The Garner Files: A Memoir

by James Garner

  Golf has been berry, berry good to me. It’s taken me around the world. In the fall of 1995, Lois and I flew up to Canada and had dinner with Stuart Margolin and his wife Pat—at the time they lived off the coast of Vancouver—then we all caught a late-night train to the Rockies. The next afternoon we were in Jasper, Wyoming, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. We stayed in a lodge, and Stuart and I played golf every day. At night, there were elk outside our rooms. On the course one day, I hit a ball that landed underneath a big buck elk. We were playing with a native Canadian who said, “I think you’d better leave your ball there.” It was getting near rutting season so you didn’t fool around with them.

  Most of my golf travels were with Bill Saxon. We played in the Hawaiian Open on Oahu and at the opening of the Kapalua Village Golf Course on Maui with Bill’s son Steve and Arnold Palmer. We flew to Japan in the early 1970s, when golf was just getting popular there, and played several rounds with Japanese pros and celebrities to promote the Lobo golf club. We’d invested in the company along with Charles Coody and Johnny Unitas. The trip was a success: we sold a few hundred sets of Lobos and got to play four or five of the best courses in Japan. Now they have about three thousand courses, by the way, second only to the United States, with more than fifteen thousand.

  In 1978, Bill and I flew to Scotland and stayed at the Gleneagles Hotel. From there we went by car each day to play some of the major golf courses in Scotland: the King’s and Queen’s courses, Turnberry, Muirfield, Gullane No. 1, North Berwick, and St. Andrews, the cradle of golf, where we played with Keith McKenzie, the secretary of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, and his friend Stewart Lawson. After a guided tour of the old clubhouse with all its little rooms, we engaged in a preround ritual: in a small locker room in the basement, we all downed a dram—and not a wee dram—of Scotch, which our hosts assured us would take care of us for at least nine holes.

  We played a match: Scots against Yanks, no strokes, a golf ball to each winner from the losers. Bill made par on the seventeenth, the famous “Road Hole,” to put us two-up with one hole to play. Our Scottish opponents declared the match over, gave us each a ball (an old ball), and started walking in. Bill and I wanted to finish the round, so we played number 18. After which Mr. McKenzie invited us to join the R&A Club. Not appreciating what an honor it is, we said, “No, thanks. We already belong to too many clubs.” Brilliant. We went over to Scotland again a year or two later with our wives. We were guests at the British Open and were flown by helicopter to Muirfield for the final day of the championship.

  While Bill and I were playing on the southern coast of Spain in the fall of 1999, we dropped by Valderrama to watch the World Cup. Tiger Woods was in the field and Bill wanted to meet him, so I offered to perform the introduction, even though I’d never met Tiger myself. We stood near the tenth tee waiting for Tiger, and as he passed within two feet of us, I said, in my best James Garner voice, “Well, hello, Mr. Woods!” Tiger blew right past us without turning his head. Never even blinked. I don’t think he was being rude; I think he was so focused on golf that he was oblivious to everything around him.

  In Singapore, we teed off at 5:00 a.m. and by 8:30 it was so hot I had the dry heaves. On the last hole you had to walk down into a ravine and then up the other side to get to the green. I didn’t think I’d make it to the clubhouse. In Thailand, we played the “Army Course” with two generals amid very tight security: armed troops lined the fairways and Jeeps with mounted machine guns escorted us.

  For many years we played in the Darrell (Royal) and Willie (Nelson) Golf Tournament in Texas with the greats of country music in attendance. Darrell is the winningest coach in University of Texas football history, having won three national championships. He’s also a good friend. Willie Nelson is, well, Willie Nelson, as much a character as anyone I’ve ever met. Willie is one of the wittiest people I know, and probably the most tolerant: He accepts everyone on their own terms, rich or poor, young or old.

  The golf was fun, but the entertainment at night was outstanding. I love country music, and the musicians were bigger-than-life personalities, guys who were up and down, in and out of love, lying, cheating, drinking, always looking for a “hook” for the next song. The biggest “personality” was Waylon Jennings. We became good friends, and I actually toured with Waylon for a few weeks. If it had been more than that, I don’t think I’d be alive today.

  After great performers like the Gatlin Brothers, George Strait, Alex Harvey, Vince Gill, and Mickey Newbury did their sets on stage, they’d go off to separate rooms for “pickin’ ’n’ grinnin’” sessions. There’d be a picker here and a picker there. That’s where I met Ed Bruce, the guy who wrote “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” I later cast him in Bret Maverick.

  I had an awful temper on the golf course, and I threw clubs when I got mad. I think one of them is still in the air. I threw so many clubs I finally had to heed Tommy Bolt’s advice. “Terrible Tommy,” aka “Thunder Bolt,” was a good guy and a great PGA Tour player who won a lot of tournaments, including the US Open. But he was more famous for his temper. He advised always to throw the club down the fairway. That way you don’t have to go back for it. That valuable tip saved me a lot of steps over the years, because I was a world champion club thrower. But what I could really do was bury it. Give me some damp ground and I could sink an iron that deep. Just try to get that sucker out.

  I’d get so mad playing golf . . . it was a side of me that most people never saw. I’d get especially angry over missing a short putt. I realize now that my temper caused me to do things that made people want to go hide.

  In the mid-1970s, Bill Saxon and I played a money-raiser in Orlando, Florida, for returning Vietnam POWs. A good-size crowd turned out to watch and support men who had sacrificed so much for the country. Our foursome included PGA Tour pro Charles Coody and a former POW, a major, as I recall. The format was best-ball of foursome. On the third or fourth hole, the other three had all hit into the water and I was the only one left who could make par for the team. I had an uphill putt of about three feet. As I settled over the ball, Coody said, “Okay, Jim, keep your head down and stroke ’er in there.” Well, I missed it, and with a couple hundred people watching, I hurled my putter into the swamp. The crowd gasped. I stomped off the green, ranting and raving: “I’ve been playing golf for twenty years and I don’t need Charles effin’ Coody to tell me to keep my head down! Nobody tells me to keep my head down!”

  Of course, that was my excuse for missing the putt. I stormed to the next hole, a par three, and grabbed any old club out of the bag and promptly hit the ball in the water. I kept going to the next tee and hit my drive before the rest of my foursome arrived. Still steaming, I sat down on a bench to wait for them. Bill’s wife, Wylodean, whom I’d known since grade school in Norman, had been in the gallery and witnessed my outburst. She came over and sat down beside me. I glared at her and said, “NOW WHAT?”

  “Well, excuse me!” she said.

  The look of hurt and surprise on Wylodean’s face snapped me out of my tantrum. I apologized profusely. I told her I hadn’t meant to be so rude and that I realized I’d made an ass of myself. She was gracious and never mentioned it again. That’s when I hit bottom. From then on, I was more aware of my temper and more in control of it, and as I got older, the outbursts were fewer and farther between.

  I’d get angriest when I missed a putt, maybe because I was usually a pretty fair putter. I have a different approach to it than most people: I close my eyes.

  Gary Player taught me that. He said, “Jim, how far is that putt?”

  “Twenty feet.”

  “Okay, now how much does it break?”

  I did my little calculations, plumb bob, whatever. “Eight inches.”

  “Okay,” he said, “Now line up, you close your eyes, visualize the roll, and hit that ball exactly eighteen feet, eight inches.”

  It went right in the center of the hole.


  I used that method until I quit playing three years ago. I’ve turned around and taught it to other people, and it worked for them, too. It isn’t one of those, “I’ve got the secret now” things; it’s mental.

  There are some pretty good golf courses in and around Los Angeles: Riviera, Bel-Air, Rancho Park, Lakeside, Los Angeles Country Club North, Wilshire Country Club. I was a member at Riviera for twelve years. Had a regular game there with Bill Saxon, who was also a member, and Pat Harrington Jr., a talented actor-comedian who’d played Guido Panzini, the Italian golf pro, on The Steve Allen Show in the 1950s and Dwayne Schneider on the 1980s sitcom One Day at a Time.

  There were lots of entertainers at Riviera, including Dean Martin, Vic Damone, Donald O’Connor, Jim Backus, and Jack Ging, a good golfer and fellow Oklahoman who’d starred as a halfback at OU. The best golfer in the showbiz lot was an actor named Bob Wilkie, a big man who usually played heavies.

  The sportswriter Jim Murray was also a member at Riviera. Jim wasn’t an exceptional player, but he loved the game. When he made a hole in one on the 230-yard fourth hole, someone asked him what club he’d hit. “I cut a little driver in there,” he said.

  In 1988, the family that owned Riviera sold it to a Japanese businessman who made it harder and harder to get a tee time. Bill Saxon joined Bel-Air and suggested I do the same. I didn’t think I could get into Bel-Air because Lois is Jewish, but it wasn’t a problem. It was the best move I ever made.

  A good caddie is indispensable. He calms you down when you need it and thinks for you when your brain goes fuzzy. To say nothing of his knowledge of the course. My regular caddie at Bel-Air was New York Mike, whose real name is Michael Loughran and, yes, he’s originally from the Bronx. Mike is a good caddie and a pal. He knows what he’s doing. He’d help me read putts, and I’d either agree or overrule him. (I knew those little bitty greens at Bel-Air just about as well as anybody.) You play better when you have a caddie who knows his business, and it enhances your enjoyment of the game. I took Mike with me to the Crosby whenever I could.

  Bing Crosby started a tournament in 1937 at Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego, in which entertainers, athletes, and businessmen joined the best golfers in the world for a week of golf and fellowship. Bing was a pretty fair golfer in his own right. In 1930, carrying a two handicap as a member at Lakeside, he won several club championships and competed in the US and British Amateurs. After World War II, Bing moved the tournament to the Monterey Peninsula, an area Robert Louis Stevenson described as “the most felicitous meeting of land and sea in creation.” The golf courses there are so spectacularly beautiful, with breathtaking views wherever you look, it’s hard to concentrate on your game.

  In those days, Bing’s tournament was played on three courses, Spyglass Hill, Cypress Point, and Pebble Beach. At Spyglass, the newest of the three, I always felt I was walking uphill. Cypress Point is one of the most exclusive clubs in the world and the golf course is uniquely beautiful and punishing. The par-three, sixteenth hole is probably the most difficult, and most scenic, par three in the world. But Pebble Beach is the star. It’s a public course, though you have to pay a $500 green fee and book well in advance to play it.

  Bing personally selected the amateurs for the tournament but let the pros choose their partners. A lot changed after he died, but the AT&T, as it is now called, is still a unique format on the PGA Tour. While most pro-ams are a separate contest played on the Wednesday before the four-day professional tournament, the AT&T pro-am is three days of play—Thursday, Friday, and Saturday—concurrent with the pro tournament. The amateurs, who get their full handicap, team with professionals and play all three courses. Amateurs who qualify in the low ten pro-am teams get to play on television on Sunday at Pebble Beach.

  Rain and wind are usually a problem, so much so that Jim Murray suggested that if Bing and Bob Hope ever wanted to do a road picture about the Crosby, they could call it The Road to Pneumonia. But I always felt that the worse the weather, the better chance I had to win, because it didn’t bother me as much as it did higher handicappers like Jack Lemmon, who carried an 18 from Hillcrest.

  Jack loved golf and played in the Crosby/AT&T thirty-four years in a row . . . but never made the cut. Jack’s professional partner, Peter Jacobsen, affectionately nicknamed him “the Human Hinge” for his terrible swing. Byron Nelson once analyzed it in slow motion and identified eleven major flaws. On top of that, Jack was terrified of playing in front of a crowd. Said he’d rather play Hamlet with no rehearsal than play golf on television.

  Golf spectators are knowledgeable, quiet, and respectful (but not always—more about that later). They are so polite, in fact, that their silence can be intimidating. You swear you can feel every set of eyes on you. But galleries didn’t bother me, and I developed a little trick for playing in televised tournaments. It’s humiliating to hit a bad shot on national TV. The good news is that the camera stays on the golfer, not on the flight of the ball, so when I hit my shot, even if it was a shank or a snap-hook, I just held my finish, smiled, and strode briskly down the fairway. I used the technique more than once with excellent results. The only time it failed was when my ball hit the camera lens.

  Jack Lemmon wanted to make the cut and play on Sunday more than anything else in the world, and we were all pulling for him. But he couldn’t seem to get out of his own way. To give you an idea, on the long, par-three seventeenth at Pebble Beach one year, we had a breeze at our backs and Jack nailed a driver right at the flag. Unfortunately, the ball sailed forty yards over the green. It was the only good shot he hit all day, but it was in the ocean.

  Another year Jack and Peter Jacobsen were only a shot or two behind the lead and looked certain to make the cut when the pro-am was canceled because of heavy rain. And then there was the time Jack shanked one into his hotel room at the Del Monte Lodge. His wife Felicia was in the john at the time. She said the ball ricocheting off the walls sounded like a machine gun and she thought terrorists were attacking Carmel.

  Jack always accepted defeat gracefully. His perseverance and good humor were inspirational. I think that’s why he had so many golf fans rooting for him. They could relate to his tribulations on the course, like when he’d take three strokes to get out of a bunker. Maybe even non-golfers identified with his struggle. It became an annual story line—a quest that became ever more urgent with each passing year. Peter Jacobsen said he would rather see Jack make the cut than win the tournament himself. But it wasn’t to be.

  Contrast Jack Lemmon with Bill Murray, whose behavior at the AT&T is a disgrace. He thinks he’s mocking the whole thing by dressing like a slob and putting with the wrong end of the putter, but he’s only making an ass of himself. He should have been banned from the tournament years ago after he tried to dance with that old lady in the bunker and she fell down. I don’t care if she didn’t mind, I did. I’m glad I was never paired with him, because I would have refused to play.

  Clint Eastwood fell in love with the Monterey Peninsula in the 1950s, while in the army stationed at Ford Ord. He promised himself he’d settle there if he ever earned enough “crumbs.” Well, Clint wound up with the whole bakery, and not only does he live on the Monterey Peninsula, he was elected mayor of Carmel in 1986, owns his own course there, Tehàma, and a piece of Pebble Beach Golf Links to boot. Clint played his first Crosby in 1965, when he was playing Rowdy Yates on the TV series Rawhide. He’d been interviewed on television and asked whether he’d be playing in the upcoming Crosby and he said, “No . . . I guess they don’t like cowboys.” Bing heard about it and sent Clint an invitation with a note, “See, we do like cowboys.” Clint’s been playing in the tournament ever since.

  The Clambake, as Bing liked to call it, was one of the highlights of my golfing year, but in 1964, I almost didn’t play. I’d banged up my ribs shooting the beach scene in The Americanization of Emily. I went to the hospital for x-rays and the doctor said they weren’t broken, so I went back to work, though they were really sore. That n
ight I drove to Pebble Beach for the tournament. The next day, Monday, I played a practice round and the ribs were still hurting. When I got back to the hotel there was a call from the hospital—they’d misread the x-rays and several ribs were broken after all. I didn’t have to play until Thursday, so I went to a doctor in Monterey. He told me I couldn’t do any more damage to my ribs or lungs by swinging a club, so I figured out how to play without worsening the pain: I just blew all the air out before swinging. I played okay that way and my team made the cut.

  Bill Saxon and I were often in the same foursome at the Crosby, and in 1981, Nick Faldo was Bill’s pro and I was paired with young John Cook, whom I’d known since he was a boy. My brother Jack was Bill’s caddie. We usually played at Pebble Beach on Saturday, the big TV day, but the weather had been so bad, the tournament was shortened to three days and we finished at Spyglass. We’d played the back nine first, so the ninth hole was our eighteenth and final hole. I hooked my tee ball into the skinny pines in the left rough. The ball hit a spectator and knocked him down. I felt terrible and went over to make sure the man was okay. Then I said, “The hell with it, I’m not playing the hole.” I always tried to stay out of the pros’ way. If I didn’t have a chance to help the team on a given hole, I’d pick up.