Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  Earl Woods died in May 2006. From Earl’s death through the time of our visit, Tiger had won four major titles: the 2006 British Open and PGA Championship, the 2007 PGA Championship, and the 2008 U.S. Open, in the playoff over Rocco Mediate.

  “After his father died, and without getting into what happened and why it happened, Tiger got into other things,” Arnold said. “He went away from the routine and the work ethic that was so natural for him. It’s happened before. It has something to do with the psychological effect of the game. If he doesn’t try to go back to where he was five or six years ago, he will get worse instead of better. Could he go back to where he was? He could. Do I think he will? No.”

  Just so you know, those were Arnold’s own questions. It was like he was interviewing himself. It was like Arnold had thought so much about the subject of Tiger and his struggle to win more majors and was just waiting for the opportunity to talk about it. His sentences were so full and precise.

  “I’ll switch the tables,” Arnold said. “If I hadn’t won that U.S. Open at Cherry Hills, I could have won at least four other U.S. Opens. I really believe that.”

  You could almost see him making the list in his head.

  “I could have won in ’62.”

  That was the year he lost to Jack Nicklaus in the playoff at Oakmont, in Arnold’s backyard.

  “Sixty-three.”

  The playoff at the Country Club.

  “Sixty-six.”

  The one at Olympic.

  “Sixty-seven.”

  Tied with Nicklaus through three rounds at Baltusrol. Nicklaus won.

  “Seventy-two.”

  Arnold shot a Sunday 76 and finished four behind Nicklaus at Pebble.

  “Seventy-three.”

  Tied for the lead through three rounds at Oakmont. Johnny Miller shot 63 on Sunday and won.

  “If I had had the same psychological approach I did at Cherry Hills, I could have won all those years,” Arnold said. “I lost my edge.”

  That was some admission and some phrase, those last two words, and I didn’t even know what they meant. What I knew was that Arnold was being raw and honest and saying things I had never heard him say.

  “Winning that first U.S. Open was an obsession,” Arnold said. “The first thing you want to do is win an Open. Then, after you win it, you have to stay aggressive, stay the way you were when you won it. And it’s difficult to do.”

  You might be scratching your head here. After all, Arnold won dozens of tournaments after that 1960 U.S. Open, including two more victories at Augusta and his two British Opens. But what I think Arnold was saying was that after winning the ’60 U.S. Open he lost something he was never able to recover. He was never the same, not deep down inside. Mike, in his own way, knew what Arnold was talking about. His golf was never the same after Medinah.

  The table was silent for a long moment until Mike said, “It’s such a fine edge.”

  “It is,” Arnold said. “It’s so fine. You have to get in there and you have to stay in there, and once you get out it’s very hard to get back in. It’s happened to every golfer. Hogan. Nicklaus. Every golfer. It’s just a question of when.”

  Did Arnold have that same obsessive need to practice and improve and win in ’65 and ’75 that he did in ’55, when Winnie would stand with him as he beat balls? No, not with all that endorsement money rolling in and his plane idling on the tarmac and the whole world beckoning for him. Every golfer. Tom Watson. Jack Nicklaus. Mike Donald. Tiger Woods. Arnold Palmer. It’s just a question of when.

  Ken Venturi lived for years in a modern home in the California desert that was like a museum devoted to his life and times. Before that, he lived in a house with shag carpeting in Naples, Florida, that was the same way, decorated with the artifacts of his triumphs. I’ve had tours of both houses, as well as houses owned by other athletes, and in my experience that’s the standard decorating scheme. Arnold’s house was an exception, but he had his barn and his suite of offices. It’s an understandable impulse. I’m sure Picasso had a lot of his paintings on his walls.

  Ken’s house in Rancho Mirage looked like a curator had been through it. Various shelves displayed his medals, trophies, and notable scorecards. The walls were covered with glass-protected letters and scores of photographs and paintings showing Ken in action as a player, broadcaster, and man-about-town. (One was by LeRoy Neiman, ubiquitous painter of sportsmen.) There were various framed articles and magazine covers, including three of the four times he had appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, which he did twice in 1964, when he won the U.S. Open and was named Sportsman of the Year. The missing cover was from 1960, when Ken appeared with Dow Finsterwald and Arnold Palmer and the headline GOLF’S YOUNG LIONS. The absence of that cover was not a coincidence. I knew that Ken had a whole, festering thing about Arnold, but that’s about all I knew. After seeing Arnold, I knew that Ken—Arnold’s nearly exact tour contemporary—had to be my next tour stop. Driving from LAX to Palm Springs, as sparkly and ritzy as Latrobe is muted and down-home, I wondered what Ken would say about Arnold. Maybe he would say nothing. After all, they were both in their eighties. Maybe Ken had decided it was time to finally give it a rest.

  • • •

  We made a date. Dinner for four on a Tuesday night. Ken; his wife, Kathleen; secret weapon Mike Donald, in for Round II; and your tour guide. Mike and I wore sport coats—we knew Ken’s code. Ken had made a reservation at one of his regular places, Castelli’s in Palm Desert, where the waiters wear ties and speak in low voices and the dining room smells like fried garlic and red wine.

  Mike and I got to the restaurant fifteen or twenty minutes early, but Ken and Kathleen, Ken’s third wife, were already there, at the bar, having wine. Ken’s hair was thick and white and he was slim. His eyes were the same as ever: bright, intense, blue—electric. His manner and his references were Old World Italian, although his mother was Irish and his skin had more pink in it than anything else. He was dressed perfectly and he was chipper. In six months, he’d be going into the World Golf Hall of Fame.

  We ate at a corner table in the back of the back room. Ken faced out, his back to the corner, as the famous and semi-famous frequently prefer. Every now and again a name would elude Ken and he would show a hint of passing frustration, but overall his mind was sharp and he did not tire.

  The Masters came up often. Ken told a story, datelined Augusta, in which he gave several posters to a trusted CBS assistant and instructed him to take the posters to Tiger Woods to sign. This is a routine aspect of tour life, done in the name of charity. But Woods would sign only one and the posters came back to Ken. “And I took that one signed poster,” Ken told us, “and I ripped it up into little pieces.”

  Yes, Ken could have made the request himself and maybe the result would have been different. Yes, he could have had at least one signed poster without turning the episode into a confetti show. But the point was that Ken Venturi had his standards, and after this haughty act of disrespect from Tiger Woods they were even more intact.

  As Ken concluded the story with those little poster pieces scattered on the ground, his head went into a little north-south shake, like a Friday-night welterweight after delivering a TKO punch. I showed him.

  He was going through his greatest hits. Ken talked about having Frank Sinatra as a roommate after he broke up with his first wife, Conni Venturi, the mother of his two children. Ken referred to Sinatra as Francis while Sinatra called him Kenneth, Ken explained to us. One night Kenneth and Francis were having dinner with a Mafia don, which Venturi signaled by pushing a finger on his left nostril. Ken then recounted a brief, cryptic exchange in which Francis indicated to this lord of the underworld that Ken was “all right” and that the don could talk freely. Ken—who took pride in being a son of Italian San Francisco, like the DiMaggio brothers and Tony Bennett—wasn’t showing any admiration for Mob life, just a familiarity with its customs.

  As Ken described his father, Frederico Venturi, the ma
n sounded like a character out of The Old Man and the Sea, had it been written by John Steinbeck and set in Northern California in the 1940s. Ken told how his father sold nets and twine to fishermen from San Francisco down to Monterey and how he would drop off Ken at the elite and beautiful Cypress Point Club, where he would caddie.

  Years later, in January 1956, Ken returned to Cypress with another fast-track amateur, Harvie Ward, to play two titans of the professional game, Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, in a money match. Eddie Lowery, the tiny legendary Boston caddie who grew up to become the owner of the largest Lincoln-Mercury dealership in San Francisco, backed the amateurs. George Coleman, a bicoastal industrialist, backed the pros. A popular book—The Match by Mark Frost—was written about that day.

  Ken talked about a re-creation of the match that was played recently. The day had been a triumphant return for Ken. It was supposed to feature two established pros, Davis Love and his buddy Fred Couples, playing two young stars, Bubba Watson and Rickie Fowler. But Fred withdrew late, and Nick Watney, another young guy, was his last-minute replacement.

  In my sense of the day, Fred’s absence sort of killed the event. It needed Fred’s star power, and the history Fred and Davis represented, to stand in for Hogan and Nelson. But if Ken felt that Fred’s absence hurt the event in any way, he didn’t share it with us. Without Ken, there was no Match I, let alone its contrived sequel, and Ken didn’t need Fred Couples in the house to enjoy the day. In his final CBS broadcast, Ken said, “The greatest gift in life is to be remembered.” At Cypress that day, Ken was being remembered.

  I asked Ken if the remarkable scores in The Match were accurate. The four golfers were said to have made twenty-seven birdies and an eagle between them.

  Ken nodded. “I know, because I’m the only one left who was there and I have the card,” he said.

  He knew the scores and he knew the stories behind the scores. He was the source. He was the man.

  • • •

  Mike and I were under Ken’s spell, engulfed in his old-school, fly-straight, DIY values, golfing and otherwise. We were sitting with a man who knew how to dress, swing, eat, drink, swear, tell a story. We were with a man who was a central figure in golf’s greatest generation, the gang who made their mark in the prosperity of the 1950s, when a pair of leather golf shoes, hand-sewn in Massachusetts, might weigh six pounds at the end of Saturday’s wet round. Ken was taking us wherever he wanted, and it was a pleasure.

  By way of his TV work, Ken was a significant presence for me through high school and college. Ken was the doorman to the Masters, always respectful. Later, in my brief stints as a tour caddie, I got a different impression of him, as a man with an unattractive macho streak, a superiority complex, and the best seat at the bar. I got a third version of Ken some years after that, when I spent parts of two days with him for an SI story. I remember telling my boss that I was overwhelmed by how wrong my impression of Ken had been. He had charisma and warmth. The way he was connected to his own past was so endearing. Every question triggered a story, and he gave no rote answers. He just slowly sipped his Crown Royals and talked. What struck me most was his devotion to his second wife, Beau, then in the late stages of brain cancer. Her end was coming, and any visitor would have seen the same thing: Ken was heartbroken.

  When Ken retired from CBS, I wrote a farewell piece. For that story, I sat in a corner of the broadcast booth at the Kemper Open as Ken worked the final tournament of his long career. One person after another came in to pay tribute. The most telling thing was how moved the players were by his retirement and how much the players meant to Ken. They looked at Ken Venturi and saw their fathers and their boyhoods.

  In more recent years, I helped Ken write several first-person pieces for which he instructed that his writer’s fee go to a hospital in Loma Linda where he had received treatments for cancer. When he gave lessons, his entire fee, typically five hundred dollars, went to charity. One favorite was for the training of guide dogs. Another was the Stuttering Foundation. (He was a recovering stutterer.) He had the servant heart. Ken had been the host of a charity golf tournament that in a single year raised nearly $1 million for the construction of a sixty-bed shelter for victims of domestic abuse. It bears Beau Venturi’s name. Ken gave at the office, at home, in public, in private. Ken gave.

  His life, with all its ups and downs—three marriages, money problems and health problems, a publicized DUI arrest late in the day, horrible play and brilliant play—was like an old-time movie, with James Garner playing Ken. You’d need a slightly older man to play the Supportive Parish Priest. In various books and magazine pieces about the ’64 Open, there’s often a section about Father Murray, from St. Vincent de Paul in San Francisco, and the inspirational letter he wrote to Ken on the eve of the tournament, when Ken was, as they used to say, down on his luck. That letter led Ken to a Catholic church in Washington, D.C., on the eve of the Open, and that visit, as Ken told and retold the story, made all the difference. Ken was a devout Catholic, and redemption as a life theme ran deep with him.

  Everything ran deep with him. That’s why we, his viewing public, responded to him like we did. That’s why total strangers, who knew him only from TV, would call out to him, “Hey, Kenny!”

  • • •

  Many of Ken’s dinner stories were about Hogan, who came off as a second father figure. (Byron Nelson and Eddie Lowery did, too.) Ken told us about being a pallbearer at Hogan’s funeral and about his many practice rounds with Hogan. He told us how Hogan, after being absent from the national open for several years, agreed to play in the 1966 U.S. Open at the Olympic Club in San Francisco if and only if the USGA would pair Hogan with Venturi for the first two rounds. That seemed astounding to me, but that was Ken’s story.

  In rich detail, Ken told us that on the second hole of the opening round, Hogan got stuck while standing over a putt. Hogan had the yips.

  “I can’t take it back, Ken,” Hogan said.

  “Nobody gives a shit, Ben,” Ken said back.

  That bit of wise-guy humor was evidently all Hogan needed to hear: At age fifty-three and playing barely any tournament golf, he finished twelfth. Venturi finished three shots behind. Palmer was leading by seven with nine holes left and lost to Billy Casper in a playoff.

  Ken was on a roll. He talked about the aftermath of his win at Congressional at the ’64 Open, how he declined a Sunday-lunch invitation with LBJ at the White House so he could go to New York and appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, have drinks with Toots Shor at Toots Shor’s, eat at “21,” and see Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, accompanied all the while by his first wife, Conni, who looked like she belonged on a Broadway stage herself. Ken said Carol Channing changed the famous lyric of her show’s most famous number to this: “Hello, Kenny. Well hello, Kenny! It’s so nice to have you back where you belong.” The reference, in Ken’s mind, was not just to his return to the bright lights of the big city but also to his position among the elite players in the game, right there with Arnold and Jack and Gary Player. But the real soundtrack to his life seemed to be My Way, as sung by Francis Albert himself.

  We were talking about the 1964 U.S. Open when I asked Ken if he had watched the 1990 U.S. Open, Mike’s Open. Ken recalled the bomb Irwin made on the last hole of regulation to post a Sunday 67.

  “How do you think your life would have been different if you had won?” Ken asked Mike.

  “You know what?” Mike said. “I doubt it would have been very different.”

  Ken shook his head. “It would have been different,” he said.

  Our conversation turned to Curtis Strange, who had been trying to win his third straight Open that year at Medinah. Ken jumped to the ’85 Masters, when Curtis opened with an 80 and still managed to get himself in contention on the back nine on Sunday. During that ’85 broadcast, Venturi had been critical of Curtis’s play in the final round, when he made bogeys on Augusta’s two back-nine par-fives, each time knocking his second shot into a water hazard beside t
he green. Curtis finished two shots behind the winner, Bernhard Langer. In the broadcast, Ken said Curtis should have laid up short of those water hazards. Later, Ken said, Curtis confronted him about what he had said. “He poked his finger in my chest and said, ‘If I had it to do again, I’d play those same shots again.’

  “And I said, ‘Yeah, Curtis? And you’d be wrong again. Which is why you’ll never win the Masters! And if you ever poke me again, I’m gonna slug ya.’ ”

  There was another little up-and-down nod. Ken Venturi, winner by unanimous decision.

  • • •

  Ken said he learned all he needed to know about Tiger Woods at the 1997 Masters. That was the tournament Woods won by twelve shots at age twenty-one, playing in his first major as a pro. It was all so unlikely. Woods’s father grew up in a segregated country. His mother grew up in Thailand. To say the least, they were not country-clubbers. When Tiger holed out on eighteen on Sunday, it was stirring. I was standing right there.

  “He walked right by his mother on that eighteenth green and gave that hug to his father,” Ken told us. “He showed no respect for his mother.”

  In his 2004 book, Getting Up & Down, Ken talks about the last of his fourteen tour wins, the ’66 Lucky International Open at Harding Park, the San Francisco city course where he grew up playing. For many years, Ken’s parents ran the counter in the Harding pro shop. In the book, Ken gloats about beating Arnold by two and says that when he came off the final green to hug his father, Fred Venturi said, “Your mother is over there.” In other words, mother first.

  You can see the Earl-Tiger hug at the ’97 Masters on various highlight reels. Earl and Tida, separated in their married life, were standing on the back of the green arm in arm when their only child made his putt to win and punched the air with unbridled vigor. When Tiger approached his parents, Earl stepped forward, and father and son, teacher and student, shared a hug that was beamed across the world. Many people found it inspiring. Ken saw a mother being dissed.