A Golfer's Life (36 page)

By the end of the seventies, I’d seen my putting touch go into the tank and was having fits with my vision, wrestling with eyeglasses and finally growing accustomed to wearing contact lenses. True enough, I was still capable of shooting 65 on any given day, but it was maddening that I couldn’t seem
to duplicate the effort when it counted most in majors or on the regular circuit. The truth is, despite an outward appearance of contentment with my
life
, I was pretty unhappy with the state of my
game
at the age of fifty—so, in effect, the Senior Tour came along at a perfect moment for me. I needed a new challenge and something big to play for.

The thing that really kicked off interest in forming a senior tour was the popular Liberty Mutual
Legends of Golf
telecasts, produced by Fred Raphael of
Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf
fame, which first ran in 1978. That first televised best-ball match couldn’t have had a more dramatic finish. Gardner Dickinson and Sam Snead trailed the Australian duo of Kel Nagle and five-time British Open champion Peter Thomson by two at the 16th hole until Snead rolled in a clutch birdie to keep his team alive. He then knocked in an eight-footer at the next hole to even the match. At 18, he hit his approach stiff to the flag and made the birdie to win. You couldn’t have asked for a better scenario: Golf’s all-time leader in tournament wins (81 by the PGA’s official count) making three birdies in a row for a come-from-behind win.

The television ratings were high but soared even higher the next year when the
Legends
had the most dramatic finish in its history. Julius Boros and Roberto de Vicenzo put together six
consecutive
birdies in a playoff to nip Art Wall and Tommy Bolt, who made five of their own! I recall the irresistible drama of this particular match, because there was a men’s closing-day dinner going on at Latrobe Country Club that evening, and nobody in the men’s grill would go upstairs to the dinner until the action was over! Both teams kept making birdies, a mind-boggling display proving the “old” guys really could still play.

Aiming to capitalize on the
Legends
momentum, several former Tour greats gathered for an informal meeting on January 16, 1980, in Commissioner Deane Beman’s office at the
Tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra, Florida. They didn’t know precisely what they wanted to do, but they had a hankering to play tournament golf again and thought the ratings success of the
Legends
proved there might be a good market for a limited number of senior professional events. Present were Sam Snead, Julius Boros, Dan Sikes, Bob Goalby, Gardner Dickinson and Don January—career money-list leaders and fierce competitors all. Not shy about individually airing their views, I gather this group of balding eagles argued about this potential benefit and that potential drawback but finally agreed that Deane Beman would put his considerable organizational expertise behind the idea of forming a senior tour.

As it was later explained to me, it was also generally agreed that the fledgling tour needed another marquee name or two to help “sell” the idea of an over-fifty tournament circuit to the public and, most critical, to attract potential sponsors who might consider the start-up tour a competitor of the regular PGA Tour. Since I was pretty well connected in the corporate world, and was still showing up to play on the regular Tour from time to time, that person turned out to be me.

As I said, at age fifty, I wasn’t sitting around thinking what a great time I could have playing “senior” golf. Business was booming, and I felt that I still had some unfinished business left on the regular Tour circuit—namely, the PGA Championship. But a couple things happened to change my thinking in this regard.

First off, since my friends organizing the new tour asked me to lend the clout of my name and presence, and considering all the things the PGA and PGA Tour had done for me over the years, I felt morally obliged to help out. I began speaking to potential sponsors and people I knew in the business world who might benefit from an association with the new Senior PGA Tour. Then, as if scripted by the golf gods themselves, I managed to fend off an attack of the nerves and
win the 1980 PGA Seniors’ Championship, held that year at the Turnberry Isle Resort in Florida. The excitement and sudden interest in the new tour that win created across the business world, I suppose, proved incalculable.

By the way, it also felt wonderful to win.

T
hat summer, the United States Golf Association held its first USGA Senior Open Championship at Winged Foot, an event won by Roberto de Vicenzo. Based on gate receipts and other factors, the tournament was a major commercial disappointment. The problem, someone quickly deduced, was the age restriction. You had to be fifty-five or older to enter—as was the case for the established Senior Amateur—which meant a number of the best-known players from golf’s so-called golden years weren’t eligible to play, myself included. In a move that completely turned around public interest in the event, the USGA wisely lowered the age requirement to fifty for the next rendition, and the result was an enormously successful Senior Open Championship staged at Oakland Hills, which I just happened to win in an exciting playoff against my old Open competitor Bill Casper and the lesser known Bob Stone. To some folks (and even to us) it almost looked like old times.

I’m told my victory was just the shot in the arm the Senior PGA Tour needed to really get rolling, a boost of vital support once again delivered by our good friends at the United States Golf Association. After that, the sponsors started coming forward and senior tournaments started forming at an impressive clip.

As a footnote, in terms of the rules and procedures the new tour would follow, I was personally opposed to the suggestion to permit the use of riding carts in tournaments and, initially, strongly felt the tournaments should be 72-hole events in
length, the same as on the regular PGA Tour. Ultimately, I changed my thinking on the length of the tournaments but still feel allowing riding carts in competition was a big mistake. I got outvoted on this issue but warned others that it just might open Pandora’s Box somewhere down the line—as it did, indeed, in 1998, when physically handicapped player Casey Martin won his landmark court case, demanding to be permitted to use a riding cart in competition, citing, among other things, the Senior Tour’s use of them. I’m totally opposed to exclusionary practices, but equally opposed to providing an unfair competitive advantage.

In terms of popularity, it didn’t hurt the seniors’ cause that a stream of some of the biggest names in the history of the game was coming along the feeder pipe, guys like Gary Player, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Ray Floyd, Lee Trevino, and, of course, Jack Nicklaus. Maybe the thing I liked best about those early days of the senior circuit was the relaxed atmosphere that pervaded the galleries and competition. Players routinely attended sponsor cocktail parties and mingled with corporate sponsors and fans. Many of the players were grateful for the opportunity to be the center of attention once more and felt as if they’d been given a new lease on life. In effect, we had.

The competition was dead serious, but friendships were rekindled and revealed themselves in the midst of play when Chi Chi and I needled each other or Ray or Lee and I traded affectionate jabs. Those exchanges, I think, went a long way toward drawing fans into the galleries and sponsors to tournaments, ultimately making the Senior PGA Tour the $50-million, forty-two-event prime-time road show it has become. The bottom line is, we had fun in those early days, and the world saw some pretty good golf—including aces on two consecutive days in the pro-amateur event at TPC at Avenel, during the first Chrysler Cup Match in 1986 (a team competition
between America and twelve top international players) by a guy named Palmer. That really sent an electric charge through the gallery, I can faithfully report, and created a buzz in the national media that lasted for several days. Within hours, a plaque was installed at the tee. I was pretty excited about it, too.

Year in and year out, the Senior Tour has been a model of sporting consistency, earning its distinction as the most successful sporting enterprise of the 1980s. True, as it’s grown, the tour has lost a bit of the intimacy and free-spiritedness that always made it so much fun to be part of, but the overall impact and benefit to individual players’ lives and associated charities have far exceeded anything, I think, the founding graybeards could have envisioned.

I’m proud of the ten senior titles I won between 1980 and 1988. I’m also proud of the fact that a tournament I helped start in 1980—now called the Home Depot Invitational in Charlotte, North Carolina—was one of the founding events of the Senior PGA Tour. My involvement with the tournament began the same year as the Senior Tour began, when friends from Charlotte approached me about the idea of getting personally involved with a proposed Senior Tour event for that city. I liked Charlotte a lot. The region has deep golf roots, my longtime friend Johnny Harris and his family lived there, and I had numerous other friends and business interests in the area, including a large Arnold Palmer Cadillac dealership. I also knew the golf fans of the Carolinas were still smarting from—and sore at—Commissioner Deane Beman’s controversial decision to pull the regular PGA Tour’s Kemper Open out of the Queen City and move it to Washington.

People in Charlotte wanted a golf tournament badly, and I decided to be the guy who helped them create it. That same summer, with enthusiastic community support and IMG’s invaluable assistance, we started a tournament we called the
World Seniors’ Invitational at Quail Hollow Country Club. Though I’ve never managed to win my own senior tournament, which has grown tremendously in purse money and is now named for and sponsored by the Home Depot—and is played at Palmer-designed TPC at Piper Glen Golf Club to boot—it still gives me deep pleasure to personally host the event each year.

That’s because, as my own senior playing days continue to dwindle, acting as host gives me an opportunity to remain in touch with old friends and greet the younger bucks of the Senior circuit. I understand, for instance, that as I write this some frisky upstart from St. Louis has won so many Senior Tour events in the past year alone, he’s taken to lobbying to have the Senior Tour officially renamed the “Irwin Tour.”

Well, as much as I admire his style (not to mention his long-iron game), Hale Irwin had better watch his flank carefully, because some younger guys named Watson, Wadkins, and Strange are all about to become senior citizens of professional golf and will probably have something to say about that in the very near future.

Should be fun to watch for years to come.

S
omeone once said that ten men out of one hundred can handle failure. But only one man out of those ten can really handle success.

I don’t remember where I heard this, but over the years I’ve come to believe it’s really true. A little bit of success can be a dangerous thing to some men, and a lot of success, improperly handled, can be a prescription for disaster.

I was fortunate to experience success fairly early in my professional playing career, and though I always thought I had a pretty good head for numbers and handling my own business affairs, in retrospect I can see that one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to me was finding Mark McCormack or his finding me.

The truth is, I’m not entirely sure which way it happened.

According to Mark, the first time he saw me I was warming up on the practice range in the spring of 1950 on a golf course in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Wake Forest was preparing to play a collegiate golf match against the College of William and Mary. I was scheduled to play in the number-two slot behind Bud Worsham, and Mark was supposed to play
that position for William and Mary. For some unknown reason he got bumped to the fifth match for that particular tournament. He claims that was a lucky break because the way I was striking low irons on the practice tee put terror in his heart.

I don’t believe we even spoke to each other that week, or for that matter actually talked to each other for another half-dozen years. The amusing thing is, I’ve seen stories written that tell how Mark and I became fast friends playing against each other in college or forged our friendship when he was a young attorney starting out in Cleveland and I was stationed there completing my Coast Guard commitment. Nice tales, but untrue.

I’m not even certain I remember our second encounter. According to Mark, that took place at the Masters in the spring of 1956 when his friend Bob Toski failed to make it into the Masters field but asked Mark to pass along a special putter to me. Mark was in the U.S. Army at the time, stationed conveniently enough at Camp Gordon right there in Augusta. As Mark tells it, he strolled over to the putting green where I was practicing after the first round and introduced himself, then conveyed Toski’s best wishes and handed me the putter. We had a friendly chat about our college days and a few other things we had in common. He says I introduced him to Winnie, and she remembers that introduction. So it must have happened just like that.

Three years later, after he had graduated from Yale Law School and was working for the prestigious Cleveland law firm of Arter, Hadden, Wycoff, and Van Duzer and I had won my first Masters golf tournament, we met again.

This time the setting was the Tour stop for the Carling Open at Seneca Golf Club in Cleveland. I was playing, and Mark had come out with his bride, Nancy, to watch the action
and say hello again. We had a pleasant conversation, and Mark let it slip that he and Carling’s PR man, Dick Taylor, were knocking around the idea of starting up a small company to represent the business interests of a few top professional golfers, mostly in the form of booking exhibitions. Legendary Boston sports promoter Fred Corcoran had done a lot for the career of Sam Snead and others—not to mention the fledgling PGA Tour itself—but nobody I knew had a personal business manager or “agent” to handle their affairs to the extent Mark was talking about. I remember thinking the idea potentially had real merit. He asked me to think about it, and I promised him I would. That was about as far as things went then.