Men in Green (18 page)

I approached Calvin and asked about Golf Ball. He had his own name for Dolphus Hull: “Hully could read a green,” Calvin said. “He really could. I couldn't, but Hully could.”

You almost never hear a player give that kind of credit to a caddie. The typical touring pro needs to think
he
has the magic. But Calvin wasn't a typical player, and Golf Ball was not a typical caddie. For one thing, Calvin didn't turn pro until he was thirty-one. Before that he sold Florida farmworkers whatever they needed from the back of his car, diamond studs in his front teeth, adding a little uptown-Saturday-night glamour to the proceedings. Calvin refined his swing under the lights of a Fort Lauderdale softball field. He was Hogan's ideal, and he won millions with Golf Ball caddying for him.

We spoke for a few minutes. Calvin said he talked to Golf Ball only occasionally but that Raymond Floyd talked to him often. Raymond would know how to find him.

I reached Raymond by phone the same day. I told him about my Secret Legends list and Golf Ball's place on it. Raymond, like Calvin, seemed happy to talk about him. Raymond Floyd, the man who pulled Ken Venturi's golf ball out of the last hole of the 1964 U.S. Open. Golf Ball was already working for Raymond then, though not at that Open. In summer, in the Northeast, the players were required to take a club caddie. Raymond was sending a regular check to Golf Ball, although not likely made out to that name. Raymond could not have been more unassuming about his loyalty and generosity.

Golf Ball had turned seventy on his last birthday. Raymond said he had given the anniversary the attention it deserved. But when Raymond turned seventy soon after, he didn't receive a call from Golf Ball, let alone a gift or a card. He called and said, “Golf Ball? How come I remember your birthday
every
year and you never remember mine?”

Raymond grew up in North Carolina, in Fayetteville and Fort Bragg, where his father was the pro at the army golf courses. Raymond grew up playing integrated baseball and integrated golf. On tour he had an easy, natural rapport with many black players and caddies. When Raymond got on tour in the early 1960s, nearly all the touring caddies were black, many of them from Augusta, Dallas, Houston, and, like Golf Ball, Jackson. Floyd painted a vivid picture of his caddie as a man who was often in debt, sometimes in jail, intoxicated now and again, and occasionally just
gone
. That is, missing. He also described Golf Ball as a caddie and man who had an immense capacity for saying the right thing in the right way at the right time. Golf Ball had the ability to adjust Raymond's swing or mood with a single comment. That's why Raymond always paid him more than the going rate. When Floyd won his green coat in 1976, Hop Harris caddied for him, in the era when the players were required to use Augusta National caddies. But Floyd won tour events with Golf Ball before that and after that.

“I fired him six times,” Floyd said. “Maria hired him seven.”

Maria was Floyd's late wife. She was a no-nonsense Italian girl from Rocky's neighborhood whose family owned a well-known South Philadelphia watering hole called the Triangle Tavern. She was a force in her husband's professional life, and when she died she was written up lovingly in the Southampton and Palm Beach newspapers. The Floyds had traveled far. Golf Ball didn't just carry the bag. He helped pave the way. “He was the best caddie in the world,” Raymond said.

“Look what Calvin was able to do with very limited experience in tournament golf,” Raymond said. “I give a lot of credit to Golf Ball. For every time he was wrong about what club to pull, I was wrong ten times. He had an extra sense. A perception.”

Raymond had intense relationships with his caddies. Steve Williams worked for him and later won thirteen majors with Tiger Woods. “Steve Williams was the most professional caddie I ever had,” Raymond said. “But Golf Ball was the best.”

Golf Ball would drive Raymond's car between tour stops, and Raymond told me that he lost one of them, a '66 Lincoln. Those were big cars, presumably hard to lose. On at least one occasion, Raymond bailed him out of jail.

“Golf Ball and I were in the heat of competition a lot, and people change in that heat,” Raymond said. “That heat gave Golf Ball clarity.” He described an exchange they had on the eleventh hole of the final round of the 1982 Memorial.

“Golf Ball, how far to lay up?”

“It's 232 hole.”

“Golf Ball, how far to lay up?”

“I'm telling ya, 232 hole.”

“The layup, Golf Ball.”

“Man, you want to win the tournament? Take the damn 3-wood and knock it on the green.”

What Golf Ball told Raymond on the eleventh fairway didn't help him only on that hole. Floyd said it gave him the necessary feeling of aggressiveness—on a Sunday with a crowded leaderboard, on a demanding course, with a fat winner's check hanging in the balance—that carried him all the way to the house.

Raymond won that tournament by two. His check was for sixty-three thousand dollars. Raymond's check to Golf Ball was for about six thousand. He was flush.

Raymond looked up Golf Ball's number. The area code, 601, once covered all of Mississippi. He told me not to call on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. Those were his days for dialysis. A bad fall, Raymond said, had confined him to bed. “He's a ward of the state,” Raymond said. It seemed unfitting. In his prime, Golf Ball was a man at-large if ever there was one.

•  •  •

Mike and I stayed at a stately old hotel in downtown Mobile, courtesy of my lavish supply of Marriott points. As we were checking in, so were several Korean LPGA players. The women's tour had a stop in Mobile that week. Mickey Wright had carried that tour on her back for years. I wondered if those young players knew her name.

The next morning, Mike and I headed north and west to Jackson. It was May and the drive was spectacular, Alabama crossing into Mississippi, fields and creeks and forests untouched by time. Alongside U.S. 49, north of Hattiesburg, I had never seen so many wildflowers. We drove by a sprawling clearing with pale grass, and Mike said, “That's all I'd need.” That would replace his Eagle Trace driving range. Mike's paternal grandfather was a North Carolina sharecropper who could not read or write. He drank and chewed and lived to be 105.

When I'd asked Golf Ball if we could bring anything, he asked for seedless red grapes. The farm stands did not have them. They all had grapes, but not seedless ones. There was some kind of blight, we were told, and the prices had become outrageous. Finally, at a supermarket in Jackson, we found them. I bought two big bunches and worried that I was overdoing it.

•  •  •

“Ball!” Mike said as we entered his room.

“Man,” Dolphus Hull said, “you got heavy.”

The man lying in that second-floor nursing home bed would not be sugarcoating anything.

Ball was as skinny as ever—120 pounds in his sweatsuit—but the jumpiness was gone. There was a calm to him now, and he wasn't scary in the slightest. He was sitting up. He spent most of his life in that bed.

There was no preamble. Ball and Mike picked up right where they left off, sometime around 1992, when Ball's body started to betray him. They both had the gift for observation and recall. Ball knew Mike's road family and Mike knew Ball's.

“I got a trivia question for you, Ball,” Mike said.

Ball was ready.

“Name the three black golfers who won Anheuser-Busch.” That was the event Mike won.

“Calvin, Lee Elder,” Ball said. “Jim Thorpe?”

They were the three most prominent black golfers of the 1980s, along with Jim Dent. I once asked Thorpe about Ball, and he said, “Golf Ball had a better chance of showing up for a seven-thirty time than one-thirty.”

Mike provided Ball with the answer: “Calvin Peete, Lee Elder—and Ronnie Black.”

“Ronnie Black,” Ball said. He started giggling. Ronnie Black is black in name only.

Ball started telling us about his start in golf in Jackson in the 1950s. He caddied and played. Pete Brown was a long-hitting black golfer from Jackson, about seven years older than Ball. Ball was telling us about Pete Brown's win at the 1970 Andy Williams San Diego Open. Ball caddied for Brown that week. I asked why that win didn't get Pete an invitation to the '70 Masters.

“I never could figure that out,” Ball said.

Win-you're-in wasn't the rule at the Masters then, as it became later. Still, Pete Brown could have been invited.

In '75, Lee Elder became the first black player to play in the Masters. In '84, the club allowed the players to bring their own caddies for the first time. Augusta National is not a place where change comes quickly. Ball finally got to see it with his own eyes. The caddies from Augusta had been bragging about it for years.

Ball told Mike and me about his start on tour in 1963. “Eight guys,” Ball said. “Two cars.”

“You just told your parents that you were going to go out and try to caddie on tour,” Mike said.

“I told my mother, ‘They make more money out there than they do here.' She said, ‘Don't forget to send me back some of that money.' ”

He talked about Smiley—black Smiley, not white Smiley—the brothers Swordfish and Catfish, Killer, Bebop, various others. One winter on the West Coast, Ball and his boys gave Arnold Palmer the nickname “Bull,” for the steam that came out of his powerful nose in the early-morning cool. I loved that: Ball called him Bull. Ball told us about recruiting a young caddie called Froggie to the tour. He said, “C'mon, Froggie, gonna learn you how to caddie.” Years later, when the white traveling caddies started to come out, Ball was welcoming. He told a white caddie named Disco, “I'm gonna learn you how to read a green, but I ain't giving you
everything
.”

There was a lot of that in his stories, caddies looking out for one another. Using beautiful, poetic, regional English, he revealed a sort of giving nature. (He could take, too.) Ball's friend Killer (Sam Foy) was the same way. Killer caddied for Hale Irwin for years, won the '79 U.S. Open with him, and ended most sentences with the word
babe
. I will always remember Bill Britton, when I caddied for him in New Orleans, asking Killer about my prospects for finding work in Las Vegas the following week. Killer, who sensibly caddied in knickers on dewy mornings (that is, with his pant bottoms stuffed into his socks), told me about the ninety-nine-cent all-you-can-eat breakfasts in Vegas. There was nothing I could do for Killer. He didn't care. Killer, a black ex-boxer from Houston, was sounding the same note the folkies do during group sings:
all together now
. I thanked him. Killer said, “Okay, babe.”

Maybe this is a weird sort of stereotyping, but from what I have seen, black people often have less and give more. I am remembering now a moment late in Christine's first pregnancy. Her water broke, and she was keeping it together as we made the urgent late-night drive to the hospital. We got to the maternity ward, the double doors opened, and Christine burst into tears. An enormous black woman working the overnight shift spread her arms and said, “Come here, baby.” Christine wept in her massive bosom. It's the quality of knowing exactly what a person needs, particularly when the chips are down. Killer had that gift. Golf Ball had it, at least with Raymond. The immense Herman Mitchell, who caddied for Lee Trevino for years, had it, too. It goes beyond empathy.

In 1987 Davis Love was playing Hilton Head. Herman was working for Davis that week. Davis was shaking as he stood the eighteenth tee on Sunday, trying to win his first event. He was fingering a 1-iron. Herman said, “Ain't nothing but a driver.” With the ball in the air, you could hear Herman say, “That-away to drive it, babe.” Jaime Diaz once told me about visiting Lee Trevino at his home in Dallas, where a guest bedroom was reserved for Herman. Beside the bed, on a nightstand, was a framed childhood picture of Herman. There can be a lot of love between a player and his caddie.

Herman and Ball were good friends. Herman could break par, and Ball played well, too. They played a lot of money matches together on public courses all over the country. Ball told Mike and me how he had twice finished second to Herman in the caddie championship played each year on the Monday after the B. C. Open.

Ball's road life was his life. An old car in need of a new timing belt. A motel room with three guys in it. A caddie-yard card game for more money than he had in his pocket. It was rough-and-tumble and a good time. In those days, a player could use the same caddie for three consecutive weeks but not more. Tour officials were afraid if the caddie-player partnership became too strong it would encourage cheating. Ball and Raymond had a strong partnership. They'd go three, switch off for a week, and come back together. They were both in their early twenties when they started, and Raymond was cashing good checks right away. When the player does well, the caddie does, too.

“Now you were making some money, and some of your buddies weren't doing as good,” Mike said. “How'd you handle that?”

“That wasn't no problem,” Ball said. “I just be like, ‘What you need, man?' I'd give 'em some money to get down the road. They would do the same.”

One day, Raymond told Ball to come by the hotel to get paid. Ball knocked on the door. Raymond opened it wearing nothing but his golf visor. As Ball was telling the story, you could almost smell the perfume from Raymond's guest under the sheets. Ball told Raymond, “Man, you just wanted me to come here so I could see you're getting some pussy.”

Raymond probably hates that story. Over the years, Raymond morphed into one of golf's elder statesmen, and it's almost like his runaround twenties—when he played his ass off, closed bars, flew with Arnold, and shot a bunch of 68s—never happened. Ball is here to tell you: Ray Floyd was once a bachelor.