In August 1975, on the 25th anniversary of Golf Digest, the editors of the magazine voted unanimously to name Arnold Palmer as “Man of the Silver Era.” The traditional metal for a 70th anniversary is platinum, but the man hasn’t changed: Arnold Palmer endures as the figure who personifies golf through the years of Golf Digest’s existence. Ben Hogan might have been the greatest ball-striker, Jack Nicklaus the greatest champion, Tiger Woods the greatest player, but for the spirit he embodies, our Playing Editor in Perpetuity is Arnold Palmer.

This story by contributing editor Tom Callahan in the December 2016 issue paints the full arc of Arnie’s life, which largely coincided with Golf Digest’s publishing span. The first issue of the digest-size magazine at 16 pages rolled out of William H. Davis’ bedroom in Evanston, Ill., in 1950. As Davis once wrote, “During the next 25 years, the game of golf grew from a minor diversion in the United States, with a few major championships, to a major sport with a year-round season. It not only awakened assuredly from a war-time slumber, but became a lifestyle for millions of Americans.”

As a player, Palmer inspired those millions with his go-for-broke style. His partnership with super-agent Mark McCormack practically invented sports marketing and sponsorship. But it was his humility, his charisma, his sense of integrity and fair play that continue to make Arnie our “Man of the Platinum Era.” —Jerry Tarde

***

He looked like an athlete, a prizefighter, a middleweight. He opened golf’s windows and let in some air. He lifted a country-club game, balanced it on his shoulders, carried it to the people and made it a sport. He won big. He lost big. People who didn’t follow golf followed him. People who hated golf loved him. He was photogenic in the old newspapers. He was telegenic in the new medium. He was the most asked question called into the night desks on weekends: “What did Palmer do today?”

He was a Pittsburgher, like Billy Conn, Mike Ditka, Honus Wagner and Johnny Unitas. The Mellons and the Carnegies and the Rooneys and Gene Kelly and David McCullough and Sean Thornton.

He was loamy meadows and smoky skies, river valleys and steel mills, like the plant where his father, Milfred, sometimes worked [“Steel, Michaeleen, steel in pig-iron furnaces so hot a man forgets his fear of hell”] until just in front of the Depression, Milfred took a job as greenkeeper and pro [mostly greenkeeper] at Latrobe Country Club. Nobody addressed him as Milfred, except Doris when she was of a fanciful mind. To most, he was Deacon. A few said Deke. Arnold called him Pap.

From Pap, Arnie learned many important things, like how to grip a golf club and integrity. But Doris’ contribution was what made all the difference. She was as light and delicate as a scarf, but ready company and a natural communicator. She liked people, and they liked her. Deacon was always prodding his son to be tougher and try harder and succeed more. But whatever the boy did pleased his mother, provided he was kind.

Nobody had to teach him to love golf. As Peter Dobereiner wrote, “Arnold did not catch the golf bug; he was born with it like a hereditary disease.”

He started to play at the age of 3 and turned pro at 7 when Latrobe member Helen Fritz offered him a nickel to hit her drive over a ditch. After adjusting the cap pistol strapped to his hip, he took a whirling cut that brought to mind a finish-line flagman or a revolving lawn sprinkler. Mrs. Fritz’s ball floated down like a paratrooper onto the fairway. Every Ladies’ Day thereafter, he was available to bash dowagers’ drives for five cents. “Some of them,” he said, “were slow pay.”

What does he know that we don’t? Arnold in an undated photo. (Golf Digest archive)

He had a second love as well: airplanes. Whenever he could, he ran down the country club road to Latrobe’s tiny airport with its grass runway, no control tower, no instrument landing, no radio direction. He passed his hands over the few biplanes parked there and imagined himself an aviator like Wiley Post. He sat in the flight room by a pot-bellied stove and listened to the pilots’ “by-gosh and by-God” adventures.

He went to Wake Forest College but couldn’t stay. A teammate and a member of the basketball team drove to a dance in Durham and never made it home. The teammate was Bud Worsham, his best friend, whose brother Lew won the 1947 U.S. Open. Undeservedly but understandably, Palmer blamed himself for the accident, for declining their offer to join them. Had he accepted, he reasoned, he might have been at the wheel on the way back. Finishing the semester in a heart-broken fog, he dropped out of school and joined the Coast Guard.

He spent three years guarding coasts and honing his game. For a time he sold paint supplies in Cleveland. The U.S. Amateur brought him back on course. He won it in 1954, 1 up over investment banker and middle-age millionaire Bob Sweeny. That same year, Arnold successfully defended his Ohio Amateur Championship outside Toledo, where late one day he had the range to himself, knocking down 9-irons in the rain. Only one spectator stood watching, a 14-year-old named Jack Nicklaus. They would end up hyphenated like Dempsey-Tunney. Nobody wanted Dempsey beaten, either.

In December of ‘54, Arnold Palmer and Winifred Walzer eloped. To Winnie, he was Arn. The next April, they pulled up at their first Masters in a dusty and dilapidated old Ford hitched to a small trailer. Palmer tied for 10th, good for $696. Winnie told him she loved him, she’d always love him, she’d follow him to the ends of the earth, but the trailer had to go.

Though he won the Masters in 1958 and 1960, Palmer didn’t formally become Palmer until the 1960 U.S. Open near Denver. There were other applicants, including Mike Souchak, a muscleman himself, and Ken Venturi, the betting favorite to succeed Ben Hogan atop golf. Hogan’s favorite, too. “Hogan never called me by my first name,” Palmer said coldly. “Never.”

Souchak led the first round by a shot, the second by three and the third by two, leaving Palmer a full seven strokes and 14 players behind. But in the final round he drove the 346-yard par-4 first hole at Cherry Hills and went out in 30, smoking everybody [while smoking L&Ms]. His ultimate 65 was good for a two-stroke victory over the 20-year-old amateur, Nicklaus. They had begun.

A month later, with the Masters and U.S. Open in pocket, Palmer felt obligated to make his first bid for an Open Championship, in the Centenary Open at St. Andrews. Following local caddie Tip Anderson’s nose [a veiny, purple masterpiece], he lost by a stroke to Australian Kel Nagle. But Palmer and Anderson won the next summer at Royal Birkdale and the summer after that at Troon.

Arnie with his Army in the early ’60s. (Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images)

After taking his third Masters, in 1962, he was defeated by Nicklaus over 18 extra holes in the U.S. Open at Oakmont, just down the road from Latrobe. Jack’s famous concentration was so good that week that he didn’t hear anyone in the crowd say, “Miss it, Fat Guts.”

Palmer, Nicklaus and South African Gary Player, dubbed The Big Three, flew the world for a while, Arnold at the controls. Leaving an exhibition in Seagraves, Texas, Nicklaus and Player had to hold onto each other to keep off the ceiling. They were all over the sky. “I had Gary crouching under his seat,” Palmer said. “I shouldn’t laugh. But it wasn’t always hard-nosed stuff, was it? We had some fun.”

Still, even as partners, Palmer and Nicklaus clashed. It was as if God said to Nicklaus, “You will have skills like no other,” then whispered to Palmer, “but they will love you more.”

“I can remember ginger-ale battles in our hotel rooms,” Palmer said. “One night,” Nicklaus said, “we got to kicking each other’s shins under the table. I don’t know why. I kicked him. He kicked me. Neither would give. We ended up with the biggest damned bruises. We used to do the stupidest stuff.”

Getting back to work on his 62 PGA Tour victories, Palmer added a fourth Masters in 1964. With that he stopped winning major championships, but no one noticed for 10 years.

His third playoff loss in a U.S. Open, at Olympic in 1966, was the most lingering. Leading Billy Casper by three strokes on Sunday morning, he covered the front side in 32 to Casper’s 36. Now the advantage was seven with just nine holes to play. But he allowed himself a daydream—par in from here and you beat Hogan’s Open record—and the world fell apart.

The public didn’t mind. He could sling four straight 3-woods out-of-bounds to make a 12 at Rancho Park in Los Angeles, and they still didn’t care. If anything, it made him even more attractive. He always went for broke, and they always went with him.

Nicklaus and Palmer finished 1-2 at the Baltusrol Open in 1967 and 1-3 at Pebble Beach in 1972. Either man might have won the 1975 Open at Medinah if they hadn’t been paired together in the fourth round and become so fixated on each other that they lost track of the field. Afterward, Jack was bemoaning three closing bogeys so pitifully that Arnold finally jumped in and said, “Why don’t you just sashay your ass back out there and play them over?”

(John Dominis/Time Life Picture Collection/Getty Images)

The vinegar evaporated in time. Palmer made the first move. At a senior event, The Tradition, he knocked Nicklaus over by asking him to look at his swing. “Can you imagine?” Jack said. “Me? We’ve played 30 years, and that’s the first time he ever asked me.”

“We still have the needle out,” Arnold said, “but we know now that we love each other, and we always did.”

Even during the hatchet-burying ceremony, when Palmer was the honoree at Nicklaus’ Memorial Tournament, the needle was still glistening. Asked by a Canadian writer if he would be returning to the Canadian Open [Arnold’s first pro success, the only blue ribbon to elude Jack], Nicklaus replied, “Barbara says she’s going to keep sending me back there until I get it right.” To which Palmer inquired innocently, “Are you sure she’s talking about golf?”

They began to play practice rounds together again. At Augusta in 1996, Tiger Woods’ last Masters as an amateur, the three of them went out together Wednesday morning. On the par-5 13th, Woods popped up his drive and for once was away. Nicklaus had his back turned to Tiger. Peeking over Jack’s shoulder, Palmer saw the 20-year-old pull out an iron for his second shot and whispered, “He’s laying up.”

“Oh, Arnie,” Jack said affectionately. “He’s not.”

Tiger hit a blue darter over the creek onto the green.

(Bob Gomel/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

THE SEARCH FOR PERFECTION

“Arnold and I didn’t do everything perfectly,” Nicklaus said. “You try for perfection in golf, but you never get there.”

On the subject of perfection, Palmer wasn’t a plastic saint. He didn’t glow in the dark. For 45 years he adored Winnie, but he loved all women, and more than a few loved him back. PGA Champion Bob Rosburg, his roommate on tour for some of the hungry years, fielded a phone call once from an especially agitated husband. Rossie tried to mollify the man, but, never wanting to come between Arnie and buckshot, signed off by saying, “My bed is the one by the window.”

In 2013, Tom Watson complained to Golf Digest about a cover photo posing 84-year-old Palmer with supermodel Kate Upton in a parody of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” Mimicking the somber farmer, Arnold is holding a bunker rake instead of a pitchfork. “He looks doddering,” Watson said. “If they had only shot him sneaking a peek out of the corner of his eye at Kate—eyes twinkling—that would have been all right. That would have been Arnie.”

He earned $40 million that year without taking an official swing, and another $40 million the next. Palmer’s net worth as of last year was an estimated $680 million. His original money man, contemporary Mark McCormack, sport’s first super-agent, was at least a co-builder of his great friend’s great brand. McCormack died in 2003. He went in for a face-lift and didn’t come out.

Palmer made his side money in advertising, architecture, clothes, cars, motor oil, catsup, dry cleaners, umbrellas, everything. He actually guest-hosted for Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.” It was the most wooden performance since Charlie McCarthy. But the audience enjoyed him. He walked through a movie scene from “Call Me Bwana” for Bob Hope. His pals ranged from Bing Crosby, Perry Como and James Garner to Mrs. Simpson’s husband, Edward, the former King of England. A lot of pros have played golf with presidents, but only Palmer answered the doorbell at his home to find Dwight Eisenhower on the porch saying “Happy birthday.”

Palmer maintained two residences, Bay Hill and Latrobe. The portrait Norman Rockwell painted of him was in Latrobe. To revisit his boyhood, all Arnold had to do was swivel the chair in his Latrobe office and gaze out the window. Since 1971, he owned the golf course where his father had been an employee who never set foot in the locker room, the dining room or the bar unless specifically invited by a member. Pap and he walked that hillside over there, shot pheasants, rabbits and squirrels, cleaned them in a nearby stream, and soaked them in saltwater overnight. On the edge of the hill, an old oak tree fell over. The trunk was crumbling and honeybees moved in. “ ‘Now, Arnie,’ my dad says, ‘we’re going to take this honey home to your mother.’ But he says, ‘We have to get two five-pound bags of sugar. When we take the honey out, we’re going to put those two bags of sugar right there, so the bees can have their food.’ By God, we did it, too. I was about 7 or 8 years old.”

You might say, he spent his whole life taking the honey out and putting the sugar back. On May 23, 2014, he wrote a thousandth [ten-thousandth?] letter to a junior golfer in Massachusetts whose older brother had reached out:

Dear Nate:

I understand from your brother, Adam, that you are quite a golfer and a great younger brother. … As you graduate from High School and continue on to Stonehill College, I think you will find life to be enjoyable and fulfilling if you follow this advice:

Courtesy and respect are timeless principles, as well as good manners …

“Whatever Hogan did to Arnold that hurt him so,” Byron Nelson said, “I can’t believe he truly meant it. You know, Hogan knew that people as a group didn’t like him. Maybe that was it. Ben had some friends, but most people didn’t like him. He was so driven and he was so good. I think he had, I don’t know, kind of a fear of being close to people. After his automobile accident—and, you know, he played his best golf after he learned to walk again—Ben told me, he said, ‘Byron, I didn’t realize that so many people liked me.’ You could almost cry.”

Knowing when to speak is just as important as knowing what you say …

“Palmer went to bed at night with charisma,” Sam Snead said, “and he woke up the next morning with more.”

Know how to win by following the rules …

“When I think of him,” Raymond Floyd said, “I think of his hands. The greatest set of hands I’ve ever seen. Those eyes, too. On the golf course, all I ever saw was a mass of people. I saw, but I didn’t see. He was able to focus in on everybody in the gallery individually. It wasn’t fake.”

Know the importance of when and how to say thank you …

“We were paired together,” Ernie Els said, “at my first major in America, the PGA at Bellerive [St. Louis]. How old was I then, 22? As we shook hands on Friday—those unbelievable hands—he invited me to play the next year in his tournament at Bay Hill. He said it was the only time he had ever extended an invitation on the spot like that. I can’t tell you what it meant to me. It was like he opened a door and invited me in. I felt so glad, and so lucky, when I came to win his tournament eventually.” Twice.

Never underestimate the importance of a good education …

“I’ve stayed in Arnold’s house,” Player said. “He’s stayed in mine. He came to South Africa, and we took him down a gold mine. And his mother! I just loved his mother. She was a dear lady. And I loved his father. He was just as tough as they say, but that wasn’t the whole story. We compete, professional golfers. We’re competitors. But you laugh together as you go, and you cry together sometimes. He and I did, physically. We cried together. At the end of the day, you play for each other.”

In a Champions event near Washington in 1986, Palmer made a hole-in-one with a 5-iron and, the following afternoon, at the same tee, did it again. “I saw Gary standing by the green, looking back,” Palmer said. “I wanted to hit a good one.”

“That’s it! That’s it!” Player said. “He always knew how to share a moment of triumph, yours or his.”

Good luck in college and study hard.

Sincerely,

Incidentally, it delighted him to hear that his autograph was worth almost nothing on the market because there were so many of them.

Six years after Winnie died of ovarian cancer in 1999, Arnold found Kit. Families don’t always embrace second wives, but he had someone with whom to unveil the morning again, and his daughters and their children cheered.

He shook off his own cancer and, missing a prostate but not a beat, hitched his pants and went on.

For golf, he had the simplest wish: “That every 20-handicapper who goes to the first tee with a knowledge of the game should pass it on to someone who doesn’t know or doesn’t care. For every swing lesson a golfer takes, take a lesson in rules and etiquette. Preserve what we have.”

He had to be talked into talking about Tiger Woods, who won his tournament eight times.

“Let me make sure I say exactly what I want to say,” he said, staring out the window for a moment. “Let’s not put a name on it. Let’s not talk about anyone specifically. Let’s just say that not everyone in golf or sports wants to share his life with the public, or for that matter, with anyone else at all. I think that’s the simplest way to put it. I’ve liked sharing my life. I think being out there among the people, letting them know you and sincerely wanting to know them, too, is the happier way to go. But everyone has to go his own way.”

As the 2016 U.S. Open was going on at nearby Oakmont, Palmer was in Latrobe, talking about flying. “I knew the chairman of Boeing,” he said. (Of course he did.) “He let me take up a 747.” Arnold’s visitor guessed, “It must have been like piloting a skyscraper.” “Yeah,” he said with a wonderful smile, “from the top floor.” He was pallid but he was himself. Only at the mention of journeyman pro Sam Saunders did his eyes water. “It isn’t easy for him to be my grandson,” he said, and to have elected this particular grandfather’s life’s work.

Since tripping on a rug and separating his right shoulder in 2015, Palmer had looked shockingly fragile. Not just colourless, grey. But his mind was terrific and his sense of humour intact. Walking his big yellow dog, Mulligan, at dusk, he said, “I’ll be old one of these days.”

Severiano Ballesteros’ brain tumour had been stalled (but not stopped) by the spring of 2009 when a photograph from Pennsylvania arrived in northern Spain. “Arnold Palmer sent me a dog,” he said with a laugh. “In a picture. His dog, called Mulligan.” The Spaniard got the message and understood it for what it was, a prayer. “The doctor saved my life; now I use my mulligan.” Seve, of course, was the Palmer who came along. Adopting his own Labrador puppy, he named it for the Palmer who followed him. Phil.

“Never saying ‘No,’ “ Lee Trevino said, “is why Arnold wore out sooner than he should have [in the majors]. I don’t think he’d change it, though.”

What about that? Any regrets?

“Sure, I would love to have won the four [U.S.] Opens I almost won,” Palmer said, “or the two or three PGAs I barely lost. But, if I had it to do over again, would I take a different approach? I wouldn’t. Let’s say I could start over. I could have five Opens and two PGAs and six Masters and a couple more British Opens, but not as many friends? No. No way, Jose. Keep the trophies. I mean, I remember teeing off in Palm Springs at the Bob Hope, and because I had a couple of bad rounds, I’m starting early. Real early in the morning. Maybe 7 o’clock. And here comes Arnie’s Army in their pyjamas and robes.”

He was equal parts humble and proud. He was equal parts commoner and king. He was equal parts iced tea and lemonade.

He’d bobble across a clubhouse grillroom (home or away) to tell an offender (stranger or friend) to remove his cap indoors.

For 87 burned-and-burnished years, he lived his life with joy and grace, swooping and soaring like a biplane over Latrobe on the earned estimation of men and the free favour of God.

Which was how he left this world on September 25, 2016.

The post Arnold Palmer: The King for Eternity appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Peter Andrews
Editor’s note: In celebration of Golf Digest’s 70th anniversary, we’re revisiting the best literature and journalism we’ve ever published.

The alternate-shot portion of The Match II—especially when Peyton Manning was playing Tiger’s drive and Tom Brady was playing Phil Mickelson’s drive—gave a glimpse into the fantasy of every golfer with a sub-90-mile-per-hour swing speed: What could you do off a pro’s tee-ball?

The mind races at the idea of bombing 300-yard drives, routinely hitting par 5s in two, reaching the odd short par 4. It’s a variation on the theme of what a tour pro would shoot on your home course, but it puts you in the tour pro’s shoes. In early 1991, I was looking to explore this idea and found the affable Mark O’Meara as a willing co-conspirator.

Mark was known as user-friendly in pro-ams; he mixed well with amateurs and seemed to raise their games a notch when he played with them. A good indicator was that he’d won three AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Ams at that point—in 1985, 1989 and 1990. He was both a pro’s pro and an am’s pro. O’Meara was the obvious pick for this proposition—you would play off his tee-ball, and he would play off yours, and we’d see how the scoring would go.

Then the question became, who would be you? What writer could be so average, so short off the tee, so utterly inadequate in his masculinity, yet with a winning sense of humour and outsize ego to put it all on the line? Then I remembered an article I’d read by Contributing Editor Peter Andrews about Pebble Beach, coincidentally, in which he described in delicious detail how tour pros play the iconic eighth hole at Pebble. After a towering tee shot, the expert would nip a crisp iron over the cavernous abyss to a green “the size of a double bed surrounded by bunkers,” and then he added: “I love reading about stuff like that, just as I love reading about men who have won the favours of Catherine Deneuve. It may not be immediately useful to me, but it does have a certain anecdotal value, and I am delighted to know that it can be done.” We’d found our Everyman!

But Catherine Deneuve? A younger man at the time might have said, say, Demi Moore. But Andrews was a golfer with a mature swing. This story appeared in the May 1991 issue. O’Meara would go on to win two more AT&T’s, in 1992 and 1997. Peter did not. —Jerry Tarde

***

I don’t think there is a phrase in the English language I despise more than “Drive for show and putt for dough.” This is an aphorism invariably propounded by thin-lipped moralists who go jogging at dawn, hold business meetings before 10 in the morning, and tell you, “A messy desk is the sign of a messy mind.” These are people who have never in their lives expressed a thought that was not trite or banal. And yet they rule the world simply because they are awake early in the morning thinking about matters that should not concern them.

What in heaven’s name is the point of standing up at the tee, if it is not to bust something long? Who among us toiling in the trenches of golf do not believe that if only we could get some decent distance with the driver, we could really play this game? Golf manuals have been written beyond calculation (and this magazine is no better than the rest of them) telling us the key to low scoring takes place around the greens. This, however, supposes we can get to the green in the first place. They don’t tell us that. This is because they are long and we are not. They talk about chipping and putting in an airy manner while you and I, like Dickensian waifs, have to stand outside in the cold with our noses pressed against the windowpane watching the great and mighty amuse themselves with the short game.

When anyone asks me what I shoot, I generally tell them I score in the 80s when I’m playing well. This is very close to a lie. In my last 20 scores, I have done so three times. If memory serves, and I’m all too afraid that it does, I have broken 80 seven times in my life. All of those scores were on the two courses I play the most, and only three of them took place when anyone of importance was watching. Nevertheless, in my heart of hearts I am convinced that with only a few measly extra yards off the tee, assuming 50 yards qualifies as measly, I could be a regular 70s shooter.

Recently, Golf Digest offered me a chance to find out if this were so. The editors arranged for me to take my 18-handicap down to Florida and play a round with Mark O’Meara in which Mark would hit his tee shot before I played the hole from there on in. By the same token, to see if the pros really need all their famed distance, Mark would play my tee ball into the cup. The results, like those of the last Congressional election, were interesting but mixed.

In picking O’Meara for my partner in this escapade, the magazine chose well. Mark is one of the solid men on the PGA Tour. The possessor of a good, uncomplicated swing, he is generally playing well somewhere on the globe, having won events in America, England, Australia and Japan. More important, Mark has the reputation of being one of the most considerate professionals in pro-am events. He is consistent and has a kind heart, two things any playing partner of mine needs to have in abundance.

We played at Isleworth Golf and Country Club outside Orlando. It was a perfect venue for our event. The course is an Arnold Palmer/Ed Seay creation that insinuates itself through a housing complex where a prospective buyer willing to be content with something in the low seven figures can find himself quite comfortable. The swift greens are superb, the heaving fairways are curried to a bright sheen, and the rough is cropped to the length of Marla Maples’ eyelashes. That’s my kind of golf course.

Mark and I played from the middle tees, which cut the track from 7,097 yards to a manageable 6,279. This 818-yard reduction was a bonanza for me, but for Mark, who has earned more than $3 million playing the tour from the tips, it proved a bit bothersome. The match was like a mixed Pinehurst event, except this time I was the one playing in pedal pushers.

I could see from the start that things were going to be a lot different for me, but not necessarily easier. The first hole is a gentle affair, about 340 yards from our tees. I hit my standard 3-wood about 210 yards. Mark is not a super-long driver. Usually, he is in the 260-yard range, but he can crank it up when the conditions are right. This was one of those times. He blew his drive 70 yards past my ball. I left Mark with 130 yards to the green, and he left me with 60. Frankly, I would rather have had Mark’s shot than mine. Whatever assets my game may have, delicacy of touch is not chief among them. While Mark went to a simplistic par, I managed to steer a wedge barely on the green and then overthink myself into three-putts. A bogey from playing the most glorious drive it has ever been my pleasure to deal with.

And so it went; Mark clicking off pars and birdies whenever I left him on anything Luther Burbank would have recognized as grass, and me constantly being offered the glittering prize, but able, only sporadically, to gather it in.

The second hole is a brief par 3 measuring only 137 yards. Mark and I both came down short. The difference was Mark left me directly in front of the hole, but I put him well left in some ugly junk. There’s not much junk at Isleworth, but I managed to find it. I got down in two for an easy par, and Mark struggled for a bogey. It’s going to bother me a lot if the short-game academicians turn out to be right.

I began to understand why Mark is such a good professional partner for an amateur player. He is unfailingly supportive and never critical. He offers suggestions when they are obviously called for, but he doesn’t try to change your game in the middle of the round. My swing has been favourably likened to the sex life of a hummingbird: swift, darting and indiscriminate. Mark told me not to worry too much about how quickly I manoeuvre the club.

“You can’t always blame speed when something goes wrong,” he said. “Speed just exposes whatever flaws there are in the swing. Concentrate on your mechanics. If your setup and movement through the ball are correct, speed, by itself, doesn’t mean anything.”

Mark is an apostle of restraint off the tee. “Don’t try to swing too hard with your hands,” he cautioned. “Use your body and let your hands be passive. They’ll come into the swing by themselves.”

Armed with Mark’s good advice, which at once brought a measure of moderation to my swing and still let me have at it with as much speed as I desired, I managed to hit the fairway on 12 of the 14 driving holes.

I learned a great many lessons this day, not all of them immediately useful. The fourth hole is something more than 400 yards. Mark and I both parred it. I hit a 7-iron 140 yards to the green, and Mark bore in a 2-iron from 220 yards. That it is possible to save par by hitting an iron 220 yards could be good for me to know in another life. Tell me then that length isn’t important.

I learned another lesson on the fifth hole, a par 3 that measures 203 yards to the cup. I showed some of my 18-handicap by putting Mark in a culvert, and he got me on the green perhaps 90 feet from the hole. We both got miracle pars, but I realized the obvious, which is one of my specialities. As far from the hole as I was, I had an amateur’s run at par, but it took a pro-shot from Mark to have a chance. Oh, God, maybe those ghastly people are right.

You know how you always botch up a hole after hitting your best drive of the day? On the 497-yard, par-5 13th, I screwed up Mark’s best drive. He hit a screamer about 280 yards. Now I had one of my rare chances to be on a par 5 in two. I took that extra bit of upper-body coil and added a tiny bit of celerity to the swing and slurped a 5-wood some 60 yards. It was one of those times when you look at your playing partner and talk about how snarly the grass and how low the ground and one thing and another was, while he, his eyes like BBs, drum his fingers on the steering wheel on the golf cart.

Worse was to come. On the 376-yard 14th, Mark, who was rarely off the fairway, put me near a bunker with a steep uphill lie. In recompense for the leave, Mark nicely showed me a new shot for the situation. I’m sure the shot is a fine one, but it required movements alien to my body, and I whiffed. Nothing tricky, just a straightforward miss. From there, a triple bogey was child’s play.

Throughout the round I had to hit a lot of 50- to 70-yard wedges. Although that is not my favourite thing to do in golf, I could learn to love the shot if I were hitting to the green for birdie putts more often. Putting for birdies is something an 18-handicapper needs a while to get used to. Even I began to get the hang of it by the time we got to the backside. Mark left me about 70 yards short of the green on the 348-yard, par-4 16th hole, and I finally put a wedge close enough for me to make the birdie. Being farther back didn’t seem to bother Mark. He just hit the ball, beautifully to me, but not to him. Mark hadn’t played in several days and felt his game was off because of the layoff.

A small amount of statistical analysis might be useful here. I shot 82 off Mark’s ball, and he scored 75 off mine. In his round, Mark made two birdies and five bogeys. It was only when I hit wide of any reasonable target area that Mark was at a disadvantage. The lesson, I suppose, is that if you hit a tee shot both short and offline, it’s hard to make par no matter who you are.

If my shortness was not debilitating to Mark, was his length helpful to me? Oh, yes. I only had to cruise with my regular game to get that 82. Golfers are forever dealing with what might have been—but give me my whiffed stroke back and a couple of reasonable approach shots, and I’d have been in the 70s easy, which is where I belong.

Surprisingly, because this was an experiment in length off the tee, both our rounds turned for good and ill on the par 3s. Mark hit all four greens, and I was able to play them in one under par. Because I, inexcusably, missed three of the greens, Mark played the par 3s two over, and it took something close to Divine Intervention for him to do that. Are they right? Say it isn’t so.

I asked Mark what he thought was the meaning of our round, and he took a limited view.

“What it means,” he said, “is that I have to come back tomorrow and hit some balls.”

The post How would you score playing a pro’s tee ball? appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Frank Beard
From the archive (April 1977) – Editor’s note: In celebration of Golf Digest’s 70th anniversary, we’re revisiting the best literature and journalism we’ve ever published. 

Which Frank Beard are we talking about? Not the drummer in the rock band ZZ Top, who happens to sport a single-figure handicap and was ranked among Golf Digest’s 100 Best Musician Golfers. We mean Frank Beard the professional golfer, winner of 11 PGA Tour events, leading money-winner in 1969, and a popular columnist for Golf Digest in the 1970s. In the same year Jim Bouton wrote the explosive book Ball Four, Beard published a diary more insightful than controversial called PRO: Frank Beard on the Golf Tour, and it forever established him as a forthright thinker about the game.

Beard was always a good interview in his playing days, despite an Everyman appearance. The Atlanta sports editor Furman Bisher once wrote: “He looks at you like an assistant bank cashier who wants some identification before he cashes the check.” Frank’s brother was Ralph Beard, who led the University of Kentucky to two NCAA basketball championships before being barred for life from the NBA for the 1951 point-shaving scandal. Frank played in the middle tier of nondescript pros like Gene Littler, Don January, Miller Barber, George Archer and Charles Coody—who ushered in the era of tour logos, in their case hats labeled “Amana,” the refrigeration company that paid them 50 bucks a week.

Beard was always a little more outspoken, and his Golf Digest column lived in the back of the magazine, where a lot of readers turned first. His ghost writer at Golf Digest was the prolific Larry Dennis, who transcribed audiotapes that Frank would send him monthly from tour stops. There was always an edge to Frank’s opinions, as this April 1977 piece demonstrates in criticising the sacrosanct Masters Tournament during the awkward transition when Cliff Roberts was handing over the chairmanship to food-business executive William H. Lane. Here Beard accurately predicts that tour pros would dominate TV commentary; later he came to work as a foot soldier at ESPN. You might conclude there’s a bit of “tour pro whining” in his column, and maybe even some exaggeration—e.g., Quad Cities’ strength of field—but his courage in standing behind his opinions was as rare then as now. Frank had a modest career on the Champions Tour and, today at 81, lives in Palm Springs. —Jerry Tarde

* * *

Before Cliff Roberts or Bill Lane or whoever is running the Masters these days gets all up in arms, I want to preface this column by saying I like the Masters Tournament. I also like August National. It’s always been one of my favourite courses. But I think it’s time things were put in perspective.

The mystique of the Masters captures the fancy of golf fans every year. It has become a spring-time rite, almost a sacred observance. In a way, that’s good, because anything that stimulates the public’s interest in golf is beneficial. But I don’t think any mystique should keep the public from seeing and hearing about the tournament the way it really is.

What brings this to mind is that the Masters people apparently don’t want any professional golfers doing television commentary, as some of us do at other tournaments. I’ve always felt that having an articulate pro on the telecast is a good idea because he can provide some insight the fans might not get otherwise. I’m happy the networks are starting to agree. But the Masters gods obviously feel differently.

I can only assume this is because we golfers are sometimes more outspoken than the regular commentators, and the Masters doesn’t want anyone marring the picture of perfection it is trying to create, even unintentionally.

Augusta National Archive

An example of this attitude occurred a few years ago when a well-known commentator, one of the best in the business, referred to an excited crowd at Augusta as a “mob.” He was invited not to come back, although he has since returned [a reference to the highly regarded Jack Whitaker, who died in 2019].

That, it seems to me, is a bit much. It’s a good golf tournament and a nice place, but we shouldn’t have to get reverent about it.

As a matter of fact, the crowds at the Masters, while knowledgeable and sophisticated on the whole, aren’t any better than those at a lot of other tournaments. They make noise, and kids run up and down drinking beer. Augusta needs marshals to keep order, just like any place. The fans there are interested in golf, sure, but they’re also just folks out having a good time in the spring sun.

How much mystique would the Masters have if it were played in August, or late October instead of in early April, when the entire northern half of the country is just getting it appetite whetted for golf? The tournament might not be a “rite” at any other time of year.

We all know that, because of the invitation restrictions, the Masters has the worst field of any tournament we play all year. The top stars are always there, but there are fewer good players at Augusta than at Quad Cities.

What boggles my mind is that the people who run the Masters make such a fetish about the tournament being a living memorial to Bobby Jones—as well they should—yet turn around and keep making changes to the golf course that Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie built!

Some of the changes have been for the worse, in my opinion. They moved the tee back and put big humps in the fairway on the par-5 No. 15 and completely changed the character of the hole. It was designed as a hole where you could gamble on getting home in two shots, and if you mis-hit your second you risked going into the water in front of the green. Now you have to be a very long hitter to start with and then catch two super shots to get there, and it’s really not as exciting a hole.

They put in a large bunker on the left side of the driving area on 18. On the face of it, this was a good change because it certainly makes the tee shot with the driver more exciting. Except that most players now lay up with a 3-wood to avoid going into the bunker. Then they have to go with a long iron at a green that wasn’t designed for a long-iron shot. The green is about half the size of a small room, and the top half of the putting surface is so severe that it’s almost impossible to putt.

They’ve made many other changes over the years, adding bunkers, lengthening holes. Most of the changes have been good, but I don’t agree with the idea of making them. In the first place, Augusta National was designed as a putter’s course and a second-shot course, which means that if you’re going to have a chance to putt well on the treacherous greens, you must place your ball in certain places on those greens. So I don’t feel that longer holes and extra bunkers are really needed.

More important, the course was conceived by Bobby Jones, and his ideas, his dreams, his whole being went into it. When it was done and the first shot was fired, that was the course he wanted. I’m not in favour of changing a great old course, particularly one that Bobby Jones created. His stature in the game makes that course hallowed ground, as far as I’m concerned, and I can’t imagine anyone being presumptuous enough to change it just because the players’ equipment and skill have improved over the years.

If you want a different golf course, go build one, longer and tougher. But don’t make Augusta National into Augusta National Jr. If you want to be traditional—and nobody is more of a traditionalist than I am—then preserving a great golf course is a good place to start.

The post Augusta’s a nice place, but it’s not heaven appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

From the archive (December 1994): In celebration of Golf Digest’s 70th anniversary, we’re revisiting the best literature and journalism we’ve ever published.

By Dan Jenkins
Editor’s note: I’m sorry for laughing at this story. I apologise for Dan Jenkins. Forgive me for chuckling at the foibles of family golf. OK, now that it’s established that we should be ashamed of ourselves, sit back and let an old Jenkins column (December 1994) remind you of the Texas legend’s genius for finding humour in all things self-righteous or politically correct. The man who invented the 10 Stages of Drunkenness would have found humour even in a pandemic.

During these times of serious self-quarantining, many golfers have come to appreciate the joy of getting out on the course with family members. Parents pushing baby strollers have been observed following Golfer Dad or Golfer Mom. But there’s also joy in making fun of ourselves, and Dan always had a low handicap for tapping into our funny bone. He left us in 2019 at age 90, having lied about his age throughout adulthood (he said he was a year younger), but his friends thought it was Dan’s last laugh at a good life .—Jerry Tarde

Not long ago I had the unforgettable experience of trying to play 18 holes behind one of those foursomes known as a plague on earth when it is not known as the Family That Golfs Together.

I don’t believe I’ve ever taken vacations that long, frankly.

Upon finishing the round, I limped into the men’s grill and asked the bartender for a pen and notepad. While trying to calm my rage with a few cocktails, I thought it would be therapeutic to make a list of things I would rather do in this lifetime than play another round of golf directly behind such lovers of the game. I decided I would rather:

Eat a veggie burger.

Lift heavy furniture.

Attend a political rally

Drive across country without smoking.

Watch a game show on TV

Listen to accordion music.

Discuss wine.

Read Proust.

Go to a rock concert.

Try to deal with “frozen cursor syndrome” on my word processor.

I play fast, of course. I don’t line up putts from four sides, three sides or even two sides in most cases. I don’t “sweep” the line, figuring that any object the ball might hit along the way will give it a better chance of going in the cup than my putting stroke.

The only time I walk around with a towel is after I’ve showered. I might add that the only time I plumb-bob is when I’m conducting a symphony.

My club selection never causes any delays. I know what I’m going to hit before I get to my ball because I’ve been there many times before, or in a location just like it.

What’s more, I can hit two mulligans while my companions are improving their lies.

I am among those who firmly believe that a round of golf should not take more than 31/2 hours, four at the most. Anything longer than that is not a round of golf, it’s life in Albania.

So now I’m out there behind the Family That Golfs Together, all of whom are wearing shorts and anklets, naturally.

Macho Dad has a five-piece swing that strongly suggests he can’t possibly play below a 22-handicap, but he insists on hitting from the tips, from so far back his takeaway runs a serious risk of getting caught in the crape myrtle.

Never-ready Mom wears a wide-brimmed straw hat, and her golf glove features a handy little wrist compartment for her tee.

Idiot Teenage Son has his baseball cap on backward and grips the driver as he would a sledgehammer. He is here at gunpoint. He wanted to be at the beach today with his pals, drinking beer, doing drugs and falling madly in love with the third runner-up in the Miss Cerebral contest.

Sullen Teenage Daughter is also here at gunpoint. She would rather be locked in her room at home, chain-smoking cigarettes and listening to gangster rap.

I will describe only one hole.

Macho Dad stripes it down the middle, about 167, bringing it in from left to right. He struts to the cart, puts the big furry-animal headcover back on his driver.

From the blues, Idiot Teenage Son swings for the centerfield fence but hits a trickling 30-yard bunt. He trots after the ball, brings it back, tees it up again. Macho Dad goes over to give him a lesson. He points the V’s, firms up the left side, adjusts the stance. This time, Idiot Teenage Son swings for the right-field wall but hits a toe-job pop-up shot that barely clears the ball washer. He’s not happy to learn he’ll have to play that one.

Sullen Teenage Daughter goes first at the reds. After four whiffs and a yard of turf plowed up, she hits one 10 yards, although the club sails 15 yards. She retires to the cart with a shrug. Never-ready Mom takes six tedious practice swings, then smother-tops it into the rough, where they all enjoy an Easter-egg hunt.

After what seems like an hour later, the Family That Golfs Together is finally on the green, where Never-ready Mom stands over a one-foot putt, forever. Members of my group are now hollering such things as, “Pull the trigger, Mom!”

Myself, I’m playing Scarlett O’Hara, except I’m holding a golf ball instead of a turnip. But my fist is raised to the sky, and I’m saying, “As God is my witness, I’ll never play golf on Sunday again!”

The post Dan Jenkins: Why I hate family golf appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By John Barton
Editor’s note: In celebration of Golf Digest’s 70th anniversary, we’re revisiting the best literature and journalism we’ve ever published. Each entry includes an introduction that celebrates the author or puts in context the story. 

Judging by the title of this essay, one might be surprised at the uplifting nature of the storyline. But to know the author is to appreciate the value of an optimistic life. Here we are two years after publication, in the middle of a pandemic lockdown, and I just Zoomed with John from his home in London, happily telling me about his time after golf, his brilliant 12-year-old daughter, Annie, his new love who lectures at a university in Canterbury, the painting he’d just completed of his 95-year-old father (shown here), the psychotherapy practice he started after getting a doctorate in his 50s, and the occasional long walks he still is able to take on good days. “Sometimes I look at my hand and I don’t see a tremor,” he says, brightening. “But then I look again and it’s returned.”

Listen to an audio version of this story: 

We first met when John was a staff writer for our British affiliate on the Isle of Dogs in London, and I lured him to come to Golf Digest in the U.S., where he wrote a variety of far-flung stories, ran our website, rose through the ranks to become executive editor, and eventually returned to England as a contributing editor. Every one of the pieces he ever wrote was special—from travelogues in North Korea, Moscow and Bhutan to an extraordinary profile of the cross-handed golfer Papwa Sewgolum in South Africa. Even a walking marathon for the benefit of Parkinson’s could be raised to a new level by his amazing character.

John Barton’s first junior competition aged 14.
Courtesy of John Barton

John has always been incapable of doing anything ordinary, including this inspiring goodbye to golf that first appeared in May 2018. To which he added this postscript: “Golf had been such an important part of my life so I wanted to say a proper farewell. It’s a kind of eulogy to the game. I had a bigger response to the story than anything else I have ever written —thousands of likes, shares, retweets and messages from far and wide, some of them very moving. Thanks for the memories.“ —Jerry Tarde

One Sunday morning this past December, in the pre-dawn winter half-light, I teed off alone at the Freshwater Bay Golf Club on the Isle of Wight, off England’s south coast, for my last round of golf. I chose Freshwater to say goodbye to the game because it had been the scene of the first hello, in July 1976, when my father and I escaped from the doldrums of a family holiday one afternoon and retreated to the links where he used to play as a boy with his father.

The summer of ’76 was what the Brits call a scorcher. Golf balls ricocheted off the baked, domed fairways of Freshwater, performing a series of antic bounces before disappearing into a gorse bush, or down a rabbit scrape, or coming to rest perfectly camouflaged in an outcrop of chalk stones.

On that day, we shared a set of antique clubs that had belonged to my late grandmother and hadn’t been used in years. They were an assortment of unmatchable implements—hickory-shafted woods, mashies and niblicks, some irons with punch holes instead of grooves, and others with no markings on the face at all—awkwardly assembled in an ancient carry bag whose canvas hide was now petrified and brittle after decades of duty under an Indian sun, on the colonial fairways of Tingrai and Digboi, in Assam, where my father’s father had managed a tea plantation during the closing chapters of the British empire.

In the summer of ’76, I’d just become a teenager and was gangly, loose-limbed and uncoordinated. I’d tried golf only once before, in a group lesson at school, hitting balls over the rugby fields. Dad hadn’t played since the 1940s. He gave me a stroke a hole and won easily. A 13 at the devilish last hole gave me a score of 152. I was thrilled. I had arrived. I was a golfer.

There was precious little for teenagers to do in rural England in the 1970s. It was an irredeemably beige-tinted era of terrible TV, bland food and stifled emotion. There was no Internet. No connection. My three older siblings left home; I retreated to my bedroom, to books, music, daydreams. My heroes were all rebels.

Golf offered an antidote to adolescent angst. It got me out of the house, into fresh air and nature, and in the company of people. It became an escape from the escape, a place where I could find myself, even if I was often in the rough.

Each round would be meticulously recorded and analyzed in my bulging golf diaries, alongside commentary on golf news, course reviews and travelogues of family holidays that increasingly were dictated by golf. There were graphs of improvement over time, opinions of the latest golf books I had spent my pocket money on, and clippings written by great writers I would later get to know—Peter Dobereiner, Michael Williams, Frank Hannigan. The pages are filled with excitement and optimism.

There was sometimes disappointment, too. On March 12, 1978, after a lonely solo round that had to be aborted when I got caught in a storm at the far end of the course, my 14-year-old self wrote: “Why do I do it? I could have been sitting comfortably at home, but I chose to plod a couple of miles across sad, damp turf, soaked to the skin . . . the whole day was miserable.”

Later that month, with a starter 36-handicap, I played in my first junior club competition, finishing last with a pitiable 12 Stableford points. I hated how nervous I was and how badly I played. But then I won the next competition: 102, net 66. First prize was three MacGregor golf balls, which in those days came individually wrapped in gold foil. They were like jewels.

The next week I broke 100 for the first time. That summer my dad and I travelled to St. Andrews to watch Jack Nicklaus win the Open—the first of many such trips—and in October, back at Freshwater, I broke 80. Soon I would get my name on a board at my home club for winning a tournament—it’s there still. Golf is never more addictive than when you are young and imaginative and improving fast on a straight line that, if extrapolated, takes you to the final hole of some future Open where you tap in for victory, throw your ball to the crowd—you have of course rehearsed this—and make a tremendously witty, gracious and moving speech before an adoring nation. I wasn’t quite able to live the dream—my handicap never got below 8. But there were other dreams. Golf gave me an identity, lifelong friends, countless hours and adventures with my dad, and a career, too.

In the line of duty for this magazine I played from Pebble Beach to Pine Valley, Mid Ocean to Mauna Kea. I played all 14 British Open venues past and present. I finished 3-3 at TPC Sawgrass. I broke 90 at Augusta National. I played a bump-and-run approach to the 18th green at St. Andrews that finished close enough to get some applause from the onlookers leaning on the fence. I made a hole-in-one at Turnberry. I holed a 3-wood on a par-5 closing hole in France in almost complete darkness for an albatross. Twice in my life I shot 74 on a full-size course, the second time, at Royal Blackheath, with an O.B. drive on the 17th. I hit a shot in Aberdovey, Wales, that made a cow literally jump in the air. I played at Royal Dornoch with a Japanese couple who spoke no English and who, at the far end of the course, in a fit of sheer exuberance, teed up a load of balls and blasted them into the sea. I caddied in the final of the British Amateur for my then-girlfriend, who lost, turned pro and promptly cheated on me.

I played in the Russian Amateur in Moscow the first year they let non-Russians play, shot 89-88 and finished 28th. I played in Pyongyang, winning what we jokingly called the first North Korean Open. I played Royal Thimphu in Bhutan, “the world’s most remote golf course.” I finished 38th in the Putt Putt U.S. Open.

I interviewed Annika Sorenstam in her hometown, Stockholm, and Fred Couples in his home in Texas. I saw each of the four majors that Tiger Woods won in a row. I asked Jack Nicklaus a dumb question. I asked Gary Player about his early support of apartheid. I got Gene Sarazen to sign a photo of himself. I met Henry Cotton. I wrote a golf book.

I spent seven hours straight interviewing Peter Alliss in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Dallas and had the feeling he’d have happily continued long into the night. I interviewed Condoleezza Rice in her office in Stanford and Donald Trump in his office in Trump Tower.

John-Barton
Photo by Suzy Flood

I underclubbed. I overswung. I left it short.

I shook Arnold Palmer’s hand.

“The scan was abnormal,” Dr. Edwards said. “The results are consistent with Parkinson’s disease.”

He had a gentle tone. He was smiling slightly as he delivered the verdict, kindly, as if to say, Hey, you know, this is going to be OK. He had an optimistic outlook on management, medications, prognosis, the race for a cure, life expectancy and living with Parkinson’s. I walked home along indifferent London streets. I’d just turned 50 and felt like my life was over.

John-Barton with his father.
Courtesy of John Barton

The diagnosis wasn’t completely unexpected. For months, when I walked down the fairway, my left arm would feel deadened, hanging at my side like an inert slab of meat in a butcher’s shop window. My left hand, by contrast, started to get livelier. It took to playing air guitar to a tune all its own, a violent melody that I couldn’t hear. It convulsed my putting stroke.

I’d actually been struggling with golf for years. I have another unrelated neurological condition called Charcot-Marie-Tooth, which erodes the nerves of the feet, lower legs and hands. My downswing turned into a kind of flinch that would deliver a vicious pull-hook or a push-slice. Walking became a chore, like wading through sludge wearing lead boots on numb, wasted feet. Playing 18 holes got to be exhausting. Increasingly I asked that question again: “Why do I do it?”

Accepting loss is hard. In my work as a psychotherapist, I meet all sorts of people who can’t or won’t. They cannot accept the death of a loved one, or a relationship, or a dream, or the image of the person they thought themselves to be. They cannot accept the troubled childhood they had, the life they have led, all the terrible things that have happened to them. Or, like King Lear, they cannot accept their mortality.

The poet Robin Morgan regards Parkinson’s not as a diminishment but a distillation. Like a blind person whose other senses become heightened, constraints can facilitate growth, too. You can embrace time’s harsh editing of your life, and live it. Old worn-out ideas, activities and relationships can be sloughed off, as can vanity, pretence and polite conversations about the weather. And so, in the same year I had to say goodbye to my mom and my marriage, I decided to say goodbye to golf, too.

A recurring dream: I’m walking down a road beside a chain-link fence. On the other side is an overgrown wasteland. But as I look more carefully, it’s unmistakable—this used to be a golf course. I can make out the shape of what used to be a fairway, angled around a stand of trees, then rising to a distant ridge that cradled the green. A fine hole, now gone, leaving behind the ghosts of golfers and all the memories, conversations and friendships that happened here.

There’s lots about golf that I don’t miss, though. Its unashamed embrace of elitism, privilege and exclusion, for instance. Its chauvinistic belief in its own superiority; its history of prejudice and bigotry. I don’t miss the reverence for top golfers past and present. They are like deities, lauded and richly rewarded wherever they go, because they are good at hitting a ball with a stick.

Three off the tee. The silly dress codes. Green blazers. Pedantry at all levels of officialdom. Press-room platitudes. Equipment bores. Perhaps most of all, I don’t miss playing badly. Golf is a struggle; a long, slow game of extremely intermittent rewards, a hard game invented by hard men as a kind of penance. I play much better since I quit. The drives of ex-golfers bound down the middle; iron shots pull up close to the pin. I am so much better at delicate lobs over greenside bunkers now that I don’t have to play them. I never miss a putt.

P.G. Wodehouse wrote: “He enjoys that perfect peace, that peace beyond all understanding, which comes to its maximum only to the man who has given up golf.”

I was glad there was no one around to witness my last round of golf.

I hadn’t played at all in two years, and not much in the years preceding that. It was cold. I opened 4-8-4. I was a 36-handicapper again. The ball might be stationary, but with Parkinson’s, nothing else is.

Down the hill I could see a growing Sunday-morning congregation of locals by the first tee, and some stick figures already swiftly traversing the opening holes. I decided to put the scorecard away and treat the rest of the course like a buffet table. I skipped a few holes, played cross-country a bit, hit some shots I liked the look of and played others in my imagination.

The 12th hole is called Tennyson. From the tee, the highest point on the course, you can see all the poetry of the unspoiled western end of the island, including the next headland over, where for four decades Tennyson took his daily constitutional, writing verse in his head (sensibly forgoing the distraction of clubs, a ball and a scorecard). “I cannot rest from travel,” he once wrote. “I will drink life to the lees.”

I called my dad and told him where I was. Many golfers have a special relationship with their fathers because of all the time they’ve spent playing together. My dad wasn’t a good golfer but managed to pull off many miraculous shots, ridiculous hole-outs and, assisted by some extremely fortuitous bounces of the kind that often seemed to favour him, what might be the worst hole-in-one in history.

A lifelong fan of Kipling, he always managed to treat the two imposters—good shots and bad shots—the same. “You forget the bad ones anyway,” he said. He’s 93 and in a care home, bereft—my mom died in July; their 63rd wedding anniversary was their last day together—but always upbeat, generous, engaged with life. A gentleman.

Goodbyes are never really final. People die, walk out the door, or get on a plane to Paris leaving Humphrey Bogart behind. You can let the loved one go but keep the love. I thanked Dad for all the golfing good times we’d shared. Then I hung up and hit a proper, booming drive down the 12th.

I made my last par. Then I walked off the course.

The post My Last Round appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By John Updike
Editor’s note: In celebration of Golf Digest’s 70th anniversary, we’re revisiting the best literature and journalism we’ve ever published. Each entry includes an introduction that celebrates the author or puts in context the story. 

In late 1983, John Updike agreed to write an instruction story for Golf Digest. Yes, that John Updike—the acclaimed American novelist, short-story writer and book critic who lived in Beverly Farms, Mass., and played mediocre golf out of Myopia Hunt Club. Dwayne Netland had been the features editor at the time the assignment was made, but he since moved over to become the travel editor, and I inherited Mr. Updike. It was clear in the typewritten exchanges I’ve kept that the legendary author didn’t take to editing, especially by a 27-year-old hacker like me. “If you want to provide another proof, I’ll be happy to look at it; otherwise, I’ll trust you to follow the revised text,” he wrote on Dec. 4, 1983. Updike also stated that he wanted the title to be “Swing Thoughts” because “the whole piece keeps circling around the theme.” In the same letter, he noted that he’d mentioned nothing about putting: “Perhaps ‘Putting Thoughts’ would be a good sequel to these meditations, if you ever want one.”

I replied on Dec. 8 that we wanted the sequel, but in the meantime asked if he’d entertain the notion of another idea: meeting the No. 1 player at the time, Tom Watson, and writing about his impressions of him. A graduate of Stanford with a degree in psychology, Watson might not have been an intellectual match for Updike, but he could be a stimulating subject.

On Dec. 12, Updike wrote back: “As to the Watson: sorry, no. I do not feel free enough of my other commitments to undertake a real journalistic assignment like that. I don’t doubt Watson is as intelligent and winning as you say; indeed, he already comes over as such. But I don’t see myself as the kind of golf writer who will seek him out, as so many others have done already, and told us about it so ably.”

We then published Updike’s first instruction essay, and I followed up with a reminder about the sequel. On May 21, 1984, he sent me a postcard that said: “My trouble thus far has been that I seem to have no putting thoughts when I stand over the ball, and the results show it.” But the putting thoughts must have quickly materialized, because on May 25, I received a five-page manuscript and a note admonishing me: “Here are those putting thoughts you asked about; hope you can use them. If you can, the piece should be titled, ‘Putting Thoughts’; I was not entirely pleased to see that you titled my last piece “My Innermost Swing Thoughts,” and ran the title in type much smaller than that for my name. Well, it’s your magazine, of course.”

Perhaps with a bit of remorse, he added: “And one I read with pleasure every month. Send me a proof if this goes through.” We did, and many assignments followed before he died at 76 in 2009. The two pieces presented here as a pair were published in February 1984 and February 1985, the latter under the title, “Putting Thoughts.” —Jerry Tarde

Hit it with the back of your left hand was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely but not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was in my early 20s, having spent my youth in a cloistered precinct of the middle class where golf was a rumored something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did. Not only had I never held a golf club before, I had never thought about the back of my left hand before. I thought hard about it and took a murderous divot out of my aunt-in-law’s lawn.

Well, there was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. I read Tommy Armour, who told me to hit the ball with the right hand. I read Ben Hogan, who told me to push off with the right foot. I read Arnold Palmer, who said to think of my feet and head as the three apexes of an immovable triangle; your feet should feel like bricks, was one of his tips, with no indication of how your head should feel. Jack Nicklaus put great store in a little rightward cock of his head at takeaway, so his left eyeball and the golf ball were inexorably aligned. Gary Player liked to think of a core of metal passing up through the middle of his body; he twisted around it like a barbecued chicken on an upright spit. Hale Irwin has lately said he thinks of his hands and the club handle riding down an imaginary flume of water. Sam Snead thinks of waltz time, or of spanking the ball on its backside; his arms, he says, feel like ropes as he swings. Lee Trevino on television recently said to accelerate the back of the left hand through the ball toward the target—which puts me back where I began 20 bedevilled years ago.

I write, plainly, as a poor golfer, who came to the game late, with too loose-jointed a build, and frazzled eye-hand connections. But there are millions like me, shanking and topping away in a happy fog—“golf,” after all, is just “flog” spelt backwards—so my thoughts on swing thoughts might bring a little light into the outer darkness surrounding the televised championships where phlegmatic blond boys drill 5-irons 200 yards dead to the pin.

The basic duffer’s flaw is anxiety, which leads him to hit from the top, too fast and with too much right hand (in the case of a right-handed golfer). He is afraid of letting go of the earth, so he keeps his weight on the right leg and his knees prudently locked. He is afraid of the result, so he looks up, lifting his head that fatal microsecond too soon and hitting the ball as if with the flyswatter or hoe. Any swing thought that restrains these anxious tendencies is a good one; a thought that has always worked for me, though for whole summers I have forgotten to think it, is Begin the downswing as slowly as possible. This serves to keep the headset over the ball and discourages that right elbow from leaping out from the side to give the swing a counterproductive extra push. It also affords the weight shift time to occur and delays the uncocking of the wrists. Any number of inner advisements serve the same end: beginning the downswing as if pulling on a rope, imagining that the club is falling from the top, beginning with a tug or a slide of the left hip toward the target. Anything to keep those anxious hands from jumping down at the ball.

The right elbow is anxiety’s henchman, and the thoughts meant to keep it close to the body are legion; Don’t chicken-wing it, an old playing partner used to say to me. The trouble is, because there really is time for only two thoughts in the course of a two-second golf swing, we don’t want to waste one of them on a negativity and a basically trivial section of the anatomy. In general, I have had poor long-term luck with swing thoughts involving odd bits of the body, such as Put your weight on your right heel, then your left foot; or, pass your left shoulder under your chin, then your right. These things should happen, but thinking about them leaves the arms and hands-free to do too much mischief, and emphasizes our anxious sensation of being a rickety assembly of parts, any one of which might go awry.

This same old friend also would say, Throw your hands toward the hole, which, reckless as it sounds, does get the hands in front of the moving clubhead and does, if the grip isn’t twisting, send the ball toward the hole. Once the swing is commenced, a second thought must keep it going, for only a full swing through the ball produces a sweet result. A Gestalt approach translates the unnatural complications of the golf swing into some instinctive motion. We all can throw a club without thinking, with the proper weight shift. One sparkling afternoon I was hitting string-straight boomers, imagining that I was throwing the driver down through the ball toward the hole. The next day that I tried it, though, I kept hitting a foot behind the tee.

For a time I had success forgetting my body entirely and just concentrating on the image of the clubface striking the ball; picturing the face of a wedge nicely brings your hands and weight forward and usually averts a skull. But such a fine focus has a way of creating constraint in a situation already fraught with constraints; the ideal swing thought liberates the golfing body from its trepidations into a certain relaxed largeness of free motion. Turn your back was a simple directive that, when I remembered it, at least packed some torque into the top of the swing. You are a rubber man, I used to say to myself—not a man of rubber bands but of something hardish yet springy, like a rubber tire. Or, transcending anatomy entirely, I would think of the course as a succession not of narrow fairways and perilously rimmed greens but of generous depressions, great receptive areas that I only had to hit broadly “in the direction of” to obtain success.

The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burned up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: The terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum, and the ball will spray like a thing berserk. A swing thought is the golfer’s equivalent of the rock climber’s Don’t look down. With it, we reduce the huge circumambient room for error to a manageable somatic circumference. The score, the stakes, the beer in the clubhouse should all be ousted by some swing thought—which is a swing thought in itself.

Putting Thoughts
Having ventured, some months ago, to confide to the golf-mad (and tip-saturated) readers of this publication the many conflicting “swing thoughts” that have helped this poor duffer steer his erratic course from tee to green, I feel obliged to make a clean breast of it and now share my putting thoughts.

Putting: Is there any department of this convoluted game more apparently straightforward, or one wherein the experienced golfer more ingeniously defeats himself? Put a putter into the hands of a 6-year-old child or an 80-year-old crone, and neither will have much trouble sinking those little four-footers that, when I strike them, persistently slide by on the high side, or take the break six inches late, or stop short of the cup by one feeble turn of the ball.

“Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” is how Hamlet described the native hue of resolution. This sickliness broods over many a deviant lag and three-putt green. An eight-inch putt can be missed, if we think hard enough about it, and a single twitch of anxiety can skitter a 20-foot downhiller 20 feet past the hole on the other side. “You’re still away,” one’s opponent says deadpan, in lieu of laughing aloud. No significant strength is involved, so putting is all thought, all confidence and self-reassurance. Putting is child’s play—which might be why adults do so badly at it.

My first putting thought was imparted to me by the same kindly aunt who told me of the full swing, “Hit it with the back of your left hand.” Her putting instructions were more complex: “For every foot of the putt,” she said, “take your putter back an inch; then swing it like a pendulum.” And, in truth, though the mathematics of this are too tidy to be trustworthy, the notion of the pendulum has stayed with me ever since. Nothing is uglier, on the green, than the wristy putter, who crouches low and stabs and pokes like a man giving a mole a rap on its nose. He might be deadly from three feet in, but his distance touch is erratic, because he is at the mercy of his jumpy minor muscles.

How does one, for starters, lag the long putt up to within the fabled bushel basket, the 18-inch radius of the cup? Some days it can’t be done; on others, it seems as easy as tossing quarters into a tollbooth bucket. Pacing the distance off, taking note of the slant of the green, of the day’s dew point and prevailing winds all will do no good unless these unconscious observations can be fed into the subconscious mechanism that determines, at the mindless moment of truth, how hard the ball is struck. On days of high Zen, there seems no trick to it, as if the cup, wherever it is, is nestled in a soft hollow that brings every putt to a convenient rest. On other days, that old clumsy devil Conscious Effort has to do all the work. My only thoughts here are, Try to imagine the line, and stroke the ball before the image fades, and Imagine that the cup indeed lies in a receptive little swale, and coast the ball up to it. Don’t stare and plumb bob forever, but don’t hurry, either; wait that extra half-second until that projected putt becomes, somehow, real in the mind.

The shorter the putt, the greater the dishonour in missing it. Hence, the more constrained and tense the stroke. The closer we get, too, the harder it becomes to see the break, and an ambiguity develops between trying to ram the putt straight in and trying to cosy it in on a curving line. Foolishly enough, we often decide to ram it in and then hit it cosily, or vice versa. Within six feet, I think, we tend to over-read the break, so a little ramming is not a bad thing. I once had some success forgetting the shape of the hole and trying instead to strike a phantom target on the front—not the back—edge of the cup. When I try to picture the back of the cup, I feel somehow gloomy, and doomed, and far from home.

Indecision and second thoughts are the putting man’s enemies; clear visualization is his best friend. A putt we can’t picture is almost never going to drop. But what a Cubist picture we are trying to paint, in three dimensions that shift axis every time we move our heads! If only we had frog’s eyes and could see the ball and the hole at once. Bending our gaze to the ball, we forget where the hole just was; it jiggles around in the memory like a star twinkling through smog, while the green seems to sway like the deck of a rolling ship. Should we look at the back of the ball and think of driving a tack into it, as Walter J. Travis advised, or should we mark out a line on a blade of grass an inch or two in front of the ball and roll the stroke through that point, as I believe Nicklaus has suggested? The former thought produces an infallibly crisp hit, but in a variable direction, and the latter gives excellent aim to a sometimes foozled stroke.

I once played with a man who firmed up his putter head behind the ball and then hit while looking at the hole; it worked quite well for him but thoroughly spooked the rest of us. He kept staring right through you, zombie-style. I get somewhat the same shivers when, watching a seniors tournament on television, I see Sam Snead stoop into his “side-winder” stance or Gay Brewer manipulate that bizarre putter with the shaft on the far side of the ball. Putting is the sick man of golf, as we can see from the extremity of some of the applied remedies.

Well, then, what are my putting thoughts? Often, I confess, I have none, just a kind of blank dismay as my eyes circle like flies in an empty hotel room. But when I do manage in my vast unease to think, I think:

Relax. It’s just a game. Hold the putter lightly, so it can impart momentum and direction out of its own gentle swing.

Having determined the line through visualization, hit the ball as if it’s a straight putt. Subconsciously trying to build break into the stroke sicklies o’er the native hue, etc.

Try to feel the clubhead moving close to the turf, and the ball huffing this same surface in its gravity-bound flight. A certain Earth-mysticism, or Erdschluss, translates into a nice tactility and necessary boldness.

Challenge yourself with the notion that this putt should be made. It becomes easy for perennial bogey shooters to think of an automatic two-putt even from modest distances; and such defeatist thinking breeds, from farther out, those dreadful three-putts.

All else failing, pretend that you have already been conceded the putt, or that this is your second try. Ever notice how easy it is to sink the putt on the second, carefree attempt? Well, put that first try behind you in your mind, and rap this one in. Your grandmother can do it; why not you?

The post John Updike: My innermost swing thoughts appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Jaime Diaz
In celebration of Golf Digest’s 70th anniversary, we’re revisiting the best literature and journalism we’ve ever published. Each entry includes an introduction that celebrates the author or puts in context the story. 

Tiger Woods’ first appearance in Golf Digest came in 1981, when the phenom was 5 years old, tall as a ball washer and weighed 44 pounds. He was said to be shooting in the 90s on a regulation course and had appeared on network television with Bob Hope. Tiger’s father was described as a retired Army colonel, a McDonnell Douglas contracts administrator and a 3-handicap. “The kid’s not exceptional,” his pro, Rudy Duran, was quoted as saying. “He’s way beyond that.”

Our next encounter was in 1987, when Tiger was 11 and entered the magazine’s first Armchair Architect contest with a drawing of his dream hole—a U-shape, double-dogleg par 5 with an island tee and island green. He didn’t win the contest, but we eventually noticed him racking up junior victories, ranked him America’s third-best junior amateur of 1990, and dispatched senior writer Jaime Diaz to profile Tiger at age 14 in late 1990 for the March 1991 issue (below). His first appearance on a cover of Golf Digest was in November 1994 as a model for an instruction story on power. His second cover was two years later when he turned pro, with the headline, “Is This Kid Superman?” Frank Hannigan writing inside tried to temper the growing fervor: “Tiger Woods is a joy to watch, and he may very well achieve his goal of becoming the best player in the world. But there is a need for perspective. There are a lot of missed putts between desire and fruition.”

Before we get ahead of ourselves, which is hard not to do with Tiger Woods, return with us now to yesterday, when the young man was only 14 and the dream was still new. —Jerry Tarde

For someone named Tiger, the kid didn’t seem very predatory. Seventeen holes with his dad and a sportswriter had produced no blood—in fact, not even a bet. The only thing remotely competitive was the annoying way the old man kept jingling change when the kid got ready to putt.

But Eldrick (Tiger) Woods is used to winning. Finally, on the 18th tee of Coto de Caza, an arduous Southern California test, he can’t resist.

“Play you for some ABC gum,” Tiger says to the sportswriter, who, extremely thankful that his only losses to this point have been four golf balls, vacantly accepts.

Woods rhythmically settles his lithe, 5-foot-11, 138-pound frame over his ball, and with a fluid action that mixes some Davis Love III power with a smooth dollop of Al Geiberger tempo, belts a 270-yard drive down the middle. He follows with a 9-iron to 10 feet and, naturally, makes the putt.

“Where do I find ABC gum?” asks the loser.

“In your mouth,” says Woods, rolling his eyes at the lameness of his victim. “Already Been Chewed.”

As Woods cackles at the schoolboy joke, the sportswriter remembers what he has kept forgetting all afternoon. The supremely talented golfer who has been busting huge 1-irons and sucking back approach shots all day is only 14 years old.

Very simply, Tiger (Please Don’t Call Me Eldrick) Woods of Cypress, Calif., is one of the most precocious lights on the American golf scene. The prodigy has accomplished more at his age than Bobby Jones, Jack Nicklaus and Lanny Wadkins did as wunderkinder, and even more than junior stars like Eddie Pearce and Tracy Phillips, who reached their peaks in high school before fading from the arena. If Woods can maintain the rate of his rise—and “if” must always be emphasized when projecting golfing genius—he could develop into one of the game’s finer players.

“That’s what I want,” Woods says. “I want to be the next dominant player. I want to go to college, turn pro and tear it up on the tour. I want to win more majors than anybody ever has.”

“The game has never seemed hard,” says Woods, who speaks with an unaffected openness about his prowess. “I don’t know why, but I’ve always been good.”

Remarkable words, but Woods has a remarkable history. The son of a black father and Thai mother, he has been a phenomenon since the age of 3, when he shot 48 for nine holes on the regulation-length Navy Golf Club near his home. His prowess got him on “The Mike Douglas Show,” where, still wearing training pants, he competed with Bob Hope in a putting contest. At age 5, Tiger was featured on the TV show, “That’s Incredible!” and was the subject of an article in this magazine (November 1981). At 8, he was the club champion on the 2,156-yard, nine-hole Heartwell Golf Park. In 1981, he won the first of five Optimist Junior World age-group championships. By the time he was 13, he has made five holes-in-one and played an exhibition with Sam Snead.

“The game has never seemed hard,” says Woods, who speaks with an unaffected openness about his prowess. “I don’t know why, but I’ve always been good.”

And getting better. Last year, in the midst of a growth spurt that saw him sprout nearly seven inches and gain 25 pounds, Woods had perhaps the most impressive year a 14-year-old has had since Bobby Jones won the Georgia State Amateur and went to the third round of the U.S. Amateur.

In a three-week period last July, Woods won a local city junior championship, took the 13-14-year-old division title in the World Junior, then grabbed the Big I Insurance Classic in Fort Worth.

Woods’ bid to become the youngest player, and first black, ever to win the USGA Junior Championship fell short when he lost in the semifinals at Lake Merced Country Club in San Francisco. And the week after the Big I, he finished second at the United Van Lines PGA Junior Championship at PGA National. The victor there with a 63 in the last round was that other youthful phenomenon making a big noise, 17-year-old Chris Couch, possibly the youngest player ever to qualify for a PGA Tour event.

Woods tried to get his revenge on his nemesis at the year-ending Orange Bowl in Coral Gables, Fla., Couch’s home turf. Woods was two shots back going into the final round. But on Dec. 30, his 15th birthday, he blew up with a 78 to fall to sixth place, and Couch won. The hotly contested battle for consensus junior player of the year also went to Couch, who moves out of the junior class on his 18thbirthday in 1991, when he begins classes at the University of Florida.

“It was a learning experience,” says Tiger’s father, Earl Woods, who has developed his own brand of “tough love” to help nurture his son’s talents. “We had a debriefing. This is what I learned in Vietnam—you have a debriefing after a battle. He learned that he can’t win everything, even though he may want to. Right now it’s important for him to enjoy. When he’s 17, I fully expect him to win everything. But not now.”

It’s Earl Woods’ passion to manage a balance between Tiger’s enjoyment of the game and his desire to win. A former contracts administrator for McDonnell Douglas, the elder Woods is a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army. In talking about his son, he usually effects the role of pacifist in the warfare of the fairways.

“I’m just there to make sure he keeps things in perspective,” Earl says as he sits in the living room of his suburban home. “Tiger has such a high competitive drive to win and to score, it’s a constant fight for me to get him to go out and just have fun playing a round of golf.”

To prevent the burnout that can attack golf prodigies, Earl and his wife, Kultida, have made sure their son gives as much attention to academics as to golf. Tiger, now a freshman at Western High School, has kept up a 3.5 grade average. He played in a limited schedule of about 30 tournaments in 1990.

Then again, competition is in Tiger Woods’ blood, in large part because of his father. Earl Woods was the first black to play baseball in the Big Eight Conference, at Kansas State. After a shoulder injury, he chose the military over professional baseball. He was drawn to the front lines, and in Vietnam he befriended a Vietnamese soldier nicknamed Tiger.

“That guy was so brave, such a bitch in the field, I decided my next son’s nickname would be Tiger,” Earl says.

That son took to golf with big-game ferocity before he was a year old. At 6 months, Tiger would sit in a high chair and watch his 3-handicap dad hit balls into a net in the garage. At 11 months, he was imitating his father by hitting a tennis ball down the hall with a vacuum-cleaner hose.

It wasn’t long before his father was taking Tiger along on 18-hole rounds at the Navy Club. By age 4, Tiger was carrying his own bag at Heartwell.

“My view is, God gave me a gift, and he trusted me to take care of it,” Earl says.

That means ensuring that his son can take care of himself. He sadly recounts the story of Tiger’s first day of school, where, as the only black student, he was tied to a tree and called names by a group of older children. His son has also felt the specter of racism at some of the country clubs where junior tournaments have been played.

“You can feel it—I call it The Look,” Tiger says. “It makes you uncomfortable, like someone is saying something without saying it. It makes me want to play even better. That’s the way I am. Little things like that motivate me.”

“This isn’t a very nice world sometimes,” Earl says. “I’ve used psychological techniques, things I learned in prisoner interrogations, to toughen Tiger up. It’s to prepare him, not to use as an offensive tactic. I’m not trying to create a little monster.”

On the golf course, the techniques take the form of Earl placing his shadow in his son’s putting line, coughing in the middle of his stroke, or talking annoyingly about the out-of-bounds on the left.

“I tell Tiger, ‘When you are ahead, don’t take it easy, kill them,’ ” his mother says. “ ‘After the finish, then be a sportsman.’ ”

Tiger is used to his father’s testing and even welcomes it. At Coto de Caza, the interplay is comfortable and happy, and Tiger has fun despite some missed putts.

“You can’t get to me, Pop,” he says as Earl jingles change while Tiger is over an approach shot. On the next hole, as the elder Woods prepares for a delicate cut shot over a bunker, Tiger says just loudly enough: “Watch. He always hits these shots fat.” When Earl chunks his shot into the sand, there is a second of silence before the two bust out laughing.

Tiger also has a close relationship with his mother. A friendly, energized woman whose accented English comes in torrents when the subject is her child, Kultida is proud to have spent countless afternoons driving her son to the golf course, then walking and keeping score for Tiger.

Woods was a celebrity by age 5 when he appeared on the “Mike Douglas Show”.

Kultida, who thought up the name Eldrick, keeps a shrine to her son’s career. She still has the shoes she glued spikes to when he was 4, and she has filled four scrapbooks with clippings, landmark scorecards (including the first time he beat his father, in 1982) and every report card he ever brought home. Tiger’s trophies fill the living room, and there are three boxes full in the garage.

Although it is Kultida Woods who has made sure Tiger attends to his homework before golf, she is in her own way every bit as competitive as her husband.

“I tell Tiger, ‘When you are ahead, don’t take it easy, kill them,’ ” she says. “ ‘After the finish, then be a sportsman.’ ”

Tiger has learned well. “I love competition,” he says. “I love to play in tournaments, especially against older kids.”

Though Woods has thrived on a giant-killer mentality, he is also making the difficult adjustment to being the giant. Last year was a psychological minefield for a young man facing his first national tournaments.

Woods, self-deprecating as he is brash, has a vivid memory of the gnawing nervousness he felt the morning of the final round of the Big I. During a dinner at an all-you-can-eat steak house in which he returned to the buffet line as least five times, Woods alternated between mouthfuls of food and youthful hyperbole in an animated retelling of the experience.

“I was in the shower in my hotel room, and I couldn’t pick up the bar of soap,” says Woods, shaking his head and smiling. “I was choking in the shower. And I’m thinking, How am I going to handle this? On the first tee, I’m 100-percent nervous. I was choking so much, I was laughing. My eyes were looking at trees. I couldn’t focus on the fairway. I scraped it around for six holes, then on 7, I choked so hard on this 4-iron. I hit it beyond right.”

After recovering to within eight feet of the pin, his panic gave way to a sudden, mysterious calm that champions sometimes admit to.

“I knew I had to make that putt. I told myself, If you make this putt, you win. This is the turning point. And, I just felt myself slow down, like the game was easy again. I knocked it in, and I busted the next drive. And I won.”

Those who have seen Woods in competition are struck by the youngster’s poise even more than his ball-striking ability.

“Tiger’s got an aura about him, that you see in very few kids,” says Chris Haack, assistant executive director of the American Junior Golf Association. “Besides having a great swing, he shows very little emotion on the golf course. He’s got the killer instinct, and he knows how to think his way around the golf course. You just don’t see all those things in juniors, let alone a 14-year-old.”

Chris Couch, who once lost a four-ball match against Woods in the Canon Cup, has plenty of respect for his younger counterpart.

“I was real motivated when I played against Tiger because, no matter how young he is, I could see his ability,” Couch says. “I think he has the best chance to be the best junior in the country this year.”

Tommy Moore, a PGA Tour player who was paired with Woods in the third round of the Big I, was similarly impressed watching Woods shoot a 69 that beat 15 of the 21 pros who played with the juniors.

“This kid has a lot of talent, just a ton,” says Moore, who shot 72 the day he played with Woods. “He’s very long. He has a very clean, simple technique that to me was superior to the other juniors I saw. He’s got an unbelievably soft touch. The only thing about him that was 14 was his appearance.”

But Moore, Golf Digest’s No. 1-ranked junior golfer in 1980, remembers several contemporaries from his youth who never fulfilled their promise.

“You can’t ‘crystal ball’ what you think Tiger can do,” Moore says. “Yes, he’s good enough to play on the Division I college level right now, but is he going to be a great collegiate player? You can’t say that. Is he going to be a great pro? You really can’t say that.

“My advice for Tiger would be, ‘Don’t get caught up in what other people are saying.’ People are going to say, ‘Wow! You shot 63 at 14, imagine what you will shoot when you’re 18!’ But golf doesn’t work like that. Right now, the only thing he should be concerned with is enjoying his success and trying to keep improving every day. Because the enjoyment tends to lessen, and the improvements get harder and harder.”

The hardening of Tiger Woods is well underway, but on the outside, he’s still a teenager with an impish humour and a soft side that can melt even his tough old man. Earl Woods’ voice get shaky when he remembers how his son reacted to losing, 3 to 2, to Dennis Hillman at the USGA Junior.

“We got in the car, and Tiger stayed quiet for a little while,” Earl says. “Then he reached over, hugged me and said, ‘Pop, I love you.’ That made the whole thing worthwhile for me. I’m very proud that Tiger is a better person than he is a golfer.”

The feeling seems to be mutual. “Earl is the coolest guy I know,” Tiger says. “He doesn’t live through me, which is what some parents do. He might watch me play, but I don’t think about him on the golf course. I just think about me. It’s all me.”

Woods knows it’s a selfish game, but he is not full of himself. He is constantly evaluating his weaknesses. Last year, he began an exercise program he learned in this magazine (“Winter Exercise for a Spring Payoff,” January 1990), and by December was up to 138 pounds, and 40 yards longer off the tee. He seems more interested in his few losses than his many victories, instinctively knowing that the lessons he takes from failures will ultimately be his most valuable. He has a vivid memory of how humble he felt while Couch was making seven birdies in the first 13 holes at the PGA.

“I was playing awesome, but I was getting wasted,” Tiger says. “I hate to lose, but in golf everybody loses because it’s so hard mentally. Sometimes you get so nervous. I like the feeling of trying my hardest under pressure, it’s when I play my best. But it’s so intense, it’s hard to describe. It feels like a lion is tearing at my heart.”

It’s the sensation that makes some prodigies disappear. But so far, it’s only caused the one called Tiger to live up to his name.

The post Tiger at age 14 appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Jaime Diaz
Photos by Erin Patrice O’Brien
This is a new series on the 70th anniversary of Golf Digest commemorating the best literature we’ve ever published. Each entry includes an introduction that celebrates the author or puts in context the story. 

Jaime Diaz is one of the sport’s deep thinkers, whether writing features for Golf Digest, which he has done since 1989, or doing commentary on Golf Channel, his full-time gig now. He has a knack for observation and historical perspective that’s simply better than any of his contemporaries’. Jaime can dissect the mechanics of a tour pro’s swing as easily as he analyzes the closing holes of a tournament or explains the parental relationship that forged the character of a major champion. And he does it all with the empathy of a poet engaged in his own human struggle for golf’s tough love.

There was no better writer for explaining Seve Ballesteros, especially at the end of Seve’s life, when genius faced reality. I asked Jaime recently what he remembered about this piece that appeared in July 2010, and he replied: “For all of Seve’s triumphs, it seemed I wrote about him most during times of loss: his crushing defeat at the 1986 Masters, the free fall of his game in the ’90s, the poignancy of his last Open Championship, at Hoylake in 2006. Occasions when he was exposed and fragile. But contrary to his reputation for combativeness, he had handled such moments with honesty that struck me as noble.

“When photographer Erin Patrice O’Brien and I visited Seve in April 2010, he was fragile in life—physically and emotionally. Yet on a day when his nephew Ivan would warn us that his uncle’s energy was particularly low, Seve’s effort—fierce but discreet—was touching. During our interview, though it caused him tears more than once, he went to deep places and got the words right. The brain operations had left him a bit unsteady on his feet, but he insisted on guiding us through several rooms in his elegant home, lingering on a nautical motif that was a tribute to his late father, Baldomero, a local rowing champion. When his face inevitably began to betray a heavy fatigue, he stood with a determined smile to complete a rushed but successful photo session.

“Throughout, while Seve spoke positively about his recovery, it was impossible to ignore the spectre of ultimate loss. Two months later, he would follow the recommendations of his doctors and cancel his trip to participate in the four-hole Champions Challenge before the Open at St. Andrews, a decision I learned he came to regret until his death at 54 in May 2011. My lasting memory is that on the last day I ever saw him, more than ever, Seve was noble.” —Jerry Tarde

Seve Ballesteros’ home in Pedrena, Spain, is built on a promontory above the beach whereas a boy he hit pebbles with a wood-shafted 3-iron, and it’s only a few hundred yards from the converted farmhouse where he was born. It’s a three-story medley of tasteful masonry, earth-toned stucco and dark wood, understated in every way. Except one.

A silhouette in weathered bronze of the golfer reacting to his winning putt at the 1984 Open Championship at St. Andrews is mounted on the front door.

The depiction is often referred to by Ballesteros’ inner circle as El Momento, and he calls it “the greatest moment of my career.” It serves as his business logo, appearing on all manner of products, and Ballesteros even has it tattooed on his left forearm. But after the cruel blows he has endured the past several years, it has become a haunting symbol of a pinnacle too brief and too long past.

The combination of magic and misfortune is why Ballesteros’ anticipated return to the Old Course at this year’s British Open will prompt the warmest display of mass public affection any golfer has ever received. Engaged in a battle with brain cancer, Ballesteros says he will play in the four-hole Open Champions’ Challenge the day before the tournament starts. Given his illness, his standing as the most beloved European golfer ever among British fans and that the first tee at the Old Course is the game’s most iconic stage, the announcement of his name and his opening tee shot will be golf’s version of Muhammad Ali lighting the Olympic torch at the 1996 Summer Games.

Like Ali, Ballesteros, 53, has been physically diminished. Doctors discovered a malignant tumour the size of two golf balls above his right temple after he fainted at the Madrid airport on Oct. 5, 2008. Over 11 days, he would undergo three complicated surgeries totalling more than 20 hours to remove as much of the tumour as possible. After 22 days in intensive care and 72 days in the hospital, Ballesteros emerged with an unsettling diagonal scar where the main incision had been made. Once back home, he embarked on 12 treatments of chemotherapy, followed by two months of radiation late last year.

Although still too fatigued in late April from the after effects of the radiation to play golf, Ballesteros agreed to allow Golf Digest to come to Spain to discuss his recovery and his life. We met in the foyer of his home, and although his torso has lost some of its sturdiness and his features some of their expressiveness, his innate charisma still allows him to cut a noble figure.

“Hola,” he says, his voice unchanged. “Many years since you’ve been here.”

It was a reference to a visit I made in 1990, when after initially annoying Ballesteros by appearing unannounced at the Royal Golf Club of Pedrena, he graciously agreed to an impromptu interview. “This house wasn’t built yet. A lot of things are different.”

Seve in 1984

It was indeed a whole other time. When Ballesteros won at St. Andrews he was 27 years old, and it was his fourth major championship, putting him on an early trajectory no player other than Tiger Woods has equalled since.

In Ballesteros’ victory at the Old Course, he had taken the top spot in the game from Tom Watson, who had succeeded Jack Nicklaus. Ballesteros seemed well on his way to establishing his own era.

He had wondrous tools, combining the physical talents of power, shotmaking ability and a genius short game with the mental strengths of ultra-fierce competitiveness and a keen “golfing mind.”

But what made Ballesteros truly special was an ability to connect with spectators. Part of it was his gift for improvising some of the most improbable recovery shots in the history of the game. “He was to the short game what Hogan was to ball-striking,” says Hank Haney. Another element was the pure passion with which Seve performed. That was never more evident than in his ultimate “moment” on the final green in 1984. When the 15-foot birdie putt barely crawled into the high side of the hole, Ballesteros began a series of right-hand thrusts into the sky that also served as salutes to the cheering multitudes packed in the grandstands and straining to watch from the balconies of the Auld Grey Toon.

“I loved the expressive way he played, like Arnold Palmer,” says Ben Crenshaw. “When he did well, he showed it in a beautiful, proud way. When he failed, he did it with so much heart that people would feel for him. When he won at St. Andrews, that’s one of the great reactions in the history of the game.”

Somehow, the moment didn’t prove to be a springboard. Ballesteros won only one more major, the 1988 British Open, finishing with three Opens and two Masters. At first gradually, and then very quickly as the condition of his lower back deteriorated, he lost the length and especially accuracy in his long game. Even as his wedge play and putting remained in the all-time category, he didn’t have enough game to get in contention with any regularity, and he won his final official tournament in 1995. He played on for another mostly desultory dozen years, and although he ended up with more than 90 professional victories around the world, a record 50 on the European tour and almost single-handedly elevated the Ryder Cup into one of golf’s premier events, his career leaves the feeling of loss.

It’s a sensation that pervades his current life on a few levels and is palpable in his large house, where he lives alone. Ballesteros and Carmen, his wife of 16 years, divorced in 2004. Their three children — Javier, 19; Miguel, 17; and Carmen, 15 — live in Madrid with their mother and visit Ballesteros regularly, but he admits the place he once called “my paradise” contains too many echoes for a sole occupant.

PARTIAL PARALYSIS

After our greeting, he leads me into his spacious living room, with large windows opening to views of the Bay of Santander. His gait has lost its smoothness, and he explains that because of damage from the tumour, he has suffered partial paralysis on his left side. “I don’t have very good balance because my left leg has lost some feeling,” he says. “My left hand is worse. When I have something in the hand, the keys or a glass of water, I don’t know if I have it or not. Some of it might come back a little bit, but not like before.” During our conversation, several times his left arm slides off its resting place on his knee, causing him to reflexively pick it up with his right hand and put it back in position.

Ballesteros has also lost about 75 per cent of the vision in his left eye. Because I unthinkingly sit on his left, he has to fully turn to look at me, which he does. His eyes seem to open wider than I remember, and he holds eye contact longer.

Seve Ballesteros

Ballesteros says that for the moment he has lost some of the energy he exhibited after being inspired by Watson’s Open performance last year at Turnberry. Along with the radiation, the cold and rainy winter and spring in northern Spain have kept him from wanting to spend a lot of time outside. “But I’m getting stronger again,” he says. “The doctors who saved me, they say that in my treatment I am on the 15th hole. I’m looking forward to finishing this round.”

His metaphor leads into questions about the kind of golf he can play after his surgery. Ballesteros still enjoys playing and practising, and he contends he can still hit some good shots, though he’s perhaps 50 yards shorter off the tee, and because of his balance problems on his left side he often finishes in the Gary Player “walk-through” style. Beginning in May 2009, Ballesteros began hitting balls on the range nearly every day, as well as playing occasional nine-hole rounds at Royal Pedrena, where he caddied and which lies in the valley below his house.

“It felt different, very weird,” he says of the sensation of first hitting the ball again. “But as soon as I practice a few, the rhythm comes back. And I played last summer, very well. I can hit the ball. I can hit long shots, long irons, medium irons. My short game is pretty good, and I can putt. But aiming and judging distance is a handicap now. Of course, I miss that I lost a little bit of skill, you know. But golf is very good therapy.”

He gestures out the window to the nine-hole pitch-and-putt course he installed on his 17-acre property after the surgery. Though no hole is longer than 75 yards, he designed it with wickedly tiny greens that cozy up to streams and ponds and drop off to punish the smallest error. “It’s very difficult, yes,” he says. “Well, if you make it easy, it’s no challenge. I make it for me, and for my friends. If they shoot three or four under, there is nothing to talk about after. The record is one under par. By me.”

This last remark is delivered with a familiar jauntiness, but it is not accompanied by the smile or laughter that used to come so naturally. I realize that Ballesteros is now less expressive, a condition not unusual for people who are recovering from major brain surgery. At the same time, overflowing emotion is also a normal aftermath, and when I ask Ballesteros specifically about returning to St. Andrews, his voice thickens and he averts his gaze.

“Yes, I think, well…” As he grimaces and tears come, he covers his eyes with his right hand and waits through soft sobs. “It’s all right,” he says. “It will go away.”

He wipes his eyes and gathers himself before continuing. “My goal was to compete in the championship, but I cannot,” he says. “But I think I have the obligation to go and play the four holes. Because of what St. Andrews means. To me and to people. Because of all the British people have done in the past for me. They want to see me, and I have to go out there for them.”

His presenting the situation as a burden makes me think of his close friend Vicente Fernandez telling me that toward the end of Ballesteros’ career, Seve had confided to him, “I cannot handle the pressure from the people, from the players, from the press. I don’t want to act rude to the people, but that’s my feeling. I get to the first tee, I’m shaking.”

But when I ask Ballesteros if he will feel nervous about his game in the four-hole exhibition, he says, “No, there is nothing left to prove.” Asked if he is looking forward to being personally fulfilled by the experience, he again breaks into tears, finally saying, “Emotionally it will be…very strong. As you can see. Sorry.”

But even as he excuses himself for breaking down, Ballesteros seems almost relieved to be able to offer a less-guarded version of himself. He knows that since his illness his life has become more of an open book than it ever was as a player, when he fiercely guarded his privacy and was often cryptic in his interviews. He also realizes that he has become an inspiration to many. “It’s good to let go, because I have so much emotions,” he says. “Because it is so much inside, for a long time, it’s good to let it out. I am a very sensitive person. A lot of people think I’m very hard, you know. But you see the sensitive part now. Very sensitive. Very human.”

‘I DON’T WANT THIS ANYMORE’

That he kept his emotions under wraps for so long makes his later years more painful to consider. For a time, it seemed he was holding on to stay in shape for a successful run on the Champions Tour when he turned 50. But after playing only one event, in Alabama in May 2007, and shooting 78-81-73 to finish tied for last, he abruptly went back to Spain.

“Part of it was I felt homesick in America, similar to how I felt in the early ‘80s,” he explains. “I thought, If I couldn’t do it then, why do it now? That was part of it. But something inside just told me, I don’t want this anymore. It was time.”

Seve’s stairs

Two months later, at the Open at Carnoustie, he announced his retirement from competition. But though he often seemed disconsolate in the last years of his playing career, the medical crisis that engulfed Ballesteros 15 months later snapped him back into fighting mode. Ivan Ballesteros, who assists his uncle in his public life, says that Seve’s first words after emerging from the first marathon surgery, spoken in a dream state, were “Yo siempre gano.” (“I always win.”)

That spirit no doubt rubs hard against some of the significant compromises Ballesteros has had to make in his daily life. Because of his vision problems, he can no longer drive a car. In March, the golf cart he was driving went off a small embankment to his left, causing him to fall out of the cart and hit his head on the ground. He stayed under hospital observation for four days before doctors released him. Nor can Ballesteros ride a bicycle, which as a fan of competitive cycling he enjoyed as his primary source of strenuous exercise. Other than golf, his recreation is limited to walking on the beach, gardening and mild calisthenics.

Ballesteros can depend on his three older brothers. Manuel and Vicente live nearby in Pedrena, and the oldest brother, Baldomero, lives 10 miles away in Santander. Again, tears flow when Ballesteros is asked how his family has reacted to his illness.

“My brothers, my children, I see how much they care about me,” he says. “They all respond very good, very good.”

He mentions the champions and greats who have called him. “Palmer, Nicklaus, Gary Player — I don’t want to count, because I will forget many. Whenever someone calls, it helps. Arnold Palmer sent me a dog,” he says, almost chuckling. “In a picture. His dog, called Mulligan. Because the doctors saved my life, they say now I use my mulligan. So Palmer’s picture says, ‘Here’s a Mulligan for you.’ “

And to ease his loneliness a bit, Ballesteros recently acquired a Labrador puppy. After watching Phil Mickelson’s victory at Augusta in April, Seve named the newcomer Phil.

Since retirement, Ballesteros has become more interested in his legacy. He says his proudest achievement is making golf more popular in Spain. He is also committed financially and conceptually to two Ryder Cup-style professional events. The former Seve Trophy — now called the Vivendi Trophy with Seve Ballesteros — matches teams from Great Britain & Ireland and Europe. Ballesteros says the matches provide valuable preparation for Europe’s best in the next year’s Ryder Cup. Ballesteros sees the Royal Trophy — a competition between pros from the Asian and Japan tours against a European team — as an engine to expand and strengthen Asian golf, much as the Ryder Cup did for Europe. Last year he started the Seve Ballesteros Foundation, dedicated to brain-tumour research. Its blue wristbands emulate Lance Armstrong’s “Livestrong” yellow bands. “I admire Lance,” says Ballesteros, a close friend of five-time Tour de France winner Miguel Indurain. “It would be wonderful if I could motivate people as he has.”

It’s when Ballesteros talks about his illness that he is least emotional.

“Through all this, I’ve never been afraid of dying,” he says. “I was more afraid of how I was to face the future. Because maybe I couldn’t manage myself. But I feel much better about that now. I don’t feel sorry for myself, no. You’ve got to be strong in life, because it is not fair. You just have to think, This is what I have. I have no other choice. Take it or leave it. So I take it.”

The unfairness has also struck his compatriot, Jose Maria Olazabal, who at 44 is in a battle for his career against a mysterious recurrence of rheumatism. Olazabal, who lives near San Sebastian, visited Ballesteros in the hospital and continues to do so in Pedrena. Asked about his friend, Ballesteros’ voice grows husky again.

“I call him three days ago, to see how he’s doing, and I tell him to be strong, to be patient, that the bonus will come,” Ballesteros says. Asked for Olazabal’s reply, Seve struggles. “Well…he says he and I were both tough competitors. And that we never give up. And he says that we are going… to win.”

Ballesteros shakes his head after the tears stop. “I have more feeling for other people now,” he says. “Because a lot of people help me. Not only my family and friends, but a lot of people from all over the world. They don’t have anything with me. But they send me notes. And give me calls. And bring me things. That was like, Hey, wake up, you know. If people love you and they hug you, now is your time to do the same. Something like that.”

He asks about Ken Green, who once angered Ballesteros over a crucial ruling on the final nine of the 1989 Masters, and he wants to know how Green is recovering from a terrible RV accident: “I hope he is better.” And Ballesteros expresses empathy for Tiger Woods: “You know, when you win special tournaments and you become a superstar, the first thing you lose is your freedom. That’s big. That’s hard. It’s hard for others to understand. But, you know, you have to pardon people. Otherwise, you will never be free.”

The anger that for so long fueled him seems to have dissipated. As recently as his 2007 autobiography, Seve (translated to English by Peter Bush), Ballesteros took shots at just about every institution of authority in his life — including Royal Pedrena, the Royal Spanish Golf Federation and the European and PGA tours — all for various slights. He also defended himself against accusations of gamesmanship and called rumours that infidelity broke up his marriage “vicious,” writing, “neither Carmen nor myself had any affairs while our marriage lasted.” But now he emphasizes gratitude more than grudges. “I’ve had a tremendous life,” he says. “Tremendous things happen to me over the years. When you win the Masters or the British Open or the World Match Play, the following week, you know, the feeling inside is so good. So I’ve had that kind of peace. The peace I am finding now, it’s not about competition. It’s different.”

Weathervane

The questions that seemed so unanswerable during most of Ballesteros’ playing career he now solves with quick answers. He attempts to put an end to all the speculation about how he helped derail his prime by experimenting with too many swing theories and teachers, asserting that all the problems he had with his swing can be traced to a lower-back injury he suffered while boxing with a friend at 14.

“The back was the only reason my game and my golf swing would deteriorate progressively,” he says. “The only reason. To change the swing is not that hard if you have talent, but you have to be very good physically. I wasn’t. I couldn’t do it. With the driver especially, the back was more involved, and there was more pain.” Sounding more like Hogan, he adds, “There is no secret in golf that a teacher can give you. You have your own way, your own vision and your own feeling. If you practice constantly, that’s the secret.”

BIGGEST REGRET: 1986 MASTERS

Asked about his regrets, he deadpans, “Second shot on 15 at Augusta — I make 6.” In that fateful last round in 1986, Ballesteros was leading before dunking a fat 4-iron shot into the pond and ultimately losing to Nicklaus, and Seve doesn’t disagree with those who have opined that it was there where his career lost momentum. “I lose the finishing punch,” he says.

Ballesteros says the reason the disappointment and diminished confidence lingered was because he had failed to win for the memory of his father, who had died of lung cancer the month before at 67.

Baldomero Ballesteros Sr. was a local champion oarsman, with the same long arms and strong will as his youngest son. Seve felt a kinship with the man who had most helped him feel special, and he took great joy in showing his appreciation.

“My father was a fighter, and he would never give up,” Ballesteros says. “We were pretty close. He always encouraged me. I loved to take him with me in jets or limousines and let him drink whiskey and share my success. He would say, ‘Oh, Seve, this is the life!’ After he died, the hardest thing was when I was winning tournaments I used to call home and he…wasn’t there.”

Now, Ballesteros has a date with the Old Course. After his initial bout with emotion, he is expansive.

“The first time I played it, I didn’t like it,” he says. “I thought it was ugly. But the first time I played it with a little bit of breeze, I loved it. It’s an incredible place, and an incredible course. But there must be a little bit of wind. That’s when you have the challenge. Then you play all the clubs and all the shots you have in the bag.”

He played well in 1978, leading by two strokes until he hit into the hotel and took a double-bogey 6 on the 17th in the second round, finishing the tournament T-17. In 1984, during practice rounds, his friend Fernandez encouraged Ballesteros to take the club a bit more on the inside to counteract a tendency to let his right elbow wander too far from his body. “Chino give me a little tip on my swing,” he says, “and I stick to that and each day played better and better.”

He started the final round two shots behind Watson and Ian Baker-Finch, who were paired in the last group.

“Watson was the best player in the world at that moment,” Ballesteros says, “and he was trying to tie the record of Harry Vardon: six British Opens. He was under a lot of pressure also. We were not close, but champions in the same category never are close. You never see both go outside for dinner. Never. That’s not because it is personal. The competition carries on, not just on the golf course, but off the golf course also. It was that way for me and Watson.”

In the last round, “I played very steady,” Ballesteros recalls. “I didn’t do anything spectacular, but I played very steady and very solid, especially on the back nine. I birdied 14, then a fantastic par on 17, where I put my 6-iron on the middle of the green from the rough on the left side. That second shot was like a tunnel, you know.”

On the 18th, Ballesteros hit a conservative 3-wood off the tee and then a wedge into the green.

“The putt, breaking six inches, I hit it well,” he says. “As the ball was approaching the hole, I was more and more hoping, and it dropped in. I think with my interior energy, I put it inside myself. I think so. That was the greatest moment of my career.”

He has been back to the hallowed ground to play three British Opens since then, but never with so much anticipation. When Bobby Jones returned to St. Andrews for the last time in 1958, he was suffering from a crippling disease of the spinal cord. After Jones was honoured during the Freedom of the City and Royal Burgh of St. Andrew ceremony, a filled auditorium began singing an old Scottish song, “Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?”

“It had all the strange, wild, emotional force of the skirl of a bagpipe,” wrote Herbert Warren Wind. “Hardly a word was said as the people filed from the hall, and for many minutes afterwards it was impossible for anyone to speak.”

When asked what he will feel when he is announced on the first tee, it is Ballesteros — his face scrunching but his gaze steady — who cannot speak.

He doesn’t have to. It will definitely be a moment.

The post Seve’s Story appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Charles Price
This is a new series on the 70th anniversary of Golf Digest commemorating the best literature we’ve ever published. Each entry includes an introduction that celebrates the author or puts the story in context.

The late Charles Price had the raspy look and voice of the Burgess Meredith character in the “Rocky” movies, but the man had style. He could toss a double-breasted blazer over a silk shirt and a pair of linen trousers and, with an ever-present cigarette at his fingertips, give a perfect impression of Fred Astaire on his way to pick up Grace Kelly. He had style on a golf course and at the typewriter. He was a low-handicapper with a sweetly crisp swing, reliably shooting in the low 70s. And he liked to hang out at good places; he was the official Writer-in-Residence at various times at Hilton Head, the Old Course Hotel and, in his final days, Pinehurst. He liked to complain how expensive it was in St. Andrews, even though his lavish room was comped. “Charley, it wouldn’t be so expensive if you didn’t order your cigarettes and scotches by room service,” I told him. He was the first guy I knew who owned an Acura car, when it was introduced in the image of Japanese luxury and mechanics. He said they named the model after him: Legend.

Charley was the founding editor of Golf Magazine in 1959; a frequent companion of Bobby Jones and Gene Sarazen; correspondent for Newsweek and Cosmopolitan; golf historian whose books included The Complete Golfer, Golfer-at-Large and A Golf Story: Bobby Jones, Augusta National and The Masters Tournament; and a monthly columnist for Golf Digest in the early 1980s through his death in 1994. His writing had an ageless quality. He liked to remind me to avoid allusions to modern culture: “How people popularly put things today may already be on the way out. In 1956, the most popular lyric in America was ‘Some enchanted evening.’ Six months later it was ‘You ain’t nothing but a hound dog.’”

The piece I’ve selected for this collection is a wonderful exposition of his philosophy of writing in three rings. As he once told our staff, “Everything must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In writing they must interconnect, like the three rings of logic. The first ring is your proposition: What the hell is this piece all about? The second ring contains the proof of the proposition. The third ring draws a conclusion from the proof. The trick, though, is to make the third ring interconnect with the first somehow. Thus the reader is reminded of whatever it was you were trying to prove.”

Along with Herbert Warren Wind and Dan Jenkins, Charley might be considered the third player in American golf writing’s Great Triumvirate. His monthly columns were lessons in how to write. This one originally was published in Golf Digest in April 1991. Once you’ve read it, it’s unforgettable. —Jerry Tarde

By 1968 Bobby Jones’ health had slipped from the terrible to the abysmal. His eyes were bloodshot from the spinal disease he had endured for 20 years, his arms atrophied to the size of a schoolgirl’s, his ankles so swollen by body fluids they spilled over the edges of his shoes. This was a man who could once effortlessly drive a golf ball a sixth of a mile.

Still, he had not lost the humor with which he viewed so many things, often at his own expense. Confined to a wheelchair all day, he had to be put into and taken out of bed by a male nurse, who was the size of a linebacker. “He handles me like a flapjack,” Bob said by way of complimenting the man when he introduced us. Then he chuckled. Bob laughed a lot, although never out loud, and he laughed during his last days mostly to put people at their ease, especially strangers. Meeting him then for the first time could be a shock, and Bob knew it. But he insisted on shaking hands with everybody, painful as it had to be, excruciating if his hand were squeezed. But it was part of the price he insisted on paying for having been Bobby Jones, the one and only.

Having covered the Masters for 20 years, I had become his companion during it by a choice that was as much his as mine. Those years became the most fulfilling of the 44 I have been writing about golf. I’ve never written about them, and don’t know why. In looking back, that period in his life seems as towering as the Grand Slam.

For 10 years we had been collaborating on a number of writing chores. Since I then covered the tournament for Newsweek and wrote a column elsewhere that appeared only monthly, I had the time to act as his legman. He had long been unable to watch the Masters even from a golf cart, and his son, Bob III, was on the course most of the day as an official. I became somebody who could bring younger players and foreign writers to him, someone with whom he could pass off a casual observation about the tournament on TV without fear of explaining himself, someone he could share lunch with now that he no longer would eat where people could watch him.

We would sit at a card table next to a window in his cottage that overlooked the 10th tee. A curtain prevented spectators from looking in but allowed Bob to peer out. He had the same thing for lunch almost every day. First there’d be a couple of dry martinis, which he drank with relish but scolded himself for. “I shouldn’t be drinking these,” he said to me one day. “They don’t mix with my medicine.” The martinis would be followed by a hamburger, in part because he liked hamburgers but mainly because he could no longer cut meat and disliked anyone cutting it for him, so gnarled had his fingers become.

Bob smoked more than two packs of cigarettes a day, sometimes in chain fashion, and they were lined on the card table in neat rows for him, each in a holder so he would not accidently burn himself. An elegant lighter, covered in leather, sat ready. All he had to do was push down a lever that any child could. But even that was becoming an effort. So, with as much nonchalance as I could devise, I’d pull out a cigarette of my own, thereby giving me the excuse to light his.

He had been a man who never looked as though he needed help, even when he was dying, and it was part of Bob’s magnificence that disablement evoked admiration more than pity. Those cigarettes were actually a token of his will to live, not the other way around. One day he left me speechless after I lighted one for him. “I’ve got to give these things up,” he said. “They’re bad for me.”

Charley Price

I had long known what was wrong with Bob, and he asked me not to write about it while he was still alive. “People think I’ve got arthritis,” he said. “Let’s let it go at that.”

Actually, he had what is known as syringomyelia—pronounced sir-ring-go-my-ale-ee-ah—an extremely rare disease of the central nervous system. It took eight years to diagnose. Researching it, I found neurosurgeons who had never even seen a case. “And I guess,” one told me, “that I’ve treated 20 cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

Syringomyelia is a disease you are born with, although it is not hereditary and does not manifest itself until much later in life. Bob had been 46 when his symptoms first appeared. His right leg began to pain him, then the right arm. Eventually, he lost the use of both legs. For a while he got around on elbow crutches, then a “walker” and finally a wheelchair. Then his whole body began to waste away. Even in that condition he went to law offices in Atlanta every day he could, chiefly to keep from vegetating. The disease had no effect on his mind. Indeed, the complex nature of it is such that it doesn’t kill you, as it didn’t Bob. Clinically, he died from an aneurysm, but actually from the exhaustion of just trying to stay alive. “If I’d known it was going to be this easy,” he told Jean Marshall, his secretary, days before he died, “I’d have gone a long time ago.”

Bob and I first collaborated in 1959, when he agreed to rewrite some old instructional articles for Golf Magazine, of which I was the first editor. Three years later he wrote the introduction to a history I had written with his help, which by itself has been widely quoted, especially his line about golfers sometimes being “the dogged victims of inexorable fate.”

Augusta National
“He had been a man who never looked as though he needed help, even when he was dying,” Price wrote of Jones, “and it was part of Bob’s magnificence that disablement evoked admiration more than pity.”

A few years later another book of mine had been dedicated to him, and we had talked about golf at such length and in such detail that I suggested he put together a book from his old newspaper columns and magazine articles. He had written hundreds, not a word of them ghosted. Bob was reluctant, what with his flagging energies, but I convinced him it had to be done. People would be interested in what he had to say about golf a century after he was gone, or long after every other golfer’s thoughts had left the public yawning. His ideas were so eloquent, so down to earth, so free of technicalisms. He agreed when I volunteered to collect them, cut out what was dated, and dovetail the rest into logical order. These were words Bob himself hadn’t read for 30 years or more.

Like a lot of people who are good at it, Bob did not like to write, only to have written. Notwithstanding, he threw himself into the project. My manuscript was retyped by Mrs. Marshall into triple-spaced pages so Bob could mark between the lines any changes he wanted, which he did with a ballpoint pen inserted into a rubber ball he could grip with his crippled fingers.

Sitting with me across from his desk in Atlanta, he’d study every word, pushing each page aside only after he was sure of what he wanted to leave to posterity. I’d note the changes, all the while finding excuses to light his cigarettes. When he was finished, I’d take the changes back to New York, where I lived, while he pondered what was still to be done. The whole process took almost a year. Bob was the most honestly modest golf champion ever. But he was well aware of, and conscientious about, his unique role in the game’s history.

The book became Bobby Jones on Golf (Doubleday & Co., 1966) and I was pleased to learn from Mrs. Marshall that work on it had given Bob a new purpose in life. For the first time in years he was doing something creative and constructive, something only he could do, of which the Grand Slam is just a monument.

At this stage in our friendship, it had become apparent that Bob was passing some sort of torch to me. I was a writer, and I represented the generation immediately after his. He wanted to leave somebody behind who could straighten out the facts of his life if they had to be, as O.B. Keeler did when Bob was at the peak of his career. Bob not only seldom reminisced, he disliked to.

We were joined once in his cottage by two former U.S. Open champions from his era. Bob did all the listening, and I could see he was getting restless. Finally, he made an announcement. “I wonder if you fellows would excuse us,” he said. “Charley and I have something to discuss that can’t wait.” Minutes went by after they left. I had to come out and ask him what it was he wanted to discuss. “Oh, nothing,” he said. “I just can’t stand sitting around talking about ancient history.”

Yet he would with me, all day long, with the Masters Tournament taking place just outside his window. Armed with his confidence in me, I approached him about doing a film on his life, concentrating on the Grand Slam, the drama of which had never been explained to my satisfaction. He was reluctant, as I knew he would be. But I pointed out the inevitable. If he didn’t do the film, somebody else would eventually, disarticulating it with the sort of hyperbole he hated and which he made such an effort to avoid in his own accounts.

So he agreed. Somehow word got out before we had hardly begun, and we were approached by potential producers, one of whom conferred with us in Atlanta. But the project never got much further. Bob became too exhausted to continue. He never came back to the Masters and died in December 1971.

I was abroad at the time. When I got home, there was a package from Bob’s office for me. In it was that lighter with which I had lit so many of his cigarettes, trying to circumvent his pride. There was a note from him, typed by Mrs. Marshall but signed by Bob in his scrawl. “You weren’t fooling me a bit,” it said.

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