Men in Green (16 page)

“They wouldn't let my pal Harvie Ward talk to me when I reached the seventeenth. A tournament official stopped him, said he might be accused of helping me if he made the friendly gesture.

“They took care of Mr. Lowery, too, sent him to referee the Byron Nelson–Ben Hogan twosome so he couldn't be close to me.

“They also switched the pairings. In the first round I was paired with Billy Joe Patton, the second Jimmy Demaret, the third Jackie Burke. And I was supposed to go out with Byron Nelson in the fourth and final round. But, oh, no, they switched and put me in with Sam Snead, instead.

“They were afraid that Nelson might give me some help. They knew of our long friendship and that he had helped me build my game.

“Snead hardly said a word to me all the way around. That's OK. He can't be accused of helping me. But have you noticed that the pictures prove that Mike Souchak was helping Jackie Burke all the way around the course?

“All I heard back there was it would be great for an amateur to win the Masters for once. Well, if they wanted an amateur to win all they had to do was let my original pairing with Nelson stand and send us out at 12 o'clock noon, instead of 2:06
P.M.

“I would have won by five strokes if that had happened.

“They started me on the first day at 9
A.M.
I took the lead with my 66. So they started me after 2
P.M.
, when the wind had dried the greens to lightning fast texture on each of the following three days.

“Give me a decent starting time and I would have been OK.

“It's a pro league.

“Turn pro? Hell, no, I'll never turn pro.”

It is unlikely that Harry Hayward recorded that session; the quotes don't read as if they're verbatim. (Many of the quotes in this book are not verbatim, either.) The quotes in the stories by Hayward's competitors are not identical. But how is he going to make up all
that
? Or really,
any
of it? With the other reporters there? And why would he? He was a guy who obviously cared about his beat. He was his paper's main golf writer, not the off-season football writer. He knew he would be covering Ken for years to come. He would have no reason to want to bury him.

Maybe I'm showing my prejudice here, but I have to believe that what Hayward wrote is very close to what Venturi said and even closer to what Venturi meant.

Ken spent the next half century saying he was misquoted, that his words were twisted and taken out of context, that he would never forgive Harry Hayward, even though the man was dead.

Taken out of context? Reading Hayward's story, and the others, the context is obvious: Young, annoyed amateur golfer comes home after shooting an 80 that costs him the Masters, sees a bunch of familiar faces at the airport, and spouts off. I feel duty-bound, as your tour guide, to offer an opinion here: I think Ken was blaming the wrong guy for his troubles. And it made me wonder about other things. Or, more accurately, wonder more.

I sent another e-mail to David Fay, my retired friend who ran the USGA, asking if we could talk about the Palmer-Venturi rules dispute from 1958.

After that, I settled in with Google and tried to find Conni Venturi. I clicked here and there, not knowing if she was dead or alive. A Conni MacLean Venturi of Napa, California, had written a recent letter to the editor of the
Napa Valley Register
to praise the local theater scene. Of one local actor, she wrote, “I think he could go to Hollywood and light up that mecca.” That had to be her: Conni, no
e
. A phone number was proving elusive. I had a possible address. Her former husband's Hall of Fame induction was coming up. I wondered what that meant to her, if anything at all.

Every sport loves its Hall of Fame inductions, along with its various testimonial dinners and trophy presentations and the like. The more Hallmarky, the better. Golf gets particular pleasure from any moment where a guy can get in front of a microphone and talk about the courage another man mustered while standing over a double-breaking downhill ten-footer. No other sport could generate so many press releases that use the word
ceremony
. You can try to fight or mock these events, but in the end the culture will overwhelm you, and then the question is: Are you in or are you out? On that basis, I go to the Golf Writers Association of America dinner every year, on the Wednesday of Masters week. It's a staple of the golf calendar. There is a bunch of them.

The best of these annual rites in golf is the Sunday-night Green Jacket Ceremony in Butler Cabin, at the conclusion of the Masters, Jim Nantz of CBS presiding. Jim does similar events in other sports and always adds a certain solemnity and gravitas. That's because he is missing the gene for sarcasm and cynicism. He makes those Butler Cabin sessions feel like papal inaugurations.

Over the years, glimpsing the inside of the great cottage became a Holy Grail for a small group of us, and one year my
SI
colleague Alan Shipnuck did it. He slipped into Butler Cabin on a Sunday night while Bubba Watson and family, celebrating a second Masters victory, were in it. When Alan was spotted by a club official, he made a beeline for the loo and turned it into a hideout. For the crime of overzealous reporting, Alan was banned by the club for the next year's tournament. Was his act
so
outrageous? Yes, but I admire it anyhow. Another Sunday-night tradition at Augusta has the new winner attending a members' dinner in the clubhouse. I fully expect Alan to show up some year in a waiter's jacket.

The looming World Golf Hall of Fame induction, where Fred Couples and Ken Venturi would get enshrined, promised to be a particularly important night for Nantz, as he had been tapped to make introductory remarks for both of them. Ken was his CBS tower-mate and golfing mentor, and Fred was his University of Houston roommate. One man introducing two inductees: In the history of the World Golf Hall of Fame that had never happened before!

About a month before the induction date, I went to see Nantz in Hilton Head, where he was renting a house when the tour was there. Jim had agreed to write a first-person piece for
SI
about Ken, and I was going to help with it.

Jim greeted me wearing blue jeans and a dress shirt. He had been doing waist-up tapings for the induction ceremony. He asked about the lag time between finishing the
SI
piece and its publication. I told him what I knew. Jim said slowly, “Kenny's very ill. Right now, whether he can make it to the ceremony or not, it's touch and go.”

Life will really throw curves, won't it? Ken had waited for decades to be elected to the Hall of Fame, but a spinal cord infection had shown up seemingly overnight and he could not shake it. Jim said the PGA Tour would make its private jet available to Ken if that was what he needed to get to his date with destiny.

He opened up a bottle of wine, one from his own label. He had not stamped his line of wines with his own surname, as celebrity vintners typically do, but dubbed it The Calling. “Have you unlocked yours?” asks the company motto.

I've helped many people write first-person pieces over the years, but I have never worked with anybody who paid closer attention to what he was writing. There was one rewrite after another. In the end, his piece took the form of a letter to Ken. It was tinged with good-bye.

•  •  •

The World Golf Hall of Fame is the centerpiece of the World Golf Village, located off I-95 in northern Florida. The hall is about thirty miles south of Jacksonville's downtown high-rises and surrounded by a housing development and cart-only golf courses. There's also a Murray Bros. Caddyshack restaurant and a Renaissance hotel. The induction ceremonies are held in the hotel's Legends Ballroom. One year Peter Alliss, the English golfer and broadcaster, started and finished by thanking his parents, followed by a quick nod to a Mrs. Weymouth, a boyhood teacher who said in a report, “I fear for his future.” By way of farewell, Peter raised his middle finger high in the air in salute to Mrs. Weymouth and walked off to a standing ovation.

The day before Ken's induction, there was an afternoon discussion group amid the new class of inductees, with one notable exception. Ken was in a hospital in Palm Springs. He would not be attending his own induction. What a bummer for him and his family.

His absence left three living inductees in the house: Fred, Colin Montgomerie, and Ken Schofield, the retired executive director of the European Tour. I had been invited to moderate that warm-up-act discussion group. The inductees waited in a back room, and when showtime came I followed the honorees into a ballroom with maybe two hundred friends and family members, plus Hall of Fame employees and volunteers. The three Hall of Famers and I were on a stage, and right there in the first row, in loafers with no socks, was Ben Wright, the old CBS golf commentator. The man Chuck Will called Bentley. I hadn't seen him in the flesh in years and years.

I opened the session by telling blips of stories about the three inductees. For Fred, I stole one of Mike's stories, going back to 1982, Fred's second year on Tour.

Fred and Mike were driving from the Westchester Classic, in suburban New York, to the Buick Classic, in Flint, Michigan. They were heading west across Ohio on I-80 and pulled in to a motel for the night. A sign in the parking lot posted room prices as a filling station does for gas by the gallon: $32 for a single, $36 for a double.

“Pull 'round back,” Fred said. “Tell 'em you're a single.”

Mike pulled around to the back. Fred hid in the car. Mike checked in as a single, even though there would be two guys in the one room. The move saved Mike and Fred two dollars each.

Fred nodded sheepishly and said, “It's true.”

He had signed on for a couple of days of this-is-your-life. Not his kind of thing—he despises attention—but he was being a good sport about it.

Every inductee at the Hall of Fame has a locker. In the locker reserved for the writer Dan Jenkins are an electric typewriter and copies of his books. Arnold's is stuffed with golf clubs, shoes, a bottle of wine, sport coats—enough stuff for a yard sale. Hale Irwin's has his first set of clubs. Mickey Wright's locker is empty except for a copy of her book,
Play Golf the Wright Way
.

Months before the event, two Hall of Fame curators had been assigned to go to Fred's house on a memorabilia scavenger hunt. They went to Fred's with low expectations, and understandably so. Fred had put them off for months, and nothing in his personality suggested he was a saver. On the day of their visit, Fred conveniently arranged to have an all-day dental appointment. He turned the matter over, as he has various other personal matters in his life, to his agent, Lynn Roach.

But when Roach let the Hall of Fame men in, they were stunned. Fred had stuff that evidently had survived his many moves. He had saved a circa-1979 bright red University of Houston golf shirt with a collar so big it looked like the fins of a skate fish. A classic. You could imagine Fred wearing it well.

•  •  •

I had caddied in his groups and had seen him in press conferences but had never been around Fred very much. Just here and there. I would say I got one real glimpse of him. On the Sunday night of the 1999 PGA Championship, after Woods won at Medinah, I was flying from O'Hare to LAX. I was frequent-flyered to first class and happened to be sitting beside Fred (we each had an aisle seat in the same row). I was going to visit Christine's family in suburban Los Angeles. Fred was living near Santa Barbara at the time. We chatted. An hour or so into the flight, Fred said, “Could you wake me up in like an hour? I'm supposed to call Crenshaw.”

He needed to make a call to the U.S. Ryder Cup captain to find out if he had been picked for that year's Ryder Cup team. Ben Crenshaw would be announcing his two picks the following morning. Fred had been on the previous five teams.

In that period, if there'd been something in his public life known to be important to him, it would have been Ryder Cup golf. Fred loved any sport with a roster, and his Ryder Cup experiences allowed him to be on a team, in a uniform, with guys on his side. For some players, it is a welcome break from the solitary nature of tournament golf. It can remind a guy of playing in college, when golf was fun.

Fred woke up from his nap without any help and released the whitish plastic rectangular phone from the seat back in front of him. I went to the head to give him space.

Fred is Italian on his father's side—he'd be Fred Coppola, had there never been a name change—and his skin is dark, especially by the Sunday night of a tournament week. But when I came back, Fred's complexion resembled skimmed milk.

“You got bad news,” I said.

Fred made a solemn nod. Ben had chosen somebody else. You could see Fred's surprise and hurt and how much he cared.

•  •  •

The induction ceremony was held on a Monday night in the Legends Ballroom. Dan Hicks of NBC Sports introduced Jim Nantz of CBS Sports, and Nantz talked about the evening's absent star, Mr. Kenneth Paul Venturi, “son of Fred and Ethyl.” Nantz spoke in fully formed sentences and without notes. He said, “Audiences considered Ken their trusted friend.” If you knew Ken only from his work on TV, and that was how millions knew him, he really was like a friend. For thirty-five years, he was always there.