Phil Tresidder
First published in 2005 Copyright © Phil Tresidder 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Tresidder, Phil. Phil Tresidder on golf. ISBN 1 74114 633 X. 1. Golf - Anecdotes. 2. Golfers. I.Title. 796.352
Set in 11/13 pt Bembo by Midland Typesetters,Victoria Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS Foreword
vii
1 No regrets—just fond memories
2
2 Keeping a lid on our emotions
7
3 Shape up or ship out
12
4 When tempers flare
17
5 A new step in the life of Grady
22
6 Golf ’s colourful sidekicks
27
7 A little man with grand plans
32
8 Augusta’s surrender to technology
37
9 Rejuvenated Woosie rekindles flame
42
10 Memoirs of Australia’s ironman
47
11 Mr Anti-golf comes round
52
12 Credit where credit is due
56
13 ‘Thunder’ Bolt strikes again
61
14 Keep it under your hat, Sam
66
15 When a career is a round of golf
71
16 The long and short of pro golf
76
17 Life turns full circle for Ogle
80
18 Greats on a level playing field
85
v
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF 19 Golf ’s Marco Polo
89
20 Gary Player’s KO win
95
21 Golf ’s great coup
103
22 Ben Hogan’s perfect round
108
23 Ghosting
113
24 Red Braces
119
25 Royal Melbourne’s jovial skeletons
124
26 Golf ’s firecracker
128
27 The genius of course design
134
28 Alpine palpitations
139
29 Nice bear, give the ball back
142
30 Fun on the world fairways: United States Australia Canada Japan Ireland England Scotland France Hong Kong Wales China Italy Germany New Zealand
147 147 148 149 150 151 152 154 155 155 156 156 156 157 157
Phil Tresidder tribute 1928–2003
160
Acknowledgments
170
vi
FOREWORD
My many visits to Australia were made much more enjoyable by my friendship with Phil Tresidder. Phil was a press man who covered it as it was. He wasn’t a sensationalist and he didn’t manufacture things. I have so many great memories of Phil and of Australia. I well remember playing the Augusta course with Phil the morning after my last US Masters win in 1978, and in turn playing several rounds at his home course, Bonnie Doon, in Sydney. I used to meet him at various golf tournaments around the world and enjoyed finding out what was happening in Australia. I just love Australia and still miss it terribly. But Phil loved all sport, not just golf. He was a great rugby supporter the same as I am. We used to have little bets on South Africa versus Australia—in those days South Africa used to beat them regularly. Now results have turned about considerably, but he’s not around to see it—I’m sure he’s watching from heaven though, so I can’t escape him. I have so many great memories of Phil and of his family. He was a lover of sport and particularly of golf. He loved professional golfers and they in turn respected him. Phil Tresidder was a real gentleman and he will be missed. He has left a legacy both to golf and to journalism. Gary Player
vii
O’Grady: I’m all in favour of a tough open Mac championship course. A smooth sea never develops a skilful sailor.
1
NO REGRETS—JUST FOND MEMORIES
The gold medal they presented him wasn’t much bigger than a ten cent piece but Tony Gresham fondled it proudly in his hand. He was the new Australian Senior Amateur champion and in sports-speak he was ‘stoked’. Gresham had led the field through two rounds of medal play then marched through the match play stage, culminating with his victory against Tasmania’s Max Robison in the final at the Yowani Country Club course in Canberra. So it seems that a new era of achievement is launched for Australia’s most remarkable amateur since World War II. At 57 years of age he is sturdy in frame and gimlet in eye, and the highly efficient game that has served him so well down the years shows little sign of decay. Like Ol’ Man River, he just rolls on cheerfully. It was as far back as 1967 that his name first bobbed up into prominence as a medallist winner in the Australian Amateur Championship. He won the national amateur title ten years later at Victoria Golf Club, and finished runner-up twice. In 1972 the name of Tony Gresham became an international golf talking point. On the Olivos Country Club in Buenos Aires 2
NO REGRETS—JUST FOND MEMORIES he won the Eisenhower Trophy medal, beating Ben Crenshaw by two strokes. All told, Gresham played seven times in the Eisenhower event for Australia and his score counted in all 28 rounds. ‘Nobody will beat that,’ he says. Why? ‘Because the young guys won’t stay long enough in the amateur game.’ And that saddens Gresham a little. Right now, he says, Australia has three brilliant teenage amateurs—Adam Scott (Queensland), Aaron Baddeley (Victoria) and Matthew Jones (New South Wales)—but he fears they will be lost to the professional ranks in a year or two. Too many young amateurs see the dollar signs and rush into the pro ranks and many don’t make it, Gresham says. Which brings us back to the tiny gold medal they handed Gresham at the presentation ceremony following the Australian Senior Amateur final at Yowani. Its value? ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t even guess,’ said Tom Duguid, the deputy executive director of the Australian Golf Union. ‘It’s symbolic and that’s its value.’ Gresham has never regretted his decision to stay loyal to the amateur game, not even after he proved his class by beating full professional fields in the New South Wales and South Australian Opens. Not even after Crenshaw went on to win the US Masters. And not even when Gentle Ben won a second green jacket at Augusta National. As a schoolboy at Sydney’s Barker College, with a six handicap, he spent a few weeks in the Avondale Golf Club pro shop sweeping out the back room. If that was how young professionals started off, well, it wasn’t for him.‘I just didn’t enjoy it,’ he recalls. In truth, in those early days there wasn’t so much incentive to turn pro.The money just wasn’t there. Gresham flourished alongside such classy amateurs as Kevin Donohoe, Phil Billings, Kevin Hartley, Des Turner and Harry Berwick, the last name making a belated tilt at the money game at the 50-year mark. When leading Pro, Billy Dunk won the New South Wales open and was handed a cheque for a mere $5000, Gresham remembers thinking, ‘I’m glad I haven’t turned pro.’ He recalls that, ‘They 3
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF were busting their butts for small prize money. Mind you, that’s all changed now.’ Gresham’s father Syd was Canadian born, while his mother Lola came from Wellington, New Zealand.Tony worked for his father, who was a national cigarette distributor, and he was encouraged to work hard on his golf game. A 6 a.m. start and 3 p.m. finish enabled him to hurry to the golf club to practise after work. His father’s constant advice was to ‘work on your short game’. And he did. ‘I chipped, putted, chipped, putted, played bunker shots—and hit more chips and putts,’ says Gresham. ‘My short game has been my strength. My long game was no more than adequate but my short game got me out of all sorts of trouble.’ This was no better illustrated than at Yowani’s 17th where, from a bad lie, he bent a recovery shot 15 metres around trees to win the hole and clinch the title. Gresham reckons in his heyday he could get up and down from bunkers 80 per cent of the time. Probably 60 per cent nowadays, he says. He was briefly a member of the Australian Golf Club, where he won three championships in his only three appearances. The Pennant Hills Golf Club on Sydney’s north side has been his home and he has won the club title some 25 times. A cursory examination of the various honour boards will reveal his name some 60 times. This year the members elected him club captain. ‘His name’s on every other board, so it may as well be on the club captains board, too,’ quipped a member.
4
NO REGRETS—JUST FOND MEMORIES Golf stories How would you like to hit a golf ball with the flight of angel’s wings? Of course you would. Florida scribe Jim Fallon reported in Delray Beach, Florida that lost balls are pennies from heaven for needy nuns, who sell them back to wayward golfers with a smile and a saintly salutation. The resourceful Second Order of Franciscans—Poor Clares—have turned a minor hazard into a small financial plus at Christ the King Monastery, which is separated by a fence from the Lakeview Golf Club. It seems errant shots started flying into the monastery more than twenty years ago when the executive eighteen-hole course was opened to the public. Golfers can buy balls back at a cheap $3.50 for a pack of six, although the balls are not merchandised with the promise of divine intervention for the hapless hacker. Fallon related that on one occasion, however, a ball bounced at the feet of a walking nun, who picked it up and flung it back over the fence. The fortunate golfer then hit it into the hole from where it lay!
5
Billy Graham: I never pray on the golf Reverend course. Actually, the Lord answers my prayers everywhere except on the golf course.
2
KEEPING A LID ON OUR EMOTIONS
‘Golf. This is a game that would make even the pope swear.’ That’s the irascible Tommy ‘Thunder’ Bolt speaking on the cruel emotions the game can evoke. Temper is the in-flavour subject after the usually urbane Davis Love cut loose during the Bay Hill Invitational on Arnold Palmer’s Florida course. Davis played a poor bunker shot and promptly berated the turf in disgust. Unfortunately he struck a sprinkler head which broke, flooding the bunker and surrounds. Palmer impishly left a bill for $175 000 in Love’s locker the next morning.The PGA, however, couldn’t see the humour and fined the golfer. Golf prides itself on the elitist good manners and sportsmanship of its players. Remarkable, really, because let’s face it, the game is so capricious, so skittish with its favours and raw deals that every golfer’s composure is tested. Bolt was Vesuvius, according to one writer of his day.‘You never knew whether it was going to be a nice sunny day or the last days of Pompeii.’ Bolt led the tour in twisted metal.When he teed off the betting was not how few shots he would finish with, but how few clubs. 7
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF His legendary club-hurling feats included having to pay a deep-sea diver $75 to swim down a canal and rescue his favourite driver. The Professional Golfers Association later put Tommy in charge of the tour’s ‘good conduct’ committee in a bid to reform him. One sceptic suggested it was like putting the rabbit in charge of the lettuce patch or the fox in charge of the chicken coop. In truth, the refined game of golf is littered with explosions, like the golfer so mad with his errant putter he tied it to the back of his car and delighted as the club bumped painfully along for miles down the freeway. We all know there’s no more sensitive moment for a golfer than when he is committed to his back swing—the point of no return where the slightest noise or interruption can wreck his concentration. So let’s sympathise then with Dr Sherman A. Thomas of Washington who was poised to strike a putt on Congressional’s 17th green at the precise moment a Canadian goose honked. The good doctor missed his putt but not the goose, landing a fatal blow on the poor bird’s head. Dr Thomas was charged in federal court for killing a goose ‘out of season’. The doctor justified himself, saying he was merely committing euthanasia by dispatching the goose, which he claimed had been sorely injured by his approach shot. The federal magistrate thought otherwise: goosicide was the verdict and Dr Thomas paid out a $500 fine. The governor of Victoria, Sir Henry Winneke, once related this story at a player’s dinner. It seems one member of his team strayed into the rough where he located his ball, stooping over to identify it. As he bent over he was struck firmly on the rump by another ball. Looking back, he perceived a woman golfer who had just completed her swing. Obviously satisfied she was the culprit, he strode back up the fairway and said peevishly:‘Madam, would you kindly aim at the hole with the flag in it!’ 8
KEEPING A LID ON OUR EMOTIONS Professional teachers have dealt with the problem of controlling tempers, saying the swing and your personal temperament go hand in hand on the golf course. If you play a poor shot and get upset, then assuredly you will play more bad shots before you recover composure. The solution is to find ways to get back to positive thinking and they recommend a series of mannerisms to restore timing. For instance, you may normally waggle the club three times on the tee, but facing a particularly tough shot in the rough you may resort to five or ten waggles, thus breaking your concentration pattern and resulting in your swing becoming tight and jerky. One teacher maintained most golfers create their own distractions and mental hazards. He related how one lady told him she couldn’t stand to play with a certain person because she talked continually. He suggested she use ear plugs. Golf Digest once produced a book of its ‘Instant Lessons’ over 25 years, concluding a golfer only needs a simple tip or ‘swing key’ to get their game back on track. They advised you should check your set-up in a mirror. Take a shoe off to set your weight right.Think of a noose to keep your chin up. Wrap a towel around your grip to eliminate tension. Count ‘one, two’ for better timing. Point the belt buckle at the target for accuracy. Think of a clock to help keep the swing ticking. Contemplate shooting an arrow to learn how to make a proper release. Drive your chest through an athletic finishing tape for proper weight transfer. Sight the target as if looking down a gun barrel. Ingenious fellows these teachers. So there you have it. No more tantrums, please.
9
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Golf stories The East Dorset Club in England provided this story of a golfing romance. Twenty-one-year-old Tracy Lovey, ranked the best woman golfer in the country, married John Dovey, the club’s 24-year-old professional. Members confidently predicted a lovey-dovey honeymoon.
10
Gleason: Golf and women are a lot alike.You Jackie know you’re not going to wind up with anything but grief, but you can’t resist the impulse.
3
SHAPE UP OR SHIP OUT
With the arrival of winter golf, senior golfers, who comprise the majority of the country’s players, will encounter an extra challenge. It’s hard work getting old muscles moving freely in a chill wind, the course is longer with less run on the fairways and wintry conditions can turn a game into a strenuous slog. So what to do about it? Norman von Nida and Gary Player, winners of ten Australian Open Championships between them, have a few useful theories. Golf,The Von agrees, for the over-50 brigade can be a physically taxing game, so the secret is to stay in as good a shape as possible. The Von quotes famous South African heart surgeon Dr Christiaan Barnard, who said, ‘I’m alarmed that people do not realise just how strenuous golf can be. I think people should be aware of the calls the game makes on the body.’ An American orthopaedic surgeon, Dr Fred Good, added his support: I treat many people a year who strain muscles and hurt themselves on the course. Much strain is put on little-used muscles in making the golf swing. Many people take up golf late in life.The nearest they’ve been to exercise has been a stroll 12
SHAPE UP OR SHIP OUT to the bar for a drink or to the post box with the dog. But in an average round a golfer walks five miles and uses a lot of energy in teeing up, practice swings and hitting the ball.
The Von believes that those who begin the game late in life usually do so with a little extra weight. ‘Assuming they pull their own clubs,’ he says, ‘with the added load of a few kilos, bending down and back up again eighty or more times, and crouching to get the line of putts—it all adds up to quite a bit of effort in general.They are subjecting their bodies to a strain to which they are ill accustomed.’ The message then is—watch it! The heart and frame can take only so much, and overloading happens much more in golf than most of us realise. Von Nida recommends senior golfers should loosen up like footballers—the hands, arms, shoulders, back and leg muscles are jiggled about, trying to take the stiffness out of them.Then stroll to the putting green with a wedge, seven iron, putter and three balls. Drop the balls just off the fringe, so you can play a few chip and run shots with the least amount of effort.Try to feel the hands coming into the ball nice and square, with the blade just sweeping the ball onto the green. Gary Player quotes the 50-and-over golfer lamenting: ‘I can’t hit my woods (aor my irons) as I used to. I can’t hit the ball hard any more. It hurts my back. I can’t putt worth a lick. I just can’t concentrate any more.’ Player says golf is the only game he knows in which, as you get to senior status, you can make adjustments that enable you to keep up with the youngsters.You certainly can’t do that in games like tennis or running. He advocates adjustments to your swing that not only give you power and accuracy, but which won’t hurt your back. The shot with a hook/draw shape will move the ball from right to left and is much stronger than the fade/slice.The difference could be 10 to 15 yards (9 to 13 metres). ‘Hook and you’ll hang in there. Fade and you’ll fade away,’ he says. 13
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF So did you notice Gary Player’s ‘walk-through’ swing during his recent visit to Australia? The action, he says, can be traced right back to Willie Park Senior in the late 1890s. Park carried out this follow-through principle to such an extent that he frequently used to run a yard or two after his drive. Player says he developed the walk-through because he found he was falling over his left foot at the finish; in other words, a complete transfer of weight to the left side on the downswing. Player, naturally, as the game’s most dedicated fitness devotee, urges seniors to exercise and get in shape. Fitness and concentration can keep a senior golfer’s game to a level of his earlier years, he says. At any rate, it will be interesting to see how golf ’s older brigade cope with the winter months ahead. At least heat exhaustion and sun stroke won’t be a problem.
Golf stories Irrepressible Lee Trevino regards the Senior Tour as a second home. ‘These are my boys,’ he says. ‘I can go into the locker room and bum a cigarette. You go inside on the other tour and all they are doing is drinking orange juice and eating bananas.’
14
SHAPE UP OR SHIP OUT Golf stories Gary Player brims with pride over his physical condition. ‘I’m really fit,’ he once said. ‘I weighed one hundred and eighty pounds [81 kilograms] when I was fifteen. That was nineteen years ago and now I weigh eleven pounds [5 kilograms] less. I am frustrated by the physical shape of many Americans. Their bodies are fat and worthless. They are headed for heart attacks. During the next twenty years people will discover more and more the importance of sound bodies. I’m only five feet seven inches [1.7 metres] but my condition makes me six feet [1.8 metres] tall.’ American firebrand David Hill was not impressed by Player’s boasts. Hill said: ‘He works harder at golf than the rest of us—as he is always telling anyone who will listen, especially the writers. Gary is a little man and he’s tremendously proud of his superior condition. He runs and lifts weights and eats health foods. That’s all well and good, but I get tired of hearing him brag about it. So what if he has the most perfect bowel movement on the tour?’
15
Ford: I know I’m getting better at golf Gerald because I’m hitting fewer spectators. Either that, or fewer people are watching me play.
4
WHEN TEMPERS FLARE
German professional Sven Strüver politely shook hands with his playing partners at the end of the round at the Greg Norman Holden International at The Lakes and decided he would make a clean break . . . with his putter. The putter bravely resisted as he bent it over his knee, but the man from Hamburg pressed firmer and the luckless putter surrendered to be neatly snapped in his hands. Just another casualty among the flat sticks that betray their owners in moments of need. Not that putters are the only clubs to suffer punishment for not delivering. The metal driver belonging to Brett Ogle must have been sorely bruised after smashing a tee marker at The Vines. The authorities in charge of golf ’s proud squeaky-clean image do not treat these spasms of club terrorism lightly, of course. Fines are imposed on the culprits, like South African professional Hennie Otto, who broke his clubs and emptied them all into the river after missing the cut in the South African Masters. He had posted a ten over par 80 in an event played appropriately on the Wild Coast. 17
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Wasn’t it that legendary golfing maverick, Tommy Bolt, who came up with the priceless one-liner: ‘Golf. This is a game that would make even the pope swear.’ Traumas, tantrums, torment between them spell temper. That uncontrollable moment when golf ’s cruel fates become all too much and the frustrated golfer seeks the unfortunate scapegoat. I recall walking in the gallery of our little Aussie champion, Norman von Nida, in a Dunlop tournament at Southport after World War II. Well, The Von is a superb diplomat as the game’s elder statesman today, but in the late 1940s he could be a fiery customer. Putts were lipping out in maddening succession. He was so overcome by his fortune at the 9th hole that he hurled his putter into a neighbouring field, the club gyrating through the air like the sound of a flock of starlings. His caddie had to cross a railway line to retrieve the putter, a noble forage because the railway line was electrified. Bobby Jones, the most famous all-time amateur, had a flawless reputation for good sportsmanship, except for an unhappy introduction to St Andrews. He arrived, at the age of nineteen, for the Open Championship and after two rounds was leading amateur. But he took a calamitous 46 strokes for the outward nine of the third round, then a six at the 10th. Declaring that he hated St Andrews ‘enthusiastically’, Jones tore up his card and withdrew from the event. He was to regret his action for the rest of his life and upon his return to the home of golf, Jones declared St Andrews the greatest golf challenge of them all. The Scots like to tell the story of the golfer who declared he would quit the game and proved it by tossing his bag and clubs into a river. Club members said don’t worry, he’d be back. He came back, too, but only to rescue his golf bag for a moment. He’d left his car keys in one of the pockets. The American Dave Hill was, to say the least, an outspoken competitor. When he arrived at the Hazeltine National club in 18
WHEN TEMPERS FLARE Minnesota for the 1970 US Open, he took one look at the newly created course and commented: ‘It should be ploughed up. All it needs is eighty acres of corn and some cows.’ Enraged locals mooed at him as he walked along the fairways. Hill finished second behind Britain’s Tony Jacklin but refused to attend the presentation. Today’s more peppery players might have envied the American golfer, Lefty Stackhouse, who reportedly released his temper afterwards in the car park, demolishing the radiator of his roadster with a flailing putter. The putter had misbehaved during the round, of course, but as clubs at that time had hickory shafts, Lefty was able to build a bonfire and burn his entire set. Then there was another old-time legend, Ky Laffon, a ‘shaky’ putter at the best of times, who vented his anger over a missed putt by chewing tobacco and spraying the juice into the cup, to the dismay of the next player required to retrieve his ball. An American scribe reported that Lloyd Mangrum once played a round with Laffon, who furiously discarded a club on every hole, playing the last four holes out of Mangrum’s bag. He once hurled his putter into a lake, yelling ‘Drown, you SOB, drown.’ Oh yes, and another time he tied his putter to the back of his car and dragged it down the highway to the next tournament venue. Must have been quite a character, Laffon, but he denied he threw a network television executive into a swimming pool after an argument during a cocktail function.‘It was a lagoon,’ he insisted. We’ll end this account by recalling the American on his first visit to the Old Course at St Andrews, playing miserably, who came to the last hole and found himself still on the wrong side of the Swilcan Burn after three shots. He announced he would throw both himself and his clubs into the water and drown. His weather-beaten old caddie snorted: ‘You couldna’ keep your head down long enough!’
19
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Golf stories Putting can be off-putting. Confused? The Punch Book of Golf offered this light-hearted advice to perplexed putters from its Dr Golf segment: Question: ‘I keep having this recurring nightmare in which I am on the 18th green with no clothes on, putting for the British Open, and I suddenly notice Jack Nicklaus in a bunker with my wife and I am about to go over and separate them when suddenly the Queen drives past in a caddie car shouting, “It’s rude to putt during the National Anthem”. At which point I find my putter is made of rubber and I take eight shots to get into the hole, and even the hole disappears with my ball.’ Answer: ‘We all worry about putting too much.’
20
Cross: Golf does strange things to other Milton people, too. It makes liars out of honest men,cheats out of altruists, cowards out of brave men, and fools out of everybody.
5
A NEW STEP IN THE LIFE OF GRADY
He came into big golf with just three dollars in his pocket and only six dollars in his cheque account. But he cautioned the scribes: ‘One day you’ll be writing about me.’ And write about him they did, enthusing over the ‘unknown youngster with curly hair and a ready smile’. The rags to riches fable was played out on The Grange course in Adelaide during the summer of 1978. That was when Wayne Grady turned up and, in the space of four eventful days, toppled a pack of international pros to win the Westlakes Classic and a $12 000 cheque. And so we witnessed the launch of one of the most remarkable and eventful careers in Australian professional golf.Wayne Grady, now 43, is back in the news again as the newly appointed chairman of the Australasian PGA Tour. He takes over from another remarkable ‘knockabout’ golf star, Jack Newton, who decided he needed a break. Grady is enthusiastic about his new mission, taking office at a time when he describes Australia as having the best group of golfers we’ve ever produced. He’s acutely aware of the task of 22
A NEW STEP IN THE LIFE OF GRADY enticing leading overseas players to Australian tournaments because of restricted sponsorship here and the sagging dollar. But he will throw his endeavours into the development tour to provide many ambitious young pros with crucial four-round tournament experience. It is interesting to recall that the Westlakes Classic was also the catalyst for Greg Norman’s career. The similarity does not end there, for both were talented teenagers from Virginia Golf Club in Brisbane. Destiny sent them both off to the United States to join the American tour and years later they were thrown together in the climactic British Open shoot-out at Royal Troon with the ultimate winner, Mark Calcavecchia. Norman, of course, was to become an Australian golf legend. Grady would never tread that path but stardom touched him on the shoulder from time to time, notably when he gaffed the Shark to win the 1988 Australian PGA crown at Riverside Oaks. How the crowd cheered that day for the golfer with the sunniest smile, even clapping when Norman missed putts. Observing this made David Graham angry, however it was not so much the traditional Australian cutting down of the tall poppy but rather a genuine wave of admiration for the battler. Grady’s bold and cheery quotes were seized upon by the media. Pushing hurtful memories of his British Open loss behind him, in 1990 ‘Grades’ won the 72nd United States PGA Championship at Shoal Creek, Alabama, and a place in history was assured. ‘You bloody beauty,’ his cry rang out as he grasped the huge PGA trophy and the crowd roared its approval. On a tough course, described as being as much fun as a week on the rack, he fired four steely rounds of 72, 67, 72 and 71, not one of them over par, to finish a three-shot victor. An Australian scribe wrote: ‘. . . he cleansed a nation of the insidious belief that its only credible contender for major champion honours was Norman.’ Grady carried no tickets on himself, no superstar status claims, quipping: ‘I may not dazzle you with great play, but I’ll beat you 23
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF to death with persistence.’And gazing lovingly at the PGA trophy, he added:‘No matter how hard you scratch that trophy, you’re not going to get my name off it.’ That major victory should have paved the way for a glittering career, instead Grady’s long stint on the tour witnessed only erratic highlights. ‘My own fault,’ he confesses. ‘I could knuckle down when I needed to, but I could also go off with the fairies for a while.’ He agrees he should have reset his goals after Shoal Creek. Maybe he placed less importance on tournament success than the bulk of touring pros. He remains a devoted family man and his emotional call to wife Lyn after the PGA triumph shared a camera call of ‘G’day Sam’ to his daughter, who suffers from Down’s syndrome. Grady has represented Royal Pines on the Gold Coast these past eleven years. He tried his hand briefly in the food business but admitted he was no restaurateur. Sixteen long years on the American tour have not soured his passion for top competition and he remains a popular figure, despite infrequent appearances with starts he gains now his full exemption has expired. In June 1989 he won the Westchester Classic in a play-off, this breakthrough earning him a start in the Masters. Once again the infectious smile and the inevitable modesty. He quipped to the Americans:‘You’re stuck with me for a while. I feel I belong over here now.You can’t kick me back to Australia.’ Running the Australasian PGA Tour today with its sponsorship problems must shape as the supreme challenge. Indeed, you most certainly need a sense of humour to pull through. Well, you’ve got to admit that won’t be a problem for the tour’s new chief guardian,Wayne Grady.
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A NEW STEP IN THE LIFE OF GRADY Golf stories A Tweed Heads golfer who worked as a check-in clerk at Coolangatta Airport was extremely depressed when his clubs, worth some $700, were stolen from the clubhouse. But he cheered up a day or two later at work. A passenger booked the clubs in with him as luggage! Police made an arrest at Sydney airport when the passenger retrieved ‘his’ clubs at the baggage carousel.
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Longhurst: Golf is the Esperanto of sport. Henry All over the world, golfers talk the same language— much of it nonsense and much unprintable—endure the same frustrations, discover the same infallible secrets of putting, share the same illusory joys.
6
GOLF’S COLOURFUL SIDEKICKS
The battery of cameramen covering today’s golf scene must be well trained, because they rarely stray from the mercurial Tiger Woods in his remorseless surge for new glory. But unfailingly you will catch a glimpse of the robust fellow at his side, his Kiwi caddie Steve Williams.The two Ws are a uniquely bonded combination. Williams, who is richly commissioned by Tiger’s triumphs, makes more money carrying clubs than most of the tour pros make swinging them. His takeaway last year hit the $1.5 million mark, with another bumper year already assured in 2001. Williams has worked for the best of them, carrying the bags of Greg Norman, Ray Floyd and Ian Baker-Finch among others, until he joined forces with the Tiger. A three-marker himself in early days, he certainly hit it off with his champion boss, to the extent that he appears to have enticed Woods to visit New Zealand for an appearance in the national championship.Williams runs a car racing team in Kiwiland, together with other business interests, and the prospect of white water rafting and trout fishing adventures in an escape from the frenetic American scene must have sounded like a welcome holiday retreat for Woods. 27
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF The role of professional caddie has evolved over the years from mere pittance fees to riches, thanks to the ever-expanding prize money purses of today’s tours. Of course, it is the good players who get the best caddies, though for a time the US PGA Tour felt that this was unfair and ordered that caddies be drawn for in major events.This is no longer the case, however, and the caddie who fulfils Henry Longhurst’s description of ‘guide, philosopher and friend’ is much prized on tour. It’s a glamour role in itself when you reflect that the caddie first came into existence as a word corrupted by the Scots from the French cadet, meaning an odd-job man.The money in those early days was well earned, with the caddie lumping 45 pounds of dead weight on his back for some four miles over four marathon hours. Caddies had to become brawnier with the introduction of steel-shafted clubs and golf bags that weighed as much as the clubs.Then came the extras—towels, rain gear, soft drinks, a dozen spare balls, an umbrella and perhaps some food. We can recall how Peter Coleman had to carry a shooting stick for Greg Norman, who was recovering from a piles operation, to sit on between shots in the 1982 Australian Open; Malcolm Mason carried a supply of carrots to calm the nerves of his master, Sam Torrance, on the greens. And spare a thought for the Zambian caddying for President Kaunda, inside whose bag was a gun—in case somebody attempted to assassinate the president while he pondered over a putt. Caddies must suffer in silence when their man’s fortunes turn sour. Indeed they become virtual whipping boys as the player endeavours to shelve blame for a bad shot. Spaniard Seve Ballesteros regularly gave his caddie, Ian Wright, a verbal battering which the caddie accepted in stony silence. But it is said a quiet word from the caddie can occasionally hit back. Harry Vardon, once experiencing a series of horrors, is said to have asked his caddie: ‘What on earth should I take now?’ to which the caddie replied: ‘Might I suggest the four o’clock train to Edinburgh?’ 28
GOLF’S COLOURFUL SIDEKICKS A breakthrough in the caddie scene arrived when Fanny Sunesson entered the usually strict male arena as Nick Faldo’s bag toter. But she remarked:‘The men were great when I first started. Everyone was helpful and caring. I used to room with them, but there was no funny business.We all had our job to do. I switched to staying with a girlfriend on tour, but now I stay in hotels on my own.’ Caddie chairman, Martin Rowley, recalled: ‘No one looked on her as a woman, although she definitely is! She was just another caddie on the road.We’re all rake rats together.’ Angelo Argea, the silver-haired long-time caddie for Jack Nicklaus, wrote a book on his experiences, relating how a ‘good bag’ did not necessarily mean a caddie consistently earned fat cheques.‘Some of the biggest winners have combination locks on their wallets,’ Argea asserted. ‘But certainly not Nicklaus.’ Galleries may be unaware that the real personalities of the fairways are often colourful ‘bag-toting servants’, rather than the players who pursue the money chain with such robotic and humourless profiles. British golfer Max Faulkner employed a regular caddie nicknamed Mad Mac who was, to say the least, slightly eccentric. He wore a raincoat but no shirt and always studied the greens through binoculars from which the lenses had been removed. He once advised Faulkner:‘Hit it slightly straight, sir.’ American Orville Moody once had a caddie who went to extremes to get the exact course measurements. He even used to walk through water hazards with the golf bag held over his head to be sure to get the correct distance. Steve Williams can afford to chuckle. It won’t cost him a dime.
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PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Golf stories Hallelujah, American golfers are finding their legs again. A bug has swept the nation in which golfers are determined to walk, albeit with the assistance of a bag-toting caddie. A Massachusetts official, Dick Haskell, made this natty comparison between the merits of caddies and motorised golf carts: Caddie Has name, will respond Will signal and wave Moves out ahead Holds flagstick Hands you a club Weighs 65 kg, no tracks Will caddie rain or shine Finds your ball Wipes your clubs Tires but never stops Can judge distance Says ‘Nice shot’ Cleans your ball Rakes bunkers
Cart Just sits there Doesn’t understand Always with you Can’t go on green You get it yourself Weighs 340 kg, makes ruts Barred in bad weather Never even looks Bangs your clubs Runs out of juice, quits Blind as a bat Has no interest Couldn’t care less Watches you do it
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Rogers: I guess there is nothing that will get Will your mind off everything like golf will. I have never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say you can get so sore at yourself that you forget to hate your enemies.
7
A LITTLE MAN WITH GRAND PLANS
There was a time when Michael Wolveridge was the only English golfer competing on the United States PGA Tour. The smallest, too. Compatriots and champions Tony Jacklin, Nick Faldo and Lee Westwood followed his path, but Wolveridge’s destiny led him elsewhere. Today, he is the dedicated and energetic partner alongside Peter Thomson in Australia’s best known course design and construction company, with a third partner, Ross Perrett, joining the scene later on. The trio’s work is so prolific that their signature is now on 170 courses in 25 countries. I caught up with Wolveridge at Rose Bay, where the vintage Royal Sydney layout is due for a facelift. Plans are prepared for all the greens to be reconstructed, with the architects reintroducing Botany Grey sands to reproduce the firm, fast and true surfaces made so famous from the course’s early heritage. Wolveridge nurses a passion for classic layouts, especially Royal Sydney.There, he enthuses, local wild and wispy grasses and deep bunkers provide a links appearance to remind everyone the course is beside the sea. 32
A LITTLE MAN WITH GRAND PLANS At 64 years of age and with unbounded enthusiasm, Wolveridge has lived a life of remarkable events and adventures, and his eyes sparkle as he reflects. Golf flows like a torrent through his veins, yet by rights he should have been a wealthy oil company executive. That’s what his father, an oil company director, had planned. Instead, after national service in the air force, Michael clambered on board a company oil tanker and finished up in Bermuda. His father was displeased. Diminutive in build, Michael was no slouch on the fairways and fancied his chances on the US PGA Tour. Alas, it was four years before he could gain a visa to play in America. In the meantime he turned pro, worked at Mid-Ocean Golf Club and enjoyed social golf with such luminaries as the Duke of Windsor, President Eisenhower and the great conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent, who always rounded off his golf with a game of table tennis. The American visa finally arrived and Wolveridge joined the US Tour for the 1962 Los Angeles Open, the event where Jack Nicklaus was also a tour debutant. He was to spend the next four years on tour, the solitary Englishman. The adventurous little English golfer made his way down under and contested the Australian Open at Royal Adelaide, won by South Africa’s Gary Player. But Wolveridge was a winner too, meeting up with Peter Thomson at a cocktail party and striking up a bond that has flourished to this day. Determined to promote an Asian tour, Thomson urged Wolveridge to join the Australian golf party of flag bearers. Back in the States,Wolveridge might have been the smallest tour player but, as he stoutly claimed, he was strong. Mark McCormack quipped he mightn’t make the last day very often but added:‘You know everybody so you’ll be perfect for television.’ The world had become his oyster. Playing the French Open, Wolveridge was greatly impressed to meet up with Commander John Harris, a renowned course designer. This, he decided, was what he wanted to do. Dashing down to New Zealand, he picked up his first assignment, a 36-hole course construction in 33
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Christchurch. When Peter Thomson arrived on the scene, Wolveridge asked him if he would like to be involved.‘Sure, Mike, I’m with you,’Thomson said, and the partnership was sealed. Through the 1970s and 1980s, during which they built 130 courses, the workload became too much.They needed a team to document the work and at this time also secured the services of Perrett, a master landscape designer and architect. It was an inspired recruitment and Perrett is currently involved in eight course projects in China. Twin Waters, Hope Island, Camden Lakeside, Moonah Links . . . the Australian scene is their domain, but overseas constructions also escalate with nowhere more prestigious than at golf ’s ancestral home, the Dukes course near St Andrews. It was named with permission after the Duke of York, Prince Andrew officially opened Scotland’s newest links and proceeded to hit the first ball out of bounds! Thomson quipped cheerfully: ‘Nice practice shot, now let’s get started.’ The prince clouted his second ball down the middle and signed for a three. Links courses are Wolveridge’s speciality. ‘They are inside me,’ he says passionately. He has built a fine home on the boundary of the spanking new links at Port Douglas, which he lovingly supervised. Peter Thomson was his hero when they first met and remains a close and respected business partner. ‘I can’t say enough about Peter and his steadying influence in golf,’ Wolveridge says. ‘It is his common sense. He has his hand on the tiller.’ So now it’s back to work for golf ’s remarkable ‘little man’, who’s relishing a very large assignment at Royal Sydney.
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A LITTLE MAN WITH GRAND PLANS Golf stories Was there ever a better story told about the Masters at Augusta than this one recounted from a locker room in the west of England? A keen golfer was due to be married. A few days before his Saturday wedding, he happened to win first prize in the clubhouse raffle—an air ticket for one to attend the Masters tournament in Augusta. The flight was to leave the morning after the ceremony and he said it was too good an opportunity to miss. His bride presumed he was joking but, sure enough, after a splendid family reception and one night of the cosy connubials he was up early and away for his solo flight. When he returned a week later, his wife had flown. He has never set eyes on her since. The story continues that when he’s putting at the last and into a serene shepherd’s red sunset over the Bristol Channel, he will pull from his bag a peaked cap bearing the flamboyant badge ‘Masters 1972’ . . . and every time he arranges it on his head with reverence, he offers himself a tiny sigh and gives a momentary rueful shrug before settling over his putt. Trouble is, you don’t know whether it’s his wife or Augusta on his mind. The Masters gets them like that, concludes the storyteller.
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Milne: Golf is so popular because it is the best A.A. game in the world at which to be bad. At golf, it is the bad player who gets the most strokes.
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AUGUSTA’S SURRENDER TO TECHNOLOGY
Any last lingering doubts about whether Tiger Woods is changing the face of golf must now dissolve. From America’s deep south, rumours have become action and the majestic Augusta National layout is undergoing a transformation. Not a few subtle changes, mind you, but a wholesale revamp that would never have happened but for the impact of predator Tiger Woods. Next April, golf ’s more cynical observers say competitors will recognise little more than the narrow driveway along Magnolia Lane. The Augusta guardians and course architect Tom Fazio will combine to add another 300 yards (275 metres) to the championship layout, among a shoal of other alterations. All this remoulding is claimed to challenge not only length but shot making and positioning, in short to preserve Augusta’s reputation as no pushover (even if Tiger Woods did punish the course in 1997 with his twelve-stroke victory). So this is labelled ‘Tiger-proofing’. Understandably, the players view the changes with both anxiety and misgivings. Speaking to Golf World, Greg Norman said: ‘What they’ve done is completely change the golf course. 37
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF This is not the Augusta National everybody grew up to love.’ Brad Faxon suggested the renovations were ‘a huge overreaction to technology’. Jeff Sluman sniped: ‘If the times in the 100 metres dash go down, do the people in charge change the distance to 110 metres?’ Mark O’Meara queries: ‘It sounds pretty drastic considering people haven’t been shooting 61s and 62s.’ (Norman and Nick Price hold the Augusta record with 63s.) Price cautioned:‘They’re eliminating 80 per cent of the field.What they’re telling us is, if you don’t hit it 300 yards [275 metres] you’re not going to win at Augusta.’ The changes will tear painfully at the heart of Gary Player, a three-time Masters champion and Augusta’s most devoted admirer. ‘You don’t tamper with the Mona Lisa,’ he said back in 1978 when alterations were mooted. I walked with him the morning after that victory when, with special permission, he guided his teenaged son, Wayne, around the course, lovingly identifying every subtle nuance, quirk and cranny. Architect Fazio defends the changes, saying he is tired of people saying, ‘Doesn’t this play into Tiger’s hands because you make it longer?’ Says Fazio: ‘Augusta National deals in the present and the future, not in the past. It has nothing to do with Tiger. This is a golf course in evolutionary form, year after year. The one consistent thing at Augusta is change.’ Nothing to do with Tiger? Really? The champion’s coach, Butch Harmon, comments: ‘They’ve pretty much taken the average hitter out of the equation. I don’t think they’re Tigerproofing it at all.’ Just what are these dramatic changes that have caused such a furore? Well, they challenge the player from the outset, a 25-yard (23-metre) extension to the first hole, which will require a 300-yard (275-metre) carry over an extended fairway bunker. A scary opening. An additional 45 yards (41 metres) stretches the 7th hole to 405 (370 metres), 20 yards (18 metres) takes the 8th to 555 (275 metres), and another 30 yards (27 metres) makes the 9th 38
AUGUSTA’S SURRENDER TO TECHNOLOGY play 465 yards (427 metres), with several bunkers simply doubled in size. Augusta has even bought land from neighbouring Augusta Country Club to bring Rae’s Creek more into play at the 13th hole. Of the middle six holes, only the treacherous par three 12th remains untouched. (Treacherous? Greg Norman lost a ball from his tee shot in 1999, despite thousands of fans and cameras following the ball’s flight.) More extensions follow on the homeward run but true drama must inevitably come at the closing hole, which traditionally produces gripping Masters finales. The tee shot, played from a narrow chute, now goes back another 60 yards (55 metres) and added trees will aggravate problems to the bail-out area left of the two fairway bunkers. Short hitters may not be able to negotiate the dog leg. As one astute judge predicted, whereas birdies so often decided the fate of leaders on the final hole, it may well now be determined by bogeys. Back to Fazio: ‘You say narrow hole, uphill, dog leg right, through a chute of trees, side hill lie on your approach. I like every one of those qualities in a golf hole,’ he told Golf World. ‘I’m not sure it’s fairer, but it’s golf.’ After that, let’s go back in time to the mighty Bobby Jones, founder of this masterpiece. He said: Our overall aim at the Augusta National has been to provide a golf course of considerable natural beauty, relatively easy for the average golfer to play and at the same time testing for the expert player striving to better par figures. Our golf course was designed for the enjoyment of our members who do not delight in playing all day from sand and long grass. For this reason we expect to keep the course about as it is regardless of what the long hitters may do.
RIP Bobby Jones.
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PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Golf stories The players never complain about the rough at Augusta. There isn’t any! With a brook, ponds, tall pines and steep bunkers, Augusta is formidable enough without snagging undergrowth trapping your ball off the fairway. At a press conference the Augusta chairman, Clifford Roberts, was once asked: ‘Mr Roberts, can you tell me why there’s no rough at Augusta National?’ Roberts answered in a slow old southern drawl: ‘Well, we’ve got a very fine club here and we like to keep it in trim for the members. Each year we invite along a few outsiders and we like to afford them the same conditions that apply to our members.’
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Murray: Do I get nervous? I’m like a duck. Andrew I may appear calm and serene on top, but underneath I’m paddling like hell.
9
REJUVENATED WOOSIE REKINDLES FLAME
The world’s newly anointed World Match Play champion is a pint-sized fella blessed with a huge heart. Ian Woosnam, at the slightly venerable golf age of 43, captured the title at Wentworth for the third time, illustrating that rolling back the years requires not only a copybook swing that defies time and tensions but a generous dose of passion and guts. ‘Woosie’ cleaned up Ireland’s Padraig Harrington, a man almost two decades his junior and the banner leader for Europe’s elite young stars. Okay, the Americans were absent, but that was their problem. They are reluctant to venture across the Atlantic at the best of times and on this occasion reckoned they had a good excuse. But for that disastrous extra club mix-up with his caddie at Royal Lytham and St Annes, incurring the infamous two-stroke penalty, Woosnam could have had the British Open to further embellish his trophy cabinet.This adds up to the reincarnation of one of the game’s champions. So where has Ian Woosnam been? More recently, he’s put in sporadic appearances, the result of a dispiriting form slump and 42
REJUVENATED WOOSIE REKINDLES FLAME too much time on the sidelines. Just reflect that only a decade ago he was on top of the golf pile.That was the year he turned a deaf and defiant ear to the Augusta hecklers and won the Masters.That was the year he set out to become the number one golfer in the Sony world rankings and succeeded with a bunch of other tournament successes. On that Sunday evening at Augusta in 1991 they found a green jacket to fit the stocky little Welshman, who stands just 164 centimetres tall and weighs 73 kilograms. He’s the player who Seve Ballesteros tells the media has the best swing in Europe and who causes David Feherty to sigh: ‘When Woosie starts holing putts we might as well all go home and leave him to put the lights out.’ So much for the game’s prophets, who warned that golf will assuredly fall into the hands of some super-powerful athletes who will overwhelm tournaments and crush smaller opponents along the way. Maybe they had Tiger Woods in mind. He is certainly bigger framed than you expect to see and looks even more formidable after each conquest. Ian Woosnam, on the other hand, has turned back the clock. There was a time when the small men of golf dominated the game. Norman von Nida, our tiny firecracker, was this country’s champion who went off to blitz British golf. Gary Player won the Australian Open seven times together with an imposing shoal of major victories. He stands 170 centimetres tall and succeeds because he is a disciple of the Power of Positive Thinking, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, wears black clothes to absorb the strength of the sun, performs press-ups and eats bananas. Ben Hogan was small in stature but strong, with chilling precision. He survived a near fatal car crash to win the Masters, US Open and British Open at age 41. Epic Masters victor Gene Sarazen, at 165 centimetres, was the shortest of all the major winners of his era. It is interesting to reflect upon these diminutive champions, who all reached their summits from virtually desperate backgrounds. 43
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Von Nida worked in a Brisbane abattoir to help keep his family above the poverty line. Player did it tough as a youngster with his family depending on his father’s income from working in a mine. He needed sponsorship money before he could make his first trip abroad. Sarazen, the son of Italian immigrants, helped his father by selling papers, picking fruit and even lighting gas lamps to put food on the family table. Ian Woosnam? Well, at the beginning of his career he travelled to tournaments in a campervan and ate tins of baked beans to save money. Woosnam needed three attempts to win a European PGA Tour card, but in 1987 became the first British player to win the World Match Play, at that stage in its twenty-fourth year. He teamed with Nick Faldo in the Ryder Cup that year at Muirfield Village to win 31⁄2 points out of four as Europe marched to its first victory over the United States on American soil. In the rain in Hawaii, Woosnam joined David Llewellyn to win the World Cup and at Monte Carlo in 1990 he missed a first European tour score of 59 by ‘just a couple of inches’. The son of a Shropshire farmer, Woosnam was born in the town of Oswestry on the England–Wales border. He learned his golf at the quaint Llanymynech club, which has fifteen holes in Wales and three in England.Yet Woosnam insists: ‘I’m a Taff to the core.’ Because of his stocky legs, wee Woosnam needed a special seat to reach the pedals when he drove his father’s tractor. He attributes his strength and sturdy physique to lifting heavy bales on the farm. In later years, he encountered problems on long flights where his feet could not touch the floor. Today, Ian Woosnam lives in style in Jersey in the Channel Islands and commutes in his own turbo aeroplane. Oh yes, and in 1999 he became president of the World Snooker Association.
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REJUVENATED WOOSIE REKINDLES FLAME Golf stories The diehard would tell you the American Seniors Tour is a stroll down memory lane for old champions, a relaxed party, a chance to renew old fellowships. Wrong. The golden oldies are a bunch of cry babies according to some of their colleagues. J.C. Snead told the Chicago Sun-Times, ‘I thought it’d be a big party. It is . . . a big cry baby party. Everything bothers these guys. They complain about the birds chirping, the colour of their shoes, the coin you use to mark your ball, the side of the fairway you drive the cart. It’s just ridiculous. It takes the fun out of it.’ And Snead is even more incensed about the gamesmanship on tour. ‘I’ve never tried to screw up another player,’ he said. ‘But some of these guys are almost mean. There’s been more fights out there than in the last fifteen years on the other [PGA] tour. They’re like old dogs fighting over a bone.’ Of course, in their golfing ‘dotage’ the old guard is suddenly tasting prize money wildly in excess of the best rewards they earned in their halcyon days. They like the taste!
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Love III: I expect myself to win whenever I Davis play, so the only real pressure I have is not pushing myself too hard.
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MEMOIRS OF AUSTRALIA’S IRONMAN He was described as being as ‘grim and purposeful as a bloodhound’. Bruce Crampton was the man of steel among Australia’s post-war golfers and unluckier, perhaps, than even Greg Norman with the roll of the dice in major championships. If Jack Nicklaus was the golfer of the twentieth century and Crampton finished runner-up to him in four majors plus the US Senior Open, just what was his status? If Crampton was unsmiling on the fairways—‘his office’— these days he is a cheery, mellow fellow. In Melbourne recently he was inducted into the Australian Sports Hall of Fame. Peter Thomson was accorded legend honours. With a sigh at age 66, Crampton recalls those contests with Nicklaus and philosophises.You can play the best game of your life, he says, but the difference between winning and defeat can be desperately slim.‘I guess Jack just made fewer mistakes than I did,’ he concedes. The major loss that saddens him most was their battle at the 1972 US Open at Pebble Beach. On the par four 10th hole on the final day, Crampton smoked his drive only to see the ball 47
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF run out of the fairway and disappear into a steep bunker. He took six. Nicklaus hit into the ocean and also took six. At the 17th, the Golden Bear struck his famous one iron to the sloping par three green that struck the pin for a tap-in birdie to seal the US Open. ‘I had my chance only it didn’t fall that way,’ Crampton recalls. ‘But at Pebble Beach I came awfully close. I think Jack’s advantage over me down the years was more conducive to a wealthy family and the great benefit of college training. I can only say I gave it my best.’ He is one of a handful of great players to go winless in the majors, so what records did Crampton set? Try these. He twice won the prized Vardon trophy for the season’s lowest scoring average and was the first foreign golfer to earn $US1 million in the United States. He won fifteen times on the circuit, retired in 1975, then turned back the clock eight years later to dominate the US Senior Tour, winning seven times. Just as 1956 was the Melbourne Olympics year for our athletes, it was also Bruce Crampton’s blast-off year as a professional. Just twenty years of age, nerveless, muscular and determined, he staged a heart-stopping finish to snatch the Australian Open title from Kel Nagle. Peter Thomson, at the height of his career, did not play and critics queried if Crampton could have possibly won with Thomson in the field.The answer came a few weeks later in the Speedo tournament at Thomson’s home course, Victoria Golf Club, where Crampton celebrated his twenty-first birthday by defeating Thomson by four shots. Known for his ironman endurance (at one stage he played 37 tournaments straight on the regular PGA Tour), Crampton has not picked up a club for the past few years. ‘It’s too frustrating,’ he says.‘What can I achieve? It’s no fun not being able to beat golf courses and the elements. And besides, you need to spend so much time to keep up with professional standards.’ With his new bride he now lives in Annapolis, Maryland, 50 kilometres north-west of Washington DC. He pursues an 48
MEMOIRS OF AUSTRALIA’S IRONMAN enthusiastic business life with managerial interests in software programs and computers. And he writes a weekly column for a local paper in which he answers golf-related questions.You can’t take the Australian out of the boy, as they say, and he has called his column ‘Fair Dinkum’. Crampton says he spent half his second column explaining to nonplussed American readers the meaning of his column title. Unlike some of golf ’s older generations, he has only admiration for the current crop of pros. ‘They’re bigger and stronger,’ he observes. You have only to read about Tiger Woods’ amazing bench press achievements. Tiger has raised the bar in golf and everyone else is trying to get there.The pro golfers are getting better each generation, just as we were ahead of the previous generation. Better technique with the modern concept of the golf swing. Better than the way we learnt to play.Videos go back and forward, back and forward, analysing what makes the most effective shots.The players can stretch with their greater suppleness.The more you can swing a club in a circle, the more effective you are going to be.
Crampton says the question he is asked most often is if he had set his career goals high enough. For instance, did he program his season to win a major, such as the US Open? ‘It might have made a difference,’ he confesses. ‘The most powerful asset you’ve got is your subconscious. I proved I could compete favourably but I never self-talked about winning the US Open. David Graham was a bit cocky in his approach and it worked. He won the US Open and PGA.’ There was some nostalgia surrounding Crampton’s recent trip home. He visited the burial place of his parents in Sydney and he drove from there down to Tumut to recall more youthful days when he went trout fishing. Crampton reminded friends that he is an old Cantabrian, schooled at Canterbury High School in Sydney’s mid-west.While 49
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF in Melbourne, he met up with John Howard and could chuckle and recount that he was always a class ahead of the prime minister.
Golf stories Craig ‘Popeye’ Parry’s first golf trophy was won at the Melton Valley club outside Melbourne. He won the under-sevens competition but because he was only five years of age he was not allowed to stay up long enough for the presentations. Years later he recalled: ‘My grandma collected my prize for me. There were two, a set of dominos and a pocket knife. She brought me back the dominos. Can you imagine? At five, I wanted that pocket knife so badly!’
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Chi Rodriguez: Somebody give me a banana. Chi I’m playing like a monkey so I might as well eat like one.
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MR ANTI-GOLF COMES ROUND
He was the self-appointed chairman and founding member of the Anti-golf Society but then became seduced by the ‘mystic element’ of the game and turned full circle into a golf nut. The mystic element, he explains, is the difference between a successful round and selling your clubs. Michael Parkinson, television’s peerless interviewer, once aspired to play cricket for his native Yorkshire, but failed to progress much past his father’s challenge games against Lancashire visitors on the sands of Bridlington. Later he rather fancied the life of a beach Lothario in the south of France, ‘speaking English with an amazing French accent, being adept at all water sports, lithe of limb, teak brown and filling his bikini briefs’. His thoughts later turned to Queensland, where he envisaged whiling away his days spraying suntan oil on scantily clad young ladies. Fun without ruin, as he put it. He had observed that Australian beach beauties gave you more to spray on. But resigned to the fact that most ambitions are fantasies and that he was never going to be a beach Adonis, Parkinson took up golf after being persuaded by his wife, Mary, a noted 52
MR ANTI-GOLF COMES ROUND ‘dangerous’ eighteen handicapper. So he became poacher turned gamekeeper. The attraction of golf, he found, was that it could become a fun pastime, even in the face of a blowout scorecard. Parkinson recalls with a chuckle a game with good friend James Tarbuck, who was standing over a putt on the last hole of a Surrey course where a public footpath runs close to the green. Relates Parkinson: ‘There was money on the shot and at such a moment Mr Tarbuck is not to be messed with. He had carefully but painstakingly lined up and drawn the putter back when a citizen approached. “Excuse me,” he said. Mr Tarbuck looked up in disbelief. “Can you tell me how I get to the cemetery?” he inquired. ‘“Try dying,” said Mr Tarbuck, affably enough.’ Michael Parkinson emulates those northern hemisphere winged birdies that migrate south to Australia each summer. He is 66 years old, silver haired, fit (save for a dodgy back) and experiencing a resurgence in his television career with the BBC. He was in need of an annual golf furlough down under to pep up, as it were, and says he wants two summers each year—like Richie Benaud. Besides, Parkinson is in love with Australia and says he can walk through the streets of Sydney’s Parramatta unmolested. Oh yes, and he takes pride in a large, appreciative Australian audience, part of his eight million weekly viewers as he parades his colourful celebrities across the Parkinson stage. He never even came close to wearing the white rose of Yorkshire on his cricket cap but he did captain the Maidenhead and Bray Third XI, which contained his three sons, at Thames Valley in the London competition. While he is a left-handed golfer, he is right handed at other two-handed sports. His father, John Parkinson, could bat either way, often deciding which stance he would take on his way to the wicket. Left-handed golf is a curse, Michael complains, because there is so little equipment in pro shops all over the world for unloved 53
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF south paws, except perhaps in New Zealand where left handers seem to outnumber their right-handed counterparts. ‘Left handers watch with amazement as right handers stroll through pro shops picking up and testing from rows of wedges and putters. Left-handed clubs are like crown jewels,’ he says. He got down to an eleven handicap on a famous occasion after he shot a net 59 at his club,Temple, outside London. It was, in his own words, an extraordinary round. Every single putt went in, but a miserable time followed trying to get back to a rational handicap. Together with Mary, he is a member of the Australian Golf Club in Sydney where each summer the professionals try to make adjustments and turn the cricketer in his swing into a golfer.The culprit in Parkinson’s swing seems to be a front knee that, instead of moving behind the ball, shoots forward ‘like an England batsman playing Muralitharan’.A video reveals that at the peak of his swing he is bow legged, with his legs forming an aperture through which a decent-sized family car could be driven. Parkinson complained to his long-term playing partner, Lozza Holloway, asking why he hadn’t said anything. ‘About what?’ his partner said. ‘What’s wrong with my swing,’ Parkinson said. ‘I never look,’ he said. ‘Why not?’ Parkinson asked, a bit miffed. ‘I daren’t,’ he said. Charming.
Golf stories Tom Watson, good-natured fellow but hard-nosed competitor, favours the edict of letting your sticks do the talking. He quips: ‘A young fellow came into the clubhouse complaining about taking a “nine”. Ninety-five per cent of the members close by didn’t want to hear about it, the other five per cent wished he’d taken ten.’
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Trevino: There are two things not long for this Lee world—dogs that chase cars and golfers who chip for pars.
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CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
‘Of course I wrote the bloody thing. And I’ve got the original script to prove it.’ That’s Patrick McCarville speaking, with his Irish paddy up, defending his claim as creator of the controversial film The Man Who Sued God, and very much miffed at his lack of recognition. His great friend Marty Feldman would have verified it but he’s passed on, so there’s legal action in the wind with McCarville doing some suing himself. The film, produced in the fishing hamlet of Bermagui on the scenic New South Wales south coast, has proved a box office winner, but McCarville was ‘mortified’ when he joined the film crew for a viewing. He is not credited with the original screenplay, just scores an end of film rollout—‘based on an original idea by . . .’—as theatre-goers are shuffling out of the aisles. I can sympathise with the forthright 65-year-old Dubliner because some 30 (or was it 40?) years ago he unfolded to me the theme of his story. As he said, it was a simple idea that came to him: a bloke loses his boat when it’s hit by a bolt of lightning and he sues God. Originally he planned a book, then decided this was a script meant for a film. It was offered to the BBC for a half-hour 56
CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE comedy show, but never saw the light of day until years later when movie producer Ben Gannon picked it up. McCarville has no gripe about his payment; all he wants is a fitting credit line. It’s another remarkable chapter in the career of a remarkable actor–writer character, oh yes, and enthusiastic promoter of Jameson Irish whiskey in Australia. Jameson, incidentally, is very pleased with him. A couple of years ago McCarville trekked along with a posse of security guards as President Bill Clinton played some holes with Greg Norman at the New South Wales course on a biting, cold day at La Perouse. McCarville produced a bottle of Jameson and the president said: ‘I wouldn’t mind trying a drop of that.’ The Jameson company liked the picture of the president drinking their product. McCarville is also a golf nut and has become heavily involved in the sport since migrating to Australia. With Kel Nagle, he organised the first Australian golf film ever shown in Japan and he imported celebrity players for senior tournaments here. He also wrote highly amusing articles for a golfing magazine. McCarville’s been playing golf at the breezy St Michael’s course off a handicap of fourteen—and by necessity plays left handed. Thereby hangs another story. His right arm was broken in four places in a car mishap. The vehicle slid forward as he opened a door for one of his passengers to alight, and he jammed his arm against a lamp post. McCarville woke up halfway down the street after hitting the back of a truck. The doctors had to rebreak the arm twice, so golf appeared a lost cause for the once promising junior at Sunningdale, outside London. A visit to Bill Holder, the legendary teacher at The Lakes in Sydney, changed all that. Realising McCarville’s arm was too fragile to take the impact of a swing, he switched him to south paw and sent him off for a trial round with a set of left-handed clubs and a bag full of golf balls. He even offered to accompany him, but Patrick said he would do it on his own. Faithfully counting every one of his shots for a 234 total, he returned minus 57
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF some twenty golf balls. St Michael’s members today will vouch for his competitive left-handed play and he is a popular celebrity at corporate pro ams. ‘I just love links courses,’ he says in a lilting accent straight off the Blarney Stone.As a youngster he was coached by Ireland’s golf hero, Christy O’Connor, but he was always heading for the stage. As an actor with the Stage Golfing Society, he had acting roles in Emergency War 10 and The Avengers. McCarville has a long-time friendship with Billy Connolly, who plays the rumbustious lawyer-turned-fisherman in The Man Who Sued God who sees his livelihood, his fishing boat, demolished in a fireball after a bolt of lightning strikes in a fierce storm over the Bermagui harbour.A love affair with an intrepid journalist (played by Judy Davis) and a series of fabulous court scenes in which religious leaders defend the absent defender (God) make fascinating viewing. McCarville says he has no complaints about the film. He likes it and smiles at its belated appearance. It’s just that missing frontup credit. A bit like listing Tiger Woods among tournament also-rans.
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CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE Golf stories Matchplay in the World tournament at Wentworth’s Burma Road course is grim eyeball to eyeball stuff. But in a curious incident, Seve Ballesteros desperately wanted his opponent, Zimbabwe’s Nick Price, to hole a critical putt that would square the hole. Playing the 13th, Ballesteros choked on a chunk of cake and spluttered during Price’s back swing. The Zimbabwean duffed his approach into a greenside bunker. ‘I was eating one of those fruit cakes and, unfortunately, it went down the wrong way,’ Seve said afterwards. ‘I felt really bad and I offered him a half.’ Price declined the offer and holed a 2.4-metre putt to square the hole. Ballesteros admitted: ‘I was pulling for Nick’s putt. If he had missed it, there’s no doubt I would have felt very guilty.’
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Montgomery: With the top players, the money Colin is incidental.They live for competition and they live for titles.
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‘THUNDER’ BOLT STRIKES AGAIN
You could say Tommy ‘Thunder’ Bolt has entered the World Golf Hall of Fame through the back door, coming in via the veteran category hatchway. Bolt won the US Open, the US Senior Open and fifteen US PGA Tour events, yet it’s taken the best part of half a century to hand him his entry ticket. And at 84 years of age! Well, better late than never. Oklahoma’s Tommy Bolt, harnessed with a fiery temper, has always been one of my favourite golf pros. He provided golf with stories of great humour and adventure that could only emanate from this unique sport. Maybe it was those club-tossing exploits that delayed his Hall of Fame induction. Australian galleries followed Terrible Tom during two eras of his career. He came here during his prime in 1954, four years before he carried off the US Open, as the leading figure in America’s four-man team. Together with Marty Furgol, Dutch Harrison and Dave Douglas, Bolt took on our best Aussie line-up at The Lakes and at Lake Karrinyup. After a tight skirmish at The Lakes, Bolt announced he wanted to play our best player, Norman von Nida, to show the galleries 61
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF who was best. So The Von took him on at Lake Karrinyup and was three up when Bolt duck hooked a drive at the 14th into the crowd where it thumped into a spectator.‘That’s enough, I’m finished, you can bloody well have the game,’ he said. The Von urged Bolt to check on the spectator he had hit, who was fortunately unhurt, and to finish the game, which the little Aussie champ won three and two. The years had rolled past when Bolt arrived here again for the seniors championship at Manly Golf Club. Bolt had played a key role in the formation of the American seniors tour and styled the Legends of Golf at Onion Creek, which was hailed as a money tree for otherwise retired star pros. Tommy had mellowed quite a deal in his senior days and at Manly, holding a useful tournament lead, he paused to ask the gallery, ‘Who’s coming second?’ ‘Daylight,’ came the reply. ‘Never heard of him,’ grunted Bolt. It was a miserably cold and wet day and Bolt looked longingly back at the clubhouse, commenting that he should be back there where everybody was warm and comfortable drinking their gin and tonics. The US PGA Tour commissioner, Tim Finchem, has labelled Bolt ‘one of the great personalities to have ever played the game’, and astute judges credited ‘Thunder’ Bolt with the best swing golf had ever seen. He was a great showman and had a lot to do with the growth of the game because of the interest and excitement he instilled in the fans, Finchem added. Bolt confesses he would like to have shed that temperamental title he’s been saddled with. Bolt always reckoned his sturdy lantern jaw was a reason galleries didn’t take to him. He did it tough as a youngster compared to the cool and calm advent of Jack Nicklaus. ‘I’m happy for him,’ Bolt once said, ‘but there’s a tremendous difference between a silver spoon and trying to eat soup with a tin fork.’ Tommy’s rebellious streak can be traced back to when the PGA Tour in America brought in new rules and started fining people for all sorts of misdemeanours. Tommy was once fined $25 for 62
‘THUNDER’ BOLT STRIKES AGAIN breaking wind on the first tee. He complained: ‘Hell, they’re taking all the colour out of the game.’ In a bid to appeal to ‘Tom’s better nature’, the PGA Tour put him in charge of the tour’s ‘good conduct’ committee. Tommy, honesty personified, duly fined himself $100 for club throwing. He labelled the younger generation of talented players as ‘flippywristed college kids’ and criticised them for not being able to throw clubs properly. He even suggested he might open a school for club throwers so players could get their clubs going in the right direction and at the right angle so that the club was not damaged. Self-conscious about his age,Tommy, when nearer 40 than 30, was shocked to see the Los Angeles Times refer to him as 49 years old. He eventually confronted the culprit journalist and stormed: ‘You son of a bitch.What do you mean saying I’m 49? You know I’m 39.’ The miserable journalist replied: ‘Yes, Tom. I know. It was just a typographical error.’ ‘Typographical error, my ass,’ said Tom.‘It was a perfect four and a perfect nine.’ He was never offended by his nickname, claiming people recognised him for what he was—a golfer showing his emotions. And so now the US PGA Tour has recognised him. Officially. About time, too.
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PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Golf stories Darrell Fazio, magazine editor and golfing buff, was the game’s prince of storytellers down under. Before his untimely death he regaled audiences with this delightful yarn. Craig, a young professional on the New South Wales pro am circuit, was about to play a solo practice round on the Condobolin golf course on the eve of the tournament when he was approached by a pretty young lass who asked if she could accompany him on the round. Craig readily agreed and the couple got on famously. On the last green the lass was faced with a 20-metre downhill, curling putt to break 80 for the first time in her golfing career. She had been helped immensely by Craig’s advice and was elated at her improvement. ‘If I sink this putt,’ she said with a twinkle in her eye, ‘I’m going to take you to the fanciest restaurant in Condobolin—my shout— and provide the nightcaps at my house.’ Craig studied the putt carefully then plucked the ball up. ‘Heck, that’s a gimme if ever I saw one!’ he said.
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Benny: Give me golf clubs, fresh air and a Jack beautiful partner, and you can keep my golf clubs and the fresh air.
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KEEP IT UNDER YOUR HAT, SAM
The Slammer, Samuel Jackson Snead, left us in May—four days shy of his ninetieth birthday.With his departure from the fairways disappeared his signature, the straw hat that was his inseparable partner.The hat was a sort of uniform, we are told, that had been a source of dismay and embarrassment to Sam. His great friend, discoverer and sponsor, Fred Corcoran, claimed he had a photograph of Snead taken in Florida that showed him getting a haircut with his hat on. There was a suggestion he even wore it to bed. I learned a lot about Sam Snead during a week in which I was a hotel guest along with Corcoran during the 1973 British Open at Troon. Corcoran had written a book, Unplayable Lies, in which he recounted how he had befriended a raw-boned youngster fresh out of the foothills of West Virginia. As a boy, Sam caddied in bare feet until the winter snows arrived. Shoes were only for school, or churchgoing. Corcoran, the entrepreneur who virtually founded the LPGA circuit in the United States, had recruited a bunch of male pro golfers to share breakfast with members of the Lake Merritt Club. 66
KEEP IT UNDER YOUR HAT, SAM Somebody announced: ‘They have a guy named Stan Speed, or something like that. I don’t know, a golf pro, I think . . .’ After the first round, wrote Corcoran, they had narrowed it down to Sam Sneed but three days later every golf fan in America had the correct spelling. Sam had won with a score of 270 in only his second PGA tournament. The Miami News Bureau wired Corcoran, asking:‘How good is this Snead?’ Corcoran wired back: ‘He’s the best swinger of a golf club I’ve ever seen.’ A glorious swing it was, too. Smooth, flowing, relaxed and the inspiration of seven major victories, even if he never quite made it onto the winner’s podium at the US Open. He was runner-up four times, most disastrously in 1939 at Spring Mill where he came to the last hole needing a par five to win and ‘hacked his way from tee to green in eight heartbreaking chops’. Snead enjoyed his hillbilly role and contributed to stories with his own fertile imagination. Corcoran enthusiastically fed those stories to an eager media bored with the game’s regular ‘muscle mutes’. During the 1948 American presidential campaign, Corcoran approached Snead on the fairway and told him Dewey was leading the count. ‘What did he go out in?’ queried Snead. And when Bing Crosby won an Academy Award for Going My Way, Snead responded:‘Okay, did he win at match or medal play?’ Corcoran quipped in his book that if Walter Hagen was known as the first to make a million dollars in golf and spend it, Sam was the first to make a million and save two million. Thrifty to the extreme yet, oddly, this was the same Snead ‘who would wrestle a cab driver for the tip and who hoarded golf balls as if production was about to be halted [but] could be the most casual person in the world about investing thousands’. Corcoran chuckled over his story involving Snead sharing the Red Sox baseball bunker with the famous Ted Williams. He received some good-natured teasing from players about the task of a professional golfer compared to the life of a ball player. ‘Look,’ Williams needled, ‘you use a flat hitting surface and belt a stationary object. What’s tough about that? I gotta stand up there with a round bat and 67
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF hit a ball that is travelling at me 110 miles [175 kilometres] an hour—and curving.’ Snead pondered, then drawled: ‘Yeah, Ted, but you don’t have to go up in the stands and play all your foul balls. I do . . .’ But back to those straw hats. Corcoran recalled a tournament he attended at Belmont, outside Boston, and Sam was rooming in the next hotel apartment with fellow player Johnny Bulla. Corcoran said he was woken every morning by a peculiar thumping sound. At the same time, he noticed Sam was wearing automobile tape wrappings on both wrists. He finally sought Bulla for an explanation. ‘I know it’s silly,’ Bulla told him,‘but he’s walking on his hands to make his hair grow. Something about the blood rushing to the scalp and stimulating the follicles . . .’ Corcoran recorded that during the decades when Sam was in his prime, the more exuberant pros might fling their hats in the air on the final green in triumph. But not Sam, whose hat was ‘firmly glued to his brow’. Corcoran said he could vouch that Snead did remove it in the shower, in church, at the dinner table . . . and in bed. Sam Snead, sublime golf pro and superb funster, will be sorely missed.And, I guess, so will that signature straw hat. But thanks to Fred Corcoran for the memories.
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KEEP IT UNDER YOUR HAT, SAM Golf stories In his book Golfing Heroes, Scottish commentator Renton Laidlaw provided these interesting, ‘discoveries’: • Walter Hagen sometimes had 22 clubs in his bag in exhibition matches. The reason was he was paid $500 a year for each club he used. • Australia’s Kel Nagle celebrated his Centenary British Open win in unusual fashion—with a cup of tea. • Greg Norman played in the Italian Open at Monticello on a guarantee that he would go to numero uno in the waiting queue for the newest Ferrari. He got his Ferrari and won the tournament! • Gene Sarazen changed his name from Saraceni because he felt it sounded as if he was an Italian violinist rather than a professional golfer. • Bobby Jones was named after a grandfather who considered golf to be a waste of time.
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Rice: Eighteen holes of match play will Grantland teach you more about your foe than nineteen years of dealing with him across a desk.
15
WHEN A CAREER IS A ROUND OF GOLF
It’s not true that he first strapped his golf bag on the back of a dinosaur, but America’s ‘Mr Golf ’ is about to celebrate his one hundredth birthday. No joking.The 29th day in May will see the world’s showbiz giant, Bob Hope, become a centurion. The golf world will stop to salute—and indeed it should. The man who is a long-time sponsor of his own tournament, the Bob Hope Desert Classic, has raised millions of dollars for charity and made countless wartime appearances across the oceans to entertain servicemen. Never has a more popular celebrity stepped onto the pro-am tee. Hope played with presidents, kings, sultans and generals and his only problem was with the Secret Service. He said that when you hit a ball into the rough, the trees ran along with you! Hope’s elevation to stardom from the most humble of starts is an epic itself. He was born in the English village of Eltham, worked as a delivery boy and milk bar clerk as a youngster, played pool and boxed under the name of Packy East. And that’s the name that still identifies his locker at Lakeside Golf Club in America. 71
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Hope’s lifelong love affair with golf saw him play briefly as low as a four-marker and he made an appearance in the 1951 British Amateur at Royal Porthcawl in Wales. He was beaten in the first round by a man ‘smoking a pipe and wearing glasses that looked like the bottom side of a scotch bottle’. He said his old film partner and golf opponent, Bing Crosby, was delighted. In Britain during World War II, Hope teamed up with campaign chief Ike Eisenhower and General Omar Bradley and showed off his swing before the American troops. He recalls that Sir Winston Churchill, the British prime minister who never much cared for the game, sniggered: ‘Never before has anyone swung so hard for so little.’ Bob Hope’s one-liners and anecdotes have delighted millions over the decades, and on the eve of his one hundredth birthday it seems worthwhile to recapture some of his banter about his famous playing partners. Billy Graham: ‘We’re a lot alike. He prays and I cheat. How would you like to play eighteen holes and have it raining just on you? He always wins, but then look at the help he’s got.’ Jackie Gleason: ‘It’s fun with Gleason. He has the only golf cart with a bartender. Seeing Jackie ride around in his cart looks like a Good Year blimp giving birth to a jeep.When he gets into a trap, the sand has to get out.’ Gerald Ford: ‘There are 42 golf courses in the Palm Springs area and nobody knows which one Ford is playing until after he hits his tee shot. It’s not hard to find Gerry Ford on a golf course, you just follow the wounded. Gerry has made golf a contact sport.’ Jimmy Demaret: ‘Standing on the 10th at Pebble Beach I once asked Demaret, “Can I get home from here?” “I dunno,” he replied. “Where do you live?” He’s an awesome wind player. I think he was born in the wind. His mother had to run five miles to retrieve him.’ Arnold Palmer: ‘Golf ’s most intrepid pilot. He has owned his own jet for years, taking over the controls himself, which can get 72
WHEN A CAREER IS A ROUND OF GOLF dangerous. On one flight he thought he was in a golf cart and stepped out at 40 000 feet.’ Jan Stephenson: ‘I watched Jan’s stroke and almost suffered one myself. I wanted to play with her, but couldn’t get a note from my doctor.’ Perry Como: ‘The sleeping prince, he kept dozing off in the middle of his back swing. One day we were all complimenting Perry about keeping his head down until we realised he’d fallen asleep.’ Telly Savalas: ‘Easy to tell he’s been a cop for so long. Instead of “Fore!” he yells “Freeze!”’ Andy Williams: ‘Distracting to play with. Have you ever tried to pitch over a water hazard when your partner is humming “Moon River”?’ Clint Eastwood: ‘He’s easy to spot, the only guy on the course who carries his putter in a holster.’ We can only think Hope was ultra modest when asked to describe his swing. ‘To some, it looked a little like a polo player without a horse,’ he quipped.And the champion funster confessed he never hangs around when a storm’s brewing.‘Personally if I’m on the course and lightning starts, I get inside fast. If God wants to play through, let him.’ His golf philosophy: ‘I get upset over a bad shot like anyone else. But it’s silly to let the game get to you.When I miss a shot I just think what a beautiful day it is. And what pure fresh air I’m breathing.Then I take a deep breath. I have to do that.That’s what gave me the strength to break the club.’ Asked when he would retire, Hope summed up: ‘Retire? This is my work. Play golf, tell a few jokes and have so many friends all over the world. My whole career has been a round of golf.’
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PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Golf stories Dan Cullen, a Sydney veteran pro who consistently beats his age, says Walter Hagen once told him that three basics were required to hit the golf ball: 1 A pair of feet to stand on. 2 A pair of hands to swing a club. 3 No brains.
Golf stories Comedian Bob Hope, on one of his Australian visits, agreed to play a charity exhibition four ball at The Lakes, the treacherously waterhazarded Sydney layout. Norman von Nida was one of his partners but, sadly, heavy rain ruined the occasion. Hope confessed he was terrified by The Lakes. He called it ‘Alcatraz without bars’. ‘Once you go into the rough, you join the Foreign Legion,’ he said.
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Gallico: If there is any larceny in a man, golf Paul will bring it out.
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THE LONG AND SHORT OF PRO GOLF
Jack Newton described it as the changing face of golf. We have arrived at an era when the tall poppies have taken control of the stage and nobody, it seems, is going to cut them down come the majors.The ‘plus six footers’ hold the ace cards as professional golf grapples with the equipment explosion. We are singling out the world’s top three performers—four, if you like. The supremacy of Tiger Woods (6 feet 2 inches; or 188 centimetres), Ernie Els (6 feet 3 inches/190 centimetres), Vijay Singh (6 feet 2 inches/188 centimetres) and perhaps Phil Mickelson (6 feet 2 inches/188 centimetres) all revolves around height, which in turn produces a longer and more lethal arc. Newton told us:‘Not so long ago, 5 feet 10 inches [178 centimetres] was deemed ideal because that was what Jack Nicklaus was. Today’s kids are bigger and rangier and if, as professionals, they can apply the right plane, generating greater clubhead speed, that will guarantee greater distance.’ Newton recalls George Archer, all 6 feet 5 inches (195 centimetres) of him, couldn’t get properly weighted clubs. Equipment today is pure technology finesse. If you are tall club fitters match 76
THE LONG AND SHORT OF PRO GOLF you up with the right shaft, one that has the correct weight. It is no longer a big issue. Okay, so it’s not entirely golf giraffes versus the odd brash chimp out there on the tournament tee. Mike Weir, all of 5 feet 9 inches [175 centimetres], stepped up to snare two early :tournaments this season. Newton commented:‘He’s grown another leg these past few years.’ Newton recalls the Ontario-born south paw plugging along on the Australasian circuit in his earlier years, learning the trade.‘He’s a big name now and a good advocate for the little bloke,’ Jack says. Norman von Nida, just 5 foot 5 inches (165 centimetres) in his prime but one of our greatest, always predicted a young ‘giant’ would emerge to dominate professional golf. He might well have had a Tiger Woods in mind, although both Els and Singh and even the wayward Mickelson could fit the bill. The Von likened Nick Faldo’s physique to the legendary Byron Nelson, whose one-piece action helped him record that never-tobe-surpassed streak of eleven victories in a row and eighteen all told in America during 1945. Extra height and reach perhaps permits a longer back swing, The Von concedes, but adds: ‘Modern-day youths appear physically stronger and certainly taller.’ Weir’s success would have pleased the game’s best-known coach, David Leadbetter. He has worked with two of the game’s tall men in Faldo and Ian Baker-Finch, but maintains being very tall is not necessarily an advantage. Longer limbs, Leadbetter says, only complicate your method. They can often be seen to introduce a great deal of confused motion, which inevitably leads to an inconsistent strike and a poor shot pattern.The short player, however, with a much lower centre of gravity, will benefit from a greater level of stability. Neither Jack Nicklaus nor Arnold Palmer tipped the 6 feet (183 centimetres) bar. Nicklaus was as long as anybody at his peak but, when asked to nominate his longest drive, he replied he measured success in scores, not yardage. He quipped he was just as happy to win the 1972 Masters with a 286 score as he was the 1965 Masters with a 271. 77
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF He was quoted as saying: ‘People think I drive 300 yards [275 metres] but only occasionally 300 or more—and only when I have a tailwind, or a lot of run on the ball or both. On a windless summer day I would carry about 260 yards [238 metres] and to make it 270 [247 metres] I would have to jump out of my socks.’ In fact Nicklaus did carry drives more than 300 yards (275 metres) a few times in still air while practising for the 1971 World Cup at Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, but that was with ‘some incredibly “hot” Australian-made, British-size balls’. Interestingly, if 300 yards (275 metres) is the benchmark today for long hitting, back in 1980 Dan Pohl was the US PGA Tour’s longest driver with an average of 274.3 yards (250 metres). By 2002, John Daly had raised the bar to 306.6 yards (280 metres). Just imagine if Daly had joined the six-foot marauders!
Golf stories Golf’s elite pros play for big money in the various Skins promotions. For them, Skins is fun—when you’re playing for somebody else’s money! American Ned Pastor got it right with this cute rhyme: No wonder pros have fun at Skins, It’s sponsors’ cash on which they thrive; But if their dough was on the line, Some would, alas, get skinned alive.
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Bolt: The mind messes up more shots than Tommy the body.
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LIFE TURNS FULL CIRCLE FOR OGLE
Underachiever? Brett Ogle agrees, but with that big, sunny, signature smile when others might sadly lament their futility. It’s been the full circle for the gregarious Ogle, who is now ensconced as head professional at Bonnie Doon Golf Club in Sydney, where it all started for him. Oh yes, and he’s also the bright, entertaining face of The Golf Show, Fox Sports and Australian Golf Digest’s weekly television show that has proved such a winner. There are no dreams of golf grandeur left for the 38-year-old Ogle who, by his own admission, could have and should have won a major. He peaked with two big tournament wins under his belt on the US PGA circuit and he won in a host of other places around the globe. But a giant dose of homesickness, an aversion to travel, plus the mischievous disruptions of the ‘yips’ convinced him he needed a home base in Sydney. He recounted: Yes, I got really sick of travelling. I quit the circuits, then found I had a lot of free time at home, got sick of being a bum, and took up the chance to get the Bonnie Doon post, together with 80
LIFE TURNS FULL CIRCLE FOR OGLE my partner, Dave Merriman. It gapped my life nicely and I could see a lot of my children. I love home, the cricket, the rugby league and I love Sydney. I was a junior at Bonnie Doon, then a member and the club has always been good to me. I knew many of the members when I took over and I love the job—always did love retail. I have gone from being a slack ass to a workaholic, sometimes working twelve or thirteen hours a day and loving it.
The United States PGA Tour was desperately intense, he reflects. A turn-off for him came one morning when he visited the clubhouse for an early breakfast before his tee time. There were eight tables set—and one pro at each table! Intense? No conversation, no bonhomie. He said he never enjoyed full-on touring golf and reckons it gets quite boring. Ogle has fallen in love with television. ‘Golf, especially of all sports, needs to be bright. But it can be slow when watching and it needs bright personalities to give viewers a lift. I would like to think that’s something I can do.’ Ogle is contracted to Channel Seven but spends time with Fox Sports and The Golf Show.‘I like to think that what I am saying is sensible and with a bit of wit, a bit of excitement. I know most of the players personally and I know what’s in their heads, what they’re thinking—a bit like Jack Newton, who I think is great. He’s been a good mentor for me, never afraid to put his neck on the line with his call. He’s never over-critical of players because he knows what is going through their minds under the pressure.’ But for the chipping and putting yips, Ogle says he could have won a major. He tried everything, including spending thousands of dollars to pay sport psychologists, but to no avail.The last resort would have been chipping left-handed but that would have taken too long to get used to. A colourful tour life behind him? You’d better believe it. He won the Tahitian Open playing bare chested, wearing board shorts, socks and golf shoes. ‘There was no dress code then,’ he 81
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF laughs. And when he won his first tournament, a pro am in Fiji, his cheque was hanging from a string over a log that was lying across a swimming pool.Trouble was the log was greased and he tumbled into the water ten times before finally reaching his booty. By rights, Ogle should have grown up a hockey player. He played hockey from ages five to twelve, at which point he first entered a junior golf event at Tully Park in Goulburn. Being a hockey player, the organisers gave him an overly generous handicap and he duly carried off the prize. As he left the course, three boys angered over his big handicap roughed him up. ‘Well, they gave me the handicap so I wasn’t going to say no,’ Ogle defends. He reckons one of the boys was Steve Elkington but, each time he chides the Elk, Steve says he has no memory of the incident. Looking back, Ogle played his early golf in the era of blades when, as he puts it, everybody was equal. But today’s new technically superior equipment has raised the standard from the bottom. Ogle is quick with the jokes and enjoys telling about the time Tiger Woods was winning a third United States Amateur championship and about to hit the big time professionally. He was present when an official asked the British golfer Sandy Lyle what he thought of Tiger Woods. Lyle scratched his head and responded: ‘I don’t think I’ve played that course.’ And Ogle recalls when his drive finished just 1.5 metres from Greg Norman’s big drive on the par five 5th during the 1990 Australian Open at The Australian. The Shark holed his second shot for an incredible albatross and Ogle tells that the club laid a plaque where the ball was hit to acknowledge Norman’s feat. But there was no plaque for Ogle when his ball ricocheted off a tree and fractured his knee. ‘Okay, they did remove the tree,’ he concedes. Brett Ogle is back home—smile and all—and with no intention of any more globetrotting. In fact he’s not all that concerned at missing that elusive major. Okay, he’s an underachiever, but he reckons he’s got a new mission: to lighten the golf scene with some jolly entertainment. 82
LIFE TURNS FULL CIRCLE FOR OGLE
Golf stories Extrovert American Mac O’Grady is the game’s undisputed oddball. He tried seventeen times before he earned an American card, yet his swing has been compared in purity with that of the legendary Sam Snead. He’s a nifty striker of the ball left-handed, too. O’Grady always claimed his aim was to elevate his game to the supreme level—‘to be a virtuoso in the study of golfology’. So what was holding him back? First, he confessed, he needed to find a way to get the ball into the hole. A virtuoso finds a way to make the putts. Second, he wanted to develop a sense of serenity and serendipity of spirit. ‘The final evolution of personality is a combination of coolness and confidence, like Seve Ballesteros, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson all have. It’s the same tranquility of spirit,’ says the unorthodox Mac.
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Littler: Golf is not a game of great shots. It’s a Gene game of the most accurate misses.The people who win make the smallest mistakes.
18
GREATS ON A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
A remarkable golf book is about to take prominence on Australian bookseller’s shelves. Remarkable because it may well solve the eternal problem that comparisons cannot be made between champion golfers down the decades.You debate with your golf pals whether Tiger Woods eclipses Jack Nicklaus, whether Sam Snead would have won head to head against Ernie Els, or if Bobby Jones would have outsmarted Ben Hogan. Insoluble arguments—or are they? An American scribe, David Mackintosh, has gone to fantastic lengths to help you pit the best of the twentieth century, all against all. His book, Golf’s Greatest Eighteen, includes a unique feat of balancing many thousands of events over 90 years and equating their prize money to see who comes out on top. Mackintosh calls the concept ‘new money’ in his search for an unbiased standard to compare the greatest players in the modern age of golf. Bobby Jones, the ultimate amateur, in a moneyranking book? It’s hypothetical money, of course, because Jones never banked a professional cent from his victories. Mackintosh says the ‘statistical miracle’ of this book, the mammoth work of Joey Kaney, can be traced back as far as the tail 85
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF end of World War II and those few extraordinary men who organised millions upon millions of pieces of data and ran them cautiously through an experimental electro-mechanical sorting process in an attempt to break Axis intelligence codes. Mackintosh says:‘Before 1944 a computer was a human being. Then Alan Turing, by applied mathematical logic, made the major breakthrough that programs operating on numbers could represent themselves as numbers or as anything else. Half a century later a considerable slice of the world’s population sits down at a personal computer as part of normal daily life.’ Why the greatest eighteen? Mackintosh quips that a couple of centuries ago some Scotsmen in Fife thought it was the number best suited to golf, so why change a winning formula? The eighteen chosen champions are not ranked in any particular order by the book’s author. He leaves it to his readers to decide with the evidence of these monumental statistics as their guide. Those eligible for inclusion needed to have captured more than one modern major championship, not just two US Opens or two US PGAs. So what’s Greg Norman doing there? In defence, says Mackintosh, could anyone imagine leaving the Great White Shark off the list of modern greats? I’m glad the Shark made it because it gave me the opportunity to join a galaxy of today’s top golf writers who have profiled the eighteen champions. Jack Nicklaus, with his eighteen major titles, is credited with $US128 054 968 in ‘new money’, far outdistancing his fellow champions. For once Tiger Woods takes something of a back seat, credited with $US45 207 924 in ‘new money’. But the historians rush to smother Tiger with praise.‘His potential and attributes are scary,’ enthuses one writer. ‘He’s physically and mentally stronger than any of his contemporaries. If he were more focused, he’d be in a trance.’ Mackintosh says: ‘It would be wonderful to bring back Ben Hogan, Gene Sarazen and Walter Hagen, playing with modern equipment on today’s beautifully manicured courses against Jack 86
GREATS ON A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer in their prime or today’s Tiger Woods. Even the authors of this anthology cannot conjure up that miracle.This book, however, is the most realistic level playing field constructed to pit all against all.’ Because the one constant—whether yesterday, today, tomorrow or next century—is this: professional golfers will always play for money. It’s what they do!
Golf stories They interviewed Jan Stephenson in America, one of a number of golfers asked to describe their fantasy round. Jan said she chose Cypress Point for her fantasy round and her foursome would include the Wright brothers, George Washington and John Kennedy. Informed her grouping would compose a fivesome, Stephenson shrugged and said, ‘Drop Orville, keep Wilbur.’
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Brue: What’s nice about the US Seniors Tour is Bob that you can’t remember your bad shots!
19
GOLF’S MARCO POLO
Gary Player is a man of fierce passion. His wide brown eyes light up like lamps, earnest and intense. Life moulded him for perhaps a pulpiteer role, maybe a submarine commander or a martial arts guru. Instead he chose golf, a game in which he has participated with a gospeller’s zeal for over five decades. Nobody has worked harder or sacrificed more in the ceaseless quest for perfection. His secret, though, was never a silken swing, a magic grip or an uncanny touch. The key has been superlative fitness, strength of body that he could call on when opponents faltered, and strength of mind because not even Ben Hogan played the game with more single-minded resolution. I always feel Australia owns a piece of Gary Player. After all, he launched his great career here, cut his teeth on our circuit, spent some twenty birthdays in a row down under and appeared and reappeared summer after summer until he had his name inscribed an unmatched seven times on our Australian Open Championship trophy. Nicklaus and Palmer visited us and the glamour American champions drew headlines, but year in and year out it was Player who put life and soul into what was a basically modest Australian tournament circuit. 89
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF He has his critics, of course, as do the world’s evangelists.They watched him exercise in passageways during long flights and accused him of showmanship. They shook their heads when he won an important tournament and solemnly pronounced that bananas had given him strength. In fact, he could do with one right now he said and suddenly his great friend and mentor, George Blumberg, bustled from the back of the interview room with a banana he just happened to have. At Kingston Heath, as the big galleries marched behind the ropes turning rich turf into dust that the hot winds blew across the fairways, Player attached a handkerchief around his face, Mexican bandit style, to ward off a bout of hay fever.Was he smiling behind the handkerchief as he observed the galleries’ astonishment? Kel Nagle next day amusingly copied him. And then there was American firebrand Dave Hill’s irritable barb in his book Teed Off: ‘Gary Player . . . He works harder at golf than the rest of us—as he is always telling anyone who will listen, especially the writers. Gary is a little man and he’s tremendously proud of his superior physical condition. He runs and lifts weights and eats health foods. That’s all well and good, but I get tired of hearing him brag about it. So what if he has the most perfect bowel movement on the tour?’ So maybe there is a hint of the showman there but the passion of the man is indisputable. I witnessed it first hand at the very outset of his Australian career launching when he won the big Ampol tournament at Yarra Yarra, won with fiercely disciplined play against a class field. It was my job to ‘ghost’ articles by him for the Sydney Telegraph group so I was staying in close contact. In those years there was no Sunday tournament play and events finished with an arduous 36 holes on the Saturday. I met Player in the washroom during the break and he asked me to dampen down his face with a wet, cool washer. He didn’t want to touch water, he explained—it would change the temperature of his hands! The fervour shone even brighter at the end of the day as the gallery massed to see the young South African receive the trophy. The Victorian governor made the presentation with a cheery 90
GOLF’S MARCO POLO speech in which he likened Player to the great New Zealand racehorse Red Craze, which had made such an impact on Melbourne tracks. The crowd chuckled but fell silent when Player solemnly told them he owed his victory to God. And if the fans wanted to improve their golf, well, they needed to believe in God, too.There was an embarrassing shuffling of feet. The Player passion simply blazes when it comes to his loyalty and love of his native land. His book, Grand Slam, captures this worship in its opening pages. He relates: I am an African. My land is the land of the Niger and the Nile, the Limpopo and Zambesi, the Sahara and the Kalahari, of the Atlas and the Drakensberg and Kilimanjaro; of Hemingway and Rider Haggard, Rommell and Montgomery, Stanley and Livingston, Schweitzer and Gordon of Khartoum and the wild Fuzzy-Wuzzy. A unique continent, a prodigious land mass, abundant in game, thick with rain forest, barren with desert, white with rushing waters, populated by millions of people as diverse as can be . . .
It needed just one unforgettable morning for me to experience Player’s passion for the mystery of the Dark Continent. I was reporting Bobby Simpson’s Australian cricket tour and after inspecting Victoria Falls we travelled back, arriving at the Wanki Game Reserve as night fell. Accommodated in the resort inside the game park we were awoken before dawn to the wafting aroma of bacon and eggs from out on the verandah.We were told to get dressed and be ready for an early departure as there were lions down by the lake, a dozen males. The resort was perched on a hilltop with a commanding view. As the black curtain of night slowly lifted and daylight filtered through we seemed to be looking through a window on all of Africa. The plains below were outlined by a misty haze, through which animals became visible. There were elephant on the nearby embankment. This was Gary Player’s Africa. No 91
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF wonder, unlike the Normans, Prices, Cramptons and Gradys of international golf, he could never give it all away to set up an American base. I recall the World Cup played out on the Royal Melbourne course and an extraordinary occurrence.A day’s play was lost, rain beating down incessantly. Taxi after taxi pulled up by the clubhouse entrance, players were told the round was washed out and they turned to head back to their hotels. But not Gary Player. He alighted with his caddie, donned heavy wet weather gear and moved down to the practice range where he worked out for the best part of two hours. Unpleasant? Certainly, but you have to learn to play in these conditions, he said. Father of six, son of a gold miner, Gary Player is the game’s Marco Polo, traversing continent after continent, either as player or more recently as golf course architect. Frequently on his travels he has carried barbells in his luggage. Often we saw the spectacle of hotel bellboys staggering under the heavy weight as they carried it to his room. He reckons he has spent two years of his life in aeroplane seats. He is one of only three to win the Grand Slam and he has repeated the feat in senior golf. That April afternoon in 1978 when he fired 30 on the Augusta back nine for a recordequalling 64 to win the Masters against unbelievable odds will remain the absolute summit of his achievements. He has won well over 100 tournaments around the world, but not even these imposing statistics tell the story of the little man with golf ’s biggest passion.
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GOLF’S MARCO POLO Golf stories ‘Tienes—las manos, ahora juega con tu corazon.’ Translation? ‘You have the hands, now play with your heart.’ That was the sage advice given by Argentinian elder statesman Roberto de Vicenzo on the eve of the final round of the 1979 British Open Championships to 22-yearold Spaniard Seve Ballesteros, whom he had taken under his wing. The precocious young Seve conquered Royal Lytham, the first continental European winner since 1907, and he did it by ‘playing with his heart’ and visiting some parts of the course—including a car park—with which even the head greenkeeper was unfamiliar. Ben Crenshaw provided the ultimate accolade: ‘Seve has got the greatest imagination for playing golf of anyone in history.’
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Miller: Happiness is when you know that Johnny even your worst shots are going to be quite good.
20
GARY PLAYER’S KO WIN
I’m sure Gary Player didn’t originate sport’s triumphant punching fist through the air in the sweet moment of victory. But certainly nobody did it with more panache, especially on that late Sunday afternoon in April 1978 when the Player fist cleaved defiantly over Augusta’s last green.The doughty little Springbok game cock had played the final nine holes in a stunning 30 shots to turn the Masters on its ear. From seven strokes behind on the last day, Player fired a 64 then waited amid heightening tension as the last groups wrestled with the final stretch.Tom Watson, Rod Funseth and Hubert Green in turn missed putts that would have taken Player into a sudden death play-off. This was the forty-second staging of the Masters and, appropriately 42 years of age, Gary Player was to become the oldest champion of them all. For the third time in his career he slid his muscular shoulders into sport’s most celebrated piece of haberdashery, the Masters green jacket. Before 30 000 fans, shoe-horned around Augusta’s 18th green, Player had snorted his defiant reply to critics who labelled him ageing, a fading star—yes, even ‘muscle bound’. I was a spellbound 95
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF watcher in the midst of this huge gallery, emotionally enflamed by a supreme moment in sport. It was a special moment for me, too, for Player was my friend and still is. From his first arrival in Australia at a tender twenty years of age, I had worked with him on newspaper articles. A treat was now in store. Next morning I played Augusta with the champ.This was the account I gave to the American magazine Golf World. The morning after the night before is a moment when the new Masters champion can luxuriate back in his bed, hug himself in delight and even make light of a hangover. But not when your name is Gary Player, the little South African golfing game cock. No, sir. The time was 7 a.m. Monday morning at Augusta.The fairways shimmered under lacework jewels of dew, and a wispy mist reluctantly took its leave as the big clean-up began. Yesterday’s hero, Gary Player, was on time for his appointment. This was a special occasion, the day he had promised to introduce sixteen-year-old son Wayne to the most aristocratic course of them all. We came along for the ride, an unlikely addition to this family twosome. A few days earlier it hadn’t sounded such a big deal.‘I’d just love you to see Wayne hit the ball,’ Gary had said.We said we’d come, complete with our balky back swing, just for curiosity. By Monday morning, of course, it was a whole new ball game. The little bloke they said was ‘muscle bound’ and a ‘fading star’ had pushed it all back in their teeth and won the Masters a third time. He’d equalled Ben Hogan’s record of major wins, become the oldest Masters winner, and had indicated he was going to be around for a long time yet.We turned up, of course. Couldn’t miss a chunk of history making like this. Then there were the preliminaries. Even a thirteen-hour old Masters champ needs to loosen up. Father and son took off to the practice tee where an astonishing event took place. The practice area, as we remember it, stretches a good 300 yards (275 metres) and is bounded by a towering fence. Both Jack Nicklaus and Tom 96
GARY PLAYER’S KO WIN Weiskopf are credited with knocking drives clean over the fence. At roughly 7.08 a.m. Wayne Player, sixteen, knocked a drive out of the park. Gary Player doesn’t strut across Augusta with the arrogance of a three-time Masters conquerer. He greets Augusta like an old friend.There is a mutual respect bordering on reverence. He is as concerned as anyone at any remodelling, however slight, of a hole here, a hole there. He is unappreciative, for instance, of the new left-side bunkering up the fairway slope of the 18th, restricting players to a three wood or one iron when they should be busting a driver for last-hole glory.‘You don’t make alterations when you have a Mona Lisa,’ he philosophises. It is a fact that Player has built beside his Johannesburg rural residence a cavernous bunker and a steeply graded green à la Augusta for practice chiefly, we suspect. Wayne Player, you might have gathered, is quite a prospect. His initial drive at Augusta exploded like a gunshot in the crisp morning air and climbed high along the slope of the first fairway. He is a carbon copy of his father, facially at any rate, if slightly bigger already in frame. He is a 165 pounder [75 kilograms] (Gary’s weight has not varied for the last twenty years, though he shed five pounds [2.2 kilograms] through the tensions and exhaustions of Augusta week). Like his father, Wayne is a fitness devotee and immensely strong. No press-ups for fear of muscling up shoulders and chest too heavily. He concentrates on building up leg and arm power. His handshake is testimony to the weights he patiently, lovingly lifts and lowers on a string. We don’t feel competent to analyse the swing of Player junior except to suggest it is fluid, well grooved and powerful. ‘Awesome, isn’t it?’ said Gary quietly after another huge, reverberating drive. Gary has got it all mapped out for his son.Two years of amateur golf, two years of national army service, then a professional golfing career. Wayne will cut his teeth in the United States and British 97
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Amateurs if he can shoulder his way through the army of wouldbe qualifiers. We asked innocently if it’s going to be one hell of a burden to carry the Player name into tournament golf. Isn’t everybody going to dig out a microscope and make inevitable comparisons about whether he’s as good as his father. ‘Exactly,’ said Player. ‘And that is why I have told him he’s got to be better than his daddy.’ The introduction continued. It was just like Gary presenting an old friend and explaining his background, his virtues, his quirks. He gently chided his son, who flicked his driver abstractly in a practice swing at the next tee. ‘Always practice swing at the same tempo as you hit,’ said the champ. He pointed down the second fairway, indicated a target between the line of bunkers and cautioned never to risk playing to the left. ‘Don’t get greedy at Augusta,Wayne,’ he said. ‘Else it’ll get up and eat you.’ ‘Never be short to the third green,’ he was saying minutes later. ‘You can salvage par from the back but rarely from the front.’ We came to the 6th and he took a look at the flag stick poked at the bottom of the sloping green in the left-hand corner.‘Now, isn’t that a pin placement,’ he enthused.‘No matter where the flag is, you play to the top right of this green. Now watch this ball kick down.’ It did. Handshakes along the way, then another lesson at the 11th. ‘Always be grateful if you get four here,’ he said. ‘There is water left and long and not much green in the left corner so you play safe to the right.’ At the 12th, there was a slight argument over club selection. Wayne has a mind of his own, we noted. Oh yes, and did we mention that he was on a nice incentive that morning, which helped to explain his purposeful approach? ‘I’ll deposit $75 in your bank if you shoot 75 or better,’ Gary had said. At the famous 15th, Player pointed out the sprinkler head, the point of no return, the fairway mark which you must pass 98
GARY PLAYER’S KO WIN before you go for the green. Otherwise you lay up, and,‘my boy, when you lay up, you lay up short, otherwise the ball can roll right down into that pond’. The Players, father and son, halted on the Gene Sarazen bridge to read the plaque and the tribute to that most famous of all double eagles. It was a round of rich memories, too. Player pointed out the very spot from which Arnold Palmer had holed a downhill putt at the 16th in the historic 1962 play-off.‘The green was like glass and if it had missed the cup it would have run right on down into the bunker,’ said Gary. Tournament chairman Bill Lane came out on the course for a final handshake and farewell. He presented gold Augusta emblems to Wayne and his sister, Jenny, who had come out to see her brother tackle Augusta. Photographers joined the group and Augusta members broke off from their games to congratulate Gary, share a photograph with him and take a curious peek at the next generation Player. At the 18th, Gary tried to repeat that downhill birdie putt that won him the Masters, only this time he missed.Then he made two passes at Hubert Green’s little 3-foot (1 metre) teaser and he missed both times (if that is any consolation to Hubert).And finally he got down on his knees and kissed the cup. It was a great pictorial. Four days of fierce, unbridled competition, nerve and muscledraining contest and here was Gary Player, fresh and bright as a button. The cameramen mentioned they had focused on Player during the drama of Hubert’s final putt and he hadn’t looked nervous. ‘I was,’ Gary assured them. ‘How do you smile when you are choking?’ Player’s press interview had been one giant rollicking affair, so good, so meaty that the scribes had to rewrite their columns. He had taken a sideswipe at the critic who suggested he was a fading star. And he was outraged by the claim that weight training had left him too muscle bound to win the Masters. 99
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Player is immensely proud of his dedication to fitness. He had worked until midnight exercising with weights after the Masters champion’s dinner on tournament eve. ‘Keeping physically fit, looking after the body is something I have preached all my life,’ he said.‘It would mean more to me getting this message through to young people than leaving behind a reputation just as a golfer.’ And again:‘If a man looks after himself he will play golf as well at 50 as he does at 30. Do you know that I won the British Opens in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and I will win it again in the 1980s.’ Gary Player, he agreed, is an eternal optimist. ‘Isn’t that something?’ he exclaimed when he learned he had just become the oldest Masters winner of them all.Yes, he had played the last round with a few prayers. ‘I never pray to win a tournament. I pray for strength and the strength to handle adversity. I have my faults. I am not perfect, but I think I can say I am a good Christian.’ With almost preacher fervour he told the press multitude:‘You know, I’m playing the best golf right now of my whole career.’ There was a long silence and a smile spread slowly across his face. ‘Okay, so you’ve heard that before.Well, you guys exaggerate with your articles at times so why can’t I exaggerate a little, too?’ He was sorry for the runners-up and he knew how they felt. He was Masters runner-up three times. ‘Second is the lousiest place of all,’ he opined. Was he the best golfer in the world? a pressman asked challengingly. ‘Gentlemen, that is for you to decide,’ Player parried. ‘But I will tell you this much: I have the best golfing record in the world. And I mean the world.’ Now he warmed to his favourite subject. ‘You criticise me because I haven’t won in the United States for the last four years, but let me tell you I have been winning all around the world. Golf is played in countries other than America you know.’ Oh yes, and there was a little matter of an apology he wanted to make. Out on the course in that last round, he had thought he had holed a chip shot. He had fallen on his back and kicked his 100
GARY PLAYER’S KO WIN legs up in the air in glee. On reflection, that was unbecoming behaviour for Augusta, he agreed. Back to the advancing years theme.‘You’ve got to make adjustments as you get older. If you can make those adjustments then you can continue to go forward.’ He would quit the circuit the moment he thought he couldn’t win. And another thing. He had made five round trips to South Africa in the past year and he just wondered how other players like Jack Nicklaus would react to such strenuous travelling programs. ‘I’ll tell you this much, I have travelled five million miles in my golf career. I’m the most travelled athlete in history.’ By 11 a.m. the newly crowned Masters champion had completed his Monday morning outing.Wayne had fired a 77 and, if it didn’t earn him his first golfing purse, it was a score that a few professionals wouldn’t have sneezed at the previous few days. There was time to play the little nine-hole course, so Gary suggested father and son move off for a little more action down around the lake. These were precious moments between them. Precious for Augusta, too.
Golf stories A Sydney club received a complaint from female members that a male member had been sighted urinating on the side of a fairway. The committee studied the complaint gravely, then assured the women they had equal rights on the course.
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Player: I was against the long putter to start Gary with, but then I also believed in Father Christmas at one stage.With square grooves, metal heads and longer balls, you might as well play with hickory shafts if you’re going to be old-fashioned.
21
GOLF’S GREAT COUP
The grand slam of champion signatures! It happened down under in the late 1950s, surely the most amazing promotional coup d’état in the whole history of the game. Fancy recognising the raw potential, then signing up a wet-behind-the-ears Gary Player. Fancy anticipating the dramatic pro debut of a crew-cut young Jack Nicklaus and grabbing his signature on a contract. Fancy the mighty Arnold Palmer saying yes! Fancy thus picking up all three legends to be and for a proverbial song. Yes, it happened right here. So we should introduce the key figure, the magic maker. His name? Noel George Morris, a bank manager’s son, now enjoying a twilight retirement in a leafy Sydney north shore suburb where, between regular golfing outings, he doubtless reflects with a wry smile on the genius of his coup. He attended Ipswich Grammar in Queensland and was fourteen years old when his father received a bank manager’s appointment in London. The family were about to leave but the trip was abandoned when the father died suddenly. With family finances in an impecunious state the schoolboy joined the 103
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF workforce, becoming office boy for a Sydney accountancy firm on his fifteenth birthday. The year was 1927 and the office boy studied enthusiastically to become an intermediate audit clerk. He progressed to earn an accountancy degree and was urged to set his sights on a career as a barrister. In the meantime he was put in charge of the Slazenger account.The big chief of Slazenger, David Blacklock, was impressed and invited Noel to join his company as his understudy. Slazenger sports good company was founded in 1927, setting up in a factory in an old Nestlé garage. In those days, the Englishbased parent company sent their products by sea to far-off Australia but this posed problems such as tennis balls losing their compression. In the grim years of World War II, Slazenger turned its manufacturing skills to producing rifle butts and munitions to assist the war drive. Noel Morris was 38 years of age when he became managing director and chairman of Slazenger Australia. He was to prove a dynamo in the post-war sporting scene, signing such tennis champions as Laver, Hoad and Rosewall, and launching the first Australian Open tennis tournament in 1961 at Sydney’s White City. He received an MBE for services to the industry and became president of the Father’s Day Council of Australia, earning warm recognition for his community work. A shrewd businessman, he was alert to the golf craze that overtook Japan at the end of the American occupation and Slazenger was quick to exploit the market. Indeed, it was golf for which Morris will be most remembered, and his close association with our country’s little globe-trotting campaigner, Norman von Nida, paid rich dividends.Von Nida had snared for Slazenger two outstanding young Australian professionals, Bruce Crampton and Bruce Devlin, and now from the clubhouse at the Sunningdale club on London’s outskirts he made a phone call that was the catalyst for the grand slam signature coup. Noel Morris took the call to hear von Nida say,‘I’m getting over the hill and Bobby Locke has seen better days. There’s a 104
GOLF’S GREAT COUP young fellow here . . . swings a bit flat but has a very competitive attitude.’ ‘What’s his name?’ came the reply. ‘Gary Player,’ said The Von with undisguised enthusiasm. ‘He’s got a friend here, Trevor Wilkes, and I suggest we give them an economy ticket each and they can stay at my home at Maroubra in Sydney.’ The deed was done and Gary Player stepped off the plane in Perth and won the Western Australian Open at Cottesloe. This was Olympic year and Melbourne buzzed with the excitement of Games fever. The Ampol petrol company joined the party, promoting a bumper $10 000 golf tournament at Yarra Yarra. Gary Player won and the little golfing game cock from Johannesburg, son of a humble miner, phoned his girlfriend Vivienne Verway, daughter of the Royal Johannesburg professional, and shouted, ‘Buy your wedding dress!’ The Gary Player career was launched. He was earning £500 ($1000) a year from his Slazenger contract when, a couple of years later, he bumped into Noel Morris in his gallery at the Southport club on the Queensland Gold Coast. Player suggested that with due modesty he had since won major championships and he was worth more. ‘We’ll discuss it later,’ said Morris. ‘But why are you handling your own affairs?’ he queried. ‘You should have somebody looking after you.’ The upshot was that Player was referred to a livewire American management firm. Mark McCormack had just arrived on that company’s scene and his desk was bare. Player became his first client! Now the year was 1960 and Morris received a call from McCormack, who confided, ‘Jack Nicklaus is about to turn pro. Don’t tell anybody but I’ll be signing him. He’ll be good for you in Australia.’ Nicklaus duly signed but there was a minor ‘catch’, a proviso that if he won a major event Slazenger would be required to sell his signature clubs. Slazenger already had Hogan, Locke, von Nida and Player clubs on the market and didn’t exactly need another name. But that was the deal, and when in 1962 at the Oakmont club outside Pittsburgh, Nicklaus beat Arnold Palmer 105
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF in a play-off for the United States Open Championship, there were new signature clubs on the Australian market. When Slazenger London sold out to the English company Dunlop, Slazenger Australia merged with Dunlop, their former fierce rivals. In 1966 Noel Morris took over full command with 1400 employees in his charge. Arnold Palmer was contracted to Dunlop and thus became the third member of this famous hat trick of legends who were committed to regular visits to Australia, where between them they carried off the Australian Open Championship no less than fourteen times. If these were not golden years for Australian golfers they were memorable years for our golf galleries, privileged to watch three of golf ’s all-time masters parade their phenomenal skills summer after summer across our fairways. Take a bow, Noel George Morris.
Golf stories A Country Week golfer had a reputation for skipping the golf in pursuit of the dazzling night life when he visited the city. His wife rang him in Sydney during the week to inquire how he was going. ‘Oh, I’m playing really well,’ he assured her. ‘And what about those new clubs you bought last week before you left? Working out?’ ‘Splendid,’ he enthused. ‘Best clubs I’ve ever had. Improved my game enormously.’ ‘I am pleased to hear that,’ the wife replied. ‘Because they’re still in the garage where you left them!’ Click.
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Allem: Golf is a challenge of you against Fulton yourself.
22
BEN HOGAN’S PERFECT ROUND
Ben Hogan. Living legend. I met him by chance on the verandah outside the player’s eating room at Augusta.The year was 1978 and Hogan had come to the Masters to take a nostalgic look at all the changes and to attend the annual dinner of the green-blazered champions. You had to be straight away impressed with his trim frame and erect carriage. He wore a dark green jacket and a nifty brown Panama straw hat and he spoke so softly that you had to strain and inch closer to hear among the throng that jostled around him. I think it was his eyes that impressed you most. They are gun metal grey, keen, alert, analytical. Occasionally on this sundrenched afternoon they gazed out above the heads and shoulders of his audience, and there was a visible softness as they took in the familiar landmarks of the classic course under its pale yellow pollen cloud cover. But they didn’t call Hogan ‘Mr Icewater’ for nothing, and there was no mistaking the steely quality of the visage. He was, of course, the very emperor of competitors and, at 64 years of age, a spry 108
BEN HOGAN’S PERFECT ROUND elder statesman (if you overlook a gammy knee), with a massive record of 62 tournament victories and nine ‘majors’. He was very definitely ‘Mr Hogan’, just as golf folk spoke so reverently about Mr Bobby Jones. Few took the liberty of calling him just ‘Ben’. ‘Bantam Ben’ his contemporaries nicknamed him and he had come out of a caddie shop to conquer the golfing world. They made a film about him—Follow the Sun—and it graphically related the story of his career, depicting the terrible road accident in the fog that so nearly cost him his life and his epic comeback to golf. He was asked that day out on the verandah if he thought he had been born a generation or two too early. After all, Hogan at his peak released among Nicklaus and company could have expected to earn a fortune as the game exploded through huge mushrooming purses. ‘I have enjoyed every bit of my life, the good and the bad,’ he said. ‘I don’t think money would have enhanced my feelings. Jimmy Demaret, Jack Burke and I talked coming over here. I think if you play for a medal, trophy or whatever, if you play well, you’ll get some money. At least I never thought of the money I was playing for. I loved to play golf. I loved competition. I tried to win.’ In fairness, Hogan didn’t think the current crop of players thought of money either when they were out on the course. If you thought about money, what this shot or this putt means, then probably you wouldn’t pull it off. And then the great man confessed that when he first joined the tour he ‘couldn’t play at all’. ‘I was God awful. It takes a lot of work.You try things but not on the golf course.You do it on the practice tee. Ninety per cent of these things you have to discard. A theory, a movement . . . you have to find out what will work and what won’t.You must learn to fade or draw.The golf ball goes straight only by accident.You must hit it left or right so you then cut your mistake in half. It takes time.’ 109
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Hogan made his debut on the tour in 1937 but did not win his first tournament until 1940. It was not until 1946 that he started thinking he really knew how to play. For six years, he confessed, he didn’t know what he was doing.‘I guess I was a slow maturer,’ he said with the flicker of a smile. Would you like to coach a talented young player? ‘I don’t know all the answers,’ he replied. ‘If I saw a young fellow with a very good swing I wouldn’t dare tell him anything.’ The conversation got around to golfing enigma Johnny Miller. Hogan said Miller’s 63 to win the US Open at Oakmont was one of the finest rounds he’d ever heard of. The course was wet and the greens slow. ‘Miller shot some fantastic golf for a year and a half. Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing in the golf swing. Maybe he could not later retrace that golf swing. I’m sure he tried.’ In 1953 Ben Hogan achieved his triple crown, the pinnacle of his career. This happened to be the twenty-fifth anniversary, a moment to savour.At 41 years of age he had won three of the four major events, the US Open, the British Open and the Masters. He did not contest the fourth, the American PGA, because of conflicting schedules, otherwise he might have become the first Grand Slam winner in the one year. Hogan won the Masters again in 1967, firing a dazzling 30 for a six under par 66 (a feat Gary Player was to emulate that very week). Does he ever think about it, he was asked. ‘I often think about it. I got an ovation on every hole,’ he answered. Had he noticed any changes in Augusta this time, an inquirer quizzed him.‘The fairways are so lush it’s hard to see how presentday players could hit anything but “perfect shots”. But yes, I am surprised at the change in the greens.When we used to walk on the greens, it sounded like we were walking on a bale of hay.They would break your spikes. On the 18th last year I saw them putting downhill and the ball actually stopping short of the hole.’ Had he ever played a perfect round? No, he had never played a round in which, afterwards, he felt he could not have improved 110
BEN HOGAN’S PERFECT ROUND on. But he confessed he had once dreamed of playing the perfect round. ‘It was a round of eighteen hole in ones,’ he said with a sheepish grin.‘I got seventeen then I lipped out on the 18th. I was mad as hell.’
Golf stories An unusual golf course is being built in Scandinavia. It occupies territory in two nations! Located near the Arctic Circle, the course embraces land in the south-east corner of Swedish Lapland and the south-west corner of Finnish Lapland. The ‘borderless’ course comes about because Finnish golfers had too little room for eighteen holes in their area so they needed to extend into Sweden. This is reindeer country of course and the scheme is part of a Santa Claus land project. The proposed name of the course is the Santa Claus course. Naturally.
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Trevino: The ball’s got to stop somewhere. Lee It might as well be in the bottom of the hole. .
23 GHOSTING
In the British summer of 1948,Australia’s little golfing champ with the giant heart, Norman von Nida, was in full-scale foray in what was to prove his finest tournament season. But he found himself saddled with a second responsibility. Mr Frank Packer, managing director of Australian Consolidated Press, who had taken a keen interest in his career, signed him to write day by day accounts of his British tournament exploits for readers back home. The Von urgently needed help.When you are battling for dear life among the unforgiving pot bunkers and the suffocating gorse bushes of St Andrews, Birkdale and Sunningdale, you can’t exactly slip away to cable off an update on your progress to newspaper readers down under. The Von needed a ‘ghost’ writer, and at nineteen years of age I was happily plucked from the Fleet Street office of ACP to share the joys and traumas of golf ’s ‘little firecracker’—as one critic colourfully described him—follow the circuit and cable back the stories. It was the beginning of many ghosting assignments that I undertook in some 40 years of newspaper sports reporting, and if Norman von Nida was my first subject then there were some 113
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF notable heavyweights to follow: Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Roberto de Vicenzo, Bruce Crampton and cricket stars Dennis Lillee, Bill Lawry, Alan Davidson and Clive Lloyd. The purists of journalism frown on ghosting, alleging with some justification that the published article isn’t the real thing, the sportsman’s own work. Obviously there are times when the sports star on the newspaper payroll isn’t too fussed what appears under his name. There are probably times when he doesn’t read his own article. The Australian Journalist Association took a beady view of ghosting and insisted that the actual writer should also be identified. But after a time most publications ignored the edict, preferring to spotlight the sporting champ if only to get full value for money.Today, ghosted articles are the norm and of the dozens of cricketers, golfers and footballers whose signed names appear in print, precious few are self-composed. I don’t object to that, providing what appears is essentially the sports hero’s version of events and the journalist has merely ‘dressed it up’. And in some cases, expressed it in proper English! A case in point was a summer’s association I had with the great Australian speed bowler Dennis Lillee, who made a comeback in a home Ashes series against England after eighteen months on the sidelines, laid up by stress fractures of the back. My newspaper, the Sydney Daily Telegraph, contracted Dennis to write a daily account of each Test match.As the paper’s scribe, it was my job to see the articles were written and arrived safely for publication. The first Test was at The Gabba, in Brisbane. Australia batted on the opening day so it was a day off for Lillee who, having expressed a determination to write his own copy, duly arrived in the press box at the end of play. He sat alongside me and armed with biro and paper began his task while I worked on my own descriptive piece of the day’s play. A stray look soon showed it was proving agonising going for the speedster. Cleared of my own work I volunteered to help him and he gratefully accepted, dictating his thoughts which I took down on a faithful old typewriter. First day’s assignment accomplished. 114
GHOSTING Day two and Dennis was on the field hustling out the English batsmen with some fiery fast bowling. No sign of him subsequently in the press box so I made my way down into the Australian dressing room where I found him sitting contentedly in a hot bath relaxing weary muscles. I pulled up a chair beside the bath and scribbled down his impressions of the day’s events. I didn’t see him in the press box again that summer.We came to an arrangement in which I took notes in the dressing room and sent off the story. He never asked to check it out, which I guess was a compliment of confidence in the ghost. That was a happy association but things can go wrong.Working with Gary Player in the Australian Open Championship at Royal Melbourne, I dutifully recorded his impressions and prospects. There could be trouble ahead.Anti-apartheid demonstrators were threatening to disrupt play the next day because of his presence. What would he do? He told me he had gone through it all before. He shrugged and said simply: ‘I’ll turn the other cheek.’ I sent off the story but was amazed next morning to pick up the Melbourne edition of the Sydney Daily Telegraph. A sports headline screamed: ‘They Can Go to Hell says Gary Player.’ The headline had no relation to the story and I feared this could end a long-standing friendship. Journalists are unfailingly blamed for headlines over their stories which, of course, they never write. Happily, I don’t think Player ever saw that story. Certainly he never ever mentioned the beat-up headline. From a personal point of view, I have enjoyed ghosting assignments simply because they provided a rare opportunity to enjoy the inner feelings and experience the company of some of sport’s greatest performers. It was a rare privilege for instance to sit down with Jack Nicklaus and to listen to him analyse his round, the highlights, the memorable shots, the forgettable shots, the strategy of the day and the prospects. He, too, must have had confidence in his ghost because he never once asked to inspect an article before its dispatch. Of all ghosting assignments,Test cricket skipper Bill Lawry posed the toughest challenge.We were in Adelaide late in a series against 115
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF the West Indies. The London publisher Souvenir Press clinched a book deal with Lawry and set a fierce deadline, so we had to work at full throttle during the Adelaide Test. Lawry would let his life story and anecdotes roll and I would record it all on the typewriter. Now the cricketer they called The Phantom, a noted pigeon fancier, is an early to bed, early to rise fellow. You might have encountered him strolling the streets behind Covent Garden on an English tour if you were getting back to the hotel as dawn broke. Before light each morning in Adelaide he would knock on my hotel room door and, bright as a button, was ready to go. I was exhausted before breakfast but the book made the deadline, a top seller too among cricket tomes. The bookshelves those days simply groaned with new cricket offerings and there didn’t seem to be a title left. We called the book Run Digger, which was smart to a degree because Bill certainly ‘dug’ deep for his runs and the Aussie Digger mantle didn’t hurt, either. I ghosted Alan Davidson’s book, too, a lively account from the great all-rounder with interviewing sessions between backyard cricket games with his sons in Strathfield or soaking up the sun on Coogee Beach on the Sydney coastline. We were at our wit’s end for a title and in desperation I asked my sports editor, Gerry Pynt, for a suggestion. A racing buff with next to no interest in cricket, he asked offhandedly, ‘How far does Davidson run?’ I ventured it might have been around sixteen paces.‘Well, that’s the title of your book,’ said the sports ed. A phone call to Davidson revealed it was fifteen paces and thus emerged the title of one of cricket’s bestsellers—Fifteen Paces. I shared the agony of Mike Whitney’s shameful exclusion from the Ashes tour to England after he was our dominating bowler in the domestic Australian season. He bled. We put together a piece for the Sydney Sun-Herald. The most generous and big-hearted sportsman I have met, he said grimly that the experience would harden him up. It didn’t. Nothing could change this popular extrovert. Memories come flooding back. I sat with Gary Player in the snack room of the Australian Golf Club and a few tables away 116
GHOSTING from the Belgian World Cup player, Flory van Donck. Gary recalled only too vividly his youthful introduction to British golf and the hostile reception he received from critics who claimed his swing ‘wouldn’t stand up’.Van Donck was among the most vocal, describing it as a ‘woodchopper’s swing’. Gary looked across, glowered and said: ‘I would risk my hands on that man.’ Such are the confidences afforded ghosts. Experiences not to be swapped for anything.
Golf stories Early in his career Jack Nicklaus used six new balls a round and never the same one for two holes running. A simple reason, of course— his swing exerted a concussion force of half a ton (508 kilograms) and a hit ball takes ten minutes to regain its proper shape. Those were Jack’s ‘Fat Boy’ days. He was some 30 pounds (13 kilograms) heavier than he is today and probably some 30 yards (27 metres) longer off the tee on average with his driver. Nicklaus related that obviously you gradually lose strength as you get older, but there’s no doubt that the weight reduction took something away, too. In his book On and Off the Fairway, Nicklaus enthused over his early strength. ‘Oh, boy! Was I ever strong in those days,’ he wrote. ‘Could I bust that ball! It was some measure in the summer of 1961 of how powerful I was that I broke the face inserts out of nine drivers.’ That never happened afterwards but there was consolation because he then became a more complete golfer. He said that basically, at 21, he just hit the ball as far as possible off the tee, found it, hit it onto the green, then hit into the hole. Rough wasn’t any problem, because he was usually close enough to the green and/or strong enough to just bulldoze the ball out of anything he found himself in, short of a young forest!
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Hope: I’d give up golf if I didn’t have so many Bob sweaters.
24 RED BRACES
Golf is eloquently served by its television commentators. Very professional they are, and only cricket can claim to share such entertainment, even then a whole fairway behind, while other sports muddle in a morass of braying, trumpet-tongued callers. When proceedings are dull, both golf and cricket can fall back on some relieving humour. But it’s hard to get a chuckle out of speed car drivers at full throttle, sweaty footballers pawing over a heaving ruck, athletes thrusting Adam’s apples at a tape, and tennis players scowling over a disputed line bounce. Golf followers relished the dry, fruity wit of Henry Longhurst and, more latterly, his disciple Peter Alliss, while the canny Scots, Alex Hay and Renton Laidlaw, bring a whiff of heather and haggis to the telecast. The Americans are hard-nosed critics but fancy a laugh while we folk down under are handsomely entertained by Jack Newton and Peter Thomson, two sharp observers who have eased comfortably into the commentating chair from the fairway without any seeming specialist training. More recently, British television introduced Clive Clark to their team which personally delighted me. Clark had paid his dues 119
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF as an on-the-spot alongside-the-ropes reporter before gaining promotion to the commentary box alongside Mark McCormack and company. Let me tell you, Clark is a rare humourist. I first met up with him when he made the long journey across the globe to seek out golfing guru Norman von Nida, and for three months he lived in The Von’s house, appropriately named Sunningdale, in the Sydney coastal suburb of Maroubra.The Von, of course, won a sensational victory at Sunningdale in recordbreaking fashion in his heyday, and it was at Sunningdale outside London that The Von and Peter Thomson played some golf with a young amateur, Clive Clark. The Von recalled: ‘I knew he had ability and I told him not to complicate things. Just think about the practical movement that makes the swing, then learn to trust the swing.’ Clark, now an ambitious young professional, returned home and promptly gave the British Open a shake with a third placing. But when he sought out a local coach, nothing much eventuated and he took up the option of club professional at Sunningdale succeeding the grand old man of British golf, Arthur Lees. Feeling an urge to get involved in the media, Clark took up the pen as a columnist for the American publication Golf World, and my own magazine, Australian Golf (Digest), eagerly snapped him up. He was responsible for two of the best stories I have come across. Both concerned starters. The scene was an Australian PGA event and the field was being sent on its way by a starter who stood on the first tee in an opennecked shirt and rather baggy pants that remained waist high due only to the tenacity of a pair of bright red braces. This is how Clark related the story. The starter zealously held on to the microphone like a kid who had just been given his first candy and had become an instant addict. Bet you’ve got one in your club. He always volunteers to do the auction! My playing partners that day were Peter Thomson and Gay Brewer. First away was Brewer.‘On the tee,’ announced the starter, 120
RED BRACES ‘we have from the United States of America Gay Brewer, winner of the Alcon Tournament, the US Masters, the Greater Greensboro Open and countless other tournaments. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Gay Brewer.’ Brewer hit a beauty. Next on the tee, continued the starter, ‘we have your very own favourite, Peter Thomson . . .’. The gallery applauded again but they were shouted down, ‘. . . five times winner of the New Zealand Open, twice winner of the Australian Open’. Thomson couldn’t stand it any longer and smashed one down the centre while ‘Red Braces’ was still in full throttle. Now it was my turn. ‘On the tee Clive Clark.’ I waited for a further announcement. Nothing happened. Not very charitable considering I had won two tournaments that year and had been third in the British Open. I addressed the ball and was just getting comfortable when he started again. ‘Clark in 1967 tied for fifth place in the South African Pepsi Cola Tournament.’ The next day I arrived at the tee in time to hear the announcement of the first player of the three ball in front. ‘Next, from Nationalist China, we have Cho Ling-Low. He doesn’t swing the scales far, but my word, would you watch him hit this one.’ Just imagine how Mr Cho is feeling. All of 5 feet (1.5 metres) nothing and he has just been proclaimed as one of the longest hitters to swing a club! His drive had bounced three times before it dribbled into the 200-yard (183-metre) cross bunkers. It was at this stage that I decided I couldn’t stand the inaccuracies of ‘Red Braces’ any longer. I went over to him and had a few words. I explained that the day before I had been very disappointed that he hadn’t mentioned my first achievement in golf. ‘I’m very sorry.What was it?’ I told him. Again it was Brewer’s honour and again we went through the entire ritual.Thomson looked extremely bored, and when it came to his turn he snubbed the man again by hitting off before the announcement was over. Now it was my turn.‘Next on the tee from London, England, we have Clive Clark who, in 1967, tied for fifth place in the South 121
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF African Pepsi Cola Tournament. But his proudest moment surely came when he won the Glastonbury Sweetbreads.’ The gallery burst into laughter. If I’d known he was going to swallow that one, I’d have told him I’d won the Grand National. Clark’s adventures with starters weren’t over. He arrived at a variety club pro am outside London and was duly introduced by the starter together with his partners. I teed off first and then my ten-handicapper partner followed. We both hit good ones. The twelve-handicap partner went and, though he connected quite well, his ball just missed the fairway. The last of the four was a twenty handicapper. From the number of quick waggles he made at the ball he was obviously nervous. At last, he got the club back.The gallery must have been wondering if it was ever going to happen. He took a quick flash at the ball, which popped up into the sun and disappeared over some nearby tennis courts. My partner went to his caddie to reload. Meanwhile one of the spectators, a lady, had assumed the ball had gone down the middle and was walking down the fairway. The starter yelled a blurting ‘Fore’, and then turning to me and shaking his head said,‘Who is that silly old bag?’ Modesty almost prevented me from telling him that it was, in fact, my mother.
Golf stories An anecdote from the misty past of the Royal Sydney Club. Burly D.J. Bayly MacArthur suffered a sinking feeling during a 1931 tournament. MacArthur, who tipped the scales at 92 kilograms, stepped into a bunker and immediately began to sink. Rescuers finally pulled him from the trap after he’d disappeared up to his armpits. The sand in the bunker was really quicksand!
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Jones: Competitive golf is played mainly on Bobby a five-and-a-half inch course, the space between your ears.
25
ROYAL MELBOURNE’S JOVIAL SKELETONS
The official opening of Australia’s most famous club, Royal Melbourne, was not achieved without a hiccup or two. Indeed, it was a rocky start when Sir John Madden, the Lieutenant Governor of Victoria, stepped up to drive the first ball. His initial attempt did not open the course but it certainly opened the tee, for turf was scattered in all directions. Photographs show ladies, with their hands tucked away in fur muffs, reacting to Sir John’s embarrassing air swing with unrestrained hilarity. Royal Melbourne achieved its centenary in 1991 and a fine publication of 100 illustrious years saw some skeletons come out with the book launching. Fist fights, a bizarre nocturnal car race down the first fairway, the lady members’ battle for the cheese, and the member who flew his plane on the course! Happily Royal Melbourne, despite its lofty status, had the capacity to chuckle at itself. In all Australian sport has there been a character to match Captain Syd Dalrymple, ex-Royal Flying Corps and the 1935 Royal Melbourne club champion? Chronicled is this account: ‘Golfers out on the course, when they heard the din of the Dalrymple flying machine, were known to seek the safety of 124
ROYAL MELBOURNE’S JOVIAL SKELETONS the rough and remain there until the plane ground to a halt, the propellers stopped spinning and the smiling figure of the leathercapped, begoggled and knee-high booted Dalrymple stepped from the cockpit.’ From time to time he would recruit the more fearless Royal Melbourne members and fly off to other courses for an afternoon’s golf.The secretary of a nearby club feared the worst when he failed to arrive. But, in fact, the group had landed at another course by mistake and, after being lavishly entertained, only realised their error when they looked at the scorecard on the first tee. Fights? Yes, two bouts of fisticuffs are recorded in the faithfully documented club’s history, with one aggressive member being asked to absent himself from the club for six months. A committeeman offered to donate two pairs of boxing gloves to be hung in the locker room for future need. Passed into Royal Melbourne legend, too, was the Peter Headlam–Gib Shaw car race. After a tense four-ball match they had settled into some heavy Sunday whisky drinking. Darkness and a dense fog settled over the course outside.Their competitive urge rekindled, they challenged each other to a car race from the first tee to the first green. Loyal partners pushed them onto the tee and a handkerchief was waved, sending the two cars roaring off into the firmament. We are told that halfway down the fairway Headlam sideswiped Shaw and careered off into the foggy, foggy night. Shaw continued down the middle of the fairway but when the flag stick appeared out of the mist his golfing instincts were reborn. What would the spinning Terraplane wheels do to the putting surface? He swerved hard right like an errant slice and hurtled into the bunker, one he vowed he had never previously visited.The harder he accelerated the more deeply bunkered he became, until the clutch expired.The pair imposed a month’s exile on themselves to escape the secretary’s wrath. It proved a long struggle for lady golfers at Royal Melbourne to enjoy near equality. Requests to have biscuits and cheese 125
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF supplied to the central lounge fell on deaf ears. Some resourceful associates persuaded men to fetch them a plate of the forbidden fromage; others felt it was beneath their dignity to stoop. So much for skeletons. Royal Melbourne has won world acclaim as a club of quiet dignity and supreme leadership qualities, and with a few good laughs along the way!
Golf stories Bruce Crampton, described as a stony-faced golf practitioner, hardly won acclaim for his sense of humour. But in Texas he won the South West Classic despite buffeting gales and earned a $50 000 cheque. He told everybody that the town of Abilene, hosting the event, is the second windiest place in the world. The windiest? ‘It blew away,’ he replied, deadpan.
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Manier: Golf: the worst damn fun anybody Cy ever had.
26
GOLF’S FIRECRACKER
It was well into the evening and the crowds had long since left the Mere Country Club after a day’s play in the Manchester Evening Chronicle tournament. Inside the clubhouse the tournament committee assembled in solemn conference with the greenkeeper standing before them and holding cradled in his arms a large slice of turf. Clearly distressed, he carried the ‘corpse’ as tenderly as a farmer might bear a slain lamb. Urgent discussion followed and the Australian golfer Norman von Nida was summoned from his hotel to face a charge of damaging course property. I had watched the drama unfold earlier in the day.The Von, on his way to what was to prove a classic victory, had driven into a fairway bunker at the Mere club’s 7th hole. He had attempted a difficult recovery shot but the ball ricocheted off a large piece of overhanging grass into the gallery. Burning with anger, The Von promptly called for his sand blaster and with a series of savage strokes hacked off the offending turf. He had considered the encroaching grass grossly unfair. He had been victimised and he was going to make damn sure that no other player had to suffer similarly. 128
GOLF’S FIRECRACKER The Von dutifully returned to the Mere club to explain his action. Happily it was accepted by an understanding committee and the little champ was free to continue on his winning way. The year 1948 was to be eventful and the incident followed an earlier slice of drama after von Nida’s arrival in Britain following a stint on the American circuit. As Fleet Street gleefully reported, he had sacked his caddie at Sunningdale before the tournament even got started. It seems the Von was pitching balls to a nearby green when the caddie ‘adversely commented on my shotmaking’. Said The Von, ‘I told him I resented his impertinence and dismissed him immediately.’The Von shot one of his greatest rounds, a record-smashing 63, and won handsomely. For a couple of decades, controversy and Norman von Nida were blood brothers.A tiny flame of a man, as one critic described him, he had a short fuse. From childhood he had done it tough. No Australian sports champion in my memory scaled so many massive obstacles to achieve the summit of success. His father was German, his mother Irish, and while both thought golf ‘a waste of time’ they encouraged him. (The Von always claimed his rejection for the Royal Australian Air Force in World War II was because of his name. The army had no such inhibitions. Like so many outstanding Australian sportsmen his best years were lost through those war years.) Money was scarce, the boy caddied for a pittance and took a job at the meatworks in Brisbane, his duty of ‘gut running’ requiring the removal of the fatty tissue from the animal’s entrails. In his life story, published years later in association with Muir Maclaren, he described men working almost knee deep in the entrails of cattle, their leather aprons covered in blood.‘The place looked and smelt like a charnel house and in the heat of a Brisbane summer the smell was overpowering. It permeated your clothes, your skin, your fingernails and your hair, and no matter what you did it seemed to cling to you. Even now I can smell it,’ he wrote. Norman von Nida was, by nature, a crusader. He would fight for what he was convinced was right, and woe betide those who 129
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF took sides against him. He was equally as fearless in a dispute as he was in his superlative shotmaking.A flag bearer, he led contingents of Australian golfers through the East in those early post-war years and such was his generosity that few players returned without owing money they had borrowed from him. He single-handedly tackled the British circuit from as early as 1947, winning repeatedly against the best the Brits could throw against him. Galleries flocked to watch him, happy to admire his immaculate stroke play and ever curious to witness his famous ‘blow-ups’. One such eruption occurred in the Rio Grande Valley Open in Texas. Henry Ransom, a playing partner, had reached the 1st hole with two magnificent shots for his ball to lie just 3 feet (1 metre) from the hole. He missed the putt and, rattled, tried to knock a tap-in one handed. He barely budged the ball before knocking it into the cup. The Von graphically recalled the conversation that followed. The outcome was a physical altercation. Ransom:‘Boy, that first hole just shows how careful you have to be.There was I sitting there for a birdie three and nearly took five.’ Von Nida: ‘What do you mean, “nearly took five”? You did take five.’ Ransom: ‘What’s wrong with you? I was on for two and two putts.’ Von Nida: ‘Yes, and what about the one-handed putt that you missed?’ Ransom: ‘You must be seeing things.’ Von Nida:‘I’ve got eyes in my head.You made a five at the first. Anyway, I’m not marking your card. Ask Frank Strazza [the third member of the group] what he put you down for.’ Strazza, walking within earshot, said he had put down ‘five’. The round, The Von related, was completed in hostile silence and after a session on the practice range ‘to cool down’, he stopped by the clubhouse to check the scoreboard. He was shocked to see Ransom’s round recorded at 68 and that the score for the 1st hole had been changed from five to four. Strazza confirmed he had not 130
GOLF’S FIRECRACKER verified the change so The Von asked the scoreboard attendant to check the score. Ransom, standing right behind, growled, ‘Why don’t you mind your own business?’ ‘It is my business,’ said The Von. Ransom was disqualified.Words were exchanged and Ransom hit The Von, the pair falling to the ground with The Von on top, where he stayed until a sheriff pulled him off. What did Norman call his book? Golf is My Business—of course! Out of an abattoir, von Nida was to walk golf ’s fairways with a king. His Majesty, King George VI, followed von Nida for a number of holes in the Muirfield Open and at one stage asked if his talking would upset The Von’s concentration. The Von assured him it would not and that, on the contrary, he liked to relax between shots.‘I wish I could learn to do that,’ said the king. ‘It is the hardest part of golf,’ replied The Von. ‘Nor for me,’ quipped the king with a smile. Colourful in the extreme, von Nida was accompanied by the Duke of Windsor in a US Open at Merion and the pair were described by an American newspaper as ‘fashion leaders’. Said the article, ‘The duke wore a plaid tweed jacket and tan corduroy slacks, a slate blue shirt and neckerchief. Von Nida, the most conspicuous golfer on the links, sported a red silk shirt and cocoa shade flannel plusfours with a matching beret.’ In his post tournament years The Von was a highly respected teacher, so much so that American Dave Hill sent for him to accompany him through a Masters tournament. ‘That man can make me walk on water,’ said Hill. Peter Thomson, Bruce Crampton and Bruce Devlin were among his proteges.Thomson wrote inspiringly of The Von: Like a piece of flint, when tough treatment brushed him, the sparks flew.At times the cruel lashes of some critics’ whips cut him deep. Norman never deserved it . . . I have been by his side in moments of triumph and misfortune, victory and 131
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF defeat and never have I once lost my faith that this little man is a giant among sportsmen, a credit to his profession and a great Australian.
The Von, very much Australia’s elder golfing statesman these days, has passed the 80-year mark. His sight is desperately poor but such is his passion for the game that he continues to play, yellow fluorescent tape allowing him to focus on his clubhead for each shot he plays. Honours and tributes have been showered on him and without doubt he led Australian golf into the spectacular and prosperous post-war years. He has been the most inspiring Australian sports hero of my time.
Golf stories Ian Baker-Finch, winner of the British Open, was convinced he was headed for stardom from his teenage days. His family owns an avocado farm in Queensland and he recalled, ‘I was nineteen and I used to hit three golf balls over the avocado trees. I was playing Nicklaus, Miller and Weiskopf and I can tell you—they never beat me.’
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Norman: Confidence is everything in golf. Greg When your confidence is up, there’s nothing you can’t do with a golf ball.
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THE GENIUS OF COURSE DESIGN
Golf ’s spectacular international bash is upon us, the Australian Open and the Presidents Cup, providing a fortnight of beguiling contrast. Mark O’Meara, master golfer of 1998, heads the finest assembly of American golfers ever to arrive down under: Tiger Woods, David Duval, Fred Couples, Davis Love, Justin Leonard, Mark Calcavecchia, Phil Mickelson . . . can Greg Norman possibly inspire an international line-up to topple mighty Uncle Sam? The Holden Open, at Royal Adelaide, with a smattering of international stars, provides the hors d’oeuvres. The Presidents Cup serves up the steaming roast dinner. So get ready for the scene at Royal Melbourne. Mega-million-dollar-earning professionals, glittering sponsors, golf bags, gleaming titanium-powered clubs and balls, marquees, batteries of cameras and, of course, the famous Melbourne sand-belt galleries. Big golf is about to breast the year 2000 as Australia has never seen it before. But yes, there will still be some old world charm left, for which we owe gratitude to Dr Alister Mackenzie, whose deft, creative hand provides the very soul of these two Australian venues. 134
THE GENIUS OF COURSE DESIGN Dr Mackenzie was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1870 but by 1925 had settled in America where his fame as an architect spread like wildfire. Cypress Point carries his signature and Bobby Jones called on him to construct what they mutually acclaimed as ‘the ideal inland course’—the Augusta National. The doctor’s travels brought him to Australia and nowhere did he leave his imprimatur more forcefully than at Royal Adelaide and Royal Melbourne, where this fortnight’s long-anticipated action awaits us. A club member designed Royal Adelaide’s original layout for its opening at Seaton in 1905. But in 1926 it was redesigned by Dr Mackenzie. So impressive was his achievement that great Australian golfer Jim Ferrier said:‘Seaton has a fascination that can be compared to St Andrews in Scotland.’ He called it a ‘thinker’s course’. The West course at Royal Melbourne is referred to as a supreme testimony to Mackenzie’s art, with its bold bunkering, multiple approaches to the greens along wide fairways and strongly contoured putting surfaces hemmed in with mounds and slopes that extend into the green itself. We are told Mackenzie believed that putting should be hazardous and that a golfer’s approach shots should be tested by greens that offer an easier and harder side to the hole. It’s interesting that when Hale Irwin fired rounds of 64 and 75 in the 1978 Australian PGA Championship he said the difference was that he was below the hole in the former round and above the hole in the latter round. Dr Mackenzie sculpted the West course, Alex Russell the East course, and it was the 1959 Canada Cup (later the World Cup) that saw the creation of the ‘Composite’ course. With big galleries anticipated organisers saw the problems of road crossings, so determined the course should be contained in the one paddock. Hence twelve holes were chosen from the West course, six from the East. Club records reveal that attempts were made to call the new layout the ‘Twain’ course, while another suggestion was the 135
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF ‘Mawallock’ after Alex Russell’s family home at Beaufort. Neither name stuck and the Composite has remained. Architects Peter Thomson and Michael Wolveridge, in a joint salute to Mackenzie, wrote that the good doctor believed the game of golf should be pleasurable, interesting and optionally challenging. But will the champions of today pause amid the high tension of the Presidents Cup to offer thanks to Dr Mackenzie for the legacy he has left the game?
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THE GENIUS OF COURSE DESIGN Golf stories Fabulous Augusta evokes many emotions for many people. Reporting how the Masters runs like clockwork, a correspondent wrote: ‘It has been run like a good restaurant. The same customers return again and again and any complaints are corrected. Often the menu is bettered in anticipation of problems and complaints. Each year changes have been made, generally for the good.’ Australian golfer Ian Baker-Finch commented, ‘What do I think of Augusta? If there’s a golf course in heaven it will be a replica of Augusta.’ Countryman Wayne Grady opined, ‘If you are going to die and you have just one more round of golf to play, then for me it would be Augusta.’ Ireland’s David Feherty contributed, ‘It’s like playing a Salvador Dali landscape. You think a clock is going to drop from a tree and land on your head.’ And did you know this about the Masters? • The Augusta folk once offered their course to the United States Golf Association as a future US Open venue but were turned down. So the Masters was born. • It is the toughest entrance ticket to buy in the world of sport. • The legendary Bobby Jones, co-designer of the course, first baulked at the title ‘Masters’, feeling it was immodest. But when the press took up the cause he conceded.
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Trevino: I played the tour in 1967, told jokes Lee and no one laughed.Then I won the US Open the next year, told the same jokes and everyone laughed like hell.
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ALPINE PALPITATIONS
It is said that from time to time, golfers on the alpine course of Seefeld in Austria have been known to pause while a puff of cloud passes by their feet so that they can see the green. Seefeld, in the Tyrols, is Europe’s third highest course, 1200 metres (or 4000 feet if you are into good old-fashioned golf) with fairways that seem to climb right into the sky. It’s about as close as a golfer can get to heaven while still wearing his spikes. I was introduced to golf in the Tyrols contesting an alpine scramble event and a stableford competition from championship tees carved deep from the adjoining forest.The snows had not yet appeared on the craggy peaks above, but we were reminded that the Seefeld course was used for two Olympic and a Nordic Games for cross country events in recent years. The skiers raced across the fairways but showed due deference by avoiding the greens. Mountain golf is a stimulating experience. On the one hand the inevitable scaling of the slopes is a severe heart examination. On the other hand the air is deliciously pure and, of course, the high altitude flatters shotmaking, adding an estimated 8 per cent to distance, so the locals say. 139
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Seefeld has some memorable holes, not least the 9th with the tee perched 60 metres above the green. A rare test of judgment, to say nothing of a trial by vertigo, but a wedge or nine iron seemed to do the trick. On the occasion of our visit with a tourism assembly a new Audi car sat by the clubhouse, there for the taking for the golfer who could hole out his tee shot. No ball found the target so each amateur status remained untarnished. Seefeld sits comfortably on its plateau between the Wetterstein and Karwendel mountains, almost 5 kilometres from the village centre. Only the courses at Sestrieres (Italian Alps) and Crans (Switzerland) are loftier. The Hohoe Munde mountain, which towers some 1828 metres, is the course’s immediate background, but beyond in German territory is the mighty Zugspitze, a giant that once belonged to an Austrian baron. Because it is the highest peak in Germany, the foreign landowner gave it as a present! Austria boasts nearly 70 golf courses, seven of which are sited high in the lovely Tyrols. Most of the others are in flat meadowland, with their numbers growing as Austria savours the peripheral delights of the golf explosion through the continent.
Golf Stories Lee Trevino has an unusual method of venting his occasional anger at long-time caddie and friend, the hefty-framed Herman Mitchell. ‘When I get mad at Herman it adds 20 yards to my drive,’ Trevino says. ‘I look down at the ball and say, “That’s Herman, that’s Herman”.’
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Earl: A good firm strike, the click of David compression as the sweet spot launches your ball just as you’ve visuliased it, the cloud-stippled sky, the smell of nature, pleasant companions—these are the essence of golf.
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NICE BEAR, GIVE THE BALL BACK
Teeing off in the breathtaking Canadian Rockies can be an experience that is just a little . . . well, on the wild side. So you preen yourself as a golfing buff, you know the rules and you figure you can unravel those sticky situations that constantly seem to pop up in this testing game. But how would you fare in the Canadian Rockies, where the grandeur of the mountain scenery is on a par with the majesty of the resort courses and the wildlife? What, for instance, would you do if you drove from the tee down onto the fairway only to see your ball disappear among 200 grazing Canadian geese? Apart from their deafening honking when irritated, they can let fly with a mean beak. So would you tactfully drop another ball clear of the gaggle? Of course you would. Crisp air: So next time you climb an elevated tee, breathe the crisp air that wafts down off the nearest glacier and fire a neat shot down the middle of another fairway.Your ball rolls and rolls before it comes to rest among a herd of peacefully prostrate elk, who show not the slightest interest in your golf ball. 142
NICE BEAR, GIVE THE BALL BACK All except the big bull who has won a flurry of fights so is not planning on anybody moving in on his harem.This is the rutting season and the bugling of sex-crazed male elks echoes around the mountains. Unless you want to become a human pincushion for a rack of twelve-point antlers, you figure it is good tactics to stroll casually by and start again on the next hole. You spray your tee shot and it clatters off into the forest.There is a path leading through the pines to the likely location of your ball, so you leave your partners and saunter off. But you have company: a scrawny gray dog loping along ahead and casting curious backward glances. Oops, it’s a coyote. That ball was no good, anyway—it had a cut in its cover. Now you regroup on the next tee when suddenly a cuddly black bear cub ambles past the tee markers. A frantic rush for cameras amid squeals of delight. But what is that big black sinister shape coming out of the trees? Mother black bear, of course. Bears can look like friendly critters. You see them photographed feeding on forest berries.Yeah? Well, why was that bear family enjoying a hearty picnic on a bull elk that had broken its neck in battle? The locals, of course, take the wildlife in their stride. One resident declares that the rampaging bull elk can be put off if you stand on your toes and raise a club in each hand above your head. The elk is intimidated by anything taller than himself; and maybe the theory has something because the golfer has lived to tell the tale. There are guidelines for tourists to avoid the problem of running into a bear. If you are hiking (or just looking for that sliced ball), walk in groups and whistle, sing or shout. In any genuine encounter, climb a tree. Golf in the Rockies is a wildlife experience in opulent surroundings. I know, having just completed the Great Canadian Golf Tour, arranged by Canadian Pacific Hotels, to introduce group organisers and the media to the wonders of this mountain paradise.
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PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Resorts: The great resorts, providing golf, hiking, climbing in the summer and fabulous skiing in the winter, stretch from Kananaskis through to Banff and on to Jasper. The CP railway provides comfortable sleepers and glorious observation carriages in a memorable ride over the Rockies to Vancouver and a backtrack to another mountain mecca,The Whistler. It was the great Canadian rail pioneer William Cornelius van Horne who envisaged the magic attraction of these resorts set out inside huge national parks. He summed it up thus: ‘If we can’t export the scenery, we must import the tourists.’ And the tourists roll in, more and more forsaking the desert golfing resorts of California, Arizona and Florida. Banff and Jasper have courses that are among the most challenging and scenic in the world. They are the creations of a little-known Canadian designer, Stanley Thompson. We are told he would sit in a chair with a pad and a bottle of gin and spend a whole day envisaging a golf hole that he would mould into the shape of the snow-capped peaks that towered above. Almost all holes face a mountain or mountain range and each hole has a scenic focus. Scenery: Robert Trent Jones designed Kananaskis and his son,Trent Jones Junior, The Whistler. So the architectural signatures are there on courses to exhilarate the heart and soul of any golfer—mindblowing scenery that can make an ugly bogey soon forgotten. The courses are open for the summer season and the tees booked solid. Striking a ball through the keen, crisp mountain air is a highly satisfying experience, more so because the golf ball hit at high altitude travels 10 per cent further than at sea level.Which is very flattering unless your aim is out and your ball is heading for the tall pines, in which case it is going to travel 10 per cent deeper into the rough. Come on now. Nice bear. Give me back my golf ball.
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NICE BEAR, GIVE THE BALL BACK Golf stories Gary Player wears black for strength. True or false? False because it is revealed Player’s passion for black stems from western movies. He recalls starting to wear black in 1957.
I had watched some western movies and noticed there was always one cowboy dressed in all black with a black hat and a silver holster. I always liked that and then I had an adviser who once told me to stand out I needed something to make me identifiable. Arnold Palmer had the umbrella logo, Jack Nicklaus was known as ‘The Golden Bear’, and there was ‘Champagne’ Tony Lema. I soon became the ‘Black Knight of the Fairways’. If the temperature’s cool during a tournament, I’ll wear black. When it’s hot outside I’ll wear other colours.
Golf stories Nick Faldo has set his heart on winning the US Open but so far the prize has eluded him. It is reported that in a meeting with Ben Hogan he asked the legend what the secret was to winning the Open. Hogan replied, ‘Shoot a lower score than anybody else.’
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Wilson: Golf—a game in which one Woodrow endeavours to control a ball with implements ill adapted for the purpose.
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FUN ON THE WORLD FAIRWAYS
United States Way back in 1925 a Chicago judge ruled ‘golf widowhood’ was insufficient grounds for divorce. A wife had pleaded that her hopeless duffer of a husband spent most of his time on the links.The judge said: ‘It would set a dangerous precedent—I play golf myself.’ There’s not much argument that the best American golfers come from Texas. Hogan, Nelson, Demaret, Crenshaw and Kite confirm that Texas can afford to boast. Jack Burke, the 1956 Masters champion and Texan himself, volunteered: ‘I really can’t answer why, other than to say Texans are very competitive people. It’s in their blood to gamble, whether it’s guessing where an oil well is, planting cotton or playing golf. In Texas, it’s not a question of gambling, it’s what time are we gambling?’ Golfers superstitious? Bob Tway has an obsessive aversion to the colours red and white and it’s so deep he simply won’t wear 147
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF them or use red or white tees. Why? Those are the colours of Oklahoma University, the arch rivals of his alma mater, Oklahoma State. Two brothers from Columbus, Ohio, related they were about to start a round of golf at Scioto Country Club when their caddies arrived and introduced themselves. Their names were Dick Bunker and Jim Shank. Not the best way to start off!
Australia Golf on the Woomera course in the South Australian desert, on the edge of the defunct rocket range is, well, eventful. Players carry a small square of artificial grass and have the option of placing the ball on it for fairway shots. Visitors are advised to wear stout boots and to putt with gloves on during the summer.The boots protect them from the deadly king brown and copperhead snakes. The gloves prevent them being stung by scorpions when retrieving balls from the holes. An unhappy sequel to Kel Nagle’s triple bypass heart surgery is that his taste buds have been affected and he has lost his passion for tea. Nagle’s love of a cuppa is legendary. He even celebrated his victory in the Centennial Open Championship at St Andrews with a cup of tea. Australian golfers have been reluctant to come to grips with metric measurements. A down-under golfer might miss a putt by inches, never centimetres. So how does Peter Thomson, Australia’s most famous golfer and now a noted television commentator, cope with metric? He says he hasn’t really come to grips with it but he doesn’t talk in yards either.‘I just tell the viewers how many paces the putt is and leave it at that,’ he says with a crafty smile. 148
FUN ON THE WORLD FAIRWAYS The story goes that a real estate company once valued Royal Sydney’s classic harbourside site at £20 million ($40 million), which probably prompted a call from the Middle East. A spokesman for an oil-rich sheikh announced that His Excellency wanted to buy the club. ‘Royal Sydney is not for sale,’ came the brusque reply. ‘He wants to offer £20 million pounds,’ said the spokesman. ‘Royal Sydney is not for sale,’ came the same reply. ‘What would you say to £30 million?’ the spokesman asked. ‘Royal Sydney is not for sale,’ the answer was repeated yet again. ‘My goodness, His Excellency will not be pleased,’ said the caller sadly. The Queensland Golfer reported that early morning golfers waiting to hit off on a Brisbane course admired a young dad, two fairways ahead, pushing a pram along with his playing partners. ‘Sign of the times,’ was one comment.‘Mum must be working.’ However, the players ahead steadily became more and more boisterous. Seems there was no cuddly kid in that pram but an esky containing a generous supply of ice-cold beer!
Canada The Aroostook Valley Country Club in Fort Fairfield straddles the Canadian–United States border, which makes for a unique situation for its golfing members. Aroostook’s golf shop and parking lot are in the United States, but the golf course is in Canada. The semi-private club has two flagpoles on the property, one sporting the stars and stripes, the other a maple leaf.The membership is 55 per cent Canadian and 45 per cent American and the groups compete in a 36-hole medal event each year to determine bragging rights. Nearby resident Lee Albert commented: ‘I know of no other course where you drive in from Canada, pay your green fees in 149
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF America, tee off in Canada, return your golf cart in America and drive home to Canada. I’ve looked into it and it’s the only course of its kind.’ Back in 1933 they built the world’s most exclusive golf club at Chesterfield Inlet on the northern shore of Hudson Bay.The cost of a life membership? Ten polar bear teeth! Famous course designer Robert Trent Jones Jnr sculpted the picturesque Chateau Whistler layout on the Pacific side of the Canadian Rockies, where the official opening took a bizarre turn. Two brown bears shuffled out of the forest onto the first tee. ‘They can’t play,’ shouted a new member. ‘They’re not members.’ Trent Jones replied: ‘They’ve lived here longer than you.’ ‘Well, they still haven’t got a handicap,’ countered the member. ‘Yes they have—scratch!’ said Trent Jones, getting in the last word. Scientists at Whiteshell Nuclear Research Establishment in Pianwa, Manitoba found a way to get their golf balls to travel 5 per cent further.They nuked ’em! Lab spokesman Larry Christie said: ‘There have always been scientists who golf. Sometimes they would pass balls through the linear accelerator. We thought there must be a lot of golfers out there who’d benefit.’ The United States Golf Association gave approval for irradiated balls and several thousand were zapped, although there were no plans to market them commercially.
Japan Golf is no stranger to the bizarre, but a goddess of golf? What next? The Japanese love golf with a passion.While British buffs might worship the game, in Japan they have gone a step further, proving their homage by actually creating a golf idol. 150
FUN ON THE WORLD FAIRWAYS At a 430-year-old Buddhist temple in Annaka near Tokyo sits Kennon, the goddess of golf. We are told the place of Kennon’s enshrinement is surrounded by three golf courses and those playing would not dream of teeing off without having paid their respect to the goddess, who has a halo of clubs above her head and holds a putter in her right hand. Offerings such as a green fee or some golf balls are made and most players take a few practice swings in front of the shrine, hoping for extra guidance. In golf-nutty Japan, some 30 million enthusiasts embrace the game but most of them never get to hit a ball on the country’s congested courses. For them, golf action is confined to driving ranges. In addition, you’ll find countless more tiny nets erected on the myriad flat-top roofs of crowded Tokyo. The story goes that one young Japanese professional,Tsuneyuki Nakajima, rigged up a makeshift range in his backyard where he hit 1500 balls a day. To make the whole exercise more realistic he set up an outdoor ‘shower’ so he could practise his shots in the rain, and also a large fan that provided windy conditions. Finally, in his garden he had a practice bunker, and in the bunker were five kinds of sand! The ace isn’t so welcome in Japan. Golf ’s ultimate goal is sometimes even avoided because it’s just too expensive.The golfer has to shower fellow players with pricey gifts, throw a party and plant a tree to mark the ‘joy’ spot.
Ireland Ireland’s 208 golf clubs were quizzed on discriminatory practices. Thirty-one per cent said they didn’t discriminate in any way against women, while another 31 per cent said they are considering changing their discriminatory rules. Royal Dublin answered 151
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF blithely:‘No discrimination exists in this club as we do not have any women members.’ Christy O’Connor represented the very soul of Irish golf, the Shamrock Isle’s most famous player. He was born beside the first tee at Salthill, Galway, though one critic claimed he wasn’t born at all but was hewn from a granite quarry. In a 30-year span he won just about everything worth winning except the British Open. The Irish revered him.They called him ‘Himself ’. Asked whether he ever felt annoyed by media folk who referred to him as ‘Himself ’ and ‘Wristy Christy’, he smiled indulgently and replied in a brogue as soft as an Irish mist:‘I’ll only get annoyed if they start calling me “Herself ”.’ Ireland’s David Feherty is a compassionate man. When he was bitten by an adder during practice for a European tournament he related: ‘I considered beating the living daylights out of it but it’s probably got a wife and snakelets.’
England Business executives who want to play truant for a midweek game of golf are expertly catered for in Lincolnshire, England. A hotel group provides the perfect cover-up, explaining to any inquirers that ‘you are on a course’, which is partly true. There is a secretary available on the course—the golf course, that is—to take notes should you need her, and a caddie who will read the Financial Times to you between shots. As you leave you will be provided with a take-home selection of business leaflets, videos and books guaranteed to convince even the most doubting wife or colleague that you have had a full working day.
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FUN ON THE WORLD FAIRWAYS At an annual dinner of the Belmont Club, club captain Steven Hughes was pelted with sugar cubes by the wife of a member in the middle of his speech.The husband then attacked Hughes in the foyer of the hotel after the dinner. The member ended up in hospital with a broken nose. The club secretary volunteered:‘I couldn’t believe it when the sugar cubes came flying over as he was in the middle of a joke. His speech wasn’t that racy and we had a comedian later who was much nearer the knuckle. It is unbelievable this could happen at a golf club dinner.’
Golf stories The innovative Belton Woods Hotel and Country Club in England introduced such trendy weeks as ‘Golf for Skivers’ and ‘Golf for Posers’. Launched on St Valentine’s Day, the hotel introduced ‘Golf for Lovers’ to spice up the weekend golf. Golf World magazine explained: To get the ball rolling, the love of your life will reach the first green to be greeted with a bunch of flowers sticking out of the hole. If she’s an ardent golfer trying to make a five footer [1.5 metres] to win the hole, she may hit you with her putter. Whatever happens, you can whisk her away from the green in a motorised buggy that has been installed with curtains for extreme privacy. A member of Belton’s staff will follow the play and serve champagne and canapes upon request. After the round, relax in a spa bath complete with floating plastic golf balls and golf ball shaped soaps. But perhaps the highlight of your ‘Lovers Weekend’ will be a candelight dinner for two . . . served in the pro shop. Belton Woods is in Grantham, the birthplace of Britain’s Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher. We doubted Margaret and Denis would take up the offer.
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PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Royal St George the British Open venue in Kent, had a reputation for displaying strange signs outside the clubhouse. One sign read:‘No dogs, no women.’ Since then, an even more controversial sign appeared. It announced: ‘Ladies wearing trousers are requested to remove them before entering the clubhouse.’
Scotland There was a real hullabaloo at the famous Royal Musselburgh club in Scotland. The Dickson parents and their sixteen-monthold baby James sat down for dinner. The staff refused to serve them. Baby James was ‘improperly dressed’. He was wearing offending denims. Them’s the rules.The Dicksons couldn’t believe their ears, but they removed the baby’s clothing, leaving him sitting in his nappy. The meal was served and everybody was happy. It was on St Andrews’ final hole that dapper-dressing American Doug Sanders earned his unwelcome spot in British Open history. He missed a tiddler putt that cost him the championship. In later years he quipped:‘It was probably the most memorable thing in my life, although I don’t think about it much—sometimes I go as long as five minutes without it crossing my mind.’ Sanders admitted he vividly remembered the moment before he hit the putt, when he picked up a speck of grass from the line. ‘I was waiting and I was thinking about whether I was going to throw the ball in the air or the club. I decided I was going to bow to the gallery and be a humble winner. I would have been if that ball had gone in,’ he said. The unhappy sequel was that wherever he subsequently played nobody would give him a ‘gimme’ putt. They would say, ‘I saw you miss it before so you may miss it again.’ 154
FUN ON THE WORLD FAIRWAYS The tiny Postage Stamp hole at Royal Troon ranks among the most famous in the world. Put a wrong address on the tee shot and a ghoulish fate will knock you out of business. The green is shaped like a dining room table, set into the side of a sand hill and protected by a bunker at the front and two at the side. The side bunkers are deep and intimidatingly straight faced. The tee shot can be anything from a pitch to a full driver depending on the winds that can whip across from the Firth of Clyde. Gene Sarazen, the legendary little American, came to Troon for the British Open in 1923, got caught in a gale and failed to qualify.When he returned on a nostalgic visit 50 years later at the grand old age of 73, he holed out for an ace! But upstaging all aces was the two-iron shot of member Colin MacLaine into the teeth of a winter gale.The ball pitched past the flag and was blown back. At that moment the wind blew the flag stick out of the hole.The ball hit the pin, ran along it and plopped into the hole for an ace!
France The Bordelais are understandably very fond of their wine. These Frenchmen have also embraced ‘with fervour’ the fastest growing sport in the country. The two come together at Golf du Medoc on the outskirts of Louens.The eighteen championship holes are each named after a famous chateau, ranging from the Le Grange first hole to the Mouton-Rothschild 18th, and wine bottles are used as distance markers.
Hong Kong The Royal Hong Kong club at Fanling is chockful of delightful anecdotes, but none better than this. In 1922 a picture gallery was erected near the clubhouse entrance and members became curious about a picture of a padre attempting to hit a ball with 155
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF half a dozen broken clubs lying nearby and a puzzled expression on his face. Such was the speculation over the reverend gentleman’s exclamation that members conducted a contest,‘What the Padre said’, and asked the donor to be the judge. The donor removed the picture.
Wales Beware the angry golfer whose drive clatters off into the woods. At the Hawarden club in North Wales, a hedgehog had the temerity to cross an angry golfer’s path.The golfer took a petulant swipe and sent the poor creature skywards to a prickly fate. Junior members watched in horror. The golfer was summoned before the committee and banned for three months.
China Golf disappeared in China during the Cultural Revolution, but after World War II, servicemen reported playing on a nine-hole course outside Shanghai. The golf course was located inside a racetrack used for pony racing—but also for annual executions. A Denver serviceman reported that miscreants were beheaded, the high executioner using a huge, curved blade with accuracy and power. To assure a ‘clean’ cut and quick merciful death the friends and family of the condemned would pay kumshaw, a bribe, to the executioner, assuring an accurate back swing and follow through, you might say.
Italy Italian professional Alberto Binaghi missed the cut in the BMW International in Munich after a bizarre incident with his caddie. 156
FUN ON THE WORLD FAIRWAYS At the 2nd hole in the opening round, Binaghi handed an apple he was eating to his caddie, who was then stung by a wasp.The caddie dropped the apple into a bunker, then went in to retrieve it. Binaghi and his playing partners did not see his forage act, but a spectator did and reported the incident. The Italian was penalised two strokes under Rule 23 for removing a loose impediment from a hazard. His 73 became a 75!
Germany A herd of 30 cows died after eating an estimated 2000 golf balls that were hit into their field from a nearby course at Eutin in Germany. Farmer Peter Pellmann had been baffled by the deaths until a vet found a ball lodged in one animal’s throat. Pellman promptly sued the golf club. We can only conclude that the Royal and Ancient Golf Club must hate meeces to pieces. It seems that the R and A rejected an appeal from the German and Dutch golf associations to include the field mouse with burrowing animals such as rabbits and moles in rules that permit a drop without penalty from those animals’ scrape marks.
New Zealand New Zealand golfing author Keith Wilson produced a nifty little book, a definitive guide to golfing manners. The book made no reference to women’s golf. He explained it was impossible to write instructions without the use of terribly complicated sentences such as: ‘Before he/she has hit off, the next player should have his/her club in his/her hand and his/her ball in his/her right hand ready to play when his/her turn comes. The author suggested readers should take the word ‘man’ as referring to mankind. 157
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF New Zealand’s oddest local rule appeared on the wall of the Rakauroa Club, in the hills of the province of Poverty Bay. The rule provides that if a ball comes to rest within 6 feet (1.8 metres) of a newborn lamb, it can be dropped without penalty. Manufacturer’s logos are so prolific on the golfing clothes and bags of the pros that commentator Peter Alliss was moved to suggest that if the golf gets boring you can always have a good read. New South Wales golfer Steven Aisbett toted a bag with a difference in an Air New Zealand Open tournament. It simply said: ‘Logo space available.’
Golf stories For one of the game’s smallest competitors, Welshman Ian Woosnam is one of the golf’s biggest hitters. So just how does ‘Little Woosie’, only 1.57 metres tall, get it out so far? Seems it’s all in those Popeye forearms, which he developed driving the tractor on his father’s farm. From the moment he was old enough for his feet to touch the pedals, he drove the tractor. There was no power steering, hence those muscular forearms. And to strengthen them further, he practised steering the tractor with just the index finger and thumb of his left hand. Woosnam, like so many top golfers, has back problems. His feet can’t touch the ground in an aeroplane, so he puts a briefcase under his feet to give support to his back.
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Dent: I can airmail the golf ball, but sometimes Jim I don’t put the right address on it.
PHIL TRESIDDER TRIBUTE 1928–2003
Tributes have poured in from across the sporting world for the life and times of Phil Tresidder, Australian Golf Digest’s editor at large, whose sudden death in October shocked his countless friends and associates. The outpouring of appreciation for one of Australia’s finest ever sports scribes, and the overwhelming sadness at his going, were exactly as it should have been, although ‘Tres’ would have grumbled at all the fuss. Golfer, peerless writer of that sport (and others), chess player, classical pianist, punter, caring friend and loving family man— Phillip Lyle Tresidder was a unique contributor to the Aussie sporting life. He will be remembered as one of the greatest of Australia’s sportswriters/reporters, taking his place in the Pantheon alongside the likes of Claude Corbett, J.C. Davis, Tom Goodman and Bill O’Reilly. He wrote with grace and style and with real affection for the sports he watched, and with a true and deep understanding of them. He had, after all, played all the major games he covered (golf, cricket, rugby union and rugby league). His friend of 60 years, Richie Benaud, said of Tresidder the journalist: ‘Phil was completely trustworthy and had the 160
PHIL TRESIDDER TRIBUTE 1928–2003 ability to write with honesty and knowledge and to share with others.’ He had, perhaps, the most wonderfully dynamic beginning that there has ever been to a career in sportswriting. In 1947, when he was nineteen, Phil convinced Sir Frank Packer, owner-proprietor of the Sydney Telegraph, that there was merit in him going to England to provide support coverage of the Australian rugby union tour. In fact he stayed for eighteen magical months, working on a remarkable post-war explosion of major sport through 1947 to 1948: the Wallaby tour, the tour of the Australian cricket team that became known as Bradman’s ‘Invincibles’, the Olympic Games in London, and the 1948 campaign of the rugby league Kangaroos, featuring the young Clive Churchill. It was a career beginning that was nothing short of dazzling— and what followed in his enthusiastic pursuit of his craft after such a kick-off did not disappoint. For years he wrote cricket, golf and rugby for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, thundering out swift and near-flawless copy on an ancient typewriter, pausing now and then to tackle an Olympic Games or a book project.When the league staff was short handed, he would turn his mind to that game with equal skill—having been a keen rugby league player in the Souths Juniors. Eventual disenchantment, when the Packer-owned Telegraphs were sold to News Limited, and a new culture in 1972 saw him step away from the newspaper world. His work focus narrowed to the game, I suspect, he loved best of all—golf—and then to his roles with the magazine. Along the path of his career Tres was a wonderful friend of so many in sport, and effectively a patron to countless young sportspeople. Says Benaud: ‘He was responsible for so many young people getting a go. A word in the right place . . . a telephone call.’ Cricket’s Mike Whitney, whose career he touched deeply, remembers him affectionately as being like a ‘benevolent uncle who was always there’. Says Whitney:‘He was the only man outside my family who I turned to for advice.’ 161
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Phil lived this three-quarters of a century buoyantly and fully until illness crashtackled him in the final months. As late as mid2003 he was still playing a regular Saturday morning round at his beloved home course, the Australian Golf Club. For Phil, sporting man and sportswriter, his life ended with the flourish and fitting touch of high style—just as his career had begun. On the Saturday before he died, he backed the winner of the Caulfield Cup plus a Randwick winner owned by his great friend Alan Cardy—a man who declares he owes his Wallaby jumper to the support of Phil Tresidder. The next afternoon, Monday, 20 October, Philip Lyle Tresidder died at Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick—survived by his niece Christine Hall, nephew Michael Tresidder, great niece Melanie and great nephews Adam and Ben. I had known him for 49 years, from a first meeting at Vaucluse Public School in 1954 when Phil came to coach the team’s firstever cricket team as a favour to the headmaster, Mr Plunkett. As he did with so many other nervous greenhorn kids, he later helped and guided my career when chance took me into the Daily Telegraph sportsroom at ACP in late 1963—and on to a life in journalism. In the week before his death, my wife Joy and I dined with him in a large group at a favoured Tresidder fish restaurant at Bondi. Phil ordered the lobster—something I had never seen him do. I can only guess now that via all those years of his unique experience he had, that night, inspected the wicket, tested the speed of the greens, sniffed the breeze . . . and decided that full time was not so far away. Ian Heads I have many fond memories of Phil Tresidder. His calm gentlemanly ways, his honest appraisal of situations, that half smile and chuckle and, when he didn’t approve, one eyebrow lifted. He was without a doubt a father figure to me. I met him in 1976 when I started my career playing with the 162
PHIL TRESIDDER TRIBUTE 1928–2003 Randwick Cricket Club. He helped me, encouraged me, introduced me to influential people but, above all, he was always really honest with me. I never saw him angry, I never heard him swear, in fact I never heard him raise his voice. He was the consummate gentleman. His calm demeanour reflected his personality perfectly. Although I must say, since Phil’s passing I’ve learned more about the man than when he was alive. He always played his cards close to his chest.That was Tres. He is one of the few people in my life that I’ve asked for advice. I went to him more than once, believe me! He helped me with my life, my cricket and my work. He taught me three things I’ve tried to carry on through my life.Trust, respect and humility. Phil had all of these qualities.As a journalist and writer his words were poetry. His uniqueness allowed him to cover all sports. Like many, I’ll miss him and will always be grateful for the time I spent with him. It was special! Mike Whitney Phil Tresidder was a man for all seasons. He was equally at home with the sporting greats of the world as he was with sporting youngsters with a dream in their eyes. Many of those up-and-comers are deeply indebted to Phil for showing us the way to achieve the best we could with our talents. If Phil could not assist directly, he always knew someone else who could. The knowledge that he had aided us to go that extra step was his only reward. Phil’s friendship was enduring and he would always encourage but not criticise, he would advise but not dictate, and he was the ultimate sporting politician. I’m sure that he will be remembered for his ability to shape the lives of the famous and not so famous, as much as his genius for journalism. I think he would regard the former as his greatest contribution to the world. We will miss you, mate. Alan Cardy 163
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF I have known Phil Tresidder since he joined the 1947–48 Wallabies in London as a young newspaper correspondent. In 1947 the Wallabies were the first national sporting team to tour the United Kingdom after World War II. This was the launching pad of Phil, who covered many Australian sporting teams and Olympic Games. From that tour we developed a strong relationship through the Randwick Rugby Club and this continued until his untimely death. We had many close interests—cricket, rugby and horseracing. In writing my autobiography, The Life Worth Living, Phil was of great assistance. Phil was a man respected and admired by all who had the privilege of knowing him. His accurate reporting was one of his great features. Sir Nicholas Shehadie With the passing of Phil Tresidder, the 1947–48 Wallabies that toured Great Britain, France, the United States and Canada have lost a very close friend. Phil was regarded by the boys as part of the team, and because the tour lasted nine months we had plenty of time to get to know him. While only nineteen, Phil had managed to organise a trip to London to cover as much sports reporting as he could.The Wallabies was the beginning.Whether he inwardly planned anything else to cover I cannot say, but from then on everything unfolded and launched him into becoming one of Australia’s finest journalists. This youngster suddenly found that the sporting world in which Australians participated had landed on his plate.The smorgasbord not only had the 1947–48 Wallabies, it also included Bradman’s 1948 Invincibles, the 1948 Kangaroos rugby league side and the 1948 London Olympic Games. After all that, he never looked back in the journalistic field. The Wallabies retained a soft spot in Phil’s heart, and he rarely missed any of the team’s reunions. His eventual passing shattered the 1947–48 Wallabies. He was a true friend to us all. Trevor Allan 164
PHIL TRESIDDER TRIBUTE 1928–2003 Phil Tresidder was a man of great class, decorum and dignity. When I first met Phil as a brash long-haired teenager who loved a beer and women, he often tended his worldly words of wisdom—as he often did to most young blokes—which were always greatly appreciated. I always suspected that Phil thought I was good for a story, because I always carried my heart on my shirt sleeve both on and off the golf course. Some of the most fun I had with Phil was during his days as editor of Australian Golf Digest.In those days I wrote (and still write) a regular column for the magazine. Phil also put together the Australian Golf Digest awards night each year in the week of the Australian Open. He asked me to compere it each year, largely because he knew anything might happen and often did. I often used to rib him on the night, as it was seemingly the biggest day of the year for him—he loved it, especially if he could get Greg, Karrie or Sparrow-Finch to attend. True to Phil’s character, he was the old-style journalist who gave a balanced, fair but objective—constructively critical if need be—report of the issues in the game in which he commanded the respect of all players in an era when sensationalism was becoming more and more prominent. He will be sadly missed by the industry. Jack Newton In the early 1980s, I would hardly have been Phil’s first choice as assistant editor of this [Australian Golf Digest] magazine. I wasn’t a golfer, played for the wrong rugby club and preferred to spend my summers in surf rather than flannels. I’d even learned my journalism at a university. Yet while all this was fodder for Phil’s dry sense of humour, the only thing that concerned him was whether I could do the job. He was a natural mentor. Phil’s quiet but authoritative presence, and the example of his own excellence, helped so many young people gain precious confidence. As one of them, I will always consider it a privilege to have known Phil Tresidder. Tim Sheridan 165
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF Phil Tresidder was a great father figure to myself in a friendship spanning more than twenty years. I was first introduced to Phil when I started my professional golf traineeship at the Australian Golf Club in 1981. Coming from the countryside, the city of Sydney was a daunting place and building solid relationships with people ‘in the know’ was a must if I was to survive. At that time, wages were meagre and just to get through the week was a battle. Phil would take me out for meals and pay for some of my professional entry fees, and later offer me a place to stay whenever I came to Sydney. Phil was always introducing me to high-profile individuals and his great friends, who in turn through their relationships with Phil gave me opportunities that normally were not possible. After some success as a touring professional, I turned to golf management and once again Phil was always there to provide me with guidance and introductions. We have lost one of the great people and it is a void that never can be filled. Ian Roberts Phil and I became friends in the early 1950s when he was a coach and player with Coogee Juniors in the rugby league. In 1960 he nominated me for membership of Bonnie Doon Golf Club. From then on we played every Wednesday and Saturday. As a four-ball partner he was difficult. He would ride you all the way—where to hit the ball, the line of your putt—chiding, ‘We don’t want to lose.’ I remember the time in the 1960s when he covered a cricket tour of South Africa. He was on a fourteen handicap when he left, but when he returned he was soon on seven. He became a great wedge player and a prince of putters.We always said he must have had a lesson from Gary Player in South Africa—which he denied. One Saturday in 1966, I went to look at a house in Wolseley Road, Coogee, but found a great block of land on the cliff edge. Phil was playing cricket with Randwick fourth grade at Coogee 166
PHIL TRESIDDER TRIBUTE 1928–2003 Oval. As he was batting at number ten, I convinced him that he should come with me to have a look. We both bought a block, built houses and were neighbours for 33 years. We never had a cross word.There were many cups of coffee in the mornings, many beers in the afternoons and evenings, and great days watching football, cricket and the races. Phil upset my wife only once—when he arrived home with a kitten. Loretta did not talk to him for two days. Sometime later he confided that he was shocked. He was always advising my sons,Trent and Max, on sport and work—and told them never to be bachelors. His passing has left a void in our lives. He was one of the beautiful people in this world and part of our family. I miss him like a brother. John Mison He leaves indelible memories of dignity and vigilance in presenting a clear word picture for his readers. Phil’s passing leaves a broad gap in the golf scene; he was there when I started in 1949, when The Von and Eric Cremin were gracing the game. His opinions were always his own. Never anyone else’s. Peter Thomson We have lost a great contributor to this wonderful game of golf. I first met Phil Tresidder in 1956 in Sydney and he certainly inspired many people to take up the game. He was a gentle man and a kind man whom I will miss dreadfully, as we stayed in touch for many years. Love is something that lingers with us every day of our lives, whether you are the president or a pauper, everybody seeks and yearns for it.This word exemplifies Phil Tresidder because he gave a lot of it. Gary Player I’ve known Phil for a long time—since my first professional victory in the 1987 New South Wales Open. He’d like me to play 167
PHIL TRESIDDER ON GOLF with him at the Australian because he knew he would always get some new golf balls out of me. Phil was a kind person. I’ve never seen him write a nasty article about anybody—he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He was a person who took a real keen interest in what the players were doing. He was great for Australian golf. Craig Parry Phil was one of the good guys. I saw him often over the years, and we spent many, many hours in press rooms talking, and not just about golf but about other things in our lives. Phil Tresidder was a great friend to golf, and a great friend to me. He will be missed very much. My wife Barbara and I send our most heartfelt thoughts and prayers to Phil’s family and friends, as well as to Phil’s extended family of readers who will miss this talented man. Jack Nicklaus I will always remember Phil as someone who was one of my biggest supporters, not just from the time I achieved success but from the very beginning, dating back to my days as an amateur. I know no one who is a greater fan of golf, particularly Australian women’s golf. Australian golf has indeed lost one of its most esteemed writers. Karrie Webb Golf lost a great ambassador with Phil’s passing. As long as I have played our wonderful game, Phil was a very integral part of it through his insightful journalist style or his love and dedication to his profession. I know this golfer, like so many others, will miss Phil. Greg Norman The passing in October of Phil Tresidder has been mourned by many friends in the golfing world in all countries. He was well known just about everywhere they swing a golf club and argue 168
PHIL TRESIDDER TRIBUTE 1928–2003 with the club handicapper about injustice. Phil loved golf courses that had about them a touch of quality and history. He was even more keen on playing them and taking a dollar or two off unsuspecting opposition with an unorthodox putting style. It was Phil, and his good friends George and Brenda Blumberg, who persuaded me to start covering the Masters in 1979—it was a fifteen-year assignment. George and Brenda were the South African couple who befriended and sponsored Gary Player after they watched him as a youngster practising hour after hour in a bunker at Killarney Golf Club in Johannesburg. Player had won the Masters in 1978 with a blistering final round 64, 30 for the back nine, giving him an eleven-under 277 in the clubhouse.Tom Watson, Hubert Green and Rod Funseth all had birdie putts on the 18th to force a play-off . . . and all missed. After the service at St Jude’s Randwick, relatives and friends raised a glass or two at the Australian Golf Club where Michael Whitney, Alan Cardy, Ian Heads and David Cox spoke and Jack Newton, representing golf, delivered a brilliant short eulogy. It was cricket that started me on a 62-year friendship with Tres. We were opponents in a fourth grade high school cricket match played on a concrete pitch in Centennial Park, Sydney. He was a tall and very awkward fast bowler, I was a short opening batsman and he removed me very quickly with a bouncer. It was the start of a time when I had the chance to observe someone always renowned for his writing skills and his supportive work for young cricketers, footballers and golfers. He leaves a memory of someone trusted by those who read what he wrote, by administrators and by the players in all sports. Richie Benaud
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The publishers would like to thank the following people: Steve Keipert of Australian Golf Digest and Alan Farrelly of News Limited for their invaluable assistance. Phil Tresidder’s niece, Christine Hall, who discovered the unpublished material which became the basis for this book, amongst her uncle’s archives. And finally, literary agent Bruce Kennedy who brought the idea to us and co-ordinated the project.
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