Hale suggested that they have dinner. Mike wasn't interested, and the conversation ended.

After he hung up, Mike realized he hadn't really said what he wanted to say. He called Irwin back, and they arranged to have an early breakfast at the tournament clubhouse the next morning. This time Mike did most of the talking, and the essence of his message was this:
Hale, you've got the crown and all the jewels. It's twenty years later, and I don't get what you're doing. Medinah was one of the great weeks of my life, and every time you go negative on me, it's like you're stealing from me. And I don't like it
.

When Mike revisited that breakfast conversation for me, I asked how Hale had responded to it all.

“He was sorry about being wrong about the driver. He said, ‘I always thought you hit driver there. I wish I had known.' He didn't have much to say about the other stuff. But he had already talked. This was my turn. He did say one thing. He said, ‘You know, Mike, the way I see it? A champion is a champion. You either win or you don't.' ”

•  •  •

I saw Hale at a senior event in Boca Raton, held on a newish development course called the Old Course at Broken Sound. I introduced myself, told Hale about my project, and presented him with the exciting news that he was on my legends list. Hale said he could see me the following week, across the state in Naples, at a tournament being played there. He was matter-of-fact but polite. He's given a thousand interviews. It would be no big deal to give one more.

At Broken Sound, Wayne Levi was working on his putting, with his wife standing behind him. The same Wayne Levi who was at the back of the van at the Kemper Open in 1979. Now, thirty-five years later, his wife was giving him advice on his stroke and Wayne said, loudly enough to be heard easily by others, “I can make 'em here, I can't make 'em out
there
.” In 1990 he won four times, but sooner or later, everybody loses the edge. Even Hogan. If there was ever an exception to that, it was Irwin.

Mike played in the Tuesday qualifier for the Naples event, the week after the tournament at Broken Sound.

“How'd it go?” I asked him. I try not to do that. Usually I am able to look up the scores before we talk, but this time I had not.

“Eighty-five,” Mike said. “Played with Gary Hallberg. He shot eighty. We finish and he says, ‘Are we gonna turn these in?' I'm like, ‘I've got no problem turning it in.' It's an embarrassing score. But it's what I shot.”

Mike had a sore right hand, and I asked if that had contributed to his poor play.

“That had nothing to do with it,” Mike said. “I hit it so bad it was a joke. I got no speed, no idea where it's going. I had to hit five provisionals.” That is, emergency shots in case you are unable to find your original ball. “I found four of 'em. Otherwise, I would have shot ninety.”

I told Mike I was seeing Hale in Naples. He said, “You should probably just go see him yourself.”

•  •  •

With almost every other legend on my list, I had various paths to the person. We knew the same people, or I had intersected with said legend at an event or on a story. That was not the case with Hale Irwin. I had never even talked to him. I met him in the locker room at the TwinEagles Golf Club in Naples and followed him to a quiet spot in a massive, cold ballroom where breakfast was being served for the players and the pro-am participants. I told him that Mike was also one of my legends. I felt he should know.

I asked Hale how he started in the game. Successful golfers are asked that question to the point of boredom, but Hale took right to it. He told me about putting on sand greens as a kid, getting $2.75 to caddie and paying $2.25 golf fees. He described a solitary childhood. The Irwins had no TV, and the family moved from Missouri to Kansas to Colorado. I didn't ask him the Proust Questionnaire classic—“When and where were you happiest?”—but I'm sure he was answering it. Hale had played football and baseball in the fifties and sixties and liked it. But teaching himself golf—no instructor, no teammates, no gambling games—brought him the most pleasure. That was happiness for him, to be alone on a golf course, figuring it out all by himself. Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner, once asked Warren Spahn how he learned to pitch. The great lefty said, “Hitters taught me how to pitch.” Hale's instruction was equally direct: The flight of his ball taught him how to play. “I loved hitting it where you were supposed to hit it,” he told me.

When he first got on tour in 1968, Hale was still learning how to play. “What I realized was that body type dictated swing. I saw Jack Nicklaus, with those tree-trunk thighs, and I realized he hits the ball with his lower body. I remember the first time I saw Arnold Palmer coming out of the shower, seeing how big he was through the chest, how muscular. I realized that that's how he hits the ball, with his chest. I figured out for myself that there was no one swing. There was a swing for your body.”

That was a telling phrase:
I figured out for myself
. When I asked Hale who his closest friend on tour was, he said, “Dale Douglass was very nice to me.” The subtext was clear:
I didn't need friends
. Not on tour, anyway. Hale's friends were at home. On tour, his most meaningful relationship was with the golf ball at his feet.

Hale said, “I didn't get on the tour thinking,
I hope I can make it
. I am a compulsively driven person.”

Another interesting phrase. I would say Tiger Woods is a compulsively driven person, and that Hogan was. Palmer, Watson, and Mickey Wright were, too. Big Jack? Hard to say. Probably not.

Hale spoke with genuine affection about his first driver—cut down to size by his father, who put a tape grip on it—a club on display in his locker at the World Golf Hall of Fame. He talked about going to his first golf tournament, the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills, where he saw Ben Hogan practicing with brand-new balls. He'd never seen anybody do that. Hale had just turned fifteen. Somebody gave him a sleeve of brand-new balls that week. U.S. True Blues. He never used them.

Long before that morning in Naples, I knew about Hale's extreme competence at golf. Everybody in golf respected his game and was impressed by how he had maintained it, like a vintage race car that always turned right over. But until that day, in that cold ballroom, I never had any sense of how lodged the game was deep within him. It made him more likable for me. The odd things he had said over the years about Mike seem incongruous. In his own way, he was a soul golfer.