The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist

  We’d fielded eight U.S. teams since I’d been on the tour, and the only thing I’d been able to do was salute the guys who made it, root for them, and tell them how

  great they looked in their uniforms. Two years ago I was seventeenth on the final point list, seven spots out of it, but that wasn’t really coming close. That was coming about as close as a skydiver trying to land in Fort Worth and hitting the ground in Austin.

  I said to Smokey Barwood in the car, “My goal at the first of this year was to make the Ryder Cup team. That was it. That’s what I told Mitch. That’s what I told Buddy Stark, Jerry Grimes. . . . Cheryl . . . Alleene . . . Terri . . . all my wives.”

  “And that’s what you told me,” he said. “But that’s what you told me the year before, too. Maybe the year before that.”

  “I’m a better player now,” I said. “I’m peaking. This is the year. Look at the start I’ve got. Sixth in the Hope, fourth in the Crosby, W in LA.”

  “And two missed cuts in a row,” he said. “What’s that all about?”

  “It’s a game of slumps,” I said.

  “I’ve heard you say baseball is a game of slumps.”

  “Golf’s a better example.”

  “When was Tiger’s slump? I must have missed it.”

  “Any year now. It’ll come with a bad marriage.”

  Smokey said he couldn’t overstate the value of making the Ryder Cup team. It would double my outing fees, enhance my endorsement possibilities, dramatically increase my appearance money if I were to enter foreign events.

  “I don’t care about any of that,” I said. “The Ryder Cup is our Olympics. It only comes around every two years. It’s the only time we get to represent our country. I just want to be part of it one time. I want to put on the uniform, see USA on my bag, hear the anthem, and throw a side-body block on a European.”

  My agent asked me to walk him through it again, one more time, how you make the team.

  It’s all based on points, I said. A year and a half of top ten finishes. You get more points for this year, a Ryder Cup year, than last year, the year in between. And you get a lot more points for winning a major than you do for winning, say, your basic Colonial.

  This year in regular tour events you get 150 points for a win, 90 for second, 80 for third, 70 for fourth, and so on down to 10 points for a 10th place finish. I got 150 points for winning L.A. Last year I would have gotten only 75. And I got 50 for my sixth in the Hope, and 65 for my tie for fourth in the Crosby.

  “That’s 265 points,” Smokey said. Quick with numbers.

  “I have more than that,” I said. “You count last year, too. Last year I finished tenth twice, and eighth and sixth. That gives me fifty more.”

  “So you have 315. How many more do you need?”

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what everybody else does,” I explained. “Right now I’m in sixth place, but there are a lot of tournaments left. They count points through the PGA in August.”

  “It stops there? Why?”

  “They need a month to get the uniforms ready. The shirts, slacks, sweaters, blazers. You’re asking a man who’s never made the team. What do I know? Ask an apparel salesman.”

  “You’ll make it. When the going gets tough. . . .”

  I said, “I’ll have to do it on points. Larry Foster has two captain’s choices, wild cards, but he’d never pick me.”

  “Why not?”

  “No Ryder Cup experience.”

  “How did Larry Foster become the captain? He’s on the Senior Tour.”

  “The usual way,” I said. “Larry’s a past PGA champion, but that alone doesn’t do it. The officers of the PGA get together, talk it over, try to find a guy who’s never called any of them a shithead. Larry’s always been a diplomat. I think he’s been campaigning for Ryder Cup captain a long time. Remembers names, writes thank-you notes, telephone freak, comes complete with fleshy blonde wife. But he’ll be a good captain. He’ll leave the team alone. He won’t try to tell anybody where the v’s oughta point.”

  Smokey said, “It would be nice if we could bring closure to this Ryder Cup spot . . . sooner than later.”

  “Closure,” I said. “I’ll look it up.”

  18

  IT RAINED LIKE A BITCH THE DAY before the Players Championship in Ponte Vedra Beach, but if you knew anything about Florida you knew the rain wasn’t going to delay the start of the tournament.

  Rain doesn’t bother Florida golf courses. Florida rain goes straight down through the grass and dirt and sits there. Maybe some of it trickles on down to China, I don’t know. But mash your foot down hard anywhere in Florida and you’ve got an instant lagoon.

  If I can pin down Ponte Vedra Beach for you geographically, it’s on the Atlantic Ocean halfway between Jacksonville and Geezerville, better known as St. Augus-

  tine, which claims to be the oldest town in America. The Fountain of Youth is in St. Augustine. Big tourist attraction. This may also mean that St. Augustine has the oldest water faucet in America. I went there once and watched geezers buying bottles of Fountain of Youth water to take home and drink before they died.

  Ponte Vedra, I think, may be Spanish for real estate development.

  It is definitely the leader in the clubhouse for security gates. The security gates are in place to protect the homeowners from muny golfers and help pizza deliverymen find the right neighborhoods, which all look alike but have different names—Quail Joint, Smuggler’s Grape, Gator Cove, North Ditch, etc. The security gates also provide a stern obstacle course if you try to drive anywhere in Ponte Vedra between the ocean and the intracoastal canal.

  Halfway between the beach and the canal is where you find our PGA Tour headquarters and our TPC Stadium course with its famous seventeenth hole, the short par three with the island green. It’s by far the best course that’s ever been built entirely out of lumber.

  Just kidding. I know Pete Dye, the architect, can take a joke. Pete did introduce railroad-tie bulkheads to American golf course design.

  The best thing Pete did when he was routing the layout out of the forest and swamp, he let loose a herd of goats to get after the esses. The goats killed untold hundreds and chased hundreds more back to the Everglades where they belong. Which reminds me that it’ll be a better world when the Everglades gets paved over. Let the fuckers bite into concrete, see how they like it.

  Tour headquarters consists of these rustic-type buildings at the entrance where you turn to drive up to the golf course. In one of the buildings you’ll find our new boss, Commissioner O. P. Giddings. Buddy Stark says the O. P. stands for Over Paid. In the other buildings you’ll find our two thousand lawyers and accountants.

  The Tour’s been run by numerous commissioners through the years, dating back to Walter Hagen’s day. Commissioners used to be known as tournament managers when such gentlemen as Bob Harlow and Fred Corcoran held the job, and they were frequently disposed to “pass the hat” to raise prize money. That, of course, was before we became a big business and felt the need to have our own CEO to make rich.

  Two things did more than anything else to help us become a big business—Arnold Palmer and TV. They came along at the same time in the mid-’50s and it’s been a zoom deal ever since.

  Buddy Stark and I were talking about all this at dinner in the Sawgrass Marriott dining room the night before the Players. We were at a table by the windows, where we could watch the rain hammering down and see the lightning dance over the tops of the pines.

  “Florida gives good storm,” Buddy remarked.

  We tried to name all the many departments the Tour now has. I got Business Affairs, Corporate Marketing, Business Development, Retail Licensing. Buddy got Agronomy, Television, Player Relations, Finance, Communications, Tour Operations. Somewhere in one of those buildings, he said, there was bound to be a Department of Lunch and Dinner Reservations.

  We had no idea where O. P. Giddings came from. The Poli
cy Board knew, but we couldn’t name any of the players or captains of commerce currently on the board. They never told you any secrets anyhow.

  We knew O. P. didn’t play golf. We’d heard he used to work in “food products,” and before that he jacked around in MTV, and Buddy said he’d heard the thing that locked up the commissioner’s job for him—after Tim Finchem retired wealthy—was that he’d once been a disc jockey in Dallas.

  Buddy said, “I don’t much care where he came from as long as he keeps the train on the track. So far he seems to be doing it, mainly by staying out of sight.”

  PLAY GOOD, putt bad. Putt good, play bad.

  That’s every golfer’s complaint. You can’t have it all. God won’t let you. So you go out to play a round and you either expect to play good, putt bad, or putt good, play bad. Usually you find out which way it’ll go on the first two or three holes.

  Like you stripe the tee ball down the fairway, cut an iron in there close to the flag, but blow the birdie putt. Right away you know it’s a day when you’re going to play good, putt bad.

  This lets you pull the old Tommy Bolt act. When the birdie putt curls out of the cup, you look up at the sky and say, “Me again, huh? Why don’t you come down here and play me one time?”

  The great ball strikers in the past—Hogan, Snead, Nelson—they never played good, putted good. They played good but putted . . . just okay. It’s the way it was in their day.

  On the inconsistent greens they had to deal with, putting was always a problem. They had to read grain, shadows, splotches, even on bent, no matter how manicured the greens might look to the spectators.

  That’s why Hogan, more than anybody else, studied a course intently in practice rounds. He decided where he wanted to be on every green. He’d rather face a slick 30-footer on the right side, where he knew the speed, for example, than a 15-footer on the left, where the speed was guesswork.

  Hogan played “target golf” before anybody knew to call it that.

  We, meaning all of us today, don’t have that worry. Most of the time we can stick it in there anywhere and we know the speed will be consistent, reliable, no matter where we are on the green.

  All the advances in turf manufacturing and greenskeeping techniques have given us greens that putt true everywhere we go. We rarely see uneven greens. Lanny Wadkins said it best one time. He said, “The greens are so true now, we make six-footers the way we used to make two-footers.”

  Jack Nicklaus was the first golfer to play good, putt good. Aside from his awesome ability, Jack was a positive thinker. He’s said, “When I was at my best, I never missed a putt in my mind.”

  Good golf tip, is all that is.

  Now we have Tiger Woods. In case you haven’t noticed, Tiger is the first golfer ever to play great, putt great. Which is why he laps the field about every fourth time out. It’s why he’s “Black Jesus,” as some of the guys out here refer to him, behind his back, of course, envious of his talent, his wealth, his smile. Play great, putt great is why Tiger is up there on a level nobody ever knew existed. He can make the rest of us look like we’re swinging hickory and hitting the feathery.

  Tiger lapped the field at the Players Championship. He scorched Pete Dye’s lumberyard with a 259 in a week when the nearest score to him was was the 280 that four guys tied with.

  It was one of those “other world” performances he does so well. On the TPC Stadium course that most of us still think is pretty tough, and while most of us were glancing off the bulkheads, wandering around in the waste areas, and diving into the water around that frustrating little island green, Tiger steer-jobbed the fairways, threw darts at the flagsticks, and one-jacked the greens.

  Tiger’s total broke Greg Norman’s tournament record of 264, and on top of that Tiger contended with an occasional wind, unlike the Shark in ’94, when nothing was moving but the mosquitoes. What Tiger strapped on the Stadium course were rounds of 66, 61, 67, and 65. Uh-huh. Sixty-fucking-one in Friday’s second round.

  That’s when Jerry Grimes said, “I don’t know about you, Bobby Joe, but the sumbitch done bit my neck and sucked out all my blood.”

  Jerry was in second place at the time, but eight strokes back. He played extremely well and wound up in that four-way tie for second with Cheetah, Duval, and Mickelson. They only got beat by 21 shots.

  I was only thrashed by 24 shots. I rolled into the garage at 283, tied with Buddy Stark and Justin Leonard for seventeenth. I was $90,000 better off, but no Ryder Cup points.

  I DID get me a swing tip from Tiger, though. Somewhere down the line it might pay off.

  We were hitting balls next to each other on the range after the third round. Guys with swings that aren’t very picturesque, shall we say, don’t like to practice near Tiger. I guess they’re afraid he’ll say something like “Can’t you go to a doctor and have that removed?”

  My swing’s not a bad-looking golf swing, even when I get a result that doesn’t exactly put me on the bluebonnet highway.

  In an idle moment for Tiger, when he was taking a breather, fiddling with a grip on a club, I said to him, “I don’t suppose you’d care to show me how to hit that knock-down two-iron of yours, would you?”

  He took the two-iron out of his bag and addressed a practice ball.

  “This the one you’re talking about?” he said, and burned a low 220-yard draw down the range.

  “That’s close enough,” I said.

  He said, “I use this shot a lot when I have to keep the ball in play off the tee, coming down the stretch . . . or when it’s windy.”

  “I’ve noticed,” I said.

  He addressed another ball. “I play it back in my stance, with my hands a little forward,” he said. “And I sit a little lower in my setup. The key thing—for me, anyhow—is to bow my wrist at impact and abbreviate my follow-through.”

  He hit another shot, doing all that. Immortal.

  “But you take a full backswing,” I said.

  Mr. Observant.

  “Yeah, I do,” he said, “You need quiet feet to do that.”

  “Quiet feet,” I said. “I’ll work on it.”

  I hadn’t enjoyed many private talks with him. I had more questions.

  “I read somewhere that you once ate fourteen tacos all at one time.” I said. “Is that true?”

  He said, “It was when I was in high school, before a match. This guy and I had a five-dollar bet on who could eat the most. He ate twelve. I won.”

  I said, “When I was in college a bunch of us were in a tavern one night and I watched this guy who was on the football team—a defensive tackle—eat six dozen hard-boiled eggs.”

  “Did he win the money?”

  “There was no bet,” I said. “He was just hungry.”

  Smiling, Tiger did a stretching exercise, holding a club, moving his shoulders back and forth as I came up with another question.

  “You really make your own bed every morning?” I said. “At home and on the road? Even when you’re staying in a—you know—Ritz Carlton, somewhere like that?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a routine.”

  “Do you scrub baseboards, too?”

  He laughed. Good guy. One of your nicer immortals.

  19

  THE GREATER GREENSBORO OPEN fell between the Players and the Masters, but it’s never been one of my faves. It’s as much of an outdoor cocktail party as it is a golf tournament. Your Carolina Bubbas tend to get themselves overserved. So it didn’t take much thought for me to board the Pasadena-Sayonara Express and go home for a week to try to put a patch on my non-marriage to Cheryl Haney, my non-wife.

  As soon as I got home, however, I found out there were other things that needed to be taken care of as well.

  One thing involved George and Louise

  Grooves’s two-story condo. My folks suddenly felt the need for an elevator in their home.

  “Stairs go first,” my daddy said, feeling around on his left knee, where the arthritis was attacking him
, and rubbing on his right hip, where an Oriental rot had set up shop.

  “His legs are killing him,” my mama said, “and I won’t even bother to talk about my own pains.”

  I said, “Why don’t you turn the living room into the master bedroom and forget about the upstairs?”

  “Where would we entertain?” my daddy said. “You want us to play bridge on the bed when the McAllisters come over?”

  I called an old high school buddy who was in the construction business and asked him to recommend an elevator guy. He recommended a “good old boy” named Glenn Tabor and I met Glenn Tabor over at the condo when my folks were out limping around the Hulen Mall.

  “Aw, boy,” he sighed as he looked the job over. Tough one.

  I asked if it could be done, the elevator.

  He said, “Aw, I can do it. Run it up that storage room and into that closet up there. Might cost you Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming.”

  “That where you like to go?” I asked.

  “Yep. Me and my gun. Hide out up there.”

  “Mad Dog Roy Earle,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra. With Ida Lupino.”

  Glenn Tabor squinted at me.

  I faked a cough. “You fish up there, too?”

  “Aw, yeah,” he said. “Fish is everywhere. They send you postcards. But I just kiss ’em and throw ’em back.”

  “No problem on the money, whatever it is,” I said. “Can my folks live here while the work’s going on?”

  “They can,” he said. “It could get a might loud.”

  “They can’t hear too good anyhow,” I said. “Let’s get it on.”

  He said, “It’s on, Bubba.”

  I went to see my folks a day later and told them they were getting the elevator. My daddy asked if I wanted to see what his left knee looked like today. Pasadena, I said. He said try to visualize a skin-colored, oversize grapefruit, or a soccer ball. That was it.