Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  The LPGA player Patty Sheehan was at Mickey’s last event, a senior tournament in 1993. Sheehan had never met her fellow Hall of Famer. “Everybody knew Mickey didn’t want pictures taken, so I just watched by myself, trying to take it all in,” Sheehan told me. “I had seen old film clips of her swing. It looked the same: very fluid, very powerful—flawless. You could see she was in love with golf and dedicated to hitting a golf ball purely. She had these old clubs, old as dirt, and it was clear they were her best friends.” They were ’63 Wilson Staffs, basically the same clubs Palmer took on the road in the winter of ’55.

  You could sub in Hogan for Mickey in Sheehan’s observation and those sentences would still make sense. But Mickey was even more of an enigma than Hogan. Hogan had his golf company. He was at Shady Oaks in Fort Worth every weekday, hitting balls and eating lunch. (Mickey joined Shady in the 1960s in part because she wanted to observe Hogan at close range without being obtrusive. He returned the compliment by watching her.) In 1983 Hogan gave a revealing seven-minute coat-and-tie TV interview with Ken Venturi that has been mined for its many pearls, including this one: “I feel sorry for the rich kids now. I really do. Because they’re never going to have the opportunity I had.”

  Mickey Wright didn’t pursue a life in business when she was done playing, as Hogan had done. She didn’t do corporate outings. She gave few interviews. She never married; she never had children. Her private life was private. Were it not for Rhonda’s efforts and a 1983 story she wrote for the USGA’s late, great Golf Journal, Mickey might have faded into complete obscurity. Of course Arnold was interested. They were exact contemporaries and didn’t even know each other.

  “She doesn’t want to talk about golf,” I said. I should have added with me.

  “Isn’t that something,” Arnold said. He was baffled.

  “She doesn’t play at all,” I said.

  “I can’t believe that,” Arnold said.

  With Mickey’s rejection, my legends tour had reached its first impassable road. As your bus driver, I would like you to know that I never considered taking Mickey off my Living Legends list. If anything, I was thinking of adding her to my Secret Legends list.

  Once in St. Andrews, I found myself trying to learn more about Old Tom Morris, the longtime custodian of the Old Course. I went to visit a golf historian and actor named David Joy, who gave me Old Tom in full regalia. He had the accent, the beard, the woolly clothes. Most significantly, he understood Old Tom’s heartbreak over the death of his namesake son. In not quite the same way, I asked Rhonda Glenn if she could discuss Mickey’s life and times with Mike and me, and she was willing.

  On that basis, my reporting partner and I saddled up and headed to the North Florida horse country where Rhonda lived, in the town of Summerfield. We went there on a mission, to learn more about the woman who was one part Palmer, two parts Hogan, and, alongside Jack Nicklaus, Bobby Jones, and Tiger Woods, in the foursome of the most dominant golfers ever.

  • • •

  As we approached Summerfield, Mike told me about being at the Hollywood Lakes Country Club, near his home, on a December Sunday in 1968, at age thirteen, when Peggy Wilson won what turned out to be her only LPGA tournament. In the next tournament, Mike remembered that Peggy was playing well until a tee popped up and struck her in the eye. The things Mike remembers.

  We arrived at the front door of a tidy, comfortable development home in a gated golf community and met the ladies of the house: Rhonda Glenn, unofficial historian of Mary Kathryn “Mickey” Wright, and Barbara Romack, winner of the 1954 U.S. Amateur over “Miss Wright,” as the papers had it back then. Barb won her Amateur the same year Palmer won his, in 1954. She looked like a woman who knew a lot.

  She was wearing a bright pink cashmere sweater over her slender shoulders. Rhonda’s blond hair was just splendid. These were women who did not wing it. They both were loaded with energy and charm. Rhonda was in her mid-sixties and Barb was—she’ll hate this—done pushing eighty. Mike and I had never met either of our hosts, but we settled into a comfortable conversation almost immediately. They knew my typing and Mike’s playing career. We weren’t strangers.

  Before long, Rhonda was showing us an SI dated April 16, 1956. The cover girl, a golfer, had her hair up and braided. Her hands, high above her left shoulder in follow-through, were on a leather grip. She was wearing bright red lipstick and a lively patterned blouse. The headline was barely a whisper:

  BARBARA ROMACK,

  CURTIS CUP STAR

  The brief story mentions that Romack, as a member of the amateur U.S. Curtis Cup team, would soon sail—sail!—to England for the May matches. On page 28 of that same issue is Herbert Warren Wind’s account of the ’56 Masters. “A cool and careful golfer, the slim young man seemed a certain winner when he arrived at the sixty-third tee with a six-shot lead over Middlecoff,” Wind writes midstory.

  Wind’s cool leader is Ken Venturi. You and I both know how that story ends. Or how it doesn’t.

  • • •

  Before long, Rhonda, author of The Illustrated History of Women’s Golf, was showing us a collection of film clips that documented Mickey’s swing through the years. Her swing had changed over time. All of the swings were athletic, but some from the mid-1950s were out of balance and saved by her strength and athleticism. At her peak, Mickey looked like Iron Byron—the USGA ball-hitting machine—if it had soul, style, and a cardigan. Her best swings looked like ones that could repeat forever. There wasn’t a moment of inefficiency or eccentricity in them. In the clips Mickey is tall and slender—not skinny—with a wide stance, a low take-away, and a full turn. Her backswing had the rhythm of a cresting wave. Her follow-through was so full that some of the swings endangered her schoolteacher glasses.

  Hearing Rhonda talk about Mickey was like hearing Billy Harmon talk about Hogan. In both cases, the admiration was deep and sincere. The initial attraction for Rhonda might have been Mickey’s golf, but it went far beyond that. She appreciated Mickey’s standards, her nonconformist view of the world, her intelligence, humor, and loyalty. If Mickey was a complex personality—as her unwillingness to attend the opening of her own room at the USGA Museum might suggest—Rhonda wasn’t going to discuss that with me. She accepted Mickey as she was. Rhonda once wrote of her, “She viewed golf as a form of self-expression rather than a contest between people.” What a sentence. Rhonda didn’t need to god her up. Mickey was on another level all on her own.

  Rhonda graduated from Lake Worth High in 1964 and played often at the Palm Beach Par-3, just up A1A from Chuck Will’s condo. Her mother worked at that course for thirty years, and Rhonda had all the free-range balls a girl could want to hit. She was an excellent junior player. She first met Barb as a teenager, when Barb was giving lessons on the range there.

  “Did Mickey ever tell you what she was thinking at the start of the backswing?” Mike asked Rhonda after we had viewed the Mickey Wright highlight reel. He was an ideal guest, asking questions, offering opinions, grateful for the chance to learn something new.

  Rhonda picked up a club in her office and gripped it. Certain hands just look like they belong on a golf club, and that was the case with Rhonda. By way of answering Mike’s question, she showed us an old-fashioned hands-first lag takeaway. Just a split second where the right wrist moves before anything else does. That move is the opposite of the up-and-in move Mike was working on daily at the range at Eagle Trace. Mike didn’t say a word to Rhonda about what he was doing. We were at the Glenn-Romack ranch in search of Mickey.

  In 1966, when Rhonda was nineteen and a student at Palm Beach Junior College, she was invited to play in the St. Petersburg Women’s Open. She was paired with Mickey, and they’ve been friends ever since.

  “When I called Mickey to tell her about the USGA’s decision to open a Mickey Wright Room, she cried,” Rhonda told us. “I told her we would need some of her memorabilia. She said, ‘It’s all moldy.’ ”

  Rhonda described Mickey as a w
onderful cook. She remembered the hearty Southern food that Mickey made in her Port St. Lucie kitchen when Rhonda visited. When Rhonda was talking while the chef was over her stove, Mickey said, “If you don’t mind, I can’t talk while I’m cooking.”

  “She wasn’t meek,” Rhonda said. “She visited me once when I was living in Dallas. She drove there from Florida because she liked her dentist there.”

  Mickey was in a rush for nothing. She liked driving and didn’t like flying. “I had a sports car then, a two-door Mazda RX-7. White. It was a beautiful car. Mickey said, ‘Do you mind if I give it a test drive?’ She squealed out of my driveway. I’m in a suburban development, and she practically left rubber.”

  I asked Rhonda why, after Mickey’s competitive career was over, she stopped playing golf entirely.

  “Maybe this will explain it,” Rhonda said. “I used to play quite a bit. Mickey was always interested in how I played, and I did play pretty good golf for a long time. Then one day a couple of years ago, she asked me how I was playing. She had not asked for a while. And I said, ‘I’m done. I’ve quit. I just can’t play the way I used to.’ And Mickey said, ‘I understand completely.’ ”

  In 2010 Mickey received the USGA’s highest honor, the Bob Jones Award. She did not go to the dinner at Pinehurst to receive it. Rhonda was chosen to accept it on her behalf. We watched a tape of the occasion, Rhonda in her blue USGA blazer.

  Later, I read Rhonda’s 1983 Golf Journal piece about Mickey. She and Mickey were on the Southern Methodist University campus. Mickey was visiting one of her old golf instructors. The USGA had invited Mickey to play in the ’83 U.S. Open on a special exemption. It would have been something like when Hogan, late in the day, played in the U.S. Open at Olympic in ’66 and Sandy Tatum’s wife nabbed his cigarette butt.

  At SMU that day, Rhonda asked Mickey, “Are you going to play in the Open?”

  This is from Rhonda’s piece: “ ‘I haven’t decided,’ she said sharply. There was a sudden bite to her voice and her face clouded. For a moment I sincerely wished that I had not asked.”

  Just the question was like a flashback for Mickey. I felt for them both.

  At home, I had been collecting various old newspaper clips, courtesy of helpful librarians at the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Public Library, and Sports Illustrated. I was focused on one day in particular: Tuesday, April 10, 1956. By way of quick review, this is how I got there.

  On Saturday night, April 7, 1956, Ken Venturi—then an amateur golfer from San Francisco with a four-shot lead in the Masters—had a private meeting with the two men who ran the club and the tournament, Bobby Jones and Cliff Roberts. It was there that Ken’s vision of his future, as the gentleman amateur with a green coat in his closet, fully took form. On Sunday, April 8, Ken shot a final-round 80, a score that left him a shot behind the winner, Jackie Burke. On Monday, April 9, Venturi flew home, accompanied by Eddie Lowery, to San Francisco. At the airport, Harry Hayward of the San Francisco Examiner, along with other reporters, awaited Ken’s arrival. On Tuesday, April 10, their stories were published in various newspapers. These were the stories that changed the course of Ken Venturi’s life. They poisoned his relationship with Jones, with Roberts, with Augusta National. They were part of a fast sequence of events that forced Ken to abandon the life Bob Jones had prophesied for him on that magical Saturday night in Augusta.

  On Sunday, while Ken was trying to win that Masters, Harry Hayward went to Harding Park to see Ken’s father and write up the scene there. His story in Monday’s Examiner could not have been more empathetic. His lede: “Papa Fred was brave—and proud, too—as the final returns were in.”

  Hayward’s story in the next day’s paper begins with four brief setup paragraphs followed by a long series of quotes from Venturi without a single interjection from Hayward. I’ll cite here the quotes from the front page of the Examiner sports section on Tuesday, April 10, 1956, before the reader was asked to jump to page 8. This is exactly as it ran except the quotes in the paper were in bold:

  “They wouldn’t let my pal Harvie Ward talk to me when I reached the seventeenth. A tournament official stopped him, said he might be accused of helping me if he made the friendly gesture.

  “They took care of Mr. Lowery, too, sent him to referee the Byron Nelson–Ben Hogan twosome so he couldn’t be close to me.

  “They also switched the pairings. In the first round I was paired with Billy Joe Patton, the second Jimmy Demaret, the third Jackie Burke. And I was supposed to go out with Byron Nelson in the fourth and final round. But, oh, no, they switched and put me in with Sam Snead, instead.

  “They were afraid that Nelson might give me some help. They knew of our long friendship and that he had helped me build my game.

  “Snead hardly said a word to me all the way around. That’s OK. He can’t be accused of helping me. But have you noticed that the pictures prove that Mike Souchak was helping Jackie Burke all the way around the course?

  “All I heard back there was it would be great for an amateur to win the Masters for once. Well, if they wanted an amateur to win all they had to do was let my original pairing with Nelson stand and send us out at 12 o’clock noon, instead of 2:06 P.M.

  “I would have won by five strokes if that had happened.

  “They started me on the first day at 9 A.M. I took the lead with my 66. So they started me after 2 P.M., when the wind had dried the greens to lightning fast texture on each of the following three days.

  “Give me a decent starting time and I would have been OK.

  “It’s a pro league.

  “Turn pro? Hell, no, I’ll never turn pro.”

  It is unlikely that Harry Hayward recorded that session; the quotes don’t read as if they’re verbatim. (Many of the quotes in this book are not verbatim, either.) The quotes in the stories by Hayward’s competitors are not identical. But how is he going to make up all that? Or really, any of it? With the other reporters there? And why would he? He was a guy who obviously cared about his beat. He was his paper’s main golf writer, not the off-season football writer. He knew he would be covering Ken for years to come. He would have no reason to want to bury him.

  Maybe I’m showing my prejudice here, but I have to believe that what Hayward wrote is very close to what Venturi said and even closer to what Venturi meant.

  Ken spent the next half century saying he was misquoted, that his words were twisted and taken out of context, that he would never forgive Harry Hayward, even though the man was dead.

  Taken out of context? Reading Hayward’s story, and the others, the context is obvious: Young, annoyed amateur golfer comes home after shooting an 80 that costs him the Masters, sees a bunch of familiar faces at the airport, and spouts off. I feel duty-bound, as your tour guide, to offer an opinion here: I think Ken was blaming the wrong guy for his troubles. And it made me wonder about other things. Or, more accurately, wonder more.

  I sent another e-mail to David Fay, my retired friend who ran the USGA, asking if we could talk about the Palmer-Venturi rules dispute from 1958.

  After that, I settled in with Google and tried to find Conni Venturi. I clicked here and there, not knowing if she was dead or alive. A Conni MacLean Venturi of Napa, California, had written a recent letter to the editor of the Napa Valley Register to praise the local theater scene. Of one local actor, she wrote, “I think he could go to Hollywood and light up that mecca.” That had to be her: Conni, no e. A phone number was proving elusive. I had a possible address. Her former husband’s Hall of Fame induction was coming up. I wondered what that meant to her, if anything at all.

  Every sport loves its Hall of Fame inductions, along with its various testimonial dinners and trophy presentations and the like. The more Hallmarky, the better. Golf gets particular pleasure from any moment where a guy can get in front of a microphone and talk about the courage another man mustered while standing over a double-breaking downhill ten-footer. No other sport could generate so many press rel
eases that use the word ceremony. You can try to fight or mock these events, but in the end the culture will overwhelm you, and then the question is: Are you in or are you out? On that basis, I go to the Golf Writers Association of America dinner every year, on the Wednesday of Masters week. It’s a staple of the golf calendar. There is a bunch of them.

  The best of these annual rites in golf is the Sunday-night Green Jacket Ceremony in Butler Cabin, at the conclusion of the Masters, Jim Nantz of CBS presiding. Jim does similar events in other sports and always adds a certain solemnity and gravitas. That’s because he is missing the gene for sarcasm and cynicism. He makes those Butler Cabin sessions feel like papal inaugurations.

  Over the years, glimpsing the inside of the great cottage became a Holy Grail for a small group of us, and one year my SI colleague Alan Shipnuck did it. He slipped into Butler Cabin on a Sunday night while Bubba Watson and family, celebrating a second Masters victory, were in it. When Alan was spotted by a club official, he made a beeline for the loo and turned it into a hideout. For the crime of overzealous reporting, Alan was banned by the club for the next year’s tournament. Was his act so outrageous? Yes, but I admire it anyhow. Another Sunday-night tradition at Augusta has the new winner attending a members’ dinner in the clubhouse. I fully expect Alan to show up some year in a waiter’s jacket.

  The looming World Golf Hall of Fame induction, where Fred Couples and Ken Venturi would get enshrined, promised to be a particularly important night for Nantz, as he had been tapped to make introductory remarks for both of them. Ken was his CBS tower-mate and golfing mentor, and Fred was his University of Houston roommate. One man introducing two inductees: In the history of the World Golf Hall of Fame that had never happened before!