Golf Digress

As good a place as any to resume the conversation...

Bob Jones happened to [what do you mean, happened to? Of course he was watching!] the events at Oakmont when Jack stood down the local hero in 1962. This was at the height of Arnie-mania and the galleries were impudent. “Blobbo,” “Fat Jack,” all of it, though Jack said he never heard it. Charlie Nicklaus following along certainly did and it made the back of his neck red, but that’s another story.

So Bob was watching on his RCA Victor color television back in Atlanta. And, sentient observer that he was, in a way that none of us can truly appreciate, he saw a shot that, as you'll see below, he couldn’t believe. It stayed with him to the extent that he felt compelled to have Charlie ask Jack about it.


June 25, 1962

Dear Charlie:

Jack’s victory at Oakmont was magnificent. I tried all last week to get time to write you how pleased I was by his performance. I like and admire Palmer very much, but still Mary and I were glued to the television set pulling hard for Jack to win. I hope you will congratulate Jack for both of us.

I know Jack is too busy to do any letter writing, but I would like it very much if you could tell me what he thought of his putt on the 17th hole Saturday afternoon. He hit the putt so hard I almost jumped out of my chair.

I know that he knew, as everyone else did, that this was one he had to make, but I am wondering whether he hit the ball harder than he meant to, or if he figured that the safest way was to drive the putt straight into the back of the hole.

In any case, it was a magnificent performance under the severest possible strain. I’d just like to know what was going through his mind. BJ6G3c/31


Here’s Charlie’s reply, on Nicklaus Pharmacy Stationary, no less:


July 2, 1962

Dear Bob,

Thank you for your sincerely kind letter of congratulations on Jack’s Oakmont victory. It is especially gratifying to hear from you at this time and Jack asked me to express his thanks and send his love to you and Mary just before he left to play in the Open at Troon.

His win at Oakmont was a much needed win for him, and to even attempt to explain why to you would be extemporaneous, but I pray that the manner in which he handles himself, and the image he presents to the youth and other people in our world today will, in someway, be similar to the one you are in your glorious life as, not only the greatest golfer that ever lived, but in addition the finest gentleman of them all.

To answer the question in your letter as to what was going through Jack’s mind on the putt on the 17th hole on Saturday. Jack and I had quite a discussion about it in Chicago before he left for Troon. He said only somebody that could understand the entire situation, such as yourself, would have picked that particular putt.

He made the decision that the safest way to make the putt was to hit it hard and drive it into the back of the cup. The hole should have been a birdie hole for him, but he trapped his drive, feeling that Palmer should birdie it also, his putt was for par and to miss it would have been disastrous.

I hope this letter finds you and Mary in good health and again thanks for taking the time to write.


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We were batting around that old Ben Hogan aphorism about the number of perfect shots he said he hit in a round. What was it? Three? What would be the number for Tiger? I wonder. Anyway, I asked Bryan Gathright, who joins me each week on the air, to chime in. Whatever the story’s veracity, or the number of truly pleasing shots that satisfied Hogan, Bryan, a top 100 teacher, found a suitable moral.

What Mr. Hogan was stating is that the game is a game of misses, and I think it’s so important that you have to play the best shot you can and you have to play the miss versus trying to figure out how you’re going to hit consecutive perfect shots. It just doesn’t happen, even at the highest level.

Now on to Tiger. Here Bryan once again delighted me by sharing another of the insights that makes him such an interesting and engaging analyst.

Having watched Tiger up close as much as I have, one of the great things that I can say about Tiger Woods that I’ve never seen him do is beat himself up. He absolutely always, always tries to play the best shot he can, and I think that’s so crucial not to get down on himself even when he’s struggling, and he feels like that if he makes the cut, he’s still in the tournament. I think that’s such a great lesson for golfers to learn because if you hear enough of that negativity coming from yourself eventually some of it is going to rub off and settle in. I think it’s so important not to get down on yourself.

And the one thing that I’ve told a lot of the young tour players that I work with…if you watch Tiger Woods, Tiger Woods walks like a champion. Regardless of how he’s playing, he’s always got his perfect posture, he’s always got his head up and he’s always walking with a purpose. And that’s one of the things that I’ve most often observed about Tiger that I’ve tried to instill in younger players coming up.

A teaching pro of Spanish descent used to counsel his students to “Stand tall and walk proud, like a matador.

"Absolutely."

Is it possible that the shots that might please Tiger wouldn’t necessarily be the ones that we’d think?

Well, I think that’s very true. So many times the things that the tour players are pleased with are the shots around the greens, the trouble shots. Some of the shots that I’ve heard Tiger get most excited about were trouble shots – that he hit a great hook or a great slice around a tree or around a hazard, you know, a shot that other people can’t hit, and I think that’s the one thing that has always driven Tiger Woods: being able to do things that other people couldn’t. It’s not necessarily the seven-iron to two feet that thrills him. I think he more expects that. It’s some of the more difficult shots and more imaginative, short game shots, and then the ability to hole all the crucial putts that he’s holed in his career.

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I suppose we’d already know if David Halberstam had ever dabbled in golf. Another august member of Sports’ literary best and brightest, superlative on baseball, Roger Angell includes a delightful golf reflection in his reminiscence, Let Me Finish (Harcourt, 2006).

Without spoiling anything, he tells the story of a round in Maine many years ago. To his astonishment, Angell finds himself paired with an ingenue who asks him to stow her engagement ring while they tour the 9-holer. To their obvious and understandable consternation, the ring disappears.

Here’s a little of his descriptive prowess - what must be a rare foray on golf - familiar to his baseball and New Yorker readers. It leaves little doubt that at heart he’s a golfer.

Getting there, becoming my adult self, was not a steady goal in my scattered youth, and changes in me, when they came, took me by surprise. Who would expect such a thing to happen on a golf course? Let’s reverse directions and go back a few summers again, back before the war to a morning in late August, 1940, when I’d joined my hacker friends Freddy Parson and Bus Willis for another round, there in Brooklin. Where we played was an unfenced but privately maintained little nine holes, right in the middle of town, with bumpy, pasturelike fairways and sunburned greens, where each hole supported an old-style iron flagstick, twisted with years of use and cool to the touch. The shallow, undemanding traps had long since gone to gravel, but lichen-crusted granite ledges, here and there intruding upon a fairway or rising more boldly, like silent onlookers, to one side of a green, offered a greater threat to your score. There was one par five, a fall-away meadow that terminated in a natural bowl, where the strip of rough beyond the green was bordered by knee-high clumps of ball-swallowing ferns. Pinewoods threw their morning shadows almost to the middle of the narrower fairways, and by five-thirty or six on August afternoons began to repeat the process from the other direction. The course started at roadside, just beside the narrow two-lane macadam of Route 175, and at its farther end skirted the inner shore of our harbor. Sometimes, bent almost double under the limb of a hackmatack while I tried to extemporize an irritable slash at my Kro-Flite, nestled dangerously close to a root, I would peer out toward the green and catch a flash of rippled sunlight from the Reach beyond. Other days, again in the rough, I would straighten up to brush a twig or a bug out of my collar, and find myself monitored by a motionless gull twenty feet away, with a bit of mussel shell at its feet. It was a great seven-iron course, perfect for old gents and free-swinging teen-agers perpetually and hilariously in trouble.

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Press comments following rookie T.J. Xolotl's stunning come from behind victory last week on the PGA Tour.

“I really felt Centeotl’s presence on the back nine. It was like the Corn god, Son of Tlazolteotl and husband of Xochiquetzal was right there with me every step of the round. All glory to Centeotl.”

Note: Xolotl's only scare came on the par-five sixteenth when it appeared his drive, after an unexpected carom, seemed destined for a watery grave.

“Chalchiuhtlicue (“She of the Jade Skirt"), goddess of lakes and streams, was particularly beneficent there,” Xolotl told the media. “When I saw the green stone nearby, I knew that it was Her will. Her day of celebration, as outlined in the Myth of the Five Serpents is upon us, you know, and I look forward to proffering a sacrificial virgin in profound thanks. All glory to Chalchiuhtlicue.”

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A couple of highlights from a recent conversation with Dr. Joe Parent, author of Zen Golf and, now, Zen Putting.

On the first impression with a putt invariably being the best:

Very often it is… Sometimes we appear to have one putt from behind the ball and another from behind the hole. Or, we see it one way from behind the ball and then when we get over it it looks different. I counsel golfers to understand that the perception is different from different directions. And it’s important to pick one particular read and make a commitment to that. You’ll make a better putt if you make a commitment to one read than if you’re caught in between.

Language is very important. Each word carries with it a wealth of meaning and we can take it personally. An example I gave in my schools is that if you saw someone walking up to the tee and said, “That guy stinks,” what kind of shot would you expect him to hit on the tee? You’d expect him to hit a bad drive. But when we say that to ourselves we forget that we also hear it. We’re hearing that guy stinks. We’re also the most credible source of information about ourselves so we believe it more, so that’s the shot we’re more likely to expect when we step up to the tee. It’s going to introduce fear. It’s going to introduce hazards and we’re going to get in our own way. So, language can help us get out of our own way or get in our own way.

JA: You’d rather your students use the word “path” rather than “line”. What’s the difference?

JP: Well, if you’re doing a sobriety test, they don’t make you walk a path because that’s easy. They make you walk a line because walking a line is harder. A line is very small and precise. A golf hole is four-and-a-quarter inches wide so that path makes you feel relaxed, more at ease when you know you have a little margin for error than when you have to be perfect.

JA: I’m sure both of my listeners will find your analogy very familiar.

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We’re so much more charitable with others than we are with ourselves with respect to our games, aren’t we?

JP: Oh, absolutely. When I ask people to say, imagine you’re talking to a friend and he hits a bad shot and you say, “That’s OK, shake it off, everyone hits a bad shot once and awhile.” And then I say, “Now put your name in there and say it to yourself, it becomes very much harder…” We have such unimaginably high standards for ourselves, partly because all we see on TV are good shots. And they don’t show half the guys who don’t make the cut or aren’t playing well very often so we think we ought to be hitting every shot great, hitting every green, but it just isn’t true. So give yourself a break.


…On playing a new course well because we don’t know where the trouble is:

We play much better golf when our intention is to go towards something than it is to avoid something. That’s the classic bail out shot and protective and guiding and steering shot that we hit to protect from a hazard. We swing so much more freely when we just see the target and say, “That’s where I’m sending it and I can handle a range of results from where it comes down.”

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It’s a great story that immediately occurred to me in the aftermath of Zach Johnson’s triumph. Jody Vasquez, a Colonial member and one-time Ben Hogan shag boy, tells of the time that Nick Faldo sought an audience with the great man. You’ll find it in Afternoons with Mr. Hogan, which comes highly recommended.

Faldo was all set until he realized he’d forgotten his copy of Five Lessons and they had to scramble to go back to Vasquez’s house to retrieve it, just making the appointment at the Hogan plant to the minute.

Nick Faldo is a great student of the game and a voracious learner. With great purpose, he folded his arms and leaned forward with his elbows on Mr. Hogan’s huge desk. He looked across at Mr. Hogan and asked, “How do you win the U.S. Open?” [The audience took place in autumn, 1992.]

Mr. Hogan paused, blinked a couple of times and with his arms resting on his chair’s armrest learned forward looking directly at Nick and said, “You shoot the lowest score.”

There was a couple of seconds of silence, and then we all burst out laughing. Everyone, except Mr. Hogan. Nick looked over to me and in semi-shock looked back at Mr. Hogan and said, “No, seriously.” Mr. Hogan, glancing over toward me, said, “Seriously, I’m not kidding. If by Sunday evening you have shot the lowest score, I promise they will give you the medal. I know. I have five of them.” The laughter had stopped. Mr. Hogan, in character, was being serious. We immediately understood.

There’s more but needless to say, Mr. Hogan was not interested in Mr. Faldo’s repeated attempts to have him watch the Faldo swing. “But thanks for asking,” Hogan said. Leave it at that.

So, if you want to know how Zach Johnson won the Masters, for the record, he shot the lowest score.

The discussion about the golf course this week, particularly the trees along the 11th and 15th holes, and an overall sense of confinement, almost a sterility and exactness to the way that Augusta National must now be played reminds me of a theory once suggested by Mike Hurdzan.

The gist of it, as I recall, was that that First World War had decimated, along with so much of civilization, the ranks of golf’s elite. Lost had been a generation of influential golfers who had a direct connection back to Old Tom Morris himself, and the traditional values of opportunism, creativity, luck and resilience.

Recovering from such a loss would take time, Hurdzan believed, and that we were only just now returning to those principals that had long best served the game. Interesting that just as Oakmont has removed thousands of trees in an effort to return the course to its own origins that Augusta National is planting them.

I hadn’t meant to discuss the changes with Sid Matthew, an aficionado on Bob Jones, but it came up and I was surprised at the depth of Sid’s feeling, coming from someone with ties to, or at least a past relationship with, the National. They've gotten so many things right that one hesitates to jump to conclusions. Perhaps the players will prove the club’s competition committee right once again with an exciting finish. The direction they’ve taken however seems especially unfortunate given the articulate and extensive record left behind by Jones about his intentions. It’s an open book test that the club should ace.

Sid’s comments only further confirm how far Augusta National has sailed from its moorings, away from the celebratory principals of joyous, exciting golf with reward for the heroic shot, those traditional tenets that Hurdzan, a fine architect in his own right, hoped the passing of time had not completely erased. The muted gallery reactions this week on top of the cautious and defensive play provide additional damning exhibits to building the case that something has gone terribly wrong.

Sid has joined me in the past on the radio from the Butler Cabin (his books include Bobby, The Life and Times of Bobby Jones and The Wit and Wisdom...), so I thought I'd end the interview by asking him what would be the most fun he expected to have this week. He surprised me by bringing up a more serious and, no doubt, within the confines of the club, now sensitive, subject:

I’m glad you’re having Geoff (author Geoff Shackelford) on because he and I agree one hundred percent on Jones and MacKenzie’s philosophy on what this golf course should create. The spice of life in golf, according to MacKenzie, is variety. And variety is the key to adventure. We play golf because we love the adventure. Every golf outing is different. And MacKenzie thought: Many are the broad roads that lead to destruction, narrow is the road that leads to Salvation; allow somebody the maximum options off the tee, the maximum options into the green but protect the green with speed and undulation. And if you allow many different shots, you’re gonna see these players playing all kinds of shots into these greens, especially under these conditions. But don’t put, you know, a bunch of woods over here and eliminate the opportunity for somebody to attack a green from a different angle.

He did say, “I think Jones and MacKenzie would be smilin’ down this week saying, “We really confused ‘em this time, haven’t we?”

I’m not so sure.

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I never tire of listening to Augie Garrido. The all-time winningest coach in Division I baseball is something of a Zen master. He often talks in terms and directions you just don't typically hear out of the mouths of baseball guys. He was chatting with announcer and former major leaguer Keith Moreland on the air after a game the other night when he sent me scrambling for a piece of paper and pen.

"It is a game of failure," he said, after the Longhorns won a slugfest. "It's about diversity and adversity colliding on every pitch. And it constantly puts into conflict your confidence versus your fears, you know. You just have to learn to take whatever comes your way and see that as your opportunity to be challenged and motivated to overcome it."

Switch out "pitch" for "swing" and that would just about do it, don't you think?

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In October, 2003, I asked Dr. Martha Burk, Chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, political psychologist, co-founder and president of the Center for the Advancement of Public Policy, what her best and worst case scenarios were with respect to the admissions policy at Augusta National.

Best case scenario is that these CEOs that are reportedly working from the inside would be successful, and they would announce that they do plan to invite a woman [to join] and do plan to invite that woman before next year’s tournament. And then they would do that. Worst case scenario is that they stonewall, then they’re confronted with picket lines and a general disturbance of their tournament and the story becomes about that and not about golf.

And the smart money?

I say the smart money is on getting this resolved and moving on.

The next time the Commission for Responsive Democracy has their annual golf outing will you be teeing it up?

Well, if they…laughs…actually, they never had a golf outing but…laughs…

The Equality Summit doesn’t have a golf outing?

The Equality Summit doesn’t have a golf outing. Now if some sponsor wants to lay about fifty-thou on us to sponsor a golf outing, I’ll certainly put one on. Women and men alike will be invited.

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A Bob Estes story.

So he and some friends are at the Masters. They end up having dinner one night at one of those Japanese steak places where the seating is communal. Naturally, the talk is about golf and the conversation with others in town for the tournament is convivial for the Masters prompts a collective, festive feeling like no other event in golf.

“So, Bob,” one of the newfound friends asks as they’re filing out, “you playing any golf while you’re down here?”

“I hope to on the weekend,” says the golfer totally in character. He's got just one missed start in eight starts at Augusta National, including a fourth place finish in 1999. Those who know him will tell you the story is quintessential Bob. Despite his dedication both on the range and in the fitness trailer, he's about as unassuming a professional athlete as you'll bump across.

If he does get win this week in Houston, and IF the brahmins at the National invite him to their little tournament, he'll play well. He almost always does. -0-

Bill Penn was talking about Joe Bob Purdy, a fictional creation of his who once took a misbehaving 8802 putter, that had "turned against him," and put it in the slab as rebar on the pad of an RV park he was building out in west Texas. I asked him about his own experience with putters. Bill, one of the few men who could make the rules of golf seem not only interesting but reasonable, was the longtime director of the Texas Golf Association.

How many putters have you used through the years?

Quite a few and I’m certainly not innocent…it’s regarded as breaking a club. I prefer to think it’s the honest destruction of an inanimate object that are causing the world a great deal of harm. I’ve probably bought a hundred putters in my lifetime. I’ve never traded any or given ‘em away. I’ve got about two or three left. -0-

Admiring the last place trophy for the hickory hacker, a garishly-painted, chipped statuette of a chimp putting (not looking at his ball, I now notice), it was all bad enough to require a bracer. The Wodehouse was pulled from the shelf. I needed Jeeves.

Three stories in a row in "All About Jeeves," v. 2 of the 90th birthday edition (Manor Press, 1973) include golf references.

In “Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit,” he discusses the frequently menacing Tuppy Glossop, who once duped Bertie into a Tarzan-like stunt at the Drones Club with disastrous results.

Tuppy has one of those high, squeaky voices that sound like the tenor of the village choir failing to hit the high note. This one was something in between the Last trump and a tiger calling for breakfast after being on a diet for a day or two. It was the sort of nasty, rasping voice you hear shouting “Fore!” when you’re one of a slow foursome on the links and are holding up a couple of retired colonels. Among the qualities it lacked were kindliness, suavity and that sort of dove-like cooing note which makes a fellow feel he has found a friend.

In “The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy,” the proceeding tale, Jeeves uses Bertie’s clubs to good effect in effecting a most novel solution to yet another romantic entangle. He explains:

Before telephoning to Miss Moon, I took the further liberty of striking Mr. Sipperley a sharp blow on the head with one of your golf-clubs, which was fortunately lying in a corner of the room. The putter, I believe, sir. If you recollect, you were practicing with it this morning before you left.

And in “Jeeves and the Impending Doom,” Bertie is forced to endure a particularly austere brand of cabinet minister, and, again, finds golf a convenient point of departure in getting at the root of the man’s character.

I played golf with the Right Hon. every day, and it was only by biting the Wooster lip and clenching the fists till the knuckles stood out white under the strain that I managed to pull through. The Right Hon. Punctuated some of the ghastliest golf I have ever seen with a flow of conversation which, as far as I was concerned, went completely over the top; and, all in all, I was beginning to feel pretty sorry for myself when, one night as I was in my room listlessly donning the soup-and-fish in preparation for the evening meal, in trickled young Bingo and took my mind off my own troubles.

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Jay Haas was just about to get in the SUV for the ride to the airport. His luggage and clubs had been transferred from the adjoining sedan. Bryan Naugle, the tournament’s executive director, had one more favor to ask.

“It must be tough winning all those tournaments,” Tom Kite chided across the trunk. Haas just smiled. The two have known each other across a chasm of shared experiences in professional golf going back to the wake Tom and Ben Crenshaw left on collegiate golf.

Both Kite and Haas had successful careers on the PGA Tour. It’s easy to say they didn’t necessary need what Haas called “an unbelievable second chance,” but both have made the most of it, continuing their runs as cash machines on the Champion’s Tour.

I asked if both felt they were smarter golfers now, and each took their turn with the mic. “We know our limitations a lot more and are better able to handle certain situations,” Haas said, but Kite had the better line with his assessment: “You’ve got a lot more experience but sometimes you forget it.”

The new equipment, he said, had been an obvious advantage not only to his generation, but to the younger breed of tour player who had grown up with softer shafts and much lighter driver heads, for instance. Haas, whose son Bill follows his father and uncle Bob Goalby in the family business, added the youth of today on tour had likely “never hit a wooden driver, never worn spikes, and never hit more than a 7-iron into a par four.” How strange is that to consider, and I’m not sure he isn’t right.

On the way out of the restaurant, I asked Tom if he thought there was still room for a golfer 5’ 8”, or 5’ 9”, “normal sized,” as opposed to the linebackers who now choose golf. He immediately mentioned the young Hawaiian Tadd Fujikawa, who made the cut earlier in the year at the tender age of 15.

“What is he? Five one, five two? That was terrific…Is there still room? I hope so,” said the U.S. Open champion who accepted his friend and house guest's digs about his advanced years with grace. He still walks with a determined stride, though minus the tell-tale glasses that still grace the statue detailing his follow-through, the swing watched intently by his old mentor at Austin Country Club. For years the former Ryder Cup captain carried a copy of the Little Red Book in his briefcase. No longer, “but I read it every year,” he said.

The book is called, “Texas in her Own Words.” It’s an oral history, and if you’re wondering what it has to do with golf, it’s largely about personal character, something, of course, Texas golf has long had in abundance.

The author happens to be a friend. The book's enjoying a remarkable resonance and has already been nominated for a half-dozen awards. Having lived in Texas for nearly 20 years, the notion of what is it that has made Texas such an incubator for good golfers has always interested me. You get the usual explanations: the weather, the size of the state, the abundance of good, cheap courses, as indeed little 9-holers dot the state as I've noticed they do in Ireland.

My suspicion was that there was something deeper and Tweed Scott who conceived the book and recorded the interviews, was also after something other than the bluster and commerciality on the surface of the Texas myth, similar to what a friend once referred to with Bavarians who derisively thought of themselves as “real” Germans. There are a lot of “real” Texans out there, f'sure, which always reminds me of a useful homegrown phrase, “all hat, no cattle.”

Unintentionally, Tweed’s conversations put the finger on the type of skills that I think we might agree have served Texas golfers at the highest levels very well for a long time. One concept mentioned time and again in the book is risk. As one tells Tweed, Texans never know in turning over a rock whether they’ll find oil or a coiled snake. That’s a good attitude for a golfer, no? The ability to adapt to the cyclical nature of boom or bust. Another says, “This is a place of extremes. You live each day because you don’t know what the next day is going to bring.”

I know a lot of people have had just about enough of what Texas may or may not be responsible for. The president, after all, is a Connecticut Yankee dressed in a Midland accent. Other attributes raised in the book that I think have had a beneficial effect on homegrown golfers (though they certainly don't have the exclusive):

A wry sense of humor. “Texans like to kid too. They can kid about themselves.”

An ingrained work ethic. “Nothin’ is easy. …Texas is special because it was hard and you had to work to get here and you had to work to stay here. Everything about it is different. A lady I once knew told me, “I’ve done everything from build fence to run a whorehouse and there ain’t no easy way to make a living in West Texas.” She actually said that, and that was true.”

After that? Golf? Piece of cake.

For more info, www.tweedscott.com.

I happened to be watching a friend with a considerable gambling reputation hit balls when my eyes casually wandered down the range. Several golfers over a man in a pink shirt was pounding balls. His swing was…unique, to say the least. He took the club back to the top, stopped, then extended it further, reaching up on his toes. He pointed the clubhead vertically down at the ground. Then back the whole ensemble would come and he’d strike the ball. I was transfixed. “Look at that,” I mentioned. My friend, who has played golf for money for sums that makes me uneasy just thinking about, though he is by trade a poker player, watched two swings. “Best hustler swing I’ve ever seen,” he said. Later, he was effusive. “He hasn’t missed a shot.” We watched in silence. He missed a shot, or two.

Later still the subject of funky swings was raised on the front bench of the pro shop. “I’ve never seen nothing like it," the gambler announced. "I need to go talk to him. I don’t know where he’s looking.” Indeed. The swing kindled thoughts of Jim Thorpe who is aimed so far left over the ball, it's downright mind-boggling.

One golfer of some experience told of another who addressed the club completely open, maybe pointing 35 yards or more to the right of his target. The amateur was deadly. “Sixty-seven, 70, 69, he’d kill you,” was the verdict. “He could hook it, slice it, hit it high, hit it low.” Everything with his swing was conventional with the exception of the club sitting behind the ball. An iron would be flat on the ground.

Lee Trevino is often cited prominently and early in the discussion of unconventional swings. And we got around to him, as the gambler had indeed witnessed the historic match (1965?) in which Ray Floyd happened to tee it up against a young Hispanic golfer just out of the Marines in El Paso, the one who came to fetch his clubs and shoes out of the trunk.

It must be considered one of the great psychological ploys, although it’s possible Trevino was not doing anything other than his job in fetching Floyd’s things. Floyd, as the famous story goes, asked after a “Spanish” guy he was supposed to be playing, when Trevino introduced himself. Anyway, Lee happens to once be paired with the open-iron player in a pro-am. On the first tee he stops the guy. “Hey, where we goin’ here?” He soon saw. The guy could play. Just one more variation on the theme of propelling a golf ball. Penick fans will recall Harvey's caution against unconventional but repeatable swings.

The conversation moved around, after that famous match to another less notable but auspicious private contest. After his experience with Trevino, Floyd was told of “a sergeant in Killeen, Texas that he couldn’t beat.” They too played three days of matches, this at a small course, Leon Valley, convenient to Fort Hood. The sarge got a couple of strokes one day, and at least one the next. He was beating Floyd who finally rallied to break even on the final day (apparently he was given a shot by a gambler as a side bet). The apocryphal comment, perhaps not, and perhaps uttered after his similar match with Trevino, was that he was going to go back on PGA Tour “where there were guys I know I can beat.”

The sarge was, of course, Orville Moody, who would four years later win the U.S. Open. Moody, it was said, could miss an 8” putt but could hit a stick in the fairway. Putting bedeviled him but an eyewitness told the gathering, “He could putt then!” The long putter was his salvation. He won numerous times as a senior golfer including multiple wins partnering with Bruce Crampton, I think it was, at the Legends. Next week, I hope to have the opportunity to talk with another exceptional ball-striker, Jay Haas.