"Men in Green" by Michael Bamberger

If you are a golfer, watch professional golf on television, or if you're just a golf nerd who  appreciates the history of the game, I cannot recommend to you highly enough that you read "Men in Green" by Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger.  As teenager in the 1970's, when the PGA Tour was, and he puts it, in it's "Sansabelt-and-persimmon heyday", Bamberger fell in love with the game. He supported himself through college and in his early sports writing days as a Tour caddy, and went on to write about the game in various newspapers, as a freelancer for golf magazines, and, now, with Sports Illustrated.  He has also written a number of books on the subject.

For "Men in Green", he drew up a list of nine of golf's Living Legends, and nine of what he calls his own Secret Legends.  The Living Legends are whom you would expect - Palmer, Nicklaus, Venturi, Watson etc.  The Secret Legends are some folks you may never have heard of - a couple of caddies, a TV executive, a retired USGA official, an instructor, a sportswriter, and one golfer, Mike Donald.  He then sets out to interview all of these legends to try to find what he calls the soul of golf.  He is accompanied for most of his journey by Secret Legend Mike Donald, who he characterizes as the ultimate Tour grinder.

A word or two about Mike Donald.  Golf nerds will remember Donald as a thirty-five year old guy who came out of nowhere in 1990 to finish in a tie for the lead at the US Open.  He lost in an 18 hole playoff with a 19th sudden death hole to Hale Irwin.  It was the highlight of Donald's career.  In a career that spanned thirty-some years, Donald played in 550 PGA Tour events, made 296 cuts, won once, and earned $1.97 million (or about what Jordan Speith earned in any two given weeks on Tour in 2015).  He played thirty to thirty-five events every year and never finished higher than 22nd on the money list.  As Bamberger put it, while players like Tiger and Phil and Rory can drop in and drop out on tour events as it suits them, it is guys like Donald who are at the very heart and soul of the Tour, and Donald's insights are very much a key part of this book.

Two members of Bamberger's Legends list emerge as the featured players in this book.  One of them, as you might guess, is Arnold Palmer, and the other is Ken Venturi, whose careers managed to intertwine on the twelfth hole of the final round at the 1958 Masters.  Palmer invoked a rule that allowed him to play a second ball when he felt tat he was not granted relief from an embedded ball.  (As is often the case with the sometimes arcane Rules of Golf, the details are too lengthy to go into here, so just trust me on this.) The invocation of this rule, which was ultimately upheld by the Masters Rules officials, allowed Palmer to score a three rather than a five on the hole.  He finished ahead of Venturi by one stroke in winning his first Masters.  Venturi thought that Palmer was wrong and that he, Venturi, got jobbed by the Augusta National officials.

Palmer went on from that first Major Championship win to become, well, Arnold Palmer, and while Venturi went on to have pretty good life (multiple tour wins, a US Open win in 1964, a storied career as broadcaster on CBS, and a spot in the World Golf Hall of Fame), he never had the life that he envisioned for himself, the life that that Masters win would have brought him, and he became a pretty bitter guy over it.  Bamberger interviewed him not long before he died in 2013, and the anger and bitterness towards Palmer and the folks at Augusta National (which stems from something that happened to him at the 1956 Masters, but that is a whole 'nother story, as they say), was with him to the very end.  And that same story ultimately came up with many of the other "legends" that Bamberger encountered in gathering material for the book.  He even spoke to Venturi's first wife, and that was one of the more eye-opening parts of the book.

Another part that I found interesting was Palmer talking about "the edge" that all top level golfers have to have in order to continually succeed on the Tour.  Palmer himself says that winning a US Open was an obsession with him, and that after he won it in 1960, he was never the same. "After you win it, you have to stay aggressive, stay the way you were when you won it.  And it's difficult to do."  In other words, he had lost his "edge".  Strange when you consider that after that 1960 Open, Palmer went on the win dozens of other Tour events, including two British Opens and two more Masters.  However, he never won another Open, although he seriously contended for the Championship five more times over the years, and lost two of them in playoffs.  

In speaking about the hard to define edge, Palmer went on to say "It's so fine.  You have to get in there and you have to stay in there, and once you get out, it's very hard to get back in.  It's happened to every golfer. Hogan, Nicklaus. Every golfer. It's just a question of when."

Interestingly, when Bamberger talked to Jack Nicklaus about that 1960 Open, a tournament that Jack, then a twenty year old amateur, led for a brief point during the final round, Nicklaus said that not winning that Open was the best thing that ever happened to him. He was too young and had he won, he would have felt that his game was ready for anything, when, by not winning, he knew that it was not.  The rest of the Nicklaus Story is history.

Anyway, I would say that this book is 260 pages of must reading for any golf fan.  Really good stuff that I could write on and on about, but read it, because, trust me, Bamberger is a much better writer than I.  However, I will leave you with one more comment about Palmer, this one from the guy who may know him the best, Jack Nicklaus.  Nicklaus, who says that "Arnold is as close a friend as I've got" was making a reference about how good Palmer is in a crowd  and at golf course openings, something with which both of them have spent much of their post-playing days doing.  This is Nickalus' quote:

"I don't want to cut the ribbon or do the cocktail party. Arnold wants to cut the ribbon. He wants to do the cocktail party. We were always different that way. I'd invite Arnold to dinner, but Arnold would rather go to a party with forty people he didn't know than go to dinner with one friend. That's the difference between the two of us. I'm not criticizing Arnold. We're just different."

Terrific book.

Tiger and Rory - A Look Back and a Look Ahead

At the conclusion of last week's PGA Championship, my friend Joe Risacher made an observation on Facebook, and I am not quoting exactly, to the effect of "Is it time to start comparing Rory McIlroy to Tiger Woods and the race to catch Jack Nicklaus?"

Well, thanks to that seed planted by Joe, I decided to do a little research, and away we go....

Rory McIlroy is playing the 2014 season at the age of 25 (hereafter referred to as the "25 Year Old Season").  So far, McIlroy has accumulated 9 PGA Tour victories, and 4 Major Championships.  He also has six other professional victories world wide, for a total of 15 professional victories.  No one would dispute that this is very impressive, and he still has a chance to add to those totals in his 25 Year Old Season.

Tiger Woods 25 Year Old Season was 2001.  When that season was over, Woods had 29 PGA Tour victories, and 6 Majors.  His career totals in these categories are 79 and 14, respectively.  Woods has also added an additional 27 other wins world wide, for a total of 106 in all (I do not know how many of those twenty-seven wins were by the age of 25).

So, doing the simple arithmetic, to catch Woods over the next 13 years (Tiger is now in his 38 Year Old season), McIlroy will have to rack up another 70 PGA Tour wins and 10 Majors wins.  Because he plays much of his schedule between both the American and European Tours, and this could change, he is simply not going to win 70 more times.  As for ten more Majors in that time, well, that could happen, but would you bet on it?

And what about Nicklaus, the guy they are both chasing?  

By the end of his 25 Year Old Season, 1965, Jack had 17 Tour wins and 4 Majors.  He would go on to win 73 total tour wins and, we all know, 18 majors.  He won his last Major, the 1986 Masters, at age 46.  This was also his last Tour victory as well.

Nicklaus also went on the play a bit on the Senior Tour, but not  as  full time Geezer Golfer.  He won a total of ten senior tournaments, and eight of those were Senior Major Championships.  Jack pretty much saw that he could dominate the Seniors when and if he chose to do so, and then hung up his clubs as a serious competitive golfer.

Arbitrarily, let's say that Rory will win five more Majors over the next three seasons, not unreasonable given how he has played this summer, but no sure thing, either.  That will give him nine Majors by age 28, and at that time we can start the -can-he-catch-Jack discussions seriously.  Even then, the odds against him will be long (Exhibit One to support this statement: Tiger Woods, himself!)

And what about the all-time "standings" of Majors winners?  Take a look:

Jack Nicklaus 18
Tiger Woods 14
Walter Hagen 11
Ben Hogan, Gary Player 9
Tom Watson 8
Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer, Gene Sarazen, Sam Snead, Harry Vardon 7

(By the way, the one name on that list that all but serious golf history nerds have forgotten is Walter Hagen, and he may well have been the most interesting and most colorful guy of anyone else on the list.   Look it up if you don't believe me.)

So, even if you give McIlroy his five additional Majors as speculated above, he would be tied for fourth all time, and in some VERY exclusive company, even if he doesn't match Nicklaus and Woods.

My conclusions:

• No one is going to catch and surpass Nicklaus' 18 Majors records.
• Woods will catch and surpass the record of 82 PGA Tour wins, held by Snead, which isn't the record he wants, but will be a gold standard in and of itself.  And one of those wins might even be another Major Championship, but he is running out of time to win five more of those.
• The greatest professional golfers of all time are Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods.  I could be talked into supporting either one of them for the honor, depending on what argument you make.
• Rory McIlroy may well be in the discussion one day, but let's wait anther 3-5 years before we begin making that argument.

One final word about the guy who may well be everybody's favorite golfer, Arnold Palmer.  I don't believe that anyone would argue that Arnie was the greatest golfer of all time, but a case can be made that he was and is the most important golfer of all time (I'll bet even Jack Nicklaus would agree on that one.)  That, however, is a subject for another post.

Cue the Schmaltzy Music, It's Masters Time

Hello, Friends (as Jim Nantz would say), it is time once again for The Masters.

Before commenting on this year's event, allow me to comment on what I saw while watching the telecast of the traditional Par 3 event, held every Wednesday at Augusta National before the tournament tees off on Thursday.  All players and all past Champions are invited to play in the Par 3 event, and it is usually just a big old laugh fest, fun for fans, er, excuse me, Patrons, and players alike.  In may respects, it is the equivalent of a baseball Old Timers game, and much of the ESPN attention is focused on these said old timers, most specifically the threesome of Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player.  No one needs to be told of the greatness of this trio.  The reverence with which all golfers, from the best of the current touring pros right down to the weekend hacker, hold these three guys is understandable and unquestionably deserved.  I myself stand second to no one in my respect and admiration for these guys.

That said, I don't like watching these three guys playing now for the same reason that I don't like watching baseball old timers games.  Palmer is 82, Player is 77, and Nicklaus is 72, and they looked every bit of those years watching them play yesterday.  If you were behind this threesome on a Saturday morning at your local muni and didn't know who they were, you'd be bitching to the marshals to tell those old guys to speed it up or get off the course.  It was almost painful to watch, like watching Willie Mays with the Mets.

I have read for many, many years that Jack Nicklaus has long said that he would never allow himself to become a "ceremonial golfer", and I am betting that he hates going out there year after year and playing in the Masters Par 3.  I suppose that when Augusta calls, you do what they ask because you feel you owe it to them and to the game, but,from what I've read about Nicklaus, I am guessing that he would have rather been in his office in Palm Beach than on that par 3 course yesterday.

Hey, it's great when the Pirates bring Maz out to throw out the occasional first pitch, but I wouldn't want to see him try to go nine innings and try to hit off of Justin Verlander in 2013.  Same with these guys.  It's great to have Arnie, Jack, and Gary hit those "first drives" on Thursday morning, but they should be allowed to actually play golf on their own time these days.

Now, as for the Tournament itself, how can you not pick Tiger Woods to win?  That's my pick. Now settle back, put on your green jacket, smell the magnolias, have a pimento cheese sandwich, and enjoy A Tradition Like No Other.

Monday Musings

Thought I'd pass on this very cool picture of Andrew McCutchen's swing that appeared on the PG+ site today. I think it might appear in tomorrow's edition of the Post-Gazette. Now, on to some Monday thoughts.....

• Did I predict that a European golfer would win the Masters? I meant to say that an international golfer would win.


• Still Rory McIlroy was making my prediction look pretty good until he got to the back nine - excuse me, the Second Nine - on Sunday, which as we all know is when the Masters really begins.


• By all accounts, McIlroy is a very decent and good kid, which makes his El Foldo all the more painful. Here's hoping he can bounce back from that.


• How about that finish by winner Charl Schwartzel: 4-2-3-3. That is called grabbing opportunity by the throat and not letting it go.


• It is beginning to look like Jack Nicklaus' standard of 18 majors is not going to fall. Can't see Tiger winning five of these things from this point going forward, despite his strong showing this weekend at The Masters.


• Big news out of PNC Park was the Pittsburgh Police tasering and putting a beatdown on some drunk at Saturday's Pirates game. It is a YouTube sensation (it went viral, as the kids say), although I have not seen it. I wasn't there, I didn't see the video, and I am sure that the cops will end up as the bad guys in this, but a part of me says that no punishment is too severe for obnoxious drunks at sporting events.


• Obnoxious drunks are why I gave up my Steelers tickets eight years ago.


• An interesting observation by a caller to The Fan this morning: with beer going for $7.50 and up at PNC Park, who can afford to get so blasted at a ball game?


• Took in my first Bucco game of the '11 campaign yesterday. After overcoming a 4-0 deficit, it was a tough one to lose. Once again, those dreaded bases on balls killed the team.


• Another first of the season this morning: first round of golf for 2011. Scored a 44 at Clover Hill. For the first round of the year, that's OK, I suppose, but having to mark down a snowman on the ninth hole was most definitely NOT okay.