Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  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.

  Mike’s point is irrefutable. On the PGA Tour, your scores are your talent. I once heard a player say, “It’s a results-oriented business.” Exactly. But only Randy could know what golf was like for him in Michigan, playing against the best players in the state, and what it was like on tour, playing against the best players in the country. I think there is a mental makeup by which some people can get out of their own way and others cannot.

  Randy talked about playing well at the 1973 Tour Qualifying School and how Crenshaw, who won, finished twenty-two shots ahead of
him over the eight rounds. Crenshaw ended up twelve shots ahead of the guy who took second. Randy finished in a tie for sixth. He told me how nervous he was. His PGA Tour card was on the line, and he often felt like vomiting. His caddie, he said, kept him in the game.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Dolphus Hull,” Randy said.

  “Golf Ball?”

  Golf Ball.

  When Mike and I were with Ball in Jackson, he had brought up Crenshaw’s performance at that ’73 Q School. In fact, Ball had said in passing that he’d been working for somebody named Randy Watkins. But it wasn’t Randy Watkins. It was Randy Erskine!

  I told Randy that I had recently seen Golf Ball and that I had his phone number. I don’t think either of us could believe how the global village was shrinking right there in front of our morning eggs. Randy called Ball from our breakfast table. I could hear Ball.

  “Golf Ball? This is Randy Erskine.”

  “Randy Erskine!”

  “You used to caddie for me.”

  “I know!”

  “I haven’t spoken to you in over thirty years. How you doing, buddy?”

  “Hey, man—how you doin’?”

  “Good, good. I’m a club pro in Michigan. I’m going to retire this year.”

  They talked. Randy asked Ball if he still played. He remembered him as a good player.

  “No, man,” Ball said. “Can’t use my legs.”

  Randy could not have known.

  “You still hanging around with that Barney Thompson?” Ball asked. Barney Thompson played the tour in the seventies and eighties.

  “I spoke to Barney just the other day,” Randy said. He was amazed how quickly Ball had remembered his friendship with Barney. “I’m gonna see him in a little bit here.”

  “Man, he played golf with a pea for a brain,” Ball said.

  Randy laughed. Barney was not noted for his course management. “Barney got himself on the senior tour, but just for one year,” Randy said. “How old are you now?”

  “Seventy-one,” Ball said.

  “Seventy-one? You’re all grown up!” Randy said. “I remember back in the day you were put away wet many, many a night.”

  You could hear Ball giggle all the way from Jackson.

  • • •

  Randy and I sat at Testa’s for hours, comparing notes. Lunch was well under way by the time we were done with breakfast. Randy insisted on paying. I told him how grateful I was for the chance he had given me thirty-five years earlier in Charlotte, when we were both far from home. He seemed to remember our week together with fondness.

  “I’ve always been amazed by one thing,” I said. I couldn’t even use first person for this next part. “You’ve got this college kid caddying for you. You don’t know him at all. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. And you give him the spare bed in your hotel room. What were you thinking?” Had the tables been switched (to use an Arnold phrase), I could not imagine myself doing the same. I wish I could say otherwise.

  Randy answered instantly. “You were part of the team!” he said. “Gotta keep the team happy and strong.”

  I wish I could express how good that made me feel, to know that for a week in late spring 1979, at the age of nineteen, I was a valued member of Randy Erskine’s team.

  I have never been able to find it, but I believe one of the golf magazines had a story in the late 1970s under a headline something like THE NEW BREED OF CADDIES, in which Neil Oxman (long before he was one of my Secret Legends) was quoted. He was then a law school student and a tour caddie. That story helped show the way for me to Randy Erskine and later to Brad Faxon, Bill Britton, Al Geiberger, Mike Donald, Peter Teravainen, and other noblemen.

  Peter is one of a kind. In retirement, he will sometimes hit balls in the lanes created by well-ordered rows of blueberry bushes. Likewise, there will never be another Neil Oxman. Neil, in his life as a political consultant, knows a lot of reporters, and we met sometime after I arrived at the Inquirer in 1986. He was dismissive of me at first. He had logged years as a real tour caddie. He paid his way through Villanova (undergraduate) and law school (Duquesne) with money he earned on tour. In law school, he had an almost perfect absentee record, owing to the call of the tour. Since 1972, there has never been a year when he didn’t caddie in at least one tour event, and over forty-plus years he has worked about five hundred tournaments, senior and junior events combined.

  It embarrasses me when Neil tries to talk to me as a fellow caddie. He knows that I know I was out there on a tourist visa. Neil has a long list of preferred pejoratives, and one of them is fucking dilettante. I typed my way out of Neil’s basement and am relieved to say that I am now (I think) what Neil calls a real person. Classic Neil sentences are often variations on this theme: “Michael, these people in Philadelphia’s Sixty-sixth Ward in the Great Northeast aren’t fucking dilettantes like your rich friends on the Main Line in their Gucci loafers. These are real people.”

  Neil has a range of moods, and I’m sure he brings a boxer’s energy and disdain for an opponent to his work at his company, the Campaign Group. On tour, he’s a different person. He loves the players, the caddies, the stories, and the action. Polly Crenshaw and Neil came of age at the same time and in the same place, in the all-together-now tour of the seventies. It stamped Neil for life.

  It is sometimes said, among the people who discuss such things, that Neil “introduced” Bruce Edwards to Tom Watson, which would make Neil the best matchmaker in the history of caddie/player marriages. Neil should get the credit, but this is how it actually went: In the summer of ’73, Neil and Bruce were young caddies traveling the circuit. They were in the parking lot of the Norwood Hills Country Club in St. Louis a few days before the start of the St. Louis Children’s Hospital Golf Classic. Neil had work, and Bruce was looking. Watson was walking across the parking lot, bag on his shoulder. Upon seeing Watson, Neil yanked Bruce up from the ground and said, “That’s Tom Watson. Why don’t you ask him?” Bruce did, and with a few absences Watson and Bruce were together for most of the next thirty years. When Bruce got sick in 2003, Neil stepped in. Bruce died the next year.

  Neil and I stayed in the same hotel during the week of the 2009 British Open at Turnberry. On the Saturday night before the Sunday finale—when Tom Watson, at age fifty-nine, had a one-shot third-round lead—we sat in the hotel dining room talking for hours, not a minute of it devoted to what might happen. I knew not to talk about Sunday. I didn’t want to add to Neil’s anxiety. He had spent years schlepping around courses with some of the most unheralded players in golf history. Now he was in a position to see golf history being made from the best seat in the house. When Julius Boros won the ’68 PGA Championship at age forty-eight, he became the oldest player to win a major championship. Watson was six weeks short of sixty. He was thirty years past his prime and ahead of everybody. The prospect for something amazing to happen was right there. But Neil and I talked about the Phillies, movies, politics, newspapers, mutual friends. Watson’s name did not come up. Neither did that of Harry Vardon (the only golfer with more Open wins than Watson). We did not speak of the final round.

  Late on Sunday, Watson came to the par-four eighteenth hole needing a four to win. He drove it down the middle and was left with 170 yards to the front edge of the green, with the pin back another twenty yards. He did what he wanted to do. He hit a full, flush 8-iron and it pitched on the front of the green. But the ball hit a hard spot, bounded crazily, and settled just over the green. Links golf, like life itself, is unpredictable.

  Watson, siding with caution, used a putter from a slightly fluffy lie. He was left with an eight-footer to win, but his putt, half yippy, never had a chance. He tapped in and dragged his way through the four-hole playoff like a man out of gas.

  Anyone who thinks that Neil could have or should have talked Watson into hitting a 9-iron knows nothing about Watson or links golf. In links golf, especially, it’s not the club you pull, it’s how you decide to hit it. As
for a 9-iron, it could have left him way short of the green. There’s no way to say. Anyway, Watson makes his own decisions. If his caddie, Alfie Fyles, talked Watson into hitting that fatal 2-iron at the Old Course on the Road Hole on Sunday in 1984, the first time he was trying to win his sixth Open, Watson has never admitted it. Maybe he did, and maybe that was a turning point in his career, I don’t know. Watson contended in a dozen or more major championships after the ’84 Open but never won. Turnberry was likely the last of his chances (though you never know). It was a beautiful loss, Watson’s to Stewart Cink in 2009, as all I-gave-it-my-best losses are.

  Arnold Palmer knew why Watson lost. It wasn’t because he was fifty-nine and playing on an artificial hip. It wasn’t because he had an unlucky bounce on that approach shot to eighteen. No. He didn’t win because he had lost the edge.

  As best I can tell, this is the edge: There’s a line deep in your head with go on one side of it and stop on the other, except you can’t see the line, let alone those words. You don’t decide on which side of the line you fall. In fact, you don’t even know the line is there at all. That’s what I had gleaned from Arnold. I can’t vouch for this definition. It’s like golf on the moon. How many people are qualified to describe that?

  With his loss Watson had the opportunity to give to the game what it had already given him. He took full advantage. He gave to Stewart Cink the same present Nicklaus had bestowed upon him thirty-two years earlier, in the same place and circumstance. I am speaking of the warmth with which Watson congratulated Cink, the candor with which Watson talked to reporters, the cooperative way he posed for pictures at the Turnberry hotel that night. It was Watson at his best, and it was more significant than what he did during the U.S. Open at Pebble in ’82, when he pitched in from the hay on seventeen on Sunday and beat Jack again, as great as that was. Bruce was right there for that one, just as Neil was at Turnberry twenty-seven years later. For a few real-time hours, Neil was at the center of the sporting universe. In terms of memory, he’ll be there forever.