Not that I’d taken any victory laps lately. I’d played in five tournaments since the Masters and all I’d done was get myself Windexed, Ajaxed, and Cloroxed.
The Heritage came right after Augusta, and even though I have a hard time finding Harbour Town’s fairways, the way they’re hidden among the pines and magnolias and Spanish moss and railroad-tie bulkheads, it’s still a course I like and respect.
Harbour Town took famous the minute it opened in 1969. When Pete Dye turned a South Carolina low-country swamp on Hilton Head into a fantastic, new-old-looking layout, it was the start of modern golf course design. That’s a definite. Ask any course designer today, or read a suitcase-size book called The Architects of Golf—if you can lift it.
Length and cow pastures were out, charm and accuracy were in. All of a sudden Pete Dye’s bulkheaded bunkers and bulkheaded ponds and natural waste areas were in vogue.
Since Harbour Town, there’s no telling how many swamps have been transformed into golf courses along the eastern seaboard, from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to Ocean Reef, Florida, real estate developers running around like wild dogs. Hilton Head Island not only invented swampfiend golf, it invented The Gated Community.
This time at Harbour Town in the MCI Classic, or what I still call the Heritage Classic, I stepped on my dick at the seventeenth and eighteenth holes all four rounds. The par-three seventeenth is one tough hole—190-yard shot over water and sand—and I missed the green every trip. The eighteenth, the long par four that plays to the lighthouse, was into the wind every day, and I skillfully managed to put my drive in Calibogue Sound twice, then put my second shot in Calibogue Sound twice. Pull-hook deal. My mistakes added up to 281 and left me in a six-way tie for twenty-seventh.
Big payday. Banked $21,000. Or $21,466.66, as my ladies back in Fort Worth might have counted it.
I left Hilton Head again without knowing what MCI stands for. All I know about MCI is, I get these phone calls when I’m home. Sometimes it’s a recording that says, “Listen closely for an important announcement from MCI,” and sometimes it’s an actual human voice that says, “Hey, Bobby Joe Grooves! How you doing today? A good friend of yours gave me your number. They know you’ll be interested in a terrific offer from MCI.”
Whichever voice it is—recorded or live—my response before I slam down the phone is the same one I give to any other telephone hustle. It tends to run along the lines of “Hey, pal. Bite my ass, don’t ever call me again—and go get a real job.”
I WENT back to the Houston Open for the first time in five years and remembered why I stopped going. It’s not played in Houston.
It’s played about thirty miles north of Houston at Woodlands Country Club, a course carved out of a forest of oaks and pines by Bruce Devlin and Robert von Hagge.
It used to be accused of being in Houston, but whoever said this might as well have said it about Mars and Jupiter, too. Today it’s officially said to be located in Woodlands, Texas—the golf course begat a town—and now it’s more like a hundred miles from Houston in traffic.
In the Houston Open’s earlier years, long before my time, it was played on classy courses like River Oaks, Brae Burn, Memorial Park, and Champions. I only know those layouts from the days when I’d go down there to play in an amateur tournament and get waltzed out of town by some guy who called himself Bayou Slim. A guy who wore a hard hat, smoked Camels, carried his clubs in a little white canvas bag, and could solid play for his own money.
The Houston Open I’d most liked to have seen was the first one in 1946 at River Oaks. It marked the last time Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and Sam Snead finished 1–2–3 in a tournament. They occasionally did that. And two of them often finished 1–2. This was back in the days when they were the Biggest Big Three that ever dominated the game.
My dad would say that I played in the Houston Open at Woodlands like a man standing in line to give up. I fired a string of 74s and tied three lurkers for sixty-eighth at 296 while another lurker I’d never heard of won it with a 279.
Mitch said we could take heart in the fact that the total unknown only dusted us by seventeen shots. Funny old Mitch.
I NORMALLY only go to New Orleans to rediscover acid indigestion in the French Quarter. Now I stand before you to announce that if I ever go back again, that’ll be the only reason. It won’t be to play golf.
I hadn’t been back to the New Orleans Open since it moved from Lakewood to English Turn Country Club, a course Jack Nicklaus plopped down in the Mississippi Delta. That was about ten or twelve years ago. But Buddy Stark talked me into entering, saying the course was perfectly suited to my game.
It looked like Buddy was right after the first round. I shot a five-under 67 and was only one back of Julius Claudius, who put up a 66. But then came the near-fatal heart attack in the second round, when I walked onto the fourth green.
There the sumbitch was, curled up comfortably on the back left edge of the green, a goddamn rattle ess—and no dwarf either.
I was paired with Jerry Grimes and Rickey Padgett.
Jerry said, “That deal right there ain’t no rub of the green.”
“I bet he’s four-foot long,” Rickey said. “I’ll call a rules guy on my cell. Tell him to bring security.”
I said to Mitch, “You ever see a man run like a spotted-ass ape? You’re getting ready to. I’m outta here.”
Mitch said, “We talkin’ about WD? We close to leadin’ this Mother Goose, man. They’ll chase him off. Ain’t nothin’ to it.”
I said, “Ain’t nothin’ to it? You crazy? You know how many nephews and cousins and aunts and uncles that sumbitch has around here? We chase him off, he’s gonna tell every one of ’em about me. He knows I’m here. I saw him looking at me.”
“You the crazy one,” Mitch said. “Think about we can win this thing. We playin’ good.”
“Fuck this thing,” I said.
“We can scoop us some Ryder Cup points. Think about that.”
“Fuck the Ryder Cup.”
“Fuck the Ryder Cup, too? We fuckin’ everybody.”
“It’s not worth dying for,” I said.
The rules guy arrived about a minute later, and as soon as he stepped out of his golf cart, I slid into it and burned rubber. Withdrew wins Indy.
Later on I started thinking about what I’d done and couldn’t resist calling Cheryl. I thought she’d find it amusing. I reached her at the real estate office.
“Your phobia is not funny,” she said. “You could have won the tournament. First prize is $615,000!”
“Dadgumit, I forgot about that,” I said. “I should have sat down and tried to reason with the cocksucker!”
I called Alleene next. I was certain she’d think it was amusing, being more familiar with something in my past.
Alleene had closed the deal to buy the place on Berry for Alleene’s Delights, but she was still working out of her kitchen in the house on Hilltop. I caught her in a pile of herb-crusted salmon.
I told her what had happened.
“That’s the fastest exit you’ve made out of anywhere since college,” she said.
We relived the incident on the phone.
My second year at TCU I made this drastic mistake of signing up for Biology 101. I needed to take a science course and everybody told me biology was easier than chemistry or geology. The first day I nonchalantly walked into the classroom and took a seat. But as I casually glanced around the room I noticed three or four students and the professor, Dr. Pinhead, which should have been his name, looking on the floor for something, peeking under desks, tables, chairs.
“What are y’all looking for?” I asked a fellow student.
“Three of the snakes got out of the jar,” he said.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” I yelled and leaped up and raced out of the room in two long-jumps. Dropped the course in that instant.
Alleene said, “It’s my vivid recollection that you spent the rest of the day and night creeping brews in the Hi Ha
t Lounge.”
“As we said in those days,” I laughed. “True. It was the nearest joint.”
THE NEXT tournament was the Byron Nelson Classic in Dallas. I could have commuted from home every day, but I dropped an intellectual thought on it and decided not to penalize my golf game like that. Better to stay at the swank Four Seasons Hotel, right there in Las Colinas, where the two courses are, the ones they use for the Nelson, the TPC course and Cottonwood Valley.
So my first order of business back home was to smooth-talk, beg, and bribe Cheryl into staying with me at the Four Seasons. If something important came up at the real estate office, I said, she could always dash back to Fort Worth, but meanwhile she could lounge around the hotel, take it easy, or, while I was playing golf she could visit the North Park Mall and hit on Neiman’s and all the other fancy Dallas stores that women like to slap around with their plastic.
I was counting on my secret weapon to be the fact that Cheryl found it hard to turn down luxury. I was right. She agreed to come over on Thursday, the first day of the Nelson, and planned to stay through the weekend, provided our room was equipped with two beds and I promised not to make any sudden moves. She was still into punishment.
It would have been a good plan if it hadn’t been for the two golf courses. Both the TPC at Las Colinas and Cottonwood Valley are spread out on a sorry piece of ground—windy and treeless—and they’re a mixture of designs by Robert Trent Jones Jr. and Jay Moorish, who’ve done their best work in other cities on other prairies.
It’s birdie heaven around there, is what it is, and they come cheap. If you can’t shoot 61 or 62 every round, you might as well not enter.
A good example is what I did. I shot a 68 on Thursday and another 68 on Friday, I’m four under par, but I miss the cut. Uh-huh. Seventy-four guys shot better than 136.
I was plenty hot and packing in our room at the hotel when Cheryl came back from slapping around Neiman’s.
I told her what I’d done.
“We could still stay the weekend,” she suggested. “It’s an awfully nice place.”
“And do what?” I snarled. “Gallery some lurker in the Nelson? Some shitass who shoots sixty-fucking-two? Maybe we can follow him the last two rounds when he shoots 63, 63! Never misses a fucking putt. Maybe we can ask him for his autograph on a cap! Maybe we can get a snapshot of the two of us standing next to him holding the trophy.”
“Anything else?” she said.
“Yeah. I love Byron Nelson but piss on Dallas.”
“Well, I certainly enjoyed my stay,” she said, starting to throw her own things in a bag. “The maid service was swell. The bathroom was spacious. The minibar came in handy. I enjoyed the morning paper. We really must do this again sometime.”
I said, “Cheryl, you’ve got to understand something. When you miss the cut out here, you just want to get down the fucking road. I’ll find a way to make it up to you.”
“You seem to be piling up a lot of things to make up for, don’t you?”
I said, “You enjoyed saying that. I could tell by the look.”
Slinging more things into her bag, she said, “You want to leave? Well, haul ass!”
We were out of there pretty quick after that.
24
THE COLONIAL NATIONAL Invitational Tournament, which is now called the MasterCard Colonial, was first made famous by Ben Hogan, who won it a lot—like five times in the early days—and then it was made famous by tits and ass.
No tournament on our tour offers a skin festival like Colonial Country Club does for one week in May every year. It’s where I met Cheryl Haney, after all. But she was your honest shapely adorable. No dirty leg, she. Dirty legs never make it to their thirties anyhow. Some go chunko, some wind up in the joint, some marry U-Haul Charlie.
The Colonial became a skin festival in
the late ’60s, the members remind you. In the middle of the drug craze and The Pill and make-love-not-war and all the other enlightenment of the time.
Now at Colonial every year it’s like some showbiz producer goes out and rounds up every no-slack dirty leg and cut-slack dirty leg in the territory, pitches in a ton of steel bellies of your collegiate persuasion—and announces that what we’re going to have here is not just a golf tournament, folks. What we’re going to have here is a convention of hip-hugger, choke-crotch hot pants and skimpy, heavy-load haltertops—we’re going to Downtown Skin City. And what this does is bring out the grown man’s battle cry of “Good god-a-mighty, tell my wife I’m out on the course with Crenshaw, but get my ass to the margarita tent.”
Out on the Tour the Colonial has earned some nicknames. That’s because it’s a known fact that more than one guy out here has dumped his present wife and met his new one in the gallery, the clubhouse, or the margarita tent.
Buddy Stark calls it “the Tammy Wynette Classic.” Go to Colonial and get yourself a d-i-v-o-r-c-e. But for my money it’s Jerry Grimes who’s been the most inspired by the skin festival. Jerry’s lately taken to calling it “the Masterbate Colonial.”
Colonial draws some of the biggest crowds of the year, and not just because of the skin. Once a year it gives thousands of people a chance to hang around a fancy private club.
The course, too, is an attraction. It’s a winding, shady, riverbottom layout smack in a beautiful old residential neighborhood only five minutes from the TCU campus—as the sorority Porsches and fraternity Range Rovers fly.
The course is not as tough and narrow as the original design of John Bredemus and Perry Maxwell, back when it held the U.S. Open in ’41, or even as it was during Hogan’s ’50s, but it’s still a challenging par 70, even without much rough and with wide fairways and larger greens.
A big reason it’s popular with the contestants is it treats them better than most tournaments from the standpoint of food, facilities, transportation, lodging, marshaling, and overall friendliness. Everybody is made to feel important, even your lurkers.
I grew up watching the Colonial as a little kid, when players like Billy Casper and Gene Littler were winning it, and then as a teen rat later on when Lee Trevino and Tom Weiskopf were winning it.
I didn’t always have a ticket, but there were ways around that. One way was to dangle a string out of the pocket on my shirt, and walk fast.
Back when I was a teen rat I never dreamed I’d someday become a Colonial member with full access to a great course, not to overlook the Wednesday night fried chicken buffet and the Navy bean soup and cornbread on Saturdays.
I’d played the course hundreds of times over the years, therefore my pals on the Tour always expected me to have a home court advantage when the tournament rolled around. I should, I agreed, but I never seem to be a threat. Try too hard, maybe, in front of the home crowd.
This time I was something less than a threat, finishing tied for twenty-first at 282. Won $42,000 but no Ryder Cup points. Did that while the Great White Swede, Knut the Nuke, cheated his way to another victory.
It was windy all week, the wind coming from every which way, but Knut shot three rounds below 70 and put up a 276 that was good enough to nudge Cheetah Farmer and Fred Couples by two strokes.
Everybody knew he cheated if they bothered to read that Friday’s Light & Shopper after his opening round 68.
Knut went to his interview in the press room and bragged about how his caddy’s compass had told him where the wind was coming from on several key shots. One of the Colonial officials in the press room said, “Excuse me, Knut? Your caddy has a compass?”
Knut proudly said, “Yes, my caddy is Ernie Shockley, and he is very helpful to me.”
The retarded jerk didn’t know it was against the rules to use a compass, but he’s a Swede, right? Har, har, bang fist on table.
This was all reported in the paper.
A Colonial official, Doc Matherson, quickly consulted the rule book to make sure his memory was correct. And right there in front of everybody he informed Knut that Rule 14–3 specifically proh
ibits the use of a compass to assist a player in determining wind direction—and the penalty for the violation is disqualification.
“I’m sorry, Knut, but you’re DQ,” Doc Matherson said.
A giant hush fell over the room, according to the paper, but Knut scrambled out of it, thinking quicker than I knew he was capable.
The paper quoted Knut saying “Uh, well . . . you see . . . the situation is . . . we only used the compass in practice rounds.”
Like shit, is what I thought about that.
Doc Matherson bitterly opposed the decision, but the other officials took Knut’s word for it—no DQ—and he went on to win the whole Mother Goose, stuffing $720,000 in his bulge.
Buddy Stark said we should be in awe of what Knut did, considering how many times he got laid during the Colonial. Buddy said to be seriously pussy-whipped and still win a tournament was some accomplishment, boy, even if Knut lied like an A-rab.
In a way, Knut couldn’t help himself. Fort Worth has these well-known, good-looking “husband helpers” around town—fortyish-type businesswomen—who like to sport-fuck rich married men, rich divorcés, rich widowers, and any celebrity who turns up and makes himself available.
They all took a swipe at Knut, one by one. He was their pick this year.
Although I’d never been one of their draft choices, and I’d never known their real names, I did know them by sight and by the names certain gentlemen among the Colonial membership have given them. There was “Crime-Spree Kitty,” “Get ’Em Up Gloria,” “Racehorse Rita,” “Do Me Twice Dottie,” “Tasty Pie Tina,” and “Earth Mother Lillian.”
Such ladies exist in other cities, of course, but it’s a widely held opinion on the Tour that Fort Worth offers the best-looking, best-natured, and fun-lovingest of them all.
Something else besides the tournament to make the city proud.
25
THE TEMPTATION AROUND MY house was to blame my poor play in the Colonial on the epidemic of wives in my gallery. They were all out there at one time or another, the Great Triumvirate. In another time and place they were known as Vardon, Taylor, and Braid. At Colonial they were Cheryl, Alleene, and Terri.