Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  • • •

  Jack was a plodding player, often annoyingly so. But he was also careful, and he was never involved in any sort of rules dispute. He called penalties on himself in the rare instance when something went wrong, but there was never a time when anybody accused him of being anything less than completely faithful to the rule book. Hundreds of thousands of shots, and never an issue.

  “When you start playing as a kid, your dad teaches you good sportsmanship and to live by the rules,” Jack told us. “That’s what my dad taught me, and I’m sure that’s what Arnold’s dad taught him. The rules are the rules. That’s golf. I remember when I was eleven years old, I was playing a qualifier for a district junior tournament. We were playing at the Army Depot Golf Course, and I missed one like this.” Jack took his two small, tanned hands and held them about ten inches apart. His thumbs have always had a pronounced curve. “I got mad and I whacked the ball down the fairway. Everybody just stood there.”

  It was stroke play. There were, of course, no given putts. Every hole had to finish with the ball at the bottom of a cup. But in his anger, little Jack lost track of that basic fact.

  “So then I went down the fairway and played it back up to the green. I ended up shooting eighty-one that day instead of shooting seventy-eight. I was playing with Larry Snyder. S-N-Y-D-E-R, if you use it. We played some junior golf together.”

  “Is your memory that good for everything?” I asked.

  “I remember things that were impactful,” Jack said.

  He continued on the subject of the rules. “This was at Royal Lytham, at the Open in 1979. Fifteenth hole. Final round. There was a bunker about sixty, seventy yards short of the green. I put it in that bunker, right up against the face of it. When I swung, I took the face out and dirt went flying.”

  All manner of debris came at Nicklaus. The ball stayed in the bunker. Joe Dey, by then the retired first commissioner of the PGA Tour, was working that Open as a rules official. He had been walking with Nicklaus, with whom he was close.

  “I felt something come down and hit me,” Jack said.

  It could have been a stone or a clump of dirt or his own ball. In those days, if you were struck by your own ball, it was a two-shot penalty.

  “So I turned to Joe and said, ‘Joe, I got hit by something.’

  “Joe was right there. He said, ‘The ball didn’t hit you.’ ”

  Nicklaus asked Dey again before he signed his card whether the ball might have hit him, and Dey again said that it had not. So Nicklaus signed. He finished in a tie for second with Ben Crenshaw in the 1979 British Open at Lytham, three shots behind Seve Ballesteros, who won with 283. Jack has never felt sure about the 286 next to his name for that week. He has never felt sure about the scorecard he signed on that fourth round when he failed to get out of the bunker on fifteen on his first attempt.

  “It still bothers me,” Jack said. “Because I think that ball might have hit me.”

  • • •

  Near the end of our visit, I attempted to express to Jack what he meant to me, as a golfer, as a model of grace, as a role model. I’m sure he’s heard the same from many others. Still, he seemed to appreciate it. This was a serious piece of business for me. Jack gave my life a direction it would not have had otherwise. He helped a gangly kid, not particularly good at anything, find a path to adulthood. I was lucky to have the chance to say it in person to Jack. I could tell he understood what I was trying to say.

  “If you go back to Turnberry, to when Tom and I embraced each other, that to me really is what it’s all about,” Jack said. “When two people get done, they shake hands and say, ‘Well done.’ You say, ‘You beat my rear end. I’ll get you next week.’ I love that about golf. When I congratulated Tom on his win, I could do it with meaning because I’m the guy he beat. And when I beat Arnold, he’d shake my hand and say, ‘Congratulations, well done.’ And I knew he meant it.”

  Mike and I had come far. We were now sitting with the greatest golfer ever, and he was discussing his wins and losses and opponents and friends with casual, genuine intimacy.

  “Your character comes through in golf,” Jack said. “If you’re pissed at the world the whole time, you really can’t enjoy your wins, and in many ways you can’t really—what’s the right word?—you can’t really understand the meaning of your defeats. To get beat is very healthy. Particularly when you’ve really given it your best effort. If you win every time, you don’t learn anything. You don’t learn anything about yourself. You don’t learn anything about the other person. You don’t learn anything about the game. You don’t learn anything about life.”

  When we were done, Mike and I walked slowly across the parking lot of Golden Bear Plaza. I was half in a daze. Who today is talking about the lessons learned from losing? Jack Nicklaus has to be as thoughtful, in his plain and practical way, as any world-class athlete has ever been.

  Jack had told us about a note he had sent Bubba Watson after Bubba won his second Masters: You play a game with which I am not familiar. Bobby Jones once said that of Nicklaus. Nicklaus’s father, Charlie, offered Jones to his only son as a role model. Joe Dey, from the PGA Tour and the USGA before that, passed along much of what he knew about Jones to Charlie and Jack, and he knew a lot: When Jones completed the Grand Slam in 1930 at Merion, Dey was there as a cub reporter, covering it for Philadelphia’s proper afternoon paper, the Evening Bulletin. Four years later, Jones started a tournament at Augusta in his own image. Eighty years later, Rhonda Glenn was in Augusta during Masters week to accept an award at a banquet dinner from the Golf Writers Association of America for outstanding contributions to the game. For that dinner, Rhonda kindly invited me to join her and her people. I sat at a round table up front in a banquet room at the Augusta Country Club with Barb Romack, ’56 Curtis Cup cover girl for SI. Two months after that Masters, I saw Barb and Rhonda again when the two U.S. Opens, the men’s Open followed by the women’s Open, were played at Pinehurst. One night at the Carolina Hotel, Jaime Diaz told Rhonda, Barb, and me about a lesson Barb had given him forty-five years earlier. The ladies laughed. Eight months later, Rhonda died. Pancreatic cancer. That lifetime GWAA award went to the right person.

  As I shut things down here, and finally clean out the back of the car, I realize I have not nailed down every last thing. Fred, for instance. I knew from experience that getting Fred Couples to sit down for any sort of interview is about as easy as getting a rhino into a dental chair. I sent Fred an e-mail through his agent, told him about the legends list and his place on it, and Mike’s place, too. Fred got back to me by text, his preferred form of communication. I got back to him, and after that the line went dead. If someday I find out the answer to Mike’s question—Fred, who filled out your application for that ’79 U.S. Open?—I will figure out a way to disseminate the answer. If you hear first, please let me know. It’s not easy being a detective in the Golf Division. You need all the help you can get (and I got a lot), and still your work is never done.

  • • •

  After Nicklaus won the Masters at age forty-six in 1986, he took off a week and then played the following week in Houston. Gordon S. White, Jr., covered that Houston tournament for the New York Times. He wrote about a tour caddie following Nicklaus as he played and used a phrase that was new to me: busman’s holiday. In the ensuing years, I have come to realize that the busman’s holiday is an elemental part of my life. Actually, I don’t know where my work life stops and my recreational life begins. Mike is the same way. Visiting these various legends, secret and otherwise, felt like one long busman’s holiday.

  For all his verbal intensity, I find being with Mike relaxing. For one thing, he’s an excellent storyteller. Somewhere in our travels he told me about going to Portugal to play in the European Senior Tour qualifying tournament. Upon arrival, he hired an English caddie who, he soon discovered, reeked of body odor. Mike suspected his caddie was sleeping outside. After a morning practice round, Mike brought his man to a superm
arket and bought him soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste, deodorant. Mike gave him a pep-talk on personal hygiene. That afternoon, when Mike was on the range hitting balls, the caddie returned smelling like a rose. But the next morning the smell was rancid again. Reluctantly, Mike fired the man several holes into the round. Naturally, Mike paid him in full. Mike’s philosophy is pay in full and part as friends. I’ve learned a lot from him.

  I find that I don’t have to put up any fronts with Mike. What an energy saver. It’s helpful that he knows a lot about my everyday life. Nothing has to be perfect in my accounts. I can tell Mike things I can’t tell others, in part because he lives a thousand miles away, but also because I know he will understand what I am saying and what I am trying to say. I feel no compulsion to be successful around Mike. What a relief.

  Our night on the Elie links in 2010 was a prime example of a busman’s holiday, and so was a trip we made out to Long Island to watch the Walker Cup three years later. The Walker Cup is a competition in which a team of the best American amateurs plays a team of the best amateurs from Great Britain and Ireland. The first Walker Cup was held in 1922 at the National Golf Links of America on the East End of Long Island. In 2013 the Walker Cup returned to the National Golf Links for the second time. There was no paid parking, no security check, no gallery ropes. You could just wander the property and enjoy the golf, the course, and the people on it. Or not. Leaving the course after the Saturday round, Mike and I played Twenty Questions. To start the game, Mike offered this hint: “On the course today, I saw the biggest douchebag in all of golf.” I know it’s been a while since you’ve heard Mike in full. I didn’t want him to fade out quietly here.

  The National was designed by Charles Blair Macdonald with a major assist from a Long Island engineer named Seth Raynor, who designed the course I grew up playing in Bellport. NGL and Bellport are about thirty miles apart. They are both old-timey links built on brackish bays, and they both offer more than a nod to the motherland. As a young golfer I took many of my cues from Scotland, from Bellport, and, in a less direct way, from the National. Not the National as it actually was, because I surely didn’t know it. But the National as I imagined it, circa 1979, as a course populated (sparsely) by well-mannered gents who accepted life’s bounces, good and bad. I extrapolated wildly from there. I was a dreaming teenager.

  On the Sunday morning of the Walker Cup, Mike and I played Bellport. When I go to Bellport, it all comes flooding back: putting for quarters with Stuart Feldman; caddying for my high school principal and holding his pipe between shots; playing through dark on summer nights with Larry Lodi. If I were asked which course I would play if I were down to my last game, there would be no debate. To join Bellport as a kid, all I had to do was fill out a piece of paper and hand the clerk in the village hall fifty dollars. I still have my junior-member Class E tag on my current bag, now woefully expired (good through June 1, 1980). But in my mind my membership has not lapsed and never will. Where would golf be without public courses? Where would I be?

  On the Monday after the Walker Cup, I paid a visit to somebody I had not seen in close to forty years, Don Greenlee, my gym teacher in eighth grade. Mr. Greenlee was a good golfer, and it occurred to him that his favorite sport should be offered at South Ocean Avenue Middle School, “even though Patchogue was not an affluent community,” he said. “So I filled out a requisitions form and ordered a bunch of five-irons, and I think the class you took, Mike, was the first one I ever taught.” I was Mike again.

  The whole class, held in winter, was conducted inside on the basketball court. We hit plastic balls off plastic mats, aiming for the backboards. It was enough to get me hooked. Mr. Greenlee taught me how to hold a club. Years later, Ken Venturi complimented my grip.

  Mr. Greenlee talked about trying to qualify for a few USGA events and winning a club championship at Spring Lake, a public course where our high school team practiced and played. Mike came with me, taking it all in. Mr. Greenlee was retired, and he and his wife divided their time between central Florida and Suffolk County. Mike was impressed by Mr. Greenlee’s prudence, the care with which he had managed his life. Mr. Greenlee asked about my mother, who taught English at South Ocean Avenue for a number of years, and he remembered the day when Fred Couples came to Bellport for an exhibition, though he didn’t go. “I wish I would have availed myself of that opportunity,” he said. He talked about the pleasure golf continued to give him. He looked remarkably unchanged, though I noted that he no longer had a mustache. Turns out he had shaved it off thirty years earlier.

  Near the end of our visit, Mike said to Mr. Greenlee, “You taught Mike well.” What a nice thing for Mike to say, both for my benefit and for the man who changed my life. Better living through golf. I know the concept. Mr. Greenlee does, too. As does Mike Donald, Golf Ball, Arnold Palmer, Chuck Will, Fred Couples, Jaime Diaz, Billy Harmon, Randy Erskine—you know the list. Maybe you’re on it.

  As we got up to leave Mr. Greenlee in his tidy home, it occurred to me that I had arrived empty-handed. At the British Open a couple of months earlier, during registration in the press tent, each reporter was given a tiny metal pin, a replica of the Claret Jug that the Open winner receives. I immediately took mine out of its tiny square plastic bag and attached it to the collar of the white golf shirt I had on that day. I never wear such things, but that’s what I did. The pin stayed put through many subsequent washings, and I was wearing that white shirt with the pin that day at Mr. Greenlee’s house. In the three years I had played varsity golf at Patchogue-Medford High School, we were given something similar, along with our varsity letters: a little gold-colored pin in the shape of a golf bag. Christine has one of them on a coat.

  “I wish I had something better to give you,” I said to Mr. Greenlee as I handed him the pin. “Thank you for all that you did for me.”

  His eyes welled.

  • • •

  I had seen Arnold a half-dozen times since the first stop on our tour, when Mike and I saw him in Latrobe. Once, sitting with Arnold in his heavy leather-and-wood Bay Hill office, I asked him if he was one to dream.

  “Oh, I dream all the time,” Arnold said.

  “Really,” I said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  He then told me about a recent dream he’d had in which he could not get a business matter to work out no matter what he tried.

  I asked if golf appeared in his dreams.

  “All the time,” Arnold said. “I had one last night where I made a twenty-footer to take the lead, but I didn’t get to the back nine. I’d like to know how that one ends. I never get to the eighteenth in any of my golf dreams. It’s never a specific tournament or course. I never recognize the other players.”

  He seemed disappointed by that last revelation, as if he’d like another shot at the old gang.

  I asked Arnold how often he dreamed of golf. “About a quarter of the time,” he said.

  Arnold is a numbers-oriented man, and he then did a little round-number accounting. Golf accounted for a quarter of his dreams. Business issues, he said, occupied another quarter, and flying a third quarter. I asked about the remaining quarter.

  “Other,” Arnold said.

  Arnold was leaving a whole category for himself. Who could blame him? The secret dreams of Arnold Palmer. I’m going to take a wild guess that Arnold wanted what Ken wanted, what Mike wanted, what I wanted, what millions of men the world over want: to get the trophy and the girl. Is that asking too much? Arnold did it. He got both and never gloated about it. The opposite. He let us in.

  One day at Bay Hill when Mike and I were visiting, Arnold introduced Mike to his daughter Amy and said, “Mike and I played the tour together.” Arnold has an astounding capacity to make people feel good. On that same day, Arnold called his wife and asked if she wanted to join him at lunch. Kit said, “Can I have fifteen minutes?” Arnold said, “Take as much time as you need.” Talk about your models of manly grace.

  After lunch on a different day, I ab
sentmindedly had my right forearm in the window of Arnold’s SUV as he sat in the driver’s seat with the window down. By way of good-bye, he placed his right hand in the middle of my forearm. I don’t know how any one person could exude more warmth. It must be in his DNA.

  In the end, after Jack, there was one more final final stop on Farewell to Persimmon Tour ’79: Arnold in Latrobe. (You got to stop somewhere, right?) I drove from Philadelphia to Latrobe to see him. I made the drive wearing sandals, and when I arrived in Latrobe I was chagrined to discover that amid all my paraphernalia in the trunk of the Subaru I did not have a pair of real shoes. The only shoes back there were running shoes and a pair of white wing-tip golf shoes still wearing the dirt of their last game. I went to the men’s room in the lobby of the SpringHill Suites, at 115 Arnold Palmer Drive, to clean them up.

  A short while later, I was sitting with Arnold in his office. I was right beside him at his desk, and I noticed that he was looking in the general direction of my ankles.

  “Arnold, are you looking at my shoes?”

  “No,” Arnold said, “I’m looking at your socks!”

  They had horizontal stripes and were semi-ridiculous. I took that opportunity to apologize for wearing golf shoes (with little rubber nubs on the soles) to his office.

  “That’s not a problem,” Arnold said. He picked up his right foot and pointed the bottom of his black leather shoe in my direction. He was wearing golf shoes himself, along with a schoolboy smile. It was like he was getting away with a spitball. Golf shoes in the office!