Men in Green (31 page)

Mike's point is irrefutable. On the PGA Tour, your scores
are
your talent. I once heard a player say, “It's a results-oriented business.” Exactly. But only Randy could know what golf was like for him in Michigan, playing against the best players in the state, and what it was like on tour, playing against the best players in the country. I think there is a mental makeup by which some people can get out of their own way and others cannot.

Randy talked about playing well at the 1973 Tour Qualifying School and how Crenshaw, who won, finished
twenty-two
shots ahead of him over the eight rounds. Crenshaw ended up twelve shots ahead of the guy who took second. Randy finished in a tie for sixth. He told me how nervous he was. His PGA Tour card was on the line, and he often felt like vomiting. His caddie, he said, kept him in the game.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Dolphus Hull,” Randy said.

“Golf Ball?”

Golf Ball.

When Mike and I were with Ball in Jackson, he had brought up Crenshaw's performance at that '73 Q School. In fact, Ball had said in passing that he'd been working for somebody named Randy Watkins. But it wasn't Randy Watkins. It was Randy Erskine!

I told Randy that I had recently seen Golf Ball and that I had his phone number. I don't think either of us could believe how the global village was shrinking right there in front of our morning eggs. Randy called Ball from our breakfast table. I could hear Ball.

“Golf Ball? This is Randy Erskine.”

“Randy Erskine!”

“You used to caddie for me.”

“I know!”

“I haven't spoken to you in over thirty years. How you doing, buddy?”

“Hey, man—how you doin'?”

“Good, good. I'm a club pro in Michigan. I'm going to retire this year.”

They talked. Randy asked Ball if he still played. He remembered him as a good player.

“No, man,” Ball said. “Can't use my legs.”

Randy could not have known.

“You still hanging around with that Barney Thompson?” Ball asked. Barney Thompson played the tour in the seventies and eighties.

“I spoke to Barney just the other day,” Randy said. He was amazed how quickly Ball had remembered his friendship with Barney. “I'm gonna see him in a little bit here.”

“Man, he played golf with a
pea
for a brain,” Ball said.

Randy laughed. Barney was not noted for his course management. “Barney got himself on the senior tour, but just for one year,” Randy said. “How old are you now?”

“Seventy-one,” Ball said.

“Seventy-one? You're all grown up!” Randy said. “I remember back in the day you were put away wet many, many a night.”

You could hear Ball giggle all the way from Jackson.

•  •  •

Randy and I sat at Testa's for hours, comparing notes. Lunch was well under way by the time we were done with breakfast. Randy insisted on paying. I told him how grateful I was for the chance he had given me thirty-five years earlier in Charlotte, when we were both far from home. He seemed to remember our week together with fondness.

“I've always been amazed by one thing,” I said. I couldn't even use first person for this next part. “You've got this college kid caddying for you. You don't know him at all. He doesn't know what he's doing. And you give him the spare bed in your hotel room. What were you thinking?” Had the tables been switched (to use an Arnold phrase), I could not imagine myself doing the same. I wish I could say otherwise.

Randy answered instantly. “You were part of the team!” he said. “Gotta keep the team happy and strong.”

I wish I could express how good that made me feel, to know that for a week in late spring 1979, at the age of nineteen, I was a valued member of Randy Erskine's team.

I have never been able to find it, but I believe one of the golf magazines had a story in the late 1970s under a headline something like
THE NEW BREED OF CADDIES
, in which Neil Oxman (long before he was one of my Secret Legends) was quoted. He was then a law school student and a tour caddie. That story helped show the way for me to Randy Erskine and later to Brad Faxon, Bill Britton, Al Geiberger, Mike Donald, Peter Teravainen, and other noblemen.

Peter is one of a kind. In retirement, he will sometimes hit balls in the lanes created by well-ordered rows of blueberry bushes. Likewise, there will never be another Neil Oxman. Neil, in his life as a political consultant, knows a lot of reporters, and we met sometime after I arrived at the
Inquirer
in 1986. He was dismissive of me at first. He had logged years as a real tour caddie. He paid his way through Villanova (undergraduate) and law school (Duquesne) with money he earned on tour. In law school, he had an almost perfect absentee record, owing to the call of the tour. Since 1972, there has never been a year when he didn't caddie in at least one tour event, and over forty-plus years he has worked about five hundred tournaments, senior and junior events combined.

It embarrasses me when Neil tries to talk to me as a fellow caddie. He knows that I know I was out there on a tourist visa. Neil has a long list of preferred pejoratives, and one of them is
fucking dilettante
. I typed my way out of Neil's basement and am relieved to say that I am now (I think) what Neil calls a
real person
. Classic Neil sentences are often variations on this theme: “Michael, these people in Philadelphia's Sixty-sixth Ward in the Great Northeast aren't fucking dilettantes like your rich friends on the Main Line in their Gucci loafers. These are real people.”

Neil has a range of moods, and I'm sure he brings a boxer's energy and disdain for an opponent to his work at his company, the Campaign Group. On tour, he's a different person. He loves the players, the caddies, the stories, and the action. Polly Crenshaw and Neil came of age at the same time and in the same place, in the all-together-now tour of the seventies. It stamped Neil for life.

It is sometimes said, among the people who discuss such things, that Neil “introduced” Bruce Edwards to Tom Watson, which would make Neil the best matchmaker in the history of caddie/player marriages. Neil should get the credit, but this is how it actually went: In the summer of '73, Neil and Bruce were young caddies traveling the circuit. They were in the parking lot of the Norwood Hills Country Club in St. Louis a few days before the start of the St. Louis Children's Hospital Golf Classic. Neil had work, and Bruce was looking. Watson was walking across the parking lot, bag on his shoulder. Upon seeing Watson, Neil yanked Bruce up from the ground and said, “That's Tom Watson. Why don't you ask him?” Bruce did, and with a few absences Watson and Bruce were together for most of the next thirty years. When Bruce got sick in 2003, Neil stepped in. Bruce died the next year.

Neil and I stayed in the same hotel during the week of the 2009 British Open at Turnberry. On the Saturday night before the Sunday finale—when Tom Watson, at age fifty-nine, had a one-shot third-round lead—we sat in the hotel dining room talking for hours, not a minute of it devoted to what might happen. I knew not to talk about Sunday. I didn't want to add to Neil's anxiety. He had spent years schlepping around courses with some of the most unheralded players in golf history. Now he was in a position to see golf history being made from the best seat in the house. When Julius Boros won the '68 PGA Championship at age forty-eight, he became the oldest player to win a major championship. Watson was six weeks short of
sixty
. He was thirty years past his prime and ahead of everybody. The prospect for something amazing to happen was
right there
. But Neil and I talked about the Phillies, movies, politics, newspapers, mutual friends. Watson's name did not come up. Neither did that of Harry Vardon (the only golfer with more Open wins than Watson). We did not speak of the final round.

Late on Sunday, Watson came to the par-four eighteenth hole needing a four to win. He drove it down the middle and was left with 170 yards to the front edge of the green, with the pin back another twenty yards. He did what he wanted to do. He hit a full, flush 8-iron and it pitched on the front of the green. But the ball hit a hard spot, bounded crazily, and settled just over the green. Links golf, like life itself, is unpredictable.

Watson, siding with caution, used a putter from a slightly fluffy lie. He was left with an eight-footer to win, but his putt, half yippy, never had a chance. He tapped in and dragged his way through the four-hole playoff like a man out of gas.

Anyone who thinks that Neil could have or should have talked Watson into hitting a 9-iron knows nothing about Watson or links golf. In links golf, especially, it's not the club you pull, it's how you decide to hit it. As for a 9-iron, it could have left him way short of the green. There's no way to say. Anyway, Watson makes his own decisions. If his caddie, Alfie Fyles, talked Watson into hitting that fatal 2-iron at the Old Course on the Road Hole on Sunday in 1984, the first time he was trying to win his sixth Open, Watson has never admitted it. Maybe he did, and maybe that was a turning point in his career, I don't know. Watson contended in a dozen or more major championships after the '84 Open but never won. Turnberry was likely the last of his chances (though you never know). It was a beautiful loss, Watson's to Stewart Cink in 2009, as all I-gave-it-my-best losses are.

Arnold Palmer knew why Watson lost. It wasn't because he was fifty-nine and playing on an artificial hip. It wasn't because he had an unlucky bounce on that approach shot to eighteen. No. He didn't win because he had lost the edge.

As best I can tell, this is
the edge
: There's a line deep in your head with
go
on one side of it and
stop
on the other, except you can't see the line, let alone those words. You don't decide on which side of the line you fall. In fact, you don't even know the line is there at all. That's what I had gleaned from Arnold. I can't vouch for this definition. It's like golf on the moon. How many people are qualified to describe that?

With his loss Watson had the opportunity to give to the game what it had already given him. He took full advantage. He gave to Stewart Cink the same present Nicklaus had bestowed upon him thirty-two years earlier, in the same place and circumstance. I am speaking of the warmth with which Watson congratulated Cink, the candor with which Watson talked to reporters, the cooperative way he posed for pictures at the Turnberry hotel that night. It was Watson at his best, and it was more significant than what he did during the U.S. Open at Pebble in '82, when he pitched in from the hay on seventeen on Sunday and beat Jack again, as great as that was. Bruce was right there for that one, just as Neil was at Turnberry twenty-seven years later. For a few real-time hours, Neil was at the center of the sporting universe. In terms of memory, he'll be there forever.

I wrote my original legends list at the Ryder Cup in Medinah in 2012, with Watson on the Living Legends side and Neil batting in the Secret Legends lineup. Two years later, Watson was the U.S. Ryder Cup captain and Neil the unofficial captain of the caddies. The gig did not go well for Watson.

After another American defeat, reports emerged of dissension between some of the American players and Watson. The carping, anonymous and otherwise, was unnecessary and unattractive. The real reason the Americans lost was because the European team had better players who played better golf and better team golf. Same as forever. But the lack of connection between Watson and some of his players surely did not help. I could imagine the disconnect. I have seen Watson be cold and aloof with me and with others. A terrible know-it-all. But there's more to him than that. I am thinking now of the obvious admiration he showed that day at Whitemarsh for his friend Sandy Tatum as Sandy talked about golf and life and his memories of the '36 Olympics in Berlin.

Ted Bishop was the PGA of America official who had recruited Watson for the job. After he returned home from the Ryder Cup—
his
Ryder Cup—he told me how disappointed and upset he was with how it all unfolded. He said he had been commiserating with Watson about it. “And Watson said, ‘You gotta talk to Ox.' And I did. Neil was really the one guy who had perspective on the whole thing.”

Neil understood the Ryder Cup as the players saw it, as the NBC executives saw it, as the reporters saw it, as the PGA of America saw it. He has a profound understanding of conflict, which makes him a natural as an amateur movie critic. It also makes him successful at his day job, where he helps politicians get elected or learn something from defeat for the next time out. Understanding conflict made Neil valuable in the inner-circle cauldron of another acrimonious Ryder Cup. Bishop said Neil cited a list of reasons why that Ryder Cup was over before it began. But to me, Neil's journey to the team room at Gleneagles was the most amazing thing. It started in that parking lot in St. Louis.