The Legend of Zippy Chippy (33 page)

Winning isn't everything. Period
.

Consider for a moment two great golfers: Tiger Woods and Jim Nelford. You've heard of Tiger Woods, who despite his scandalous meltdown years ago continued to be one of the most exciting golfers in the game. An elegant and powerful athlete, Woods lived by the words “Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing.”

Intense, obsessed, and motivated to win at all costs, Tiger Woods referred to the golfer who came in second in a tournament as the “first loser.” Really? By extension, then, every Olympic podium would feature the gold-medal winner flanked by tarnished silver and rusted bronze.

You might not have heard of Jim Nelford, who was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and had a stellar amateur career. Considered one of the best ball strikers in the game, he made his mark on the PGA Tour when he finished second after Fuzzy Zoeller at the 1983 Sea Pines Heritage Classic at Hilton Head, South Carolina. The following year, at the Bing Crosby Pro-Am, Nelford was ready and more than able to be crowned king of “Crosby's Clambake.” A helluva golfer, Nelford had the Pebble Beach, California, tournament all but locked up and in his bag, with one hole to go. With the clubhouse lead, he watched
Hale Irwin, the only golfer on the course who could beat him, dump his drive on the eighteenth hole into the seaside rocks below the fairway. For Nelford, Irwin's suddenly disastrous predicament was the moment in which the brain switches from anxiety to relief to “Who do I need to thank?”

But wait! Irwin's errant drive did in fact hit the rocks along the shore of the Pacific Ocean, and then … defying logic, and the naked eye, it bounced back onto the fairway. With blessings aplenty, Irwin then nailed the flagstick, leaving his ball five feet from the cup. Many who witnessed those shots believed it proved once and for all that God really is American. Somehow, Hale Irwin had manufactured a birdie on the eighteenth, forcing a sudden-death playoff, in which he defeated the still-stunned Jim Nelford.

Having watched his greatest personal triumph disappear in a fraction of a second, Nelford was utterly devastated and broke down in front of reporters at the airport. For Jim Nelford, it seemed things could not possibly get any worse. But wait! A year and a half later, a waterskiing accident nearly killed him and left his right arm severely damaged after it was sliced by the blade of a propeller. Doctors concluded he would never swing a club again.

Cut down in his prime, did Nelford look upon the debacle at Pebble Beach as a curse in some sort of career-ending conspiracy? No, though many of us would. Instead, he went through prolonged and painful rehabilitation until he finally made it back to the top of the game. With his arm bolstered by pins and screws, covered with scars and skin grafts, the man slowly and painfully earned his way back onto the PGA Tour.

He would never win a PGA tournament; that ridiculous twenty-yard bounce up and off the rocks at Pebble Beach had ended his best shot at a title. Still, during a highly successful career, Nelford
won the Canadian Amateur Championship twice. He once beat the great Jack Nicklaus in an exhibition match. With Dan Halldorson, he won the World Cup of Golf in 1980 in Bogotá, Colombia. Once a TSN golf analyst, still a player, and a devotee of the game forever, today Nelford derives great satisfaction from teaching. In 1992 the Golf Writers Association of America presented Jim Nelford with the Ben Hogan Award for staying active in the game after such a devastating injury. Haunted by nightmares of careening golf balls and crashing boats, this guy definitely is not.

At his Canadian Golf Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the Glen Abbey Golf Club near Toronto in 2013, Nelford talked about the love he has always had for the game, as well as the rewarding career it gave him. He also challenged Tiger Woods to a one-on-one match of words.

“I don't agree with Tiger Woods,” he said. “Second place isn't first loser – it's the silver medal, and there's a bronze medal and then there's participants. In this era we put so much emphasis on winning, winning, winning, and everybody that doesn't win is a loser. That's a horrible thing to tell our kids. No, you're competing. You're doing the best you can. It's a long journey, and enjoy that. You're a winner because you're out there doing it.”

Arrogant winners put themselves above the game – and then out of it, once they suffer a loss they cannot handle. At the moment, Tiger Woods has missed the cut in three of his last four major tournaments, including the just completed British Open. When a reporter asked the thirty-nine-year-old if retirement might be in his future, Woods shot back: “I don't have an AARP card yet!” That would be the American Association of Retired Persons, who returned his shot with a hole-in-one tweet: “Tiger Woods. It's better to be over fifty, than it is to be over par.” Ouch!

Not the stars but the stayers and the plodders, the Jim Nelfords and the Zippy Chippys, reap riches from their sports because they worship the game itself and not necessarily their place within it. There's an awful lot more to be gained from feeding off playing the game with teammates than from drinking from the cup all alone. Real success comes from playing the game, not from laying claim to the trophies and record-setting stats it offers.

Displaying great modesty, Nelford concluded, “Embracing the journey is more important than the details of the destination, even when you happen to arrive at a hall of fame.” Golf has shaped Jim Nelford's life, but it's his good-natured and relentless competitive spirit that defines who he is: a hall of fame golfer and a very happy man. Who would you like to instruct and mentor your kids in golf, or even in the greater game of life? Tiger Woods or Jim Nelford?

Celebrity and winning being the tenets by which we measure success today, Jim Nelford will never be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in St. Augustine, Florida. Maybe, just maybe, he should be. And that is precisely how Old Friends farm sums up the life, career, and retirement of the remarkable Zippy Chippy: Winning means way more than coming in first.

Life Lessons the Zipster Taught Us

Unhappy? Seriously, quit your day job! In 1979 I was living on the coast of southern Spain, in a small villa above the town of Mijas, near Málaga. Off in the distance the Mediterranean Sea shimmered in deep turquoise, and beyond that, on a clear day, you could see the snow-capped High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. My rent was less than four dollars a day, and I was making eight dollars an hour teaching tennis at the three-star Hotel Mijas. Champagne cost only a few
pesetas
more than a bottle of water. I was trying to become a writer. I had just resigned as a salesman from the 3M Company. Life was good.

After my morning lessons, I'd sit in the square drinking
agua con gas y limón
, watching the town slowly slip into a coma called siesta. Among the African wood carvers and Moroccan jewelry makers selling their wares on the sidewalks was a Dutch artist whose work I did not think was very good. His paintings were all too bright, with square houses and stick-people figures – a genre of artwork common in Holland, and on refrigerator doors everywhere. I'm sure more than one tourist or local walked past his display and whispered that tired and contemptuous cliché, “Don't quit your day job.”

He had only four months left, he told me, to realize his dream of becoming a full-time, working artist. Otherwise, he would have to return to his well-paying position as an art designer for a large printing company in Amsterdam. He tolerated his regular job, but he wished with all his heart to be known as a painter. He yearned to be his own man, not someone else's department head. He refused to assume the title of painter until he was able to actually make his living from his work. This stint in Spain was his last shot.

As his departure day neared, I noticed he was looking a little more desperate – unshaven, clothes rumpled, hair much longer than when he arrived. He had moved a couple of times into cheaper digs.

“I've never been happier in my life,” he assured me, and his beaming smile confirmed it. For the moment, he was sustaining himself by the strokes of his brushes. Two commissioned portraits had come his way – not his specialty, but art all the same. He was scraping by, from hand to canvas to mouth. Finally, he was making a living from his own creativity and hard work rather than at the orders of others. Every day, in small ways, he was earning the right to call himself a painter. He had dared to make a lunge for the Holy Grail, and the world around him was finally cooperating, albeit reluctantly.