There’s a big problem with professional golf today. TV ratings are plummeting and the PGA Tour is having a cow because it believes nobody is watching because Tiger Woods isn’t playing. That’s true to a certain extent, but I don’t think that’s entirely the case. I think it’s because professional golf is boring. Granted, the game doesn’t translate well to TV unless you play it. But I’m talking about professional golf in general and the reason it’s boring is simple. It’s because there aren’t any characters in golf anymore. Back in the day, before it was on TV all the time and had it’s own channel, golf was loaded with characters. Tommy Bolt was nicknamed Terrible Tommy because he had a fuse shorter than an M-80 and a propensity to throw clubs. I don’t mean just tossing them back onto the bag, spitting and muttering a few f-bombs. I mean helicoptering them down the fairway. Once, after a particularly poor tee shot, Tommy launched his driver into a nearby lake. Immediately realizing what he had done, he jumped into the lake to find the driver, but a kid had beaten him to it and emerged with the offending club. Tommy begged the kid to give him the driver back, but the kid was having none of it and ran off with Tommy in hot pursuit. Seeing something like that would be the price of admission alone.
Chi-Chi Rodriguez and Lee Trevino were two pros that understood that not only golf, but all of professional sports is show business. Chi-Chi would wield his putter like a sword after holing a putt. Or, he would run up and throw his hat over the hole, then lift the brim up and peek in to make sure the ball was still in there. I read an interview with Chi-Chi once and he said, “if your clubs are acting up, go out and buy a set of new ones. Bring them home and take them out of the box in front of your old ones. Then put the old clubs in the closet for three months. I’ll guarantee when you take them out of the closet, they won’t act up anymore.” He also was asked how he stayed in such great shape. He said he did a hundred sit ups and a hundred pushups every day and drank two scotches before he went to bed each night because, “alcohol is the only thing bacteria can’t live in.” I’d love to hear Tiger say something like that about his workouts. Usually when he’s asked a question like that, he just glares at the commentator. As a matter of fact when he’s asked anything, he usually just glares at the commentator. Speaking of Tiger, he may have been the greatest golfer of his time, but when he does talk I can’t help but think of that guy in Beverly Hills Cop that told Eddie Murphy, “We’re not going to fall for a banana in the tailpipe.”
Lee Trevino is a legend of golf and not just because of his major titles, ball-striking ability and that flat, outside-to-inside swing. He was a true showman who knew how to play to the galleries. He once said, “At the first U.S. Open I played in, I told jokes and nobody laughed. Then I won the thing. I came back the next year and told the same jokes and everybody laughed like hell.” He also said, “Pressure? There ain’t no pressure out here. This is gravy. Pressure is standing over a putt for fifty dollars with only five in your pocket.” He would hustle at the par 3 course in Dallas where he worked by playing the entire round with a quart Dr. Pepper bottle wrapped in tape. He would throw the ball up and hit it like a baseball. Then he putted with the thin neck. Try throwing a golf ball up and hitting it with a bottle sometime. I would hazard a guess you couldn’t even hit it, let alone hustle golfers using conventional equipment.
Wearing a safari helmet and carrying a hatchet, Lee threw a rubber snake at Jack Nicklaus on the first tee of a playoff at the 1971 U.S. Open. Nicklaus got a laugh out of it and Trevino won the playoff. Try to imagine someone throwing a rubber snake at Tiger Woods today. He’d probably get ran off of the tour.
The last true character in golf was John Daly. The stories about Long John are legion. You never know what you are going to get with Daly and that’s what makes him so much fun to watch. He may shoot a 65 or dunk five balls in the water on the way to an 18 on a par 5. He came out of nowhere, from humble beginnings and won the 1991 PGA Championship as the ninth and last alternate. Fans could relate to him. He had a mullet haircut, drank a lot, smoked like a fiend, wore loud pants, played the guitar and hit drives off of the tops of beer cans and tees in the mouth of trusting TV commentators lying on the ground. Completely impatient, he slapped balls while they were still rolling back onto greens in disgust, said exactly what was on his mind to the press and gambled away millions. His swing was a mile long and generated tremendous power. He also possessed a brilliant short game and won two major championships and eighteen times around the world as a professional. During Masters Week, he parks his motor home in the parking lot of Hooters on Washington Road down the street from Augusta National and sells apparel, souvenirs, has his picture made with fans and signs autographs.
The players today are all like cookie cutters. Since the Tour is all exempt now, there are no Monday qualifiers. Nobody has to finish a tournament and drive all night to the next stop, tee it up with no sleep and try to play their way into the tournament. Nobody sleeps in their cars or in bunkers. An anonymous pro who currently plays on the tour said recently, “These guys out here are completely coddled. Most of them can’t get out of bed in the morning, tie their shoes, take a pee and go to the range without first calling their swing coach, sports psychiatrist and agent. There’s a lot of people getting rich off of them.” And it’s true. Trevino said of swing coaches, “When I find one of them that can beat me, then I’ll listen.” Too bad Tiger didn’t take that approach.
None of the players work on their own equipment anymore. Greg Norman played with a sand wedge he’d had since he was sixteen and would bend it to different degrees as needed. Same with Arnold Palmer. Arnie would grip his own clubs and grind his own irons as he saw fit. Nowadays, equipment trucks follow the tour and if a player breaks, bends or just plain hates a club, he goes to the equipment trailer. They analyze his swing, launch angle, ball speed and such, then build him another club based on those specs. The players all have sponsors, from equipment to apparel, automobiles to financial institutions, sports drinks to golf equipment and so on. The days of barnstorming in the off-season and playing exhibitions, opening new golf courses or working out of a club as a touring pro are over. Their agents wouldn’t let them, anyway. Nowadays a player can make cuts for five or six years, finish in the middle of the pack and be set for the rest of his and his kid’s lives.
At one time, I played a lot of golf. I watched it. I studied it. I was obsessed. My late wife and I were members at Lake Spivey Golf Club. We would play there at least once a week. In those days, I got off work at 2:30 pm. I would make sure I had all my weekly chores at home taken care of and three to five days a week, I would leave the office and head straight to Spivey to practice, take a lesson or walk nine holes. I eventually came to the realization that I was never going to be good enough to win anything other than a few bets. When my wife passed away, I quit playing altogether. I eventually picked up the sticks again. I still love the game but don’t spend anywhere near the amount of time and money on it as I once did. The funny thing is that I enjoy playing a lot more than I did when I was consumed by golf. I suppose it comes with growing older and realizing that each day and each round is a blessing. That being said, in 2005 I stood with my wife on the Swilcan Bridge in the eighteenth fairway of The Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland. Golf-wise, I have been to the mountain top. It’s all downhill from there.
The problem with being a character is that you also have to be an extremely good player. Payne Stewart dressed nattily in colorful plus-fours, shirts and a Hogan-style cap. When you have a silky smooth swing like Payne and win two U.S. Opens and a PGA Championship, you can wear plus-fours and a Hogan-style cap. If you or I showed up for our Saturday morning foursome dressed like that, our buddies would probably laugh us off the first tee box. Bubba Watson has a Ping driver with a big pink clubhead. When you consistently stripe the ball 315 yards down the fairway, you can have a pink driver and no one will say a word to you. Camilo Villegas’s nickname is Spiderman, because of his ability to crouch down, put his hands on the ground, extend a leg and literally get right down behind the ball when reading a green. When you can do that, get back up without the help of paramedics and hole the putt, no one will point at you and snicker. Jesper Parnevik dressed in argyle sweaters, disco-style purple pants and wore his cap with the bill turned up facing the sky. He also was a health nut who ate volcanic ash and played with a tee stuck above his ear. Jesper won ten tournaments worldwide and fifteen million dollars. Not bad for a character. Colin Montgomerie caught a lot of grief on the American tour. Most of it was due to his own making, not because he was a character, but because he was a jerk.
I don’t watch that much golf on TV anymore. When I do tune in, the players seem to be very nice young men. The shots and the distances they hit them are amazing to watch, but they themselves are boring. So after an hour or so I’ll turn off the tube and go outside or flip it over to full-contact groundhog curling. Now there’s some characters!