Men in Green (30 page)

I met Mike at the '85 Honda and I had been to many Hondas, including the one in '06. Mike's appearance wasn't exactly Arnold playing his final Masters (which I witnessed twice). I don't think Mike felt any heightened emotion about it. He wished he had played better. He was grateful for the opportunity Cliff had given him. It was the 550th and last tour event of his career. He had made 296 cuts and earned $1.97 million.

Mike did not come close to making the cut at the '06 Honda. But he came back on Sunday, when Luke Donald won. No relation, and the surname coincidence barely registered with Mike. He came back on Sunday because he wanted to be there when Cliff turned off the lights for the final time.

•  •  •

You have to be brave to answer the Proust Questionnaire honestly. Chuck Will, in his late eighties, and Sandy Tatum, in his early nineties, could do it. Billy Harmon and Mike could, too.
When and where were you happiest?
What a question. It's one thing to answer in the privacy of your own mind, and another thing to answer for others to see. Could I do it? No, but I am closer now than when I started this whole thing. Like they say in the self-help section, it's a journey.

I can do what we all do: close my eyes and drift. I am now remembering a wet and windy day from the summer of 2010. Mike and I were both in Scotland. He was there to try to qualify for the British Senior Open. I was there to cover the regular British Open, which was in St. Andrews, with its stout cathedral and buckling gray walls. The weather was south of appalling. Second-round play was suspended twice because the wind was so strong that balls would not stay put on the exposed greens. It was like being in Maine: A squall would come through, and with it a drenching rain followed by cat-and-mouse sunshine. The Scottish golf fans were unperturbed. With everyday nonchalance, they put on their foul-weather gear in the distant carparks, hiked to the ancient playfields in their rubber boots, and watched “the golf.”

Late on that Friday afternoon, Mike and I became transfixed by an odd sight: Tiger Woods and Tom Watson simply standing in close proximity to each other. Watson was in the group behind Woods, but play had ground to a halt and the two groups had nowhere to go as they waited on the second tee.

Eight months earlier, Woods had run over a fire hydrant in the middle of a November night. In a short burst, everything went wrong for him. People were screaming for his head. Everybody he had ever met seemed to have a lawyer and a publicist. Woods went deep into a cave, far from the cameras that could not get enough of his various casual girlfriends, looking for their fifteen minutes or a payday or something. The manhunt for Woods was frenzied and finally ended with the publication of a hideously invasive photo of Woods at a rehab center. I don't think any of this is what the Framers had in mind when they defined free speech, and I felt for Woods, no matter what he did to bring it all on himself.

About the only people showing any decorum or sense right about then were the old boxer Larry Holmes and Big Jack. In their primes, Holmes and Tiger had used the same Las Vegas trainer. When the story was breaking, I tracked down the Easton Assassin for his take on the whole thing. He said, “You're Tiger Woods—you're some famous athlete or show biz celebrity, whatever. The girl's got you in the corner. She's in your face. You're like, ‘No, no, no, I can't do this. I got the wife at home.' But she's pushing and pushing, and finally you give in. It don't mean nothing. It's just thirty seconds. But it feels so good you want it again and again and again. They're a toy to play with. And that's all you are to them. You give them some money and they go away.” He was encouraging people to take a deep breath. Nicklaus was, too. He said, “It's none of my business.”

Elsewhere the message seemed to be that Woods had somehow
let us down
. The fog of sanctimoniousness would have halted play. Tom Watson was especially critical, telling the world (via CNN) that Woods needed “to clean up his act.” He complained about Woods's on-course comportment and how it didn't measure up to the standards of their golfing forebears.

And there at the Old Course, where golf has been played for six hundred years, Woods and Watson stood near each other, saying nothing, making no eye contact, each staying in his corner, slightly bent in the heavy sea air. Finally, after a wait that seemed to last for an hour but was actually not even ten minutes, the coast was clear and Woods played off number two.

“Man,” Mike said, “was that weird.”

The weather conditions were not improving, but Mike and I, following the code of lunatic golfers everywhere, decided to go play. We left the Old Course around six
P.M.
and made the back-road drive across Fife to a golf course in the tiny seaside village of Elie. It's an unusual and windswept layout, with sixteen par-fours and two par-threes on a pale-green peninsula of linksland. It's one of my favorite courses anywhere.

Mike and I, as a twosome, had balls in the air a little before seven. Summer golf in Scotland. Like most private courses there, Elie is happy to have paying visitors, especially for evening play, but there was nobody around to collect our green fees. Okay: We sneaked on. The opening hole goes uphill and downhill, and there's a giant periscope on the first tee for the purpose of making sure the coast is clear. We didn't need the periscope. The place was deserted.

On a short into-the-gale par-four, Mike smashed a driver and then a 4-wood and was still maybe eighty yards short of the hole. Score was meaningless in those conditions. There were only upwind shots and downwind shots and tending to our running noses between shots. It was nearly ten
P.M.
when we got to the eighteenth tee.

Across tiny Links Road from Elie's last tee is a cozy spot called Golf Tavern, with good drink and food from a kitchen that I knew from past experience closed at ten. We abandoned the last hole, parked our clubs outside the tavern's front door, and fell into the moist warmth of a dozen or two Friday-night merrymakers. Mike checked in with his lady friend, and I did the same with mine. Then we focused on the matters at hand: the peculiar joys of Elie, Watson and Woods and St. Andrews, the number of spots available in Mike's upcoming Senior Open qualifier. A good time.

More than that. Our golf that night, on a spit of land between a town and its beach, was pure joy. That round on the Elie links was years in the making. Did we drive there from St. Andrews, as I remember it—or did the wind somehow deposit us on the course, like Dorothy and Toto being airlifted to Oz in that trippy twister? I cannot say. I can say that golf is a windblown game, and it produces energy like nothing I know. I've never been happier than I was that night. Not playing golf, anyway.

I had not seen Randy Erskine since the day he tried to qualify for the 1979 U.S. Open at the Charlotte Country Club, when he gave me a hundred dollars (an outrageous overpayment) for carrying his bag for thirty-six holes. I knew he had been enjoying a long, successful career as a club pro in Michigan and that he spent his winters in Florida. I wrote to him for the second time in thirty-five years, looking for a reunion.

When I first tracked him down by phone I realized immediately that his distinctive voice, so midwestern and accommodating, had been filed in my head, unused, since the day I last saw him. I suggested breakfast at Testa's, a reliable family-owned spot in Palm Beach that was a short drive from an apartment where Randy went in winter. He knew it and liked it, and we were on.

In the eighties and nineties, when I was covering more baseball and there was a lot of Grapefruit League play on the east coast of Florida, I ate breakfast at Testa's often, always after getting the morning papers a few doors down at Main Street News, where they pipe in the smells of newsprint and tobacco. One morning during spring training in 1994, I picked up the papers and over breakfast with Christine read two or three stories about a final bash at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach before it was being sold off. JFK had used it as his winter White House. The
Miami Herald
piece mentioned that Sargent Shriver was at the farewell party, along with his son Tony and Tony's wife, Alina. I asked Christine, who was pregnant, what she thought of that uncommon name. “It's a beautiful name,” Christine said. As I sat down for breakfast with Randy, I thought of our daughter, who was away at college and closing in on twenty. It goes fast, doesn't it? A sportswriter is gone a lot, but (in my case) home a lot, too. I was able to watch Alina grow up and become a beautiful young lady.

In May 1979 I was nineteen, and Randy was thirty and had been married to his University of Michigan girlfriend, Judy Monahan, for eight years. At the time of the 1979 Kemper Open, they had three young children, a girl followed by two boys, the second of whom had been born four weeks earlier. By the morning of our Testa's visit, Randy was sixty-five, he and Judy had been married for forty-three years, and their three children had brought ten more young people to this earth of ours. Talk about your march of time. It brings to mind something the Stage Manager says in Thornton Wilder's
Our Town
: “You know how it is: you're twenty-one or twenty-two and you make some decisions; then whisssh! you're seventy: you've been a lawyer for fifty years, and that white-haired lady at your side has eaten over fifty thousand meals with you.”

It was thoroughly enjoyable, being with Randy. The game had been good to both of us, and I think we were celebrating that, too. Randy was wearing shorts and running shoes. When I met him in '79, he was trim, blond, sun-bleached, and he was wearing Sansabelt slacks. (They all were back then.) Now his hair was white but he was still fit and active and he still played golf at a high level. He had snorkeled and scuba-dived all over Florida and once in Australia. He was in excellent shape all the way around.

As a tour player, Randy spent more than he made. After his tour days were over, he had developed three or four regular sources of income. He was a club pro in Michigan. He was the paid commissioner of a series of golfing junkets for amateurs and their professional friends. And he owned nine rental apartments in a retirement community in West Palm Beach. He also made some nice vacation money playing tournament golf. He had won the Michigan Open five times, the '79 title among them.

As a real estate man Randy did nearly all the work himself. He could paint, wire, and plumb. Randy speculated that he had inherited his entrepreneurial spirit and restlessness from his father's father, Albert Russel Erskine, who was the president of Studebaker, the car manufacturer, from 1915 through his death in 1933. Randy's namesake grandfather was an active golfer.

Randy played with Arnold Palmer in a tour event—one of his career highlights—and he readily recalled seeing the King when we were together at the U.S. Open qualifier in Charlotte in '79. “I remember watching the people watching Arnold,” he said. His stated goal that morning was to qualify for his first U.S. Open. He finally played in one in 1985, when the Open was at Oakland Hills, outside Detroit. Randy's path to that Open was a high-speed straight shot on I-275. Bob Tway had pulled out early on opening day, and Randy got a call from P. J. Boatwright of the USGA at 6:38 that morning, inviting him to take Tway's spot and fill out the threesome going off at 7:36. Randy was in his bed in Ypsilanti, fifty miles from the course. He drove like a wild man, changed shoes at a red light, and made it to the first tee with nine minutes to spare. Yes, it was insane. Dangerous, really. But it was the U.S. Open. Randy shot 76-73 and missed the cut.

Randy graduated from Michigan in 1970. Though he was aware of the teach-ins and the antiwar protests, they made little impact on him. In his graduation picture, he looks like he could pass as the kid brother of Steve Bolander, the class-president schoolboy played by Ron Howard in
American Graffiti
. Randy was an all-American golfer who graduated in four years and managed not to get drafted. With his framed diploma on the wall, his plan was to make a living selling insurance and to live the American Dream, Wolverine-style. Marriage, kids, Sunday golf, maybe save up for a cabin in the woods. It was all going fine, except golf kept nipping at him and in 1973 he turned pro.

In his short career, Randy played in 144 tour events and made sixty-five cuts. You could make a living playing like that in the Tiger Era, but you couldn't in the seventies. You'd go broke.

“What was the difference?” I asked. “What was the difference between you and the guys who made it?”

Randy thought for a moment and said, “I think they were more sure of themselves. Over every shot, they were more sure that they could do what they wanted with that shot. And it's funny, because I didn't see many players who could play shots that I couldn't play. But over the ball I had more doubt.”

This whole area is a recurring subject for Mike and me. The sports psychologists want to preach the importance of confidence and faith and trust, and Mike, as you would expect, is comically dismissive. “Here's the truth,” he once told me. “Some guys just have more talent. You know where trust comes from? Results. To get the results, you have to have talent.” But I think Randy was saying something else. I think he was saying he had enough talent on Tuesdays, but on Fridays (cut day) and Sundays (payday) something was preventing him from
proving
his talent. He was talking about confidence and talent as two different things.