Men in Green (25 page)

What luck for Mike to take up golf in the middle of the Arnold Palmer golf boom, when courses were going up in South Florida as fast as drive-through banks. What luck that Mike had access to a par-three course, a nine-hole course, a city-owned course, a public course, sometimes even a private course.

What luck for Mike that he skipped school at fifteen to caddie in the 1970 Coral Springs Open and drew a lanky golfer from Texas named Bill Garrett, who won it. What luck for Mike that Garrett gave the kid on his bag a ridiculous sum, eight hundred dollars, which gave Mike enough money to play in any junior tournament that would have him for the next couple of years. What luck for Mike to come along when he did. We often think that, any of us, looking back in the right mood. But sometimes it's actually true.

Mike grew up with heroes you could touch if you figured out how to get close enough. Julius Boros lived in Fort Lauderdale, near Hollywood. One day he'd be on TV, the next in the grocery store.
Isn't that Julius Boros?
He had a face that belonged on Mount Rushmore. Mike knew people who knew him. He knew Julius's milkman. Mike was watching on the family TV when Boros won the '68 PGA Championship over Arnold Palmer by a shot.

Mike watched all the golf he could at a time when TV executives and advertisers were figuring out that televised golf was a way to deliver the good life to the masses. Golf programming was expanding every year, and there was Chirkinian and his sidekick Chuck Will pulling strings that Mike could not possibly see. The commercials would come on, and Mike would slip outside with a club in hand and wear a path through the coarse grass of his parents' narrow yard. One year he went to Doral, camera in hand, and got snaps of Arnold and Big Jack and the others. Mike is not one to save a lot of things, but those pictures are prized possessions. Yes, he almost got his name on a venerated trophy. But had he won, would his life have been richer? “It's just a sporting event,” he once told me. Anyway, he got himself there. He started on a par-three course with seven clubs and got within a shot of winning a U.S. Open. So much of modern life is more, more, more. Mike is the opposite. He'll tell you that golf has given him everything he has, and he has a lot. Friends, family, financial security, good memories, few regrets. He has everything he needs and then some. He's grateful for what he has and for what golf has given him.

•  •  •

I have always enjoyed playing golf in the fall. The weak light and downed leaves make finding your ball a challenge, but courses in the fall are so
alive
, with tight fairways and fast greens and fewer people, owing to the call of football. Around Halloween each year, I host a little golf tournament called the Shivas Invitational, named for Shivas Irons, the celebrated Scottish golf professional. The event began in 1990, the year Christine and I were married.

I was covering the Oakland-Cincinnati World Series that October, knowing that if it went seven games without an earthquake delay it would conclude on October 24 in Oakland. We were getting married on October 28 on Shelter Island, a dot of land between the forks on the East End of Long Island. When the Reds swept in four I had a few extra days, so a group of friends and I had a small pre-wedding golfing get-together. We've been playing each fall ever since. My
SI
colleague Gary Van Sickle, an excellent golfer, won the stroke-play division of the tournament in nasty weather in a year when Bill Britton and Mike were also playing. Gary didn't milk it, at least not as much as he might have.

The Shivas medalist gets one-year custody of a framed picture of the Royal and Ancient clubhouse. But the prized annual award, presented at dinner, is the Shivas Trophy. The winner of this important piece of sporting hardware emerges in a handicap competition where the strokes are allocated in sealed conditions. In other words, you don't know your handicap, so the general advice is to play hard. Jaime Diaz won the trophy one year. In another year he spoke at dinner about golf's uncommon ability to promote empathy among its participants. He really captured something. Golf will let you share joy and also pain without anyone in your foursome ever having to ask, “So how did that make you feel?”

Michael Murphy, who knows Shivas Irons better than anybody, likes to say golf is yoga for Republicans. You could also say this: Golf is book group for men.

•  •  •

Eventually, I got an insight from Jaime about why Mike had me on verbal lockdown. That day when Mike, Jaime, Neil, and I played at the Cricket Club, more happened than I knew.

Jaime and Mike had been talking all through our first day and into the second. They both like to go deep or not bother. Walking down the fairway of the par-four eighth hole on the second day, Jaime said something to Mike about how relentless I find Mike because of his almost compulsive need to argue, debate, and examine. Jaime was accurate and of course meant no harm. Just the opposite. But he could tell Mike wasn't happy. If that was my shorthand take on Mike, he did not like it.

We got to the ninth, a long par-three, slightly downhill. From 210 yards I tried to hit a soft, fading 3-wood. But I hit it way too hard and pulled the shot, and the ball went left and over the green and into a bush. As we came off the tee, Mike asked what I had been trying to do with the shot. I started to say something about how that Cleveland 3-wood, with its stiff shaft, usually fades for me, but I quit my answer not even halfway through and said, “Yeah, you're right.”

But Mike hadn't even said anything with which I could agree or disagree! And had he said something, it likely would have been correct, or at the least insightful, because Mike
knows
golf and the swing and the mistakes golfers make. You'd be a fool to dismiss what he says about any aspect of the game.

They were like a one-two punch, those brief exchanges on eight and nine.

Then, walking up the fairway on the par-four tenth hole, Jaime said something to Mike about my tendency to hit a lot of pulled shots. He wondered if I had an alignment problem or a stance problem, something like that. Jaime can talk about the technical aspects of the swing all day long. It's his hobby.

“Yeah, you know what?” Mike said to Jaime. “I'm done worrying about Michael's golf. I got my own problems to worry about.”

Then came lunch and the final bit about the shoes he left behind at Rolling Green and his conflicted feelings about whether to see Curtis or not. By the time I picked Mike up at the New Bern Marriott he was barely talking to me at all.

•  •  •

I can offer you no dramatic story about how Mike and I worked things out. Once I understood this sequence of events, I called Mike and we reviewed what had happened on eight, nine, and ten. I apologized for being dismissive of Mike's efforts to help as we came off the ninth tee. As for what Jaime said to Mike on eight, something got lost in translation. A positive attribute got turned into a negative one. That quality, the desire to intensely examine any minute thing, is one I know well. It allows me to make a living. While reporting on a story, I once wrote to a German military affairs office, trying to find out what Bernhard Langer's father, a German soldier, did during World War II. My father helped with translation, and at one point said something like “You don't quit, do you?” Of
course
that quality can be annoying. A normal person wants to quit at some point. It's hard for me, and harder yet for Mike.

“Yeah, I just got fed up,” Mike said. “Fed up and pissed off.”

After that round in Philadelphia, Mike told me, he had made a vow: He would no longer offer unsolicited advice, insights, or observations, not to me, not to anybody else. His new program died on its second day.

We devoted about seven or eight minutes to this subject, cleared the air, and moved on. Maybe it seems like there should be more to it. There's not.

•  •  •

About seven months after Ken Venturi died, in the winter issue of his personal magazine,
Kingdom
, Arnold published a first-person tribute to Ken. It's beautifully written, and he surely got help with it. But its generous spirit is pure Arnold.

Ken became well known to casual golf fans when he joined the television booth in the late 1960s, but he was a force in the game as early as the late 1940s. A student of Byron Nelson and frequent playing partner of Ben Hogan, Ken was a formidable talent whose career was both sparked and unraveled by physical ailments. He first took up golf as a thirteen-year-old in response to his teacher's diagnosis of Ken as a “an incurable stammerer.” He took up the loneliest sport he knew.

His ironman performance in winning the 1964 U.S. Open while battling severe dehydration remains the hallmark by which on-course toughness is measured. But ultimately it was another physical challenge, carpal tunnel syndrome, which forced his early retirement in the late 1960s and encouraged his transition to the broadcast booth.

Ken and I will likely forever be linked by a rules decision invoked while playing in the final round of the 1958 Masters. On the twelfth hole, I hit a 6-iron off the tee and my ball plugged into its own pitch mark on the back fringe of the green. The ground was wet and soft, and a local rule providing relief from an embedded ball was in effect all week. I was leading by a shot, and just to be safe I called over the rules official, the late Arthur Lacey. I proposed that I could lift, clean and drop my ball without penalty to a spot as close as possible to the original position and no nearer the hole (a stance with which Ken agreed), but Lacey disagreed, saying I had to play the embedded ball. I knew I was right, but I wasn't in much of a position to argue. Finally, I said, “I'm going to play two balls and appeal to the tournament committee.” I knew I had that option under Rule 3-3a.

Lacey objected, saying, “No sir, you cannot do that either.” I told him, “Well, that's exactly what I'm doing.” I played the original ball as it lay for a five and then announced that I was about to play a second ball. I dropped to a clean lie and made par. Ken objected, saying that I was required to announce to him that I was going to play two balls before I played the original. The officials on site at the Masters reviewed the case, agreed with me, and I won my first Masters by a shot.

That incident affected our relationship. We both wrote about it in subsequent books, each of us insisting that we were right. I think the whole episode says more about the confusion built into the
Rules of Golf
than it does about me or Ken. I regret that the incident affected our relationship. Ken was a remarkable human being, and a warm and true friend to thousands of people in and out of the game.

How big-hearted. I know Ken would have disputed the part where Arnold says he announced his intention to play two balls before he played his first. Regardless, what Arnold did on that green in '58 was fine by the rules of the time. What Ken said and wrote about Arnold and what he did on that green was not. It was damning, misguided, mean-spirited. It was wrong in every way.

Ken confused Arnold. He thought they had been friends.
Why is he trying to discredit me like this?
But that was as far as he would go, from what I knew. Ken died, and nothing changed. Arnold had no interest in getting in last licks. He applied the rule book's spirit-of-the-game preamble, with its emphasis on courtesy, to life itself.

It was the right address. I had written a letter to a Conni Venturi in Napa, California, and the Conni Venturi I was looking for wrote back, by e-mail. That led to a series of phone conversations, followed by a trip to Napa to see her. By then Conni had been living for years in a hamlet of permanent homes made from trailers. Its streets were narrow and the yards were tiny. Dense living. If your neighbor had a holiday guest with a hacking cough, you'd know it. I have avoided the term
trailer park
here as it seems to carry heavy baggage and I don't want you to get the wrong idea. But you likely already have the right idea in one regard: Being the wife of Ken Venturi from 1954 to 1970 and the mother of his two sons did not provide Conni with anything like financial stability.

Conni told me about the fights she and Ken had as they were dividing their possessions. She said that Ken sold their two-seat Shelby Cobra for a song before the divorce was settled, and then bought it back as soon as the papers were signed. She said Ken's divorce lawyer collected a diamond pendant right off her neck, a piece of jewelry Ken had given her to mark his win in the '64 Open. Conni said Ken curried favor with the judge presiding over the case by giving him golf lessons. For years, Ken told people that he had been awarded full custody of their two sons, Matt and Tim. That was not true, Conni said. What was true, she said, was that the older son, Matt, chose to live with his father. The divorce tore the family apart. Conni spent her life trying to recover from it.

In our first conversation, I was struck by Conni's nasally, husky, distinctive voice, oddly similar to Carol Channing's. It so happens that in that first phone interview, I asked Conni about the night, shortly after Ken's U.S. Open win, when she and Ken went to see
Hello, Dolly!
on Broadway. In his telling, Carol Channing changed the famous lyric of its most famous number to “Hello,
Kenny
. Well hello,
Kenny
! It's so nice to have you back where you belong.”