Longevity has no particular value, its currency was instead obtained from the memories collected along the way. We don’t remember the days, once wrote a poet, we remember the moments.
Of those chosen for 51 years in the sports world, most have less to do with the results of baseball games, championship fights, golf tournaments or other sporting events – however historic or epic – than with peripheral encounters.
Play recreational golf with Tiger Woods, for example. With Kevin Costner. With Dinah Shore in a pro-am, a scramble, group hugs after each bird. With one of the Just Brothers, who later sent a handwritten note, he signed: “Rightly, Bobby Hatfield.”
Hitting tennis balls with Arthur Ashe (“catch him on the first rebound,” he said, warning me). The meeting, the day after the 1988 Olympics, was a young South Korean orphan girl that my wife and I sponsored via Compassion International, a significantly more memorable moment than Ben Johnson’s failed drug test.
Muhammad Ali, always the showman, eager to show me how he manages to levitate, actually an ingenious game of prestige, in a warehouse of a department store where he was promoting a Cologne line, “the precursor, without a doubt, to soap-on -a-rope-a-dope, ”I wrote in a column for the Orange County registry.
Rat Pack member Joey Bishop, a member of the ledger and passionate boxing fan, telephones on Monday following league fights to review them. We once discussed a book project. Abstemious, Bishop already had the title: I was a rat in the Rat package. He never wrote the book. Her stories about Sinatra alone would sell her.
Get to know Vin Scully; play tennis with Anne Koufax, Fran Cey and other wives on spring training mornings in Dodgertown; sharing a couple of scotches with Dusty Baker on the back of the Dodgers plane as he listened to him explaining the impact Henry Aaron had on him.
Perhaps the best thing, for a child who grows up reading his columns in the Los Angeles Times, calling Jim Murray a friend.
I knew how to calculate batting averages on a slide rule when I was 10, so I no longer need a calculator to understand that 51 years equals more than half a century. Or that 51 is enough. A year ago, I decided to retire, and today is my last day (although sometimes I will continue to introduce myself on GolfDigest.com).
My first entries from the game involved an embarrassing step. For a short time in the summer of 1968, I fell at the Hacienda Golf Club in La Habra Heights, California. The caddy concert was a moonlight job, albeit in daylight. I was hired in the late afternoon / evening as a waiter in a nearby restaurant.
One morning I was assigned a loop in a tournament, the bag of the son of the great character actor Richard Jaeckel, one of the dozen of the acclaimed war films, “The Dirty Dozen”. Barry Jaeckel, I quickly learned, had just won the Southern California Amateur (and would eventually have won the PGA Tour and the European Tour). Unbeknownst to us until after our 18 holes together, it was a 36 hole affair and I had tables for the bus that afternoon.
I shyly explained that I had to leave. I preferred to sneak away even without getting paid. Jaeckel paid me well to his credit. Since I was making $ 1.40 an hour as a waiter, it would have been more profitable if I had worked on the second 18.
Several months later, still a high school student attended by a teacher who cared (thank you, Don Chapman), I found my way into journalism, to the extent that the collection of preparations for the Whittier Daily News qualifies as journalism.
The first golf course I covered was the 1976 USA Amateur at the Bel-Air Country Club, for the Los Angeles Times. It was more memorable for his reigning champion than for his champion: Fred Ridley, now president of Augusta National, who defeated Bill Sander, no disrespect for the latter.
In 1985, one of my first tournaments for the register was the Uniden LPGA Invitational, the reigning champion Nancy Lopez. To move forward, I arranged a telephone interview with Lopez, who was exceptionally friendly, as advertised. At the end of our conversation, he signed saying “Thanks, Jack.”
I was coming out for six seasons at baseball, where I had been called a lot worse (looking at you, Tommy Lasorda), so I didn’t think about it. I was out when Lopez called back, leaving an apologetic message for calling me Jack. Immediately, she became my all time favorite player.
In the meantime, it was my luck that in a small house in our circulation area, a prodigy was growing. I started to take serious care of Tiger Woods when he was 14 years old and for the next six years and more I enjoyed a front row seat, and sometimes a seat in the living room, until the evolution of one of the most dominant athletes in the history of sport .
Tiger’s parents, Kultida and Earl, have been extremely kind, and have even invited my wife and me to dinner once. Earl, with whom I have played golf on several occasions, has reliably helped me fill my weekly golf column. Kultida often called only to chat or phone with a scoop, as she did when the NCAA briefly suspended Tiger, then a second year at Stanford, for allowing Arnold Palmer to pay for his dinner when the king was playing a senior event at Napa.
I can’t say what the pursuit of perfection is, although some seasons looking at Rod Carew in a batting cage must have been close. I remembered that thought that reminded me of visits to the Woods home to interview Tiger in advance about an American amateur, a US Open or a master. When we were done, I usually went around talking to Earl outside, and I could hear Tiger hitting chip shots in a trophy-filled living room, some of which were made of crystal and covered the carpet. As far as I know, he never broke one.
In December 1995, a day after his return from Stanford after the finals, we played golf together at the Coto de Caza, together with Earl and Coto’s pro boss Mike Mitzel. What struck me in this round was that Tiger hadn’t hit a ball in the previous two weeks because of the finals, and that it was a recreational round with a helicopter (me), yet he took every shot seriously, even personally, showing flashes of anger for the poor. Perhaps Rembrandt also smoked with a wandering brush, although he could paint on his.
Three months later, I introduced Tiger to Costner. The backstage involves my brother David, a well-known sports journalist and outdoor writer, who was a friend of Costner’s since the days when they were brothers of the Delta Chi brotherhood in Cal State Fullerton. They often went fishing together and, in 1994, when Dave was headed to Atlanta to cover the Super Bowl, Costner was also going and invited Dave to fly there with him on his private jet.
One day Dave called and asked if I would like to play golf with Costner, him and our colleague Rod Millie, and if I had any connection to install it. This was post “Dances With Wolves” (albeit a couple of years before “Tin Cup”), when Costner’s celebrity was exploding. We preferred a private course to spare Costner the confusion that his appearance might cause. I made a phone call and they took us to the Sherwood Country Club in Westlake Village.
Costner was new to golf, although at the beginning of the round he had made a long hole. “Local knowledge,” he said. The man who starred in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” apparently Costner was aware of the fact that two first Robin Hood films had been shot where the course was built, from which the club was named after the Forest of Sherwood.
In late March 1996, I drove to the North Ranch Country Club in Westlake Village, where Stanford was competing in the Southwestern Intercollegiate. I was there to talk to Tiger about the Masters, his summer plans and if those plans included turning professional. I was pretty sure they did, even if he refused to give up.
We were sitting on a sidewalk near the putting green when I saw Costner approaching. He was there to watch USC golfer Brian Hull, whose mother worked for him. I stopped Costner to say goodbye, chatted for a few minutes, then introduced him to Tiger and they briefly talked.
“Skinny friend,” Tiger said when Costner left.
Less than a year later, they were partners in the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. Perhaps they would have found each other, given their growing popularity in their respective arenas, but I will deal with the introduction assistance.
The point of it all is that I was blessed, a shy boy with more ambition than talent, grateful for the rush of a life that followed. I will conclude with this, from the extraordinary German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who said it better than I could.
“In ordinary life,” he wrote, “we hardly realize that we receive much more than what we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”
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