One on One

by John Feinstein

  “People are always trying to make me into the hero somehow,” he said one night. “I’m not a hero. I have kids, I’m responsible for those kids. Plus, I’m lucky that I still have Courtney and Chelsea and I’ve been able to make a living playing golf. I’m not the one who died at the age of forty-four because of something I couldn’t control. Wendy is the one people should feel sympathy for, not me.”

  Not long after Paul and Wendy had divorced, he and I were having dinner at the Palm in Charlotte, two nights before the start of the tournament that is now played there at the Quail Hollow Club. As we were having coffee, Jeff Sluman came in with several Mercedes executives. At the time, Mercedes was one of Jeff’s sponsors. Jeff stopped to say hello and introduced us to the Mercedes guys, one of whom wasn’t a guy but an attractive woman.

  “Can I join you two?” she asked Paul and me. “I’ve sort of had enough of that crowd for tonight.”

  That was certainly fine with us. It turned out her job was to provide the players with their cars for the week. She’d had a problem earlier in the day with a young player named Garrett Willis.

  “Every player in the field gets a Mercedes,” she said. “Which isn’t exactly a bad deal, right? Not everyone gets the same Mercedes though. The bigger stars get a bigger car. That’s the way it works. Well, this kid comes up at the same time as Nick Price. He starts demanding to know why Nick is getting a bigger model than his. I told him that if he didn’t like the car we had for him, he could probably go down the street somewhere and rent a car.”

  “I’m betting he took the car you offered him,” Goydos said.

  She laughed.

  We talked a little while longer. She asked if she could buy us an after-dinner drink. Sure she could. Not long after the drinks arrived, she looked at Paul and said, “Has anyone ever told you that you have beautiful eyes?”

  I almost gagged on my drink.

  “Beautiful eyes?” I said. “No one has ever seen his eyes!”

  I wasn’t far wrong. Outdoors, Paul always keeps his cap pulled so low on his head you have to take it on faith that he has eyes somewhere under there. Indoors, he has a tendency to squint when he looks at you. At that moment, if you had paid me to tell you what color his eyes were, I couldn’t have done it.

  “You’re a guy,” the Mercedes woman said. “Trust me, he has beautiful eyes.”

  I stood up. “I think it’s time for me to go home.”

  The next day on the range I told Paul’s best friend on tour, Kevin Sutherland, the story. Paul had once been asked who would play in his all-time dream foursome. “Ben Hogan, Bobby Jones, and Kevin Sutherland,” he answered.

  “Why Kevin Sutherland?” came the follow-up question.

  “Because I need one guy out there who will put up with me for eighteen holes. No way Hogan and Jones would last.”

  That day, Sutherland and I came up with a new nickname for Goydos: “Angel Eyes.”

  A couple of weeks later Paul called me at home. “I need you to do me a favor,” he said.

  “Sure, what?”

  “Call my mother and tell her the story about my eyes.”

  “Why do you want me to tell your mother?”

  “Because she’s the only person on the planet you haven’t told!”

  He had a point.

  I’ve often wondered about exactly why people who read A Good Walk Spoiled, the book that came out of that first year I spent on tour, identified so closely with Paul. No doubt a lot of it had to do with his personality: honest, funny, always thinking out of the box. But it also had something to do with the fact that a lot of people looked at him and thought, “If he can play the tour, why can’t I?” Paul is about 5 foot 9 and looks like he spends more time with a remote in his hand than any sort of training weights. His golf swing will never be used on a “how to lower your handicap” video, and he shuffles around the golf course as much as he walks around it. In short, he looks like the guy in the group in front of you on Saturday morning.

  And then he hits the ball and you realize that if he played your home course on Saturday morning, he’d probably shoot about 64—on a really bad putting day. This is, after all, a guy who is one of five players in history to shoot 59 in a PGA Tour event.

  Over the years we became good friends. When Wendy died in January of 2009, I was one of Paul’s earlier calls. He had flown back from Hawaii after missing the cut there to learn that Wendy had overdosed. I was doing a basketball game on TV at Bucknell when my phone buzzed twice. At a time-out, I checked to see who had called: one call was from Paul, the other from my son, Danny.

  I figured Paul was calling to tell me he was now really and truly the worst player in the world after missing the cut at a tournament he had won two years earlier. That could wait until I was back in the car en route home. I called Danny right back during the break.

  “You okay?” I asked. “I’ve only got about ninety seconds, tell me what’s up.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “But Paul Goydos just called here and he sounded like something was wrong.”

  Danny is very good at reading people, but my guess was he was just hearing Paul being grumpy about his play and a red-eye flight home. When the game was over and I was in the car driving south on Route 15, I called Paul back. As soon as I heard him say hello, I knew Danny had been right. Paul almost never says hello. He usually says something like, “So what game were you doing?” Or, “If I never play golf again, you think anyone will notice?”

  This was a straight hello. “Hey, I saw you called and Danny said you called the house. Everything okay?”

  “No. Wendy died.”

  I remember gasping but I also remember not being completely stunned—if you can be not stunned by news like that. I knew Wendy hadn’t been able to kick her drug habit and had been in and out of rehab for a long time. Paul filled me in on the details as he knew them at that point. They couldn’t be sure yet that she had OD’d, but it seemed pretty likely.

  Paul handled the whole thing exactly as I would have expected. His real concern was his daughters. Courtney was eighteen; Chelsea was sixteen. At one point his good friend Steve Flesch stopped him in the locker room and said, “Hey, are you okay? I mean you. I don’t think you’ve paid enough attention to that.”

  Paul was okay—shocked and sad, but okay. The players in the locker room rallied around him because he’s a guy who has never made an enemy on the tour. He’s upset some people with his honesty, and he’s had his battles with rules officials, marshals, and, occasionally, a pro-am partner here and there. But his peers have nothing but respect for him.

  I’m just happy I stuck around that day at the Buick all those years ago.

  15

  A Good Walk Not Spoiled

  AS IT TURNED OUT, I was wrong in thinking the golf book would sell as much as the tennis book. A Good Walk Spoiled not only blew the tennis book away, it outsold A Season on the Brink.

  To this day, I’m not absolutely certain what made the book such a huge seller. I can look back at Season on the Brink and figure out pretty quickly that I had unprecedented access to a unique figure—for better or worse—and that access allowed me to give people an idea of exactly what the method behind all the madness was and how the people around him dealt with it.

  A Good Walk Spoiled did not succeed because of Tiger mania. His name appears in the book once—a reference to the pressure he was about to be under as golf’s next “Black Hope.” I think the book’s success was much simpler than that: people just didn’t understand how hard it is to get to the tour, much less succeed on the tour. I think the cooperation I got from the guys who were at the top of the game at the time—Nick Faldo, Greg Norman, and Nick Price—certainly helped. But I think it was the stories of struggle—Curtis Strange trying to deal with his wife’s chronic fatigue syndrome, Davis Love III still feeling overwhelmed at times by his father’s death in a plane crash several years earlier, the rookies Brian Henninger, Jeff Cook, and Paul Goydos trying to find th
eir niche in a tough world—that resonated with people.

  The title helped too. It was perfect for this book because Mark Twain’s description of golf sums up the way most who play often feel about it. My brother Bobby, with an assist from Twain and my uncle Peter and aunt Vivian, deserves the credit for the title. My aunt and uncle had sent me a book of famous quotations for Christmas in 1993, and my brother was paging through it on Christmas morning. (We always celebrated Christmas instead of Hanukkah when I was a kid because my dad rejected all organized religion as an adult and my mom thought Christmas was a better holiday for kids.)

  “I’ve got the title for your book,” he said, sitting on the floor surrounded by opened presents.

  “What’s that?” I said, skeptical since I had always come up with my own titles.

  “Mark Twain,” Bobby said. “Golf is a good walk spoiled.”

  It was almost exactly like the moment walking around in the snow in Minneapolis thinking how sick and tired I was of every day being on the brink of an explosion with Bob Knight.

  “Mark Twain said that?” I said.

  “It’s right here,” Bobby said, showing it to me.

  “You’re right,” I said. “ ‘A Good Walk Spoiled.’ That’s the title.”

  Traveling the tour as much as I did in 1994 for the second half of the research was difficult because Danny, my first child, was born in January. But being out there almost every week yielded huge reporting dividends. I didn’t just get to know the players, I got to know almost everyone who was part of the traveling circus that makes up the tour.

  When Fred Couples keeled over on the range on Sunday morning at Doral, writhing in back pain, I wasn’t there—I was out on the golf course. But Jon Brendle, one of the rules officials I had become friends with, was there, and he later described the scene to me in detail. When Greg Norman angrily confronted John Daly on the putting green at Turnberry on the Monday of British Open week, I wasn’t there. But Frank Williams, who was caddying for Davis Love at the time, and Jimmy Walker, who was working for Jeff Sluman, were both standing there. Later that day on the range they both told me I needed to talk to Norman about what had happened, which I did. I never would have known it happened if not for Frank and Jimmy.

  Later in the year, Couples was the target of a guy who insisted he had to talk to him on Sunday at the Buick Open because he’d had a vision about him. Again, it was the rules guys who clued me in about what was going on.

  Since the internet wasn’t widely available back then, when I wasn’t at an event, I would call the press room to check on the progress of “my guys.” Marty Caffey, who was working PR at the time, started calling the group “Team Feinstein.” We never had jackets made, but I did become pretty invested in the ups and downs of those seventeen players. I had started out thinking I would follow ten guys, but as the year went on, players I’d never heard of—notably Goydos, Henninger, and Cook—became part of the storyline because they had good stories to tell.

  There are two ways to cover golf: one is to spend most of your time in the press room and wait for the leaders to come in and tell you about their rounds. Maybe you venture occasionally to the locker room or the practice range. A lot of guys involved in daily coverage have no choice but to stay close to the press room, because they need to see what the leaders are doing and the best way to do that is on TV. Others do it because, well, they’re lazy.

  I knew from the start I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time around the press room. For one thing, all I’d get there was what everyone else was getting. I was fortunate to be in there the day I met Goydos, but that was mostly because play for the day was just about finished. Most of the time I was out on the golf course, in part because there was more to see and hear there, in part because it was a lot more fun.

  What’s more, the players really appreciated it. It was considered so unusual I had guys actually thank me for walking eighteen holes with them. I’m not claiming by any means that I’m the only guy who ever got out and walked. Len Shapiro from the Washington Post walked every minute he possibly could before he had to write each day. So did Larry Dorman from the New York Times. Doug Ferguson from the AP has probably seen Tiger Woods hit more shots than anyone this side of the caddy formerly known as Stevie Williams.

  But because I didn’t have any daily responsibilities, I could be out early and out late, which was what I liked doing best. The middle of the day, especially when it was really hot, was a good time to talk to guys who had played in the morning.

  One Thursday morning at Doral, I was out early with a threesome of Jay Haas, Curtis Strange, and Billy Andrade. Back then the tour still claimed that all their Thursday–Friday pairings were purely computer generated, and yet, somehow, the three Wake Forest guys had ended up together.

  I was standing on the back of a tee when the three players walked onto it and Haas stalked over to me looking angry. You really have to work to get Jay Haas angry, so I was a little bit surprised.

  “You are not supposed to be here,” Haas said pointedly, causing several marshals to scramble toward us, no doubt to lend him support.

  “Whaa?” I said, totally baffled. “I’ve got my arm band [which lets the media inside the ropes]. What’s the problem, Jay?”

  “You are not supposed to be here, dammit,” he said.

  One of the marshals started to put an arm on me, at which point Jay started laughing. “You’re supposed to be inside with all the other media eating breakfast right now.”

  I saw Andrade and Strange behind me laughing. The marshal looked totally confused.

  “Don’t worry, Jay, I already ate,” I said.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Jay said. “But it’s nice that you’re out here.”

  The players really did notice when you walked. A couple of years later I walked early one Saturday at Bay Hill with Colin Montgomerie, who might be as unpopular as any athlete that I’ve ever liked. I find Monty funny, charming, and—believe it or not—caring. I don’t claim to know him well, but all my dealings with him have been very pleasant, in complete contrast to his public image. I’m not saying I haven’t seen him snap at people—he does it all the time—but he’s truly a Jekyll-Hyde character, and I’ve been exposed more often than not to Dr. Jekyll.

  On this particular Saturday, Monty played well and moved up the leaderboard quite a ways. When he finished, many of the European media were waiting for him in the scoring area to talk to him about his round. He answered a few questions and then, when someone asked him where he felt the round really got going, he looked at me—I was standing off to the side—and said, “I’d say it was the second shot at six, wouldn’t you, John? You chaps should really talk to John, you know; he was out there for all eighteen holes.”

  I loved that.

  In the summer of 2010, when Montgomerie was Ryder Cup captain, he and U.S. captain Corey Pavin were brought to the interview room at Whistling Straits prior to the PGA Championship for a press conference. This was the press conference that gained infamy because it was where Pavin had his confrontation with Jim Gray about Gray’s (accurate, I believe) report on the Golf Channel. Gray said Pavin had told him Tiger Woods was a lock to be a wild-card pick for the Ryder Cup team. To me, the whole thing was much ado about nothing: how was Pavin not going to pick Woods? But Pavin insisted he hadn’t said anything to Gray about Woods, and Gray, not liking the fact that Pavin had basically called him a liar, went in to confront him about it after the press conference.

  I saw Jim walking inside and I could tell by the look on his face he was angry. I wish now, in hindsight, I had stopped him. As a reporter, you can’t win if you confront someone publicly. If you feel the need to do it, you do it in private.

  The best example of this I can think of in my career—other than knowing to keep my mouth shut with Bob Knight unless we were alone—came after the publication of A Good Walk Spoiled. Paul Azinger had been a compelling figure in the book because late in 1993, not long after he had “signed on” t
o Team Feinstein, he was diagnosed with cancer. Several weeks before Paul learned he had cancer, he and I had done about a four-hour sitdown in the players dining area at the tournament in Las Vegas. Azinger, when rolling, is about as good a storyteller as there is in golf.

  He was talking about his Christianity, but not in a preachy way. In fact, he was questioning himself. He talked about how he often felt like a hypocrite and specifically mentioned the cursing jag he had gone on that day walking off the sixteenth hole after making a double bogey.

  “I do stuff like that all the time,” he said. “And then I sit here a little later, like now, and I think to myself: Heather Farr would love to be out here making double bogey right now. Who are you to get so angry and behave that way about a bad hole? It’s just golf. It’s not life and death.”

  Heather Farr was a talented LPGA Tour player who was dying of cancer at the age of twenty-eight. Everyone on tour knew at that point that she was gravely ill. She would die a month later.

  Azinger’s quote about Farr chilled me when I heard about his diagnosis. Naturally, I used it in the book. By the time the book came out in the spring of 1995, Azinger was in the process of making a full recovery from the cancer that had cost him most of 1994, although he had managed to make it back in time that year to try to defend the PGA Championship he had won in 1993.

  The book had reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list in June and was still very high on the list the week of the 1995 PGA Championship, which was held in Los Angeles that year at Riviera Country Club. Not long after I arrived I bumped into Jeff Sluman in the locker room.