Men in Green (12 page)

Back when drivers were made of persimmon, you could feel your most solid shots. On the best ones, you felt nothing. And you knew. With the modern titanium driver, you can miss the sweet spot by a half inch and be blissfully unaware. My ball was still rising when Mike broke the silence: “Michael! That's
beautiful
.” There may have been a small measure of surprise in his tone.

We marched out. Golf is a simple game, really. You hit a little ball, chase after it, advance it toward and finally into a distant hole using an odd set of tools, pick it out, move on. Our spectators that morning were deer so tame they seemed more like backyard pets. Mike and I got to the fifteenth tee, an itty-bitty par-three, and stood by a rail fence that keeps you from falling down a cliff and into the ocean.

“Come on in here; I know it's hard for you,” Mike said as he put his arm around my shoulder as posing golfers playing bucket-list rounds have done for a hundred years.

I can't stand it when people have more insight into me than I have into myself.

I put my arm around Mike, and our caddie snapped a keeper.

•  •  •

The morning after our Cypress game, Mike and I said thank you in person to the man who had set it up, Sandy Tatum, a lion of the San Francisco bar, a thoroughly erect man in his early nineties who still played golf and paid club dues. Sandy is the golfiest person I know, but as Mike and I settled into his sleek, modern, book-lined law office in Palo Alto, I was surprised to see that it held very few nods to his avocation.

Like Venturi, Sandy was one of the celebrated figures of San Francisco golf and, nationally, a symbol of establishment amateurism, a breed that is close to extinct. He won the NCAA individual golf title while at Stanford in 1942 and served the USGA for thirty-six years before becoming its president. In the decades after his presidency he had been a USGA adviser and counselor. For the past several decades he has been one of the game's grand old men.

In 1966 he was a middle-aged member at Olympic, in San Francisco, when the U.S. Open was played there. He brought his family to the opening round. The Tatums were an eightsome that morning: Sandy, with his noble nose and patrician manner; Barbara, his spirited and lovely wife; and their six children. Yes, the Tatums were practicing Catholics then. Over time, Sandy gave up the practicing part.

“We mobilized the children, but there were the expected delays, and we arrived as Hogan was teeing off the second hole,” Sandy told us. There was a High Mass formality to his speech. “He was playing with Ken Venturi.”

Mike and I looked at each other. With no prompting of any sort, Tatum was laying a track right on top of one of Ken's greatest hits: Venturi playing with Hogan at Olympic in '66. I was eager to hear how they would match.

“Hogan's tee shot on two practically landed where we were standing, on the left side of the fairway. He lines up that second shot, takes a final drag from his cigarette, and throws down the butt. Barbara picks it up, and later we tacked that cigarette butt on a bulletin board in our kitchen, where it remained for years until it fell apart.

“Hogan proceeded to hit a most magnificent iron shot to the second green, and we followed him to it. He was approximately twelve feet from the hole. Hogan stood over that putt for quite a considerable time and then he walked away from it. He conferred with Venturi. What they said I could not hear, but later Venturi shared with me their interaction. Hogan had told him that he could not bring the putter head back, to which Venturi said, ‘Ben, nobody gives a shit!' ”

Tatum laughed his throaty laugh, a laugh that sometimes ends in a worrisome cough. He had told the story just as Venturi had told the story. As the TV detectives say, it
checked out
.

Tatum had mixed feelings about Venturi. He described how much he loved Venturi's swing, which was almost immodest in its beauty. Some golf swings draw looks just as surely as some sweaters do.

“He had that childhood stammer, and it was terribly difficult,” Tatum said. “It left a hole in his personality, made him very inward. It impaired his socialization as a young man because communication was such an ordeal for him. The solitary nature of golf was his salvation, but it also impeded his growth. There's always been a quality of self-absorption with Ken, no question. But he has also, as a grown man, plugged that hole, quite effectively and admirably. The '64 Open was one of the great moments in the game, to win like that, after his game had nearly deserted him. And then the second career at CBS? Given what he had to overcome, it was nothing less than astonishing.”

What a powerful phrase,
given what he had to overcome
. Sandy's speech was often rich in meaning. It's hard to imagine any other ninety-something man analyzing another old man's life with such insight and empathy.

Harding Park, the bucolic San Francisco public course that Ken had grown up playing, was one of Sandy's hangouts, too. The Harding clubhouse, where Venturi's parents worked behind the pro shop counter, had morphed into the Frank “Sandy” Tatum Clubhouse. In the early 2000s, Sandy oversaw the restoration of the course to its circa-1954 glory.

Sandy was already a veteran of marriage, fatherhood, and the law when Venturi played in that famous four-ball match at Cypress Point in '56. Tatum knew all four players and the two men, George Coleman and Eddie Lowery, who had set it up. He knew Sam Snead, Bobby Jones. Tom Watson. He knew Tiger Woods, his fellow Stanford Cardinal, although that relationship, to the degree that there was one, started to deteriorate after Tatum urged Woods to stay at Stanford and graduate before turning pro. (Woods quit school after two years.) Between what Sandy saw firsthand and what he gleaned from Bobby Jones and Jones's contemporaries, Sandy could account for nearly the entire 125-year history of American golf.

Sandy set up the course for the USGA at the 1974 U.S. Open, the first one Hale Irwin won. That tournament became known as the “Massacre at Winged Foot.” Palmer didn't even put '74 on his could-have-won-it list, but had he shot a final-round 70, even par, he would have finished in a tie for first. His closing 76 dropped him all the way to fifth. Usually, if you start Sunday in contention and shoot 76, you will finish in oblivion. The joke was that caddies looking for balls in the rough went missing themselves. The greens were dying of thirst.

There were columnists and players who thought that the USGA had created such misanthropic conditions in response to the final-round 63 Johnny Miller had shot the previous year in the Open at Oakmont, one of the hardest courses in the world. That sounds like human nature, but Sandy told us it was not the case. To paraphrase the Hebrew National hot dog ads that were popular then, Sandy was answering to a higher authority. That is, par.

Sandy was asked during that '74 Open if he and his USGA committeemen were trying to humiliate the best golfers in the world.

“No,” Sandy said. “We're trying to identify them.”

They succeeded. Among the top-ten finishers that year were Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Tom Kite, Lou Graham, and Hale Irwin, who won with a score of seven over par. Some gang.

In 1979 Irwin won his second U.S. Open and Tatum was presiding over it as USGA president. In the opening round that year at Inverness, in Toledo, one of the pros, Lon Hinkle, decided to play the par-five eighth hole by hitting a 1-iron into the seventeenth fairway and a 2-iron second shot to the eighth green from there. He two-putted for an easy birdie.

Tatum admired the ingenuity but not the bastardization of a true unreachable-in-two par-five, to say nothing of the resulting disruptions to play on the seventeenth. Early Friday morning, Tatum oversaw the planting of a giant spruce in an attempt to stop Hinkle from taking his shortcut.

“The players complained,” Sandy said. “ ‘You're changing the course, you're changing the course!' I said, ‘We're rectifying a problem.' ”

Tatum spent that Friday on the eighth tee to quash any possible revolt. He watched as Hinkle teed his ball on a scorecard pencil and launched a shot over what was already being called the Hinkle Tree. It was such a delicious little contretemps and an insight into the mind-set of the pro. Whatever the course will yield, the pro wants it to yield more. The players often have a love-hate relationship with courses and their designers, and also the inept, ignorant bureaucrats—you've already seen P. J. Boatwright and Cliff Roberts and now Sandy Tatum in action—who attempt to administer and regulate play. Somehow Tatum rose above this lowly status to become an admired figure in the game.

Frank D. Tatum, Jr., wasn't really a blueblood, not in the Boston Brahmin sense of the word. Sandy grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in the Los Angeles of
Chinatown
. He went to public school, and his father was a real estate broker. But there's something about a USGA affiliation. It imposes formality on a person. Maybe it's the blazer.

One of Sandy's brothers, an actor who worked under the name Warde Donovan, was married for a time to Phyllis Diller. (No, he was not Fang, the ineffectual manager-husband who was a gag in her act.) Tatum had his own brushes with Hollywood. He told us how as a teenager he saw Howard Hughes and Katharine Hepburn playing furtive golf at the Wilshire Country Club in Los Angeles, where his father was a member. Those sightings gave Sandy a secret bond with the great screen beauty. He never forgot her red lipstick. It was more than he could stand.

Sandy fell just as hard for golf. As a boy he would bike to Wilshire after school with his clubs on his back. When he played two balls (with hickory-shafted clubs), one ball would represent Bobby Jones and the other Walter Hagen. The great amateur and the great professional. He loved their dress, their manners, their play. (He saw them in newsreels at his local movie house.) Then, in 1931, Bobby Jones played an informal exhibition match at Wilshire with two pros and Charlie Seaver, a noted amateur. (His son Tom enjoyed a career in sports, too.) Bobby Jones in person was overwhelming to young Sandy. Seeing Jones that day sent him down a path he followed for the rest of his life.

In the early 1970s, Tatum was visiting Augusta National when a subtle conversation began to unfold amid a small group of well-placed members. Tatum knew where it was going: He was rising in the USGA hierarchy and he was a good golfer with an attractive wife. He was deemed club material, and the men were gauging his interest in joining. Tatum demurred. He offered the most irrefutable of excuses: He couldn't afford it, with six children to feed and clothe and educate. Plus the club was far from home. Everything he said was true. But it wasn't the whole truth.

Sandy knew about the intraclub power struggle at Augusta National during the final years of Bobby Jones's life. Bobby Jones wanted his son, Bob Jones III, to succeed him as club president. Cliff Roberts, the club's chairman, was opposed. With Jones physically incapacitated by his spinal disease, though mentally unimpaired, Roberts took over the reins at Augusta National. He somehow rendered Jones powerless at the club he had cofounded. That was Sandy's sense of it. Jones was his hero, and thinking about his final years left Sandy feeling queasy. Jones died in December 1971. Bob Jones III, his namesake son, died two years later at forty-seven. Roberts was not invited to either funeral, which Sandy described as the “ultimate expression” of how the Jones family viewed Clifford Roberts.

“I saw how Roberts treated Jones and his son and I found it troubling,” Tatum said. “It was singularly unattractive, the way Roberts managed the club. I knew I would never want to be a member of a club over which Roberts was presiding.”

In Sandy's Mount Rushmore of golf, he has busts of Jones, Hogan, Palmer, and Nicklaus. When I asked Sandy about Arnold, he said, “What Palmer conveyed to me, and doubtless to millions of others, was that there was more to life than being the greatest golfer of all time.”

Palmer was not the greatest golfer of all time, even though he looked like he might be when he won all seven of his major championships in quick succession between 1958 and 1964. But he had the longest, most successful afterlife in the history of sports. Tatum offered an insight into how that happened. “Palmer had a sexual charisma that was really quite remarkable, and I say that looking at him from a masculine, heterosexual point of view. But boy was it ever impressive. And the affection that women had for him was nothing less than astonishing.

“Many years ago, a friend of mine won a two-week trip with Palmer and two others as part of some sort of contest. It was a major advertising campaign underwritten by one of Arnold's sponsors. The trip was to result in a promotional film of some kind. They went to Asia and Australia. They had a great time. When my friend returned, he remarked that it was just incredible how the men, wherever Palmer went, were drawn to him, and how the women
swooned
in his presence. Quite attractive women, I might add.”

•  •  •

In 2012, when the U.S. Open was being held at Olympic, Sandy was asked to write a piece for the USGA program. He analyzed an imaginary field for the 2045 U.S. Open. He predicted that half of the 156 players would be black, thirty players would be from China, and twenty would be from India. In his crystal ball he saw twenty female players competing, maybe a half-dozen openly gay players, and one or two transgender players. The USGA killed the piece.

I once said to Sandy, “Wasn't I lucky to come of golf age in the seventies?”

You know the drill: Watson, Nicklaus, and Trevino at the height of their powers; Palmer hanging on; Curtis and Crenshaw and Seve rising. The plaid bell-bottoms giving way to Sansabelt. The tour wives in their crazy hats and headbands. Some guy in a Budweiser T-shirt yelling
freeee-BIRD
while a long putt rolled on, hell-bound for the hole. That decade was Tatum's decade, too. He was at the epicenter of the game then.