When ‘Rough Charm’ Ruled the PGA Tour

When ‘Rough Charm’ Ruled the PGA Tour

Michael Bamberger’s new book ‘Men in Green’

By John Paul Newport in the Wall Street Journal

Until roughly the mid-1980s, the PGA Tour really was a tour, not the geographically-dispersed collection of big-money events that it is today. The players and often their wives drove from event to event or hopped on chartered flights together. The competition was as intense as it is now—the eternal quest to find an edge and the agony of losing it—but Tour life was far more personal and interwoven.

In a new book, “Men in Green,” (due on April 7), author Michael Bamberger re-creates that tour through a series of surprisingly candid interviews with players, caddies, wives and others who were there. It is a world of booze-fueled friendships and feuds, of deep bonds and annoyances, of hurts that still fester and memories that still glow. Braiding it all together is the power and addiction of golf. “There were three of us in that marriage,” Polly Crenshaw,Ben Crenshaw’s wife in the 1970s, told Bamberger. “Ben, me, and Ben’s golf. It was like his mistress.”

“Most of the people I talked to were at a point in their lives, I believe, where they wanted to be written about honestly,” Bamberger told me this week about the 18 “living legends,” some famous and some not, whom he set out to interview. Some of the conversations have what he calls “a certain what-the-hell quality.”

His first visit, to Arnold Palmer at his home in Latrobe, Penn., sets the tone. The enduring glamor of Palmer, now in his 80s, always comes as a surprise when you meet him, Bamberger writes: “His old Pennzoil ads and snapshots from his Augusta heyday and assorted other mental snapshots all converge at once.”

In unvarnished language, Palmer told Bamberger about his whirlwind courtship of 19-year-old Winnie Walzer in 1954, including the woman (“and she was a good-looking broad”) he left behind. He talked about their first year on Tour together, towing a trailer, and how his storied victory at the 1960 U.S. Open, over Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus, probably caused him to lose his edge.

 “If I hadn’t won that U.S. Open at Cherry Hills, I could have won at least four other U.S. Opens. I really believe that,” Palmer said. “Winning that first U.S. Open was an obsession… Then, after you win it, you have to stay aggressive, stay the way you were when you want it. And it’s difficult to do.”

Later, Nicklaus told Bamberger almost the same thing, in reverse. “I say the best thing that ever happened to me was not winning the U.S. Open in 1960. Because if I had won that Open, I would have been too smug or too self-confident,” he said.

The most complexly drawn legend in Bamberger’s book is Ken Venturi, the 1964 U.S. Open champ, longtime CBS commentator and pal of Frank Sinatra. Venturi died in 2013, a few months after impressing Bamberger with his warmth and charisma in a swank Italian restaurant in Palm Springs, Calif. But in Bamberger’s follow-up reporting, several of Venturi’s stories didn’t hold up. A minor contretemps with Curtis Strange that Venturi took pride in never occurred, according to Strange. Venturi’s former wife, Conni, whom Bamberger tracked down living in a manufactured home in Napa, Calif., contradicted several others. One was Venturi’s fond anecdote that Carol Channing, performing in “Hello, Dolly!” on Broadway, changed the lyrics to “Hello, Kenny” when they were in the audience the week after Venturi won the U.S. Open.

Most poignant is Venturi’s conflicted relationship with Palmer and Augusta National, where Venturi worked the CBS tower during Masters coverage for more than 30 years. Bamberger contends that Venturi, who didn’t win a Masters, never got over his jealousy of Palmer for winning four times, twice in close calls over Venturi. [Palmer] stole the life that should have been Ken’s. And Ken was not going to forgive him for that. Not ever,” he writes.

Bamberger doesn’t flinch at portraying the Tour’s earthier aspects. Drugs, sex and alcohol, although not sensationalized, take their appropriate place in his narrative. But the book is overwhelmingly a love song. He is a fan of the modern Tour—“It’s super athletic and the play is exciting, especially what the players can do off the tee,” he told me—but finds the version he grew up with more romantic. “What’s been lost is a rough kind of charm. Charm itself can be cloying, and rough itself can be tiresome. But rough charm, which the old NFL had, and old baseball had, and old golf had, that to me is extremely appealing. And of course what came out of this rough charm is wild personality, wildly different personalities,” he said.

Unexpected details are a frequent pleasure. The old-style leather golf shoes which, after wet rounds, could weigh six pounds. The sudden quiet that enveloped champions back in their hotel rooms after the hoopla of winning a major was over. The mystical communication that could develop between player and caddie, as between Raymond Floyd and Dolphus “Golf Ball” Hull, both of whom Bamberger talked to. “For every time he was wrong about what club to pull, I was wrong 10 times,” Floyd said about Hull. “He had an extra sense. A perception.”

Above all, what comes through is the sense of the Tour back then as an extended family, sometimes dysfunctional but never dull. Floyd bailed out Hull when he was up against it, and Hull helped other caddies when he was able. The whole enterprise, Bamberger said, was quintessentially American. “They’re offering a purse. You’re on the road, getting what you can out of it, and living large.”