Chasing Greatness Read online

  As a result, Player rarely finished a season near the top of the PGA money list, and never won more than three PGA events in a season (he did win seventy-three South African titles in a twenty-five-year stretch). To many golf fans, by the early 1970s, Player’s role in the Big Three seemed outdated. Lee Trevino had unmistakably emerged as a bona fide American star on tour. He tapped into the blue-collar, ethnic American crowd that never warmed to a man like Player, who spoke with a distinct British accent.

  In August 1972, at the halfway point of the PGA Championship at Detroit’s famed Oakland Hills Country Club, a reporter asked Player if he agreed that Trevino had usurped his spot among the Big Three.

  “The record speaks for itself,” Player said before storming out of the press tent.

  “The record” that Player referred to was dozens of worldwide victories as well as five major titles and sixteen PGA tour wins. The reporter’s question further irritated Player because it dismissed his chances for victory in the current championship: After two rounds, he was just two shots behind the leader (and well ahead of Trevino). Apparently, Player’s record did not speak for itself, and he set out with extra determination during the final two rounds of the PGA Championship to prove he was far from over-the-hill at age thirty-six.

  Ben Hogan had dubbed the remodeled Oakland Hills “the Monster” upon winning the U.S. Open there in 1951. And earlier during the week of the 1972 PGA, Player had echoed Hogan, calling Oakland Hills the toughest golf course in America and claiming that the dramatic pitch of its greens presented the toughest putting challenge he had ever faced. But less than twenty-four hours after his unhappy encounter with the dismissive reporter, Player slew the “Monster” with a brilliant string of long, curling putts, rolling in four birdies from over twenty-five feet on his way to grabbing the lead with a 67.

  “I think it will be a very exciting day tomorrow,” was all that Player would say afterward. “The tournament doesn’t really start until the tenth hole tomorrow.”

  Fulfilling his own prophecy, Player faltered early, shooting a two-over-par front nine on Sunday. But he then righted the ship, parred his way in, and claimed a second PGA Championship by two strokes. Throughout the remarkably competitive final round—at one moment, a single shot separated the top ten golfers—Player never flinched. He outlasted them all, finishing with a one over 281 and besting his “heir apparent,” Trevino, by five shots (and besting Nicklaus and Palmer by several strokes more).

  A month later, Player fortified his reputation as one of the world’s premier players. He edged out both Nicklaus and Trevino in the annual World Series of Golf (the tournament contested by the winners of that year’s majors; there were only three players in 1972 because Nicklaus had won both the Masters and the U.S. Open). Player then won in Brazil that November, and two weeks later he took a third consecutive South African Masters title.

  Given Player’s devotion to physical training and his stellar close to the 1972 season, what happened to him at the beginning of 1973 stunned the golf world. In January, doctors urged him to have an emergency operation to remove a blockage between his kidneys and bladder. The team of surgeons also removed a cyst on the back of his left knee. The successful procedure relieved the large family clan, which was about to get larger: His wife, Vivienne, was eight months pregnant.

  “Still, the big question that blocked out everything in my mind was: What will this do to my professional golf career ... ? I certainly didn’t know, and at that point neither did anyone else.”

  Player remained bedridden for twelve days after the surgery, and doctors forbade him to touch a golf club for an additional six weeks. He lost considerable weight and muscle and was crushed that, for the first time in fifteen years (and the only time between 1959 and 2008), he did not compete in the Masters.

  By the end of April, Player’s doctors deemed him sufficiently recovered to return to competitive golf, although he chose to play closer to home in Asia (and spend time with his newborn) before tackling the longer trip to America. He took fifth place at the Chunichi Crown golf tournament in Japan, thanks to a closing-round 65. In May, Player withdrew from the Houston Open, but finally made the trip to America two weeks later for the Atlanta Golf Classic—his first appearance on the PGA tour in more than eight months.

  Although he surprised himself by winning the pro-am the day before the tournament, Player got off to a rocky start in Thursday’s opening round. Fortunate to make the cut, he then held his own and tied for nineteenth. Player rested the following week and then, to his chagrin, missed the cut by a single stroke at the Kemper Open in Charlotte. He decided to skip the IVB Classic in Philadelphia and instead headed to Pittsburgh to prepare for the U.S. Open. He also hoped to spend time on and off the course with Arnold and Winnie Palmer.

  At Oakmont, Player repeated the same mantra each time reporters and well-wishers asked him about his health.

  “I’m fit as a fiddle, laddie. I’m fine now. No aftereffects.”

  His golf game, he believed, was still on the mend.

  “I’m playing worse than I ever have since I’ve been a professional,” he said days before the Open.

  Although his fellow pros considered Player among the most affable men on tour, some felt he regularly embroidered the truth for dramatic effect, and occasionally indulged in gamesmanship. But his recent surgeries, frail physique, and obvious fatigue created sympathy from fans and peers alike, while also dampening expectations that he could seriously contend.

  Certainly Oakmont, in the middle of a hot, humid June, did not seem the best place for Player to return to top golfing form. George Blumberg, a South African businessman who followed Player for years, predicted he “cannot yet be mentally strong enough to come back in an event of this toughness.” A London Times reporter reinforced Blumberg’s point when he spied Player yawning on the sixth tee during a practice round.

  Player’s memories of Oakmont during the 1962 U.S. Open also did little to put him in a positive frame of mind. Indeed, several of the comments that Player made at the time seemed downright mean, and were considered insults by the club’s devout Fowneseans.

  “I still say this is the worst course that the Open has ever been held on,” Player told reporters in 1962. “The bunkers are unfair. Other than that I like this course. But the traps make it awful.”

  Player’s conciliatory double-talk afterward hardly undid the damage.

  “Still I don’t throw any clubs and get mad. Because it was a wonderful tournament. I never saw such tremendous crowds before. It was a great moment. I was privileged to play in the Open.”

  However Player felt about the course, he competed splendidly: With a little luck, he could have delayed Nicklaus’s launch toward golf immortality. Player matched Nicklaus stroke for stroke at the thirty-six- and fifty-four-hole marks, two behind the front-running Palmer. He even held the lead at one point during the third round. Only a disappointing final round of 74 prevented a magical Sunday play-off that would have pitted the emerging Big Three against one another.

  Then again, Player may have been acting coy in the lead up to the 1973 championship. Palmer knew his longtime friend and competitor well.

  “I played a practice round with Gary on Wednesday,” he told reporters as the tournament got under way. “And he was putting awfully well. He had a lot of confidence in his putting.”

  Palmer, the resident Oakmont expert that week, was again dead-on. From Player’s first stroke of the tournament, he looked brilliant. A long, straight drive and a crisp seven-iron, followed by a delicate fifteen-footer, gave Player a birdie on the especially difficult first hole. He rolled in another fifteen-footer on the second, bolting to two under par. With back-to-back drivers (testimony to Oakmont’s immaculate turf), Player reached the par-five fourth hole in two shots and carded a two-putt birdie. An hour into the championship, Player glistened at three under par.

  Thus far, Player showed no signs of his winter illness or recent fatigue. Never a long hi
tter, he still had the length to attack the course when it played fast and firm, as it did on Thursday. Player’s fourth birdie came on the par-five ninth, where his fairway wood landed in the sand and he exploded close enough to the pin to roll in a short putt for a breathtaking thirty-two on the front side.

  Player was widely recognized as one of the world’s great bunker artists, so his fine recovery on number nine was no surprise; but his command of the greens was. He had played just twelve rounds of competitive golf in six months, and none on courses whose greens even approached Oakmont’s in difficulty. Yet he putted flawlessly. Twice he needed just two strokes from over sixty-plus feet to save par, and he continued his attack by sinking a twenty-foot birdie putt on the tenth hole.

  “I putted as well as I could. It was fantastic. It would be impossible for me to putt any better,” Player said. “This course is a pleasure to play.”

  When he dropped a three-foot birdie on number eleven, Player’s scorecard not only amazed; it was historic. In the eight previous major championships at Oakmont—where revered players like Sarazen, Jones, Armour, Turnesa, Snead, Hogan, and Nicklaus had won major championships—no one had ever reached six under par in a medal-play round. Ben Hogan in 1953 and Deane Beman in 1962 shared the course record of 67, and Hogan had to birdie the final two holes to achieve his mark.

  If Player could shoot par over the final seven holes, his 65 would establish a course record that might last forever. More immediately, he would surge into a huge lead; no one even approached Player’s mastery of Oakmont that day.

  Unfortunately, Player’s torrid pace cooled on the par-five twelfth, where he made bogey by driving into the thick rough; he also bogeyed the par-three sixteenth, bunkering his three-wood. Nevertheless, pars everywhere else completed a tremendous, record-tying round of 67 that was almost ten shots under the average score for the day—a true anomaly.

  When the last man on the course finished up, Player owned a three-stroke lead.

  “Someday you’ll realize what a good round it was,” Player proclaimed with his customary bravado. “I’d like to have three seventy-twos and not even play. That’s how tough the course is.”

  Although the weather for the first day of the 1973 U.S. Open was ideal—low seventies, no wind, sunny—Oakmont kept most of the world’s greatest golfers at bay. Besides 70s by Lee Trevino, Raymond Floyd, and Jim Colbert, no one else besides Player scored a subpar round.

  Given that Player was not expected to be a factor prior to Thursday, the three-stroke difference at the top of the leaderboard startled everyone except, fittingly, Arnold Palmer.

  “What surprises me is not that Gary shot sixty-seven. It’s that no one else could shoot better than seventy,” Palmer candidly observed. “There shouldn’t be so big a gap in there.”

  Player also knew the strength of the field, and to expect that anything could happen during the world’s toughest championship.

  “I remember one U.S. Open in which Arnold Palmer had a seven-stroke lead with nine holes left to play and lost,” Player recalled.

  “You never know what’s in store for you, but the only thing you can do when you’re in this position is go out and try your best. This is the type of golf course [where] it doesn’t matter whether you’re six in front or six behind; you’ve got to keep going. In fact, anybody six behind with one round to go honestly could win it quite easily.”

  • 3 •

  A View from the Parking Lot

  His whole life, Lee Trevino felt like an outsider.

  As a poor Mexican-American boy, Trevino grew up during the 1940s in the small farm town of Rowlett, northeast of Dallas. He lived with his mother, Juanita, grandfather Joe, and two sisters in a tiny unpainted shack in a desolate hayfield.

  Living without plumbing, electricity, windows, or wallpaper, Lee and his two sisters bathed together twice a week in a metal tub over a wood-burning stove filled with lake water. Joe worked as a gravedigger at Hillcrest Cemetery while Juanita cleaned houses for families in north Dallas. Usually left on his own, young Lee entertained himself when he wasn’t harvesting cotton or sporadically attending school.

  “It was a lonely life,” Trevino recalled. “I was never around anybody. I was all by myself, no one to talk to. I’d just go hunt rabbits and fish.”

  Golf eventually found him. By chance, the Dallas Athletic Club golf course lay just across the street from the dilapidated Trevino home. Though he knew nothing of the rules, Lee learned he could make money off the game. The right side of the seventh fairway caught many wayward tee shots and Lee collected balls, then sold them back to their original owners.

  In that same hayfield, he also found a discarded old club.

  “In those days, if you could afford to play golf, you could afford to throw away clubs,” Trevino said.

  Though the club was left-handed, Lee made do by turning it around and hitting balls with the blade’s tip. Eventually, a second disgruntled Texas golfer tossed another iron—this time a righty—into Trevino’s front lawn, and Lee was on his way.

  The club’s caddie master, “Cryin’ Jesse” Holdman, noticed the enterprising kid hanging around the course selling balls to players and offered him a caddie job.

  “I feel like I helped raise Lee,” Holdman said years later. “Lots of nights when we finished at the club, I’d take a package of cold cuts over to Lee’s old house and have dinner with his family.”

  With nothing but time on his hands as he ditched school and waited for loops across the street, Trevino fashioned a makeshift course out of a nearby pasture and taught himself the game.

  Despite his small size, Trevino showed considerable athleticism in Little League and, when he actually attended school, on the playground. Quickly his raw talent produced easy money.

  “I caddied for one little old man real late on Sundays, and as soon as we got out of sight from the clubhouse he’d let me play him for my caddie fee, double or nothing. I beat him every time.”

  The extra dollars went a long way toward helping to feed his family, so when Lee chose golf over school, Joe and Juanita (neither could read nor write) did not object. Although Lee had mastered the art of ditching the local truant officer, Juanita went before a judge to legalize his absences and received a work permit for her thirteen-year-old son.

  Lee persuaded the superintendent of the golf course (today known as Glen Lakes) to hire him and he earned $1,250 during that first year—a substantial sum for a young kid in 1952. In the daily company of older caddies and club members, most of whom were twice his age, he grew up fast.

  “I went from a country kid to a cool kitty from the city. I was smoking when I was ten, something I picked up from older caddies, just like the foul language. I was a little boy thrown in with men,” he remembered. “Some of them were dangerous people who carried knives and guns. Hardly a day passed that I didn’t watch a knife fight. We were shooting dice and playing cards and there always were arguments. It was an education of hard knocks.”

  Despite earning a livelihood and being surrounded by the golf culture, Trevino did not play his first complete round in a golf tournament until age fifteen, when he qualified for the Dallas Times Herald tournament by shooting a 77 at the Stevens Park municipal course. That first competitive appearance turned out to be short-lived, however, when he lost 2 & 1 in the second round of his age bracket.

  Trevino had entered the event only on the suggestion of a local driving range owner, Hardy Greenwood, who had seen him pounding balls endlessly as a skinny eight-year-old. The driving range was just a few miles from Trevino’s home, and Greenwood gave Lee a job, clubs, shoes, and entered him in the Dallas tournament.

  With extra money in his pocket and dressed like most teenagers of the day-jeans, leather motorcycle jacket, wide-collared shirts, and boots—Trevino drove around the city courting girls and trouble with the law. One night in 1956, he and a friend stole a set of hubcaps from a member of River Hills Country Club, where he now worked (he had quit the drivi
ng range after a falling-out with Greenwood). A policeman managed to crack the case—Trevino put sparkling new hubcaps on his beat-up, 1949 Ford—but let the two boys go after they returned the goods to the rightful owner.

  “Confused, unsettled, and almost seventeen,” Trevino turned to the military for guidance (and to avoid an appearance in court). On his birthday, he walked into the local marines recruiting office, passed the enlistment test, and, despite little formal education, was inducted within three weeks. A few days before Christmas 1956, he left Dallas for boot camp in California.

  After a rocky start during basic training—“I got hit in the stomach and slapped in the head so many times I lost count”—Trevino trained hard and was deployed as a machine gunner in the southwest Pacific. He reenlisted after his initial two-year hitch and, shortly afterward—to make up for an error that assigned him to kitchen duty—a captain in Okinawa offered Trevino a place in Special Services based on his golfing talents. Not surprisingly, spots on the team were highly prized and hotly contested—it was a heck of a way to satisfy one’s military obligation. Trevino earned his spot but only after he thumped a superior officer who challenged him to a match.

  “I didn’t do anything but play golf with the colonels. That’s when I really learned to play. I started out as a private, but after beating the colonels a few times, I rose to sergeant.”

  Twenty-year-old Buck Sergeant Lee Trevino returned to Dallas after his discharge in 1960, having realized that golf could rescue him from both a life of poverty and a long-term military career. He patched things up with Hardy Greenwood and returned to work at the driving range. The next spring, he joined the north Texas chapter of the PGA. He soon won several pro-ams at local Dallas and Fort Worth courses.

  Though Trevino continued to spend the bulk of his days and nights with a club in his hand, he found time to date a seventeen-year-old North Dallas High senior. Within months, the couple married—they doctored her birth certificate to avoid needing parental consent—and by November 1962 Trevino’s first child was born. His wife was only eighteen.