Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  Sandy Tatum flew to Philadelphia from San Francisco for the event. He was nearly ninety-three, and he sat on a plane all day to attend. Secret legend Neil Oxman, one of the event’s organizers, paired me with Tatum and Watson. (I half begged him not to, but likely didn’t mean it.) The fourth was our friend Jay Hass. (Not Jay Haas the pro golfer; Jay Hass the amateur distance runner.) Johnny Hass, Jay’s son and my godson, was our one-man cheering section. On the first tee, shaking like a toddler in a June ocean, I hit about the worst push in history, a shot that went farther right than it did out. “Little quick there,” Watson said, trying to be helpful.

  From the start he could not have been more accommodating, to me and everybody else. Part of it was professionalism. The bigger thing was that he cared. The day and the cause mattered to him.

  Sandy’s first shot was what you might expect from the 1942 NCAA golf champion, seventy-one years after the fact. A fine shot. Jay stepped up and drilled one, 260 yards and right down Broadway, slight draw. Some people are just good in a crisis.

  I was calmer by the time I played my second shot from the middle of the fairway on the second hole. I had 153 yards, uphill, into a slight breeze. I had my ninety-nine-dollar mail-order 5-hybrid in hand. I took it slightly outside and hit (pretension alert) a sort of hold cut that started about four yards left of the flagstick and faded about two yards. The ball finished about six feet from the hole. Watson said, “See what happens when you slow down a little?”

  A siren sounded as we stood on the second green—a summer thunderstorm was moving in fast—and our perfect day of golf was over. Tom Watson had seen me hit a good shot.

  The day got better. The group retired into a clubhouse ballroom. There was lunch, an auction, a Q&A, storytelling. Watson sat on a dais with Tatum and others. They were singing the praises of golf. “We’re all here for golf,” Watson said. “It gives us all more than we give it. It is a describer of the human condition. At times we hate it. At times we get so close to that Holy Grail we think we’re going to almost touch it. And if we ever think we’re going to grab it, it’s going to bite us in the ass.”

  There was appreciative laughter, and I felt myself falling for Watson all over again. This was Mickey Wright’s Watson. This was Tom Watson at the height of his powers, expressing with exquisite plainness an essential part of golf’s appeal. Any of us who have attempted to play golf for keeps have experienced what Watson was talking about. All golfers endure the same basic emotional responses. You can take that too far, but as a starting point it’s true.

  Watson then addressed Sandy and said, “I wouldn’t call you a golf nut. I would call you a man who will never give up.”

  Tatum ran with that. He spoke of a system, a mental trick he had developed to get through his appointed rounds. “Every time I get over the shot, I have the hope that I’m going to make the shot and the illusion that I will,” he said. “And regardless of the outcome, I use that for the rest of the round. I suggest you work on that. Hope and illusion.”

  Then Sandy talked about the most memorable sporting event he had ever attended. He had many from which to choose: Watson’s victory over Nicklaus at the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach in ’82. Tatum’s own ’79 U.S. Open, when he planted that tree. Hogan at Olympic in ’66. Bobby Jones at his home club in ’31. But for his answer Tatum strayed far from golf. He started talking about the 1936 Olympics at Berlin, which he attended as a sixteen-year-old during a summer vacation.

  Sandy spoke of the American Olympic team as being “dominated by African-Americans for the first time.” His audience was several dozen middle-aged white men. He spoke of what Jesse Owens did there and the greatness of his feats. He cited the specifics as if he’d read about them in the paper just that morning. He remembered how Hitler offered the Nazi salute “and eighty thousand Germans went absolutely nuts. Even though I was only sixteen years old, I thought to myself, What is going on here?” He remembered how Hitler ignored the black American athletes and the “awful whistling” that filled the stadium as German fans expressed their displeasure in the face of Owens’s greatness. Sandy talked about Owens’s final broad jump, an event that brought another gold medal to the United States and caused more humiliation for Hitler. “Jesse Owens was the greatest athlete I have ever, ever, ever seen,” Sandy said.

  He then described Owens’s final broad jump: “He hit that board, and I had the feeling he would never come down.” Sandy’s boyhood pride in the man, already mighty, swelled wildly during that jump. Watson stared right at his friend’s rheumy blue eyes, transfixed.

  When we were done, I gave Sandy a ride back to his hotel, the Ritz-Carlton on Broad Street, in the old Girard Trust Building, a likely hangout for the Duke brothers. If you don’t know the reference, play is suspended until you watch Trading Places.

  On the way into town, we stopped at one of my regular pizza places, where they know me as the guy who mixes the regular iced tea with their fruity iced tea and pomegranate lemonade in equal portions. Better, even, than an Arnold Palmer. Sandy was game for trying it and seemed to like it. We talked about this and that. I wondered morbidly if those two holes at Whitemarsh would turn out to be the last time Watson and Tatum played golf together. After all, Tatum would soon be ninety-three, and Watson doesn’t play much recreational golf.

  But not much later Tatum and Watson played together in Los Angeles. Sandy flew down from San Francisco for the game. They played all eighteen, and Watson told me Tatum got every shot up in the air. Who needs hope and illusion when you have talent?

  • • •

  Jaime Diaz, the only scribe on my Secret Legends list, was in Philadelphia for the U.S. Open at Merion in his role as the editor of Golf World and its back-page columnist. Later in the summer he made a second visit to Philadelphia. Who could blame him? My adopted city is one of the great American golf centers. Jaime lives in one, too, in the Sandhills of North Carolina. Mike—with a reserved seat on my legends bus at this point—and I would have been happy to road-trip to North Carolina to see Jaime there. But in the end Philadelphia proved irresistible for him.

  So Jaime came to Philadelphia and Mike did, too, and we played twenty-seven holes on the first day, followed by a neighborhood dinner, a plastic-booth breakfast, and more golf the next. This is Mike’s everyday life, but for Jaime it was a little break, and for me it was a staycation of the highest order. Golf with friends. Philadelphia could be a prized destination for visiting golfers, though the private clubs would have to be more open to outside play, something the British clubs do as a matter of course and private American clubs seldom do.

  In 1989, when I was at the Inquirer, I wrote a story identifying the best ten courses in and around Philadelphia. For that story I talked to three experts on American golf: Ben Crenshaw, Herbert Warren Wind, and the course architect Robert Trent Jones, Sr. Among American cities, Crenshaw said that only metropolitan New York had more stand-the-test-of-time courses than Philadelphia. (I loved talking architecture with Ben Crenshaw, one of the reasons he’s on my legends list.) Herb Wind said only Chicago did. And Trent Jones said no city did.

  I haven’t played in Chicago and have been to only a few courses there. In my Patchogue youth I got glimpses of some of the classic New York courses, sometimes on a sneak-on basis. But in Philadelphia I know most of our great and near-great courses. We have a half-dozen courses that could host a national open tomorrow.

  One of them, according to Mike, is Rolling Green, where Jaime and Mike and I played on our first day together. Our fourth and host was my old friend Fred Anton. Fred knows all the Philadelphia courses, too. He won the 1952 caddie championship at Merion on the club’s short, quirky, and excellent West Course, about a mile from the East Course, where so many national championships have been played. Please don’t ask me which one I prefer. I have enough trouble as it is.

  Jaime swung the club beautifully at Rolling Green and enjoyed being with Mike and Fred. He’s an excellent golfer with a fluid, upright swing and a deli
ghtful this-is-fun manner, even though deadline tortures him as it does few others. The first time we played together, years earlier, at the Hacienda Golf Club in Southern California, Jaime shot even par.

  For a few years, Jaime and I were both on the SI masthead, until he left for Golf Digest and its sister publication, Golf World. Part of the draw for him was the chance for total golf immersion. His departure was a loss for our readers, because there is no one who writes about golf with more insight and passion than Jaime. He is a unique and wonderful presence in the game.

  One of my favorite moments from his life and times came during a cab ride he took to Augusta National to report a pre-tournament story. The cabdriver quickly established his passenger’s name, residence, and (as it was then) place of employment.

  “HI-mee DEE-as,” the cabbie said with an Augusta burr. “New York Times.” A pause. “Hymie—you a Jew?”

  That’s how most people pronounce his name, HI-mee, just like the robot agent on Get Smart who struggled with everyday human life. (When Chief says to Hymie, “Give me a hand,” Hymie detaches his.) I prefer HI-may, stealing the pseudo-Castilian pronunciation favored by our friend Jack McCallum, SI’s Hall of Fame basketball writer.

  Jaime’s father was born in Spain and his mother in Mexico, and Jaime grew up in San Francisco, where he was born in 1953. A first-generation American. There’s nothing about our culture that Jaime takes for granted: movies, books, music, the NBA, city living, the country life—the whole great American smorgasbord.

  Sometimes when I see Jaime that opening bit from “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing” comes to mind: “I been to, you know, Paris, Peru. You know. I mean Iraq, Iran, Eurasia. I speak very, very, fluent Spanish. Todo ’stá bien chévere. CHEV-er-A. CHEV-er-A.” (Stevie Wonder was years ahead of the curve, mixing cultures and erasing borders, wasn’t he?) I mentioned “Don’t You Worry” to Jaime once and wasn’t surprised to learn that he had an inexplicable attachment to it, too. Some weeks we will, by coincidence, write the same story.

  Jaime has a wandering mind. He’s like Lieutenant Columbo on the old TV show, always scratching his head and trying to figure out some new thing. He’s always asking somebody something. At a tournament in Hawaii one year, Jaime was talking to Jim Thorpe, then the most prominent black player on tour. This was about 1995, when Thorpe was playing a lot of practice-round golf with Vijay Singh, the big dark Fijian. Jaime had picked up on the fact that Thorpe was teaching Singh his own choice vocabulary. Singh has a high, playful voice, and when he used any of Thorpe’s preferred phrases—youthinkyoubadmuddafukkah?—Jaime had to contain his laughter.

  “Jim,” Jaime asked Thorpe, “you might think this is kind of a dumb question, but do you consider Vijay to be black?”

  “Damn,” Thorpe said. “I’ve been trying to figure out the exact same thing!”

  Jaime’s interest in golf is broad. He knows rules officials, LPGA caddies, college coaches, players at every level. I love it that he once heard, remembered, and shared with me something Ken Venturi had said to Ed Sneed: “I admire how you mark your ball, Ed.” Nobody but Jaime would immediately identify the odd excellence of that sentence.

  Mike Donald likes golf. It is part of him. But he once said to me, “No matter how much I think I like golf, Billy Britton loves it so much more it’s a joke.” That’s how I feel about Jaime. He loves golf as much as any person I know. That’s why everything he writes about the game and the people who play it is good to its core. He writes about the game from deep inside it. He is forever trying to figure out a golfer’s head, and for the most part his subjects welcome it.

  Jaime lives in Carthage, near Pinehurst. He’s a full sixty miles from the Raleigh airport, but on the positive side of the ledger there are two dozen good courses in his backyard. Jaime and his wife, Stephanie, don’t have children but they do have a collection of animals, including some old horses in the backyard. For a while, Jaime was traveling to events with a basset hound named Max. Max, like his master, came by his charm naturally.

  Tiger Woods and Jaime met when Tiger was fourteen years old and Jaime was thirty-six. When Tiger was a teenager, Jaime spent many hours with Earl and nearly as many with Sam, as Earl called Tiger. Jaime has played half a dozen rounds with Tiger and more with Earl. Earl would sometimes refer to Jaime as “Stud,” which Jaime found odd. Even in the seventies, he was never the guy in the leather vest.

  Tiger, as a junior golfer, enjoyed hearing Jaime talk about life on tour. He was curious to learn about “the media” and how it worked. He was fourteen when he asked Jaime, “Why do they have to know everything?” In that same year, Tiger did a TV interview with Trans World Sport, a division of IMG, for whom Earl worked when Woods was an amateur. (Tiger was represented by IMG when he turned pro and remained with the company until he and Mark Steinberg left in 2011.) In that Trans World Sport interview, easy to find on the Internet, Tiger speaks with remarkable poise and little outward emotion about the racism he felt playing country-club golf, particularly in Florida and Texas. “People staring at you,” he tells his interviewer while sitting in a golf cart. “ ‘Why are you here? You aren’t supposed to be here.’ ” He shows no discomfort with the topic. Listening to Tiger’s replies, you cannot tell if he’s answering as himself or on behalf of his father.

  Jaime spent a lot of time in Tiger’s rental house in Augusta in 1997, the year Woods won his first Masters. Woods had several of his college friends there and they logged hours playing Mortal Kombat, a video game. Raymond Floyd and his kids, who were staying next door, dropped in a couple of times. Tiger and Jaime played a lot of Ping-Pong, and if Tiger played well, he could get fifteen points off Jaime, an excellent player, in games that went to twenty-one. Jaime did not find Tiger particularly clever or witty: To the better returns for winners, Tiger’s most common comeback line was “Fuck you.” But in between his losses, Tiger wanted to know how Jaime played certain shots.

  For a long time, Jaime would get at least one meaningful interview with Woods per year, usually in December. But that custom came to an end when Jaime helped Hank Haney, Woods’s former golf instructor, with a book called The Big Miss. It is by far the most insightful book into how Woods thinks and works, and much of the credit for that must go to its ghostwriter. In the book, Haney tells how Woods arranged for tickets to the Masters for two men he met at the addiction center in Mississippi where he was treated. It’s the most human thing I have ever heard about Woods doing. Good for Haney for remembering it, and so typical of Jaime to pick up on its meaning.

  • • •

  On our second day, Jaime, Mike, and I, along with Neil Oxman—tour caddie/political consultant/secret legend—played the new course at the Philadelphia Cricket Club. The Cricket Club also has an old-gal A. W. Tillinghast course from 1922 (then closed for remodeling) and a short, delightful nine-hole course called St. Martins. Late on our second day, Jaime and I went out for an emergency nine at St. Martins, and it was during that round, courtesy of Jaime, that I had an epiphany. Golfers, as Tom Watson noted that day at Whitemarsh, are always having epiphanies, the feeling that the grail is within reach. But not all epiphanies are created equal.

  I have already burdened you with the revelation that I’ve suffered for years from the yips, which has seriously diminished my ability to play competitive golf. Though I’ve tried various remedies, my case has been persistent and severe.

  Then came Jaime. As we played St. Martins, he told me about Johnny Miller winning the Pebble Beach tournament in 1994 at age forty-six. At Pebble that year, Miller looked like he might go into spasms on many of his shorter putts. But he putted well enough to win by a shot. It was seven years after his previous win and twenty-three years after his first win. Tom Watson was among the runners-up, yipping his way home on Sunday. To win you have to putt well.

  “Johnny told me he never used the same technique twice,” Jaime said. On some strokes he looked at the hole. Sometimes he looked at a little dot on the putter head as he to
ok it back. Sometimes he putted with his eyes closed. On some putts he imagined he was his son over the ball. He sliced some putts and hooked in others. One of the points Jaime was making is that the path of the putter head doesn’t have to be perfect for the ball to go in. A good path is good enough. The hole, after all, is much bigger than the ball.

  I felt like I could breathe. No method as a method! From that day on I have been using the Malcolm X Putting System. (“By whatever means necessary.”) It is not foolproof. I still have yippy days. But I have improved enough to where I can play a real match again. I have an admission to make. I haven’t even told this to Mike. In fact, until now, the only person I have shared this with is my regular St. Martins playing partner, David Morse, the least judgmental person I know: My go-to move on short putts now is to make the stroke with my eyes closed. I open them when I hear the happy sound of a hard plastic ball settling in for the night. Thank you, Jaime, for that lesson. A shout-out to you, too, Johnny Miller. For whatever it’s worth, you were so close to making my legends list.

  • • •

  Mike and I were amazed to learn from Jaime that he remembered Fred Venturi as the counterman at Harding Park. That whole scene seemed so long ago that I couldn’t imagine I had a friend and contemporary who knew it. Jaime’s father, the senior Jaime, started taking his sports-loving son to watch the Lucky International tournament at Harding Park in the early 1960s. About that same time, Jaime started playing the short nine-hole Fleming course there. Jaime was at the 1966 U.S. Open at Olympic. He knew Sandy Tatum and Ken Venturi, among various others on my legends list. That’s the nature of golf, if you hang around it the way Jaime does. More than that. It’s Jaime’s nature.