Men in Green (9 page)

The next day Ken flew home to San Francisco, and that was when his life changed forever. At the airport, he was greeted by his parents, Conni, and a group of San Francisco newspapermen. Among them was a man named Harry Hayward, the golf writer for the
San Francisco Examiner
.

Ken came home on a Monday, and the writers wrote him up for the Tuesday papers. Each reporter twisted what he said, but the worst offender by far was Harry Hayward. That was Ken's take on it. Hayward had Venturi complaining about how Snead treated him as a playing partner and about his tee time. In Hayward's account, Ken showed no gratitude to the club. He was dismissive of the pros and disrespectful toward Jones and Roberts. Hayward had Venturi claiming that the club would not allow Eddie Lowery anywhere near Ken during the fourth round, when Ken could have used some moral support. It was a hatchet job. They all were, but Harry Hayward's was the worst. Ken despised the man.

After the stories came out, Ken's patron, Eddie Lowery, trying to make things better, made things worse by sending via telegram and over Venturi's name an apology to Roberts and Jones for his remarks, with copies to the newspapers. Damage control. “I never saw that letter,” Venturi said.

A letter that had Ken Venturi apologizing for comments he did not make with an apology that was not his.

The high status he had enjoyed that Saturday night in Augusta was vanishing. His dream of living the life of the gentleman amateur, in the tradition of Bob Jones of Atlanta and Chick Evans of Chicago and Francis Ouimet of Boston (for whom Lowery caddied in the 1913 U.S. Open) died that week. Venturi turned pro before the year was out.

Ken finished tenth on the 1957 money list as a rookie. He won five times on tour before the '58 Masters. But Ken was far more focused on what his life would have been had he won the '56 Masters as an amateur—or the feelings of redemption, over Harry Hayward and various others, that he would have enjoyed had he won the '58 Masters as a pro. Or how, had he won in '60, he could have had the last laugh over Palmer and Cliff Roberts and various others for Palmer's favorable ruling. But Venturi didn't win at Augusta in April 1960. It was Palmer who did, by a shot.

It was Palmer who appeared on the cover of
Time
the following month. It was Palmer who had an intimate friendship with Eisenhower through the sixties. It was Palmer who reinvented the British Open, Palmer who piloted himself around the world in his private jet, Palmer who had a line of clothes named for him, Palmer who appeared repeatedly on the
Tonight Show
, Palmer who was the grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses parade.

Only Ken could really understood the scope of the wrong Palmer had committed on that twelfth hole in 1958. The public could not be bothered with it. Not in 1958, when it happened. Not in 2004, when his book came out. Not ever.
Some weird rules thing from a hundred years ago—who cares?

Ken and Arnold had arrived in Augusta for the '58 Masters with nearly equal status. But by that Sunday night, Arnold had become golf's leading man, while Ken had been reduced to supporting player.

Over a half century later, as Mike and I sat in the back of Castelli's with Ken and his wife, nothing had really changed. There was no way Ken could let go of Harry Hayward or Arnold or that favorable ruling. Ken once told me, “Harry Hayward's long dead, but I still don't forgive him.” Forgive and forget was not in Ken's DNA.

The check came, and there was no fight over it. It had been a working dinner, at my behest. But it didn't feel like work. It felt like a journey into a man's head. The dinner group congratulated itself for going four hours without looking at a cell phone. Well, not Ken—that was not even an issue for him—but the rest of us. Ken buttoned his blazer and headed out to the valet.

Arnold and Ken on the twelfth green of the Sunday round of the '58 Masters: What staying power that whole thing had. At least it did for Ken. Leaving the restaurant, I didn't know if the ancient dispute said more about Venturi or about Palmer. No matter: It was serious.

All these rules disputes are. Reputations are on the line, on both sides of the accusation. Consider the case of Mark McCumber. At the 1978 Milwaukee Open, playing the second PGA Tour event of his career, McCumber whiffed in the woods on the tenth hole of his Friday round and didn't count it, according to a caddie who was there that week. McCumber made the cut by a shot, but his caddie quit on him before the start of the third round. A whiff is a tricky matter because a player can always say he decided, at some point during the downswing, that he no longer intended to hit the ball. Under the rules, that is not a swing. By custom, the player's word is accepted unless the evidence against him is overwhelming. Still, that '78 event followed McCumber for his entire career. F. Scott Fitzgerald would understand.

Whenever golf is played for keeps, the rule book sees all. It directs all the action. That was true long before Bobby Jones ever played, and it will remain true long after Tiger Woods has holed his final putt.

Every legend on my list, even if he or she has never read the
Rules of Golf
, understands the wisdom of this passage from the first page:

Golf is played, for the most part, without the supervision of a referee or umpire. The game relies on the integrity of the individual to show consideration for other players and to abide by the rules. All players should conduct themselves in a disciplined manner, demonstrating courtesy and sportsmanship at all times, irrespective of how competitive they may be. This is the spirit of the game of golf.

In any system of belief, an unshakable faith can be instilled at a tender age. There are surely people who accept the importance of golf's rules as an act of blind faith. But it is much more common and much more powerful to find religion on one's own.

In August 1972 Mike played in the fifteen-and-sixteen-year-old division of the Crutchfield Invitational, a junior event in Sebring, Florida. Mike won. He was seventeen. He won his age division and every age division. Had he been honest about his age and played as a seventeen-year-old, another kid could have had the pleasure of being named the fifteen-and-sixteen-year-old champ. Over time, that tournament became a do-the-right-thing wake-up call for Mike. His career has had various moments when he called penalties on himself that only he could see. Don't give him a medal. All he was doing was playing golf by the rules.

In the spring of 1976, 1977, and 1978, I was on my high school golf team at Patchogue-Medford High School on Long Island. (I am still embarrassed about voting for myself for captain.) Our season began in late March, and the courses were raw and unkempt. We played under a local rule by which we were allowed to lift, smooth, and place our balls in sand traps. The purpose of this rule was to get relief from animal dung, hoof prints, rocks, sticks, and the general detritus of winter. One raw day, I was playing in a nine-hole match at Timber Point, a beautiful old bay-front public course. On the eighth hole of a close nine-hole match, I was in a greenside trap. I lifted, smoothed with my foot, and placed. However, I placed my ball not in the smooth pathway I had created but on a little ledge just
above
the path. In other words, I had teed my ball up to make my bunker shot easier. I cheated. Man, is that hard to write.

In 1986, when I was caddying for Mike at the Colonial in Fort Worth, he was grinding it out in the second round, trying to make the cut. On the par-three eighth hole, Mike hit his tee shot in a greenside bunker. I got to the bunker ahead of him and saw there was a rake in it, some distance in front of Mike's ball but in his line of sight. On tour, rakes are typically left outside bunkers. I picked up the rake. The sand was soft and the rake left an indentation. I smoothed it out with the rake.

Mike started yelling, “You're testing, you're testing!” His face was red. One of his caddie-yard nicknames was Mad Dog.

The caddie, by the rules, is an extension of his player. A player cannot “test” the surface from which he is about to play. Raking a bunker before playing a shot was testing. Mike called for a rules official. I went into a hole.

Mike Shea, a PGA Tour rules official and a former player, arrived by cart. Mike told Shea exactly what I had done. Shea had a reputation for being a stickler, for going out of his way to call penalties on players. But without hesitating, he said there was no problem with my action. I didn't know why, and Mike didn't, either, but he was in the clear.

Shea's ruling gnawed at me for decades: Was it fair? Had Mike Shea, for reasons I could not fathom, given us a break? That prospect was troubling. The rules cannot allow for a break. Mike made the cut on the number. It was a quiet weekend all the way around.

Years later, I asked David Fay, by then the retired executive director of the USGA, about the ruling Shea had given Mike. When he was running the USGA, David spent many hours during U.S. Opens sitting in the NBC broadcast booth, ready to answer any rules question that might arise. David's presence, sitting in those elevated green plywood boxes with Johnny Miller and Dan Hicks, had the effect of putting a human face on the USGA, not an easy thing to accomplish. David's presence, even if it was subliminal, helped make the rules a central character in the story unfolding below, as they must be.

David knows golf's rules like you know the route home. His first instinctive answer was that Mike should have received a two-shot penalty that day at Colonial for my bunker-raking with Mike's ball in it. That was his second answer, too, after checking in with a fellow rulesman.

Several days later, I heard from David again, by e-mail. He wrote that he had been troubled by the whole thing and dug out a copy of the 1984 rulebook, the one in use in '86. He found something called Exception 3 to Rule 13-4. It reads: “The player after playing the stroke, or his caddie at any time without the authority of the player, may smooth sand or soil in the hazard, provided that, if the ball still lies in the hazard, nothing is done which improves the lie of the ball or assists the player in his subsequent play of the hole.”

I was that caddie, smoothing sand without the authority of the player. Nothing I did improved Mike's lie or assisted him in his play. Shea knew what Mike and I did not: Exception 3 to Rule 13-4 from the 1984 rule book. My raking was fine.

“That destroys the mercy-on-the-hapless-caddie angle,” David wrote. “If Shea had determined that your action had improved Mike's lie, he would have nailed Mike with two shots and you probably would have been sacked at the conclusion of the round, if not right on the spot. Ain't the rules of golf entertaining?”

•  •  •

In the space of eight months in 2013, Tiger Woods incurred penalties on four different occasions. The first one was in Abu Dhabi in January, where he took embedded ball relief in a sandy area covered with vegetation, with the approval of his playing partner. But you can't take embedded ball relief from any sandy lie, and he was given a two-shot penalty, which caused him to miss the cut. The second was at Augusta, when he dropped incorrectly after his third shot on the fifteenth hole in the second round hit the flagstick and ricocheted into a pond. That resulted—after the most torturous half-day in the history of golfing jurisprudence—in another two-shot penalty. The third episode came at the Players Championship in May. On the fourteenth hole in the final round, Woods drove it into a pond that runs down the left side of the fairway. Under the rule option he chose to use, Woods was required to drop within two club lengths of where the ball last crossed that water hazard. With the ball in the air, Mark Rolfing, an NBC reporter who was standing on the tee, indicated that Woods's ball last crossed the hazard about seventy yards in front of the tee. Footage of the shot from a blimp seemed to confirm that. Immediately after hitting his shot, Woods looked away in disgust, his head spinning left, typical body language for a shot that is, as the players say,
dead
. A ball that has a chance to stay dry you typically watch. But in consultation with his playing partner, Casey Wittenberg, Woods dropped about 230 yards in front of the tee, not seventy. Woods's drop had Wittenberg's stamp of approval, which absolved Woods of any wrongdoing, at least on a technical level. But it looked to me (and others) like an outrageously bad drop.

Four months later, Woods was playing in an event called the BMW Championship in Lake Forest, Illinois. On the first hole in his Friday round, Woods hit his ball over the green, and it came to rest in a wooded area. Nobody was around except his caddie, Joe LaCava, and a cameraman from PGA Tour Productions. About one third of Woods's ball was submerged in forest dirt. The ball was leaning against a cigar-shaped twig. You can see this clearly if you're looking at the footage shot by the cameraman, but only with the benefit of super magnification. In other words, only when you see it as Woods saw it, with his head about two feet above his ball as he started to attempt to remove that twig.