Chasing Greatness

by Adam Lazarus

  But Trevino spent much more time on the links than he did with his new family, and one course in particular became his most popular mistress. Just ten minutes from Hardy’s driving range, Tenison Park Golf Club in east Dallas—with its rolling hills, pecan trees, and multiethnic clientele—became Trevino’s home away from home. He eventually moved his young family to an apartment just across the street from Tenison. Trevino insisted he never “hustled” anyone at Tenison, but he had no trouble finding matches and money games there. When he wasn’t working and hitting balls at the driving range, he was playing against anyone who would take up his challenge at Tenison.

  Within two years of their marriage, his wife, fed up with her husband’s absenteeism, offered the twenty-three-year-old Trevino an ultimatum. “Either it’s going to be golf or it’s going to be Ricky and me. We don’t know you. You never take us anyplace. Why don’t you get an eight-to-five job like everyone else?”

  Trevino remained wedded to Tenison Park and in late 1963 his wife packed up their year-old son and moved out. Trevino spiraled into “a savage uninhibited tear—drinking to excess, eating, in his own words, ‘trash’ foods, sleeping irregularly and seldom in the same place. He lost fifty pounds.”

  Given sage advice from his grandfather—“the only way you forget a woman is to find another one”—Trevino soon married another seventeen-year-old high school student, Claudia Fenley. Although Greenwood felt Lee wasn’t mature enough for domesticity (he’d felt the same way about Lee’s previous hasty marriage), Trevino made time one Monday afternoon—his day off—to fit in a wedding after a late-morning eighteen holes.

  The groom returned to work the next morning and Greenwood continued to ready Trevino for life on tour. He took his pupil to the 1963 PGA Championship at the Dallas Athletic Club (now relocated in the posh Mesquite suburbs), where Lee had his first chance to see all the tour regulars: Palmer, Nicklaus, Player, and Snead. He also sent Trevino to PGA business school for two weeks to earn credits toward earning a tour card.

  Meanwhile, Trevino slowly bolstered his local reputation, reaching the sectional qualifier for the 1963 U.S. Open and placing fifteenth in October’s Lake Charles Invitational in Louisiana. Greenwood’s friends also arranged an exemption for Lee to play in the 1964 Dallas Open, where he made the cut and impressed, among others, his Saturday playing partner, two-time U.S. Open champion Julius Boros.

  Within months, Trevino came to dominate the region and rack up local press ink. In November, he won the Northern Texas PGA Assistants tournament, then won the Northern Texas PGA Championship two weeks later. He now felt he was ready, at age twenty-four, for the tour. Having completed the necessary requirements—four years as a club pro, plus the credits earned at the PGA business school—he should have been eligible for a Class A membership as a golf professional and ready access to play on tour (PGA Q School did not begin until 1965 as the standard route onto the tour). All that remained was for Greenwood to verify his four years of work.

  “Hardy wouldn’t sign it,” Trevino later said. “He believed I wasn’t ready, that I was too wild and immature to handle the responsibility of traveling all over the country and playing professional golf.”

  That fear rested on solid logic. Before the Lake Charles Invitational, Greenwood gave Trevino $600, telling him to keep a record of his expenses. “Instead, I stayed drunk for six days,” Lee admitted.

  Furious at Greenwood, Trevino quit his job at the driving range and, bolstered by minimal savings, set out to prove he was tour-ready. In fall 1965, he birdied the first hole of a play-off to win the Texas State Open in Houston, an event that included notable touring pros such as Miller Barber and rookie Homero Blancas. Two months later, he finished second to Blancas at the Mexican Open in Mexico City, earning $2,100.

  Trevino’s play grabbed the attention of several Texas businessmen who looked past the rough edges and saw dollar signs in Trevino’s consistent swing. Some set up money matches or sponsored Trevino in events as far away as Panama. In early 1966, Martin Lettunich, a wealthy cotton field landowner and obsessive gambler, who had arranged hustles for Lee before, convinced Trevino to move Claudia and their young daughter, Lesley, to El Paso. Lettunich introduced Trevino to Jesse Whittenton, part owner of Horizon Hills, a club for a hard-drinking, brawling, gun-toting crowd among El Paso’s nouveau riche. Whittenton hired Trevino as the club’s jack-of all-trades so that he could practice with few interruptions while continuing to work toward getting his tour card.

  “We discovered Lee quite by accident,” said Whittenton, a former defensive back for the Green Bay Packers who had retired early to pursue his own golfing dreams. “He came to me looking for a job. We put him to work shining shoes, and his golfing prowess became apparent, so we financed him for the pro tour.”

  Trevino’s hardscrabble nature fit perfectly with the crowd at Horizon Hills, which managed to attract some high-profile names. In between breaking up fights among club members, Trevino fashioned a legendary reputation on the course. Twice, with dozens of local farmers betting from pickup trucks lined along the fairways, he outplayed young tour sensation Raymond Floyd, who was initially told he had come to El Paso for a high-stakes match against the “clubhouse boy.”

  These mano-a-mano matches honed Trevino’s mental toughness and proved invaluable in shaping his later public image. His facade as an unpolished player depended on projecting an image that he didn’t belong on the same course as touring pros or elite country clubbers, most of whom had sharpened their skills in high-profile amateur or collegiate events.

  Trevino proved to be a capable tournament player in the Southwest, but no one outside the region knew him. He came up short when trying to qualify in Texas for the 1963 U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, but made it through both the local and sectional qualifiers in 1966, at age twenty-six, when the national championship came to the Olympic Club in San Francisco.

  Trevino had never played a course as hilly, contoured, or quick as Olympic, or one set to the U.S.G.A.’s challenging specifications for the National Open. But after a few practice rounds, despite his shoddy bag and mismatched clubs, he felt confident and ready. Paired initially with Harry Toscano and a nineteen-year-old Brigham Young University sophomore named John Miller, Trevino shot 74-73, ten strokes behind the halfway leaders, Arnold Palmer and Billy Casper. Back-to-back 78s over the weekend dropped Trevino into a tie for fifty-fourth place with Johnny Bulla and Long Island club pro Gene Borek.

  A mediocre finish in his first U.S. Open hardly discouraged Trevino, who resumed dominating his niche in the Southwest golfing scene. In late September, he won the New Mexico Open with a closing two-under-par 69, then successfully defended his Texas State Open crown with a win over future tour pros Marty Fleckman and Butch Baird at Sharpstown Golf Club in Houston.

  In May 1967, Trevino was finally granted his Class A card. Shortly afterward, in the local U.S. Open qualifier, he fired the lowest score in the nation (134 over two rounds). He then took second in the Dallas sectional qualifier to earn a return trip to the U.S. Open, this time at Baltusrol Golf Club in New Jersey. That first visit east of the Mississippi River was major culture shock.

  “You had to wear a coat nearly everywhere you went to eat,” Trevino remembered. “Baltusrol is one of the famous old clubs in the East, with one of those big brick Tudor clubhouses sitting up on a hillside. I’d never seen anything like it and I was nervous about just going inside. The first morning I had to borrow a jacket to enter the dining room. After that I said to hell with breakfast and did without.”

  Trevino felt uneasy every time he had to mingle with the stodgy, club-member elite; he also felt awkward about hitting several balls in front of U.S.G.A. marshals during practice rounds. But he needed to learn a lot in a short time in order to compete more effectively at Baltusrol than he had at Olympic, and his game—remarkably for a Texas boy bred on Bermuda grass and without prior golf experience in the northeast—felt right at home on the trick
y, Tillinghast masterpiece. Trevino kept score during his four practice rounds and shot even-par 280, helping to bolster his confidence.

  Trevino played the opening two rounds at even-par 140, and a 71 on Saturday put him just four shots behind the leader, amateur Marty Fleckman. With his name on the leaderboard throughout the final round, just below names like Palmer, Casper, and Nicklaus, Trevino shot another 70 on the final day. No doubt feeling more pressure than he’d ever experienced, Trevino three-putted the fourteenth and fifteenth greens, but a closing trio of pars led to a 283 and sole possession of fifth place. He earned $6,000, far more than he’d earned in any of his previous tournament victories.

  From start to finish, Trevino demonstrated he could adapt his Texas game to the radically different demands of a classic Eastern golf links. Still, the national press was more interested in his colorful background than his golf. His habit of wearing “scuba goggles because of West Texas desert winds,” the (erroneous) label as a “son of a Mexican gravedigger,” and his sheer joy at receiving “more money than I’ve ever seen” as a paycheck overshadowed the media’s interest in his stellar golf. But even that brief moment of celebrity passed quickly.

  “And that night [the night after the final round], just like all week, no one spoke to me or asked me for my autograph,” Trevino remembered. “That just shows you how much I was known.”

  The New York metropolitan area fans may not have wanted his autograph, but savvy tournament directors had no trouble recognizing a new media favorite and invited him to join their fields. The following week, Trevino was persuaded to fly to Ohio for the Cleveland Open, a regular PGA tour event. Trevino’s nomadic golfing existence had begun.

  Over the next six months, Trevino quietly pieced together an impressive resume for any newcomer to the tour. In half of the 1967 season, he earned $26,472 in prize money, won Golf Digest’s Rookie-of-the-Year award, and—the ultimate symbol he had “arrived”—was invited to play in the Masters the following April.

  In years to come, Trevino would be remembered for several controversies he stirred at Augusta National, but the future discord was nowhere evident (not publicly, at least) during his first appearance in 1968. Despite “a humble background that would startle the staid old Augusta National Golf Club’s members,” the galleries at the Masters warmly welcomed Trevino from the start.

  “The 28-year-old Trevino, whose father was Mexican, has captured the fans with his carefree approach to the game,” noted an admiring reporter. “He tips his hat, waves his arms and laughs with the fans. And, he’s been skipping down the long slopes of Augusta like a kid.”

  It wasn’t just his attitude or upbringing that intrigued the elite Augusta fans. Trevino scored par or better in his first three rounds and trailed the leader, Gary Player, by just two shots. Touting a forty-year-old Tommy Armour putter he’d bought a week earlier at Tenison Park, he sank four birdies during a six-hole stretch on Saturday for a three under 69.

  Trevino’s hopes of slipping on a Green Jacket died the next day, Easter Sunday, thanks to an eight over 80, but he was clearly a burgeoning star. He narrowly missed out on victories in two PGA events in May and June.

  When Trevino arrived in Rochester, New York, for the 1968 U.S. Open at Oak Hill Country Club, he may still have felt like a long shot, but he could no longer sneak up on the golfing world. Tom Weiskopf, another rising star, predicted before the tournament that with the nasty rough along the fairways, the favorites had to be Billy Casper and the upstart Trevino, whom one reporter called “the swarthy Mexican-American from Dallas.” Oddsmakers concurred, establishing Trevino as a ten-to-one favorite.

  After three superb rounds, the twenty-eight-year-old Trevino trailed front-runner Bert Yancey by just one stroke. Though he was, in fact, an insider’s choice to win, Trevino still stood out among the field, and not just because of his colorful background. His swing was embarrassingly homemade, and while he was paired during the last two rounds with Yancey, a tall, svelte, former captain of the West Point golf team, the contrast was startling.

  Sportswriters and members of the gallery marveled at Yancey’s smooth, long, elegantly powerful motion. Trevino’s swing, on the other hand, was short, herky-jerky, and offplane.

  “In purely technical terms,” as Sports Illustrated’s Curry Kirkpatrick explained, “Trevino’s swing is all wrong. He takes the club back on an extremely flat plane from an open stance that is aiming left. To avoid the danger of duck hooking, he blocks out solidly with his left leg firm as he comes into the shot. At that moment he corrects whatever else is negative by the use of his hands.”

  “If he ever gets up high with [his shoulder],” fellow pro Dave Hill observed, “he’s got to go back to eating tacos. His right side stays so low he never has to worry about getting over the ball too much. Lee doesn’t know it, but he plays with his right arm and right shoulder almost exclusively. He’s the best I’ve ever seen at coming through with the right hand and wrist.”

  That week—and well into the next decade—Trevino perplexed golf traditionalists with his unorthodox yet remarkably consistent swing. During the opening fifty-four holes at Oak Hill, Trevino carded only four bogeys and stood at four under par.

  Even though Yancey and Trevino were the only men under par for the tournament—in fact, Trevino was half a dozen strokes ahead of the man immediately below him on the leaderboard—they knew the fourth round would not be a two-man race; Jack Nicklaus was lurking in third place.

  “Lee said, ‘I’m not that worried about Bert [Yancey],”’ recalled John Kircher, one of the children who lived in the suburban Rochester house where Trevino lodged that week. “‘But I am worried about that big bear [Nicklaus].’ It kind of scared the little kids. We’re thinking, There’s a bear on the course?”

  The following afternoon, while Yancey faded with a four-bogey binge in little over an hour, Nicklaus charged up the leaderboard. Experts wondered whether Trevino could stand up to the challenge.

  Dressed in red socks, a red shirt, and black slacks—colors that would soon become his famous Sunday “payday” trademark—Trevino boldly responded on the back nine, largely due to deft putting. He followed a thirty-five-foot birdie on the eleventh with a twenty-two-footer on the twelfth for another birdie to take a commanding four-stroke lead over Yancey, five better than Nicklaus. Trevino parred his way in, taking his only risk of the week on the finishing hole.

  “On eighteen, I missed the fairway to the left, and when I wanted to get it out of the rough and back into the fairway with a sand wedge, my caddie wouldn’t let me.”

  “You don’t want to be remembered as the U.S. Open champion who laid up on the last hole,” said his caddie, Kevin Quinn, an eighteen-year-old Cornell student.

  Unfortunately, Trevino’s flat swing was not built for six-iron heroics from dense rough. He was lucky to move the ball forty yards ahead—still in the tall grass, but now with a sand wedge in his hand and seeking only to avert further embarrassment. Attempting just to strike the ball cleanly and put it somewhere on the green, he thrilled the gallery with the best shot of his young career.

  “The pin was set right by the bunker and I was aiming at the right of the center of the green just to get it on the green. The ball came out of that tall grass, went straight at the flag and stopped two feet from the hole. Then I realized if I made the putt I’d be the first man in history to shoot four rounds in the 60s in the U.S. Open. I made it. I had another 69 and won by four shots over Nicklaus.”

  The press simply loved Trevino.

  “What Lee Trevino really did, when he won the Open championship last Sunday,” Sports Illustrated’s Dan Jenkins wrote, “was shoot more life into the game of golf than it has had since Arnold Palmer, whoever that is, came along.”

  Practically overnight, Trevino morphed into a tour superstar. With guidance from his visionary, superambitious agent, Bucky Woy, soon there were endorsement contracts for clothes, clubs, balls, cars, soft drinks, and very lucrative exhibition
appearances.

  “I was his traveling companion for the better part of a year,” Woy recalled, “[and] it was like living with a cyclone corked in a bottle.”

  Everyone wanted a piece of Trevino. And most everything he did was soon scrutinized. When he won at Rochester, a reporter asked him what he would do with his $30,000 paycheck.

  “I’m so happy I’m gonna buy the Alamo back and give it to Mexico,” he said.

  That raised a few eyebrows, but most wrote it off as a comment made in jest by a mercurial jokester. He had quickly developed a reputation for rapid-fire comedy with his gallery, constantly talking during his backswing, and beguiling the press with his self-deprecating humor.

  But as Trevino’s celebrity grew, so too did the scrutiny. After his initial three fine rounds at the Masters in 1968, Trevino never again fared that well at Augusta National. In 1969, while Trevino was talking with Charlie Sifford inside the locker room of Carlsbad’s La Costa Country Club a week after the Masters, Sifford complained that none of the past Masters champions would help him in his bid to break Augusta’s color barrier. (Every year, the former winners granted one player an exemption to the tournament.)

  Attempting to reassure Sifford, Trevino offered his blasphemous opinion about the sanctity of the Masters.

  “I said I didn’t like it, that I didn’t think I’d ever have a chance of winning there, and that I didn’t think I’d ever play there again. I thought I was just letting off steam in the locker room. What I didn’t know was that Bob Greene, the Associated Press golf writer, was nearby and heard what I said. The next day my comments about the Masters were carried on the wire all over the world.”

  Bucky Woy urged Trevino to own up to the remark and say it was simply not meant for public consumption. Trevino elected to insist that Greene, a highly respected reporter, had misquoted him. Though the remark stuck to Trevino’s profile for many years, he was still invited to the Masters in 1970 and in subsequent years as well.