Unplayable Lies: (The Only Golf Book You'll Ever Need) Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY DAN JENKINS

  His Ownself: A Semi-Memoir

  Jenkins at the Majors

  The Franchise Babe

  Slim and None

  The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist

  Rude Behavior

  I’ll Tell You One Thing

  You Gotta Play Hurt

  Fairways and Greens

  Bubba Talks

  Life Its Ownself

  You Call It Sports, But I Say It’s a Jungle Out There

  Fast Copy

  Baja Oklahoma

  Limo (with Bud Shrake)

  Dead Solid Perfect

  Semi-Tough

  Saturday’s America

  The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate

  The Best 18 Golf Holes in America

  Copyright © 2015 by D & J Ventures, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor

  Jacket images: (trap) Andrea Crisante / Shutterstock; (golf ball) Dan Thornberg / Shutterstock

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jenkins, Dan.

  Unplayable lies / [by Dan Jenkins] — First Edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-53975-3 (hardcover) —

  ISBN 978-0-385-53976-0 (eBook)

  1. Golf—Anecdotes. I. Title.

  GV967.J43 2015

  796.352—dc23 2014020086

  v3.1

  For Jerry Tarde and Mike O’Malley, good bosses, skillful editors, better friends

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  FOREWORD: ANOTHER SIDE OF DAD, by Sally Jenkins

  INTRODUCTION: WHY COLLECT ME

  AMERICA’S GIFT TO GOLF

  IS YOUR COUNTRY CLUB OLD MONEY OR NEW MONEY?

  BEN, JACK, AND TIGER

  PC OVERDOSE

  LORD BYRON

  TITANIC AND I

  THE NEW CLUB PRESIDENT

  MEMBER GUESTS

  FEUDS

  A MOVIE GAME YOU CAN’T REFUSE

  THEY DID IT FOR THE ALAMO

  THE SPEECH

  THEY SAID IT

  THIS OTHER GUY SAID IT

  ATTACK OF THE SNIPPETS

  SENIOR GOLF

  TRUE FICTION

  THE NEXT BIG THING

  DESTINATIONS

  “MATCH OF THE CENTURY”

  THE GREATEST ROUNDS

  GREATEST MOMENTS

  TOP GURU

  A CURE FOR BETRAYALS

  LETTER OF RESIGNATION

  SO LONG, PARD

  THIEVES

  THE PERFECT CLUB

  CELEBRITIES

  THE MERCHANDISE SHOW

  THE NEW WORLD TOUR

  JUNIOR GOLF

  Q-AND-A WITH SERGIO

  MASTERS MEMORIES

  U.S. OPEN MEMORIES

  BRITISH OPEN MEMORIES

  PGA MEMORIES

  THINNING THE HERD

  LITERATURE MEETS GOLF, OR TRUE FICTION RIDES AGAIN

  TALKING HEADS

  Permissions

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  ANOTHER SIDE OF DAD

  By Sally Jenkins

  My father is, sadly, a fraud. There is the public account of him, and then there is my private one, and the two don’t agree at all. For instance, there is the Dan Jenkins who pretends he’d rather burn small children with cigarettes than pat them on the head, and there is the adoring, lenient father I know. There is the guy whose no-holds-barred wit can force a sharp intake of breath, and there is the husband who has been devotedly married for, at this writing, fifty-five years. There is the cavalier veranda lounger who never seemed to take a note, and there is the writer I’ve witnessed at home who works with unswerving concentration.

  My brothers and I might be the only people, apart from my mother, who know him for the suave faker he really is. At some point your childhood becomes your own property, and you see it for what it was. When you were a child, it belonged to your parents, and they cast it in their own terms.

  “You’re having a happy childhood,” my father told me.

  “I am?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  It was a nightly ritual as we were growing up in Manhattan for him to sit with me and my brothers and share our supper before he and my mother went out for the evening. On Monday nights we ate franks and beans and they went to P.J. Clarke’s. On Tuesday nights we had fish sticks and they went to Elaine’s. Yet somehow my father, despite reinventing forms of journalism, writing best sellers in alarmingly casual-seeming fashion, and working on his reputation for enjoying the smartening effects of young scotches, managed to provide us with a childhood that was, in fact, happy and healthy. How did he accomplish this? One of his methods was a deceptive sobriety, another was a veiled attentiveness to his family, and yet another was a sly conscientiousness at his work.

  The dinner hour was always ours. My parents would sit at the kitchen table with their three children, and their three tall glasses of milk. My father would talk to us about the world in general while he stole bites of our food, if it was brown and white.

  “Daddy?” I said one evening.

  “Yes?”

  “I learned a joke today.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that. Tell it.”

  “What’s green and lives in the sea?”

  “What?”

  “Moby Pickle.”

  He began giggling helplessly, and couldn’t stop for the next three minutes, while all around him, three urchins in pajamas capsized their milk with delight.

  The rest of the world has its view of my father, and I have mine. It’s impossible for me to read his work with professional detachment, because for every Masters or U.S. Open story, there was a family summer. The combined quality and volume of his writing on golf—and scads of other subjects—is all the more impressive to me in light of the fact that he managed to produce it while mustering private-school tuitions, attending school sports events, writing checks to orthodontists, and lifting family luggage. All of which he made seem effortless.

  His fathering style was not much different from his writing style, which is to say, excellence disguised as offhandedness.

  Some of the stories represent absences, but not as many as you would think. He managed to be, despite his globetrotting, a vividly present father. He often took us with him; we scampered with impunity through pressrooms, and carried hot coffee to him on deadlines. While others might have found him acerbic, we only found him gently or hysterically funny. While his readers might be amazed to discover he had children, his children were amazed to discover he had readers.

  Which is the real Dan Jenkins and which is the cunning veneer? I’ll step aside and let someone else answer the question.

  “Do you understand,” my mother once said, “how hard your father works?”

  The answer was no, at the time I didn’t. It’s only as an adult and a colleague that I’ve come to understand. Small things, details, return to me and make sense now. The curious fact that, though he was rep
uted to like his cocktails, I never once saw him drink at home. I recall the steady metallic sound of a typewriter as I went to sleep, and the sound of it again in the morning.

  He comes from a generation of writers who adopted a demeanor of perpetual nonchalance, a cigarette smoldering at the elbow. He never talked much about writing. He never said, “Don’t be a writer, you’ll sentence yourself to a lifetime of excruciating self-doubt and criticism.” He never said, “It’s ditch-digging; it’s trying to break rocks with a shovel.”

  He did say this: “Your dad loves his work. But I try to not let it harm the product.”

  As an adult, I reread the old work and look at the new, and what I see is a constant stripping away of pretense, and of the profligate excesses of feeling that surround golf, as they do other sports, to find the truth underneath. I see an unwavering effort to make sound judgments about what’s humorous and what’s not, what’s poignant and what’s not, and what’s worthy and what’s not.

  Look at the writing in the pieces of this collection and ask yourself if it could have been as effortless to write as it is to read. Peruse the easy rhythms and the jauntiness of phrasing, and yet the unfailing truthfulness and nail-on-the-head precision in each description.

  As a writer, I drew three lessons from him: the absoluteness of his concentration, the contrariness of his thinking, and the depth of his respect for good writing. All of which can only be called integrity.

  “Learn your craft,” he told me. “And never let a piece go until it’s as good as you can make it—on deadline, of course.”

  So I do something others don’t when it comes to my father. I take him seriously. God knows, somebody has to.

  INTRODUCTION

  WHY COLLECT ME

  I’ve always wanted to do something for the golfer who has everything. I thought about a suede golf cart or maybe a pair of cashmere FootJoys. Then I settled on writing this book.

  It’s less expensive than the green fees at most public courses. It hits hard at the truth of the sport, but hopefully with a glint. I took on the subject because I was once a scratch golfer as a collegiate competitor, and for a while afterward. But even in high school I’d learned what it was like to play the game for my own money. Plus, I’ve covered the sport for over sixty years now.

  Half of this collection consists of original material written exclusively for this book. The other half is drawn from past magazine articles. All of it, of course, is literally throbbing with opinion. I hope the words will shine brighter than I did in the amateur tournaments I could have won but didn’t, which had something to do with a higher power taking days off at my expense.

  I am grateful to Golf Digest for allowing me to reproduce the pieces in here that have appeared in its pages over time. They have all been reworded, reshaped, updated, trimmed, lengthened, or tweaked in some way. That’s the luxury of doing a collection.

  Obviously I wish to thank my talented daughter for her lavish Foreword. In her own career she is a prize-winning sports columnist for the Washington Post and a bestselling author. She has a taste for fine red wine. To show my appreciation, I’ll order her a $100 bottle the next time we dine together, but she’ll probably grab the check before I can get to it. Another thing she’s learned.

  —D. J.

  AMERICA’S GIFT TO GOLF

  IT’S EASY ENOUGH to blame America for the six-hour round, the infernal plumb-bob, the blimp-size driver, the island green, and “Get in the hole!”—son of “You da man!”—but ask yourself this: What would the game be like without the gimme, the mulligan, improving the lie, and a chili dog at the turn?

  There are, of course, purists among us who eat grated persimmon for breakfast and would take us back to the square-dimple ball, the rut iron, the stymie, no sprinkler systems, and play it down everywhere, even during appendicitis attacks.

  Here’s the thing: America has been very good for golf, even though we may have overcooked the game, which is to say overadvanced it, and maybe overcorrected what we’ve overcooked.

  If America hadn’t become interested in the game, we might still be swinging at the ball in tweed coats, neckties, and plus-fours, and talking like Lord Crawley, the Earl of Grantham.

  But do we really need a golf ball today that can puncture the side of a 68.7-ton Abrams tank when hit by an anemic fourteen-year-old girl? This is the same golf ball that can be launched from London in a high slice, correct itself over Paris, and land safely in Milan.

  Which begs another question: Do we really need a 900-yard par-5 hole in our lives? The only person who might is the real estate developer who will surround it with town houses on roads named for famous courses he has never seen and therefore misspells … Interlacking Drive … Baltusroof Avenue … Bel-Ear Circle.

  America didn’t originate the gated community—I think you have to give that to Buckingham Palace—but we popularized it and contributed the windshield decal.

  The golf community should be grateful for America’s invention of central air-conditioning. Without it, whole sections of the world might never have been heard of, like Florida and South Carolina.

  It was fine with me if a man named Stimp wanted to invent a meter. His name was actually Edward Stimpson. Lived up in Massachusetts. But I could have saved him the trouble by pointing out that putts are faster going downhill and slower going uphill, and everything in between is guesswork.

  You may not know that America invented the wooden tee. Dr. William Lowell of South Orange, New Jersey, evidently a hypochondriac, was concerned about chapping his skin from forming tees out of wet sand or dirt—the preferred method dating back to Mungo Park at Musselburgh, if not before.

  One day while dwelling on the dangers of sand and dirt, Dr. Lowell began whittling wooden tees out of a leg on his dining room table. He whittled them down to two inches long. Thus came the Reddy Tee, which was happily painted red by his neighbor, a fan of Cézanne, and began to be marketed in 1922.

  America gave us the Tour, as you know. Once there were only the Big Ones. The U.S. Open, British Open, Western Open, North-South Open, PGA, Metropolitan Open, U.S. Amateur, and British Amateur. There were more majors than you could shake a Grand Slam at. But we added things like the Texas Open, Catalina Open, Los Angeles Open, and Miami-Biltmore Four Ball, the first corporate event.

  The Four Ball was dreamed up to promote the Miami-Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, which may have become best known for its Al Capone Suite.

  America gave us Ben Hogan, too, don’t forget. Then Ben Hogan gave us practice.

  What was the first corporate logo on the Tour? I know exactly what it was. I was there. The Amana hat.

  We of the press in the 1960s were compelled to divide competitors on the Tour into two categories. One category consisted of Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, and two or three others. Everybody else was an Amana hat.

  Amana was this appliance company in Newton, Iowa, a division of Maytag. Suddenly, some pros were wooed into wearing the Amana hat on the Tour for $50 a week. Julius Boros, I think, may have been the first to wear it, but he was hastily followed by Miller Barber, Dave Stockton, Lon Hinkle, Lou Graham, and several others known simply in pressrooms as “the Amana hats.”

  Today, as you may have observed, a Tour pro’s shirt is covered with so many logos, he’s in danger of being mistaken for a corridor in a shopping mall.

  Research tells us that a man in Edinburgh, Scotland, named William Currie Jr. received a British patent for a metal wood back in the day of gutta-percha golf balls. He had designed a driver with a heavy brass clubhead. It never caught on. The trouble was, it worked better as a doorstop.

  It’s safe to say that the first workable metal wood came from the brain of Gary Adams at TaylorMade. It was a twelve-degree driver of cast stainless steel with a head about the size of a seven-wood. It made its debut at the PGA Merchandise Show in 1979.

  One wonders what might have happened to this weird invention if it hadn’t provided aid and comfort to Cu
rtis Strange when he went about winning the U.S. Open in 1988 at The Country Club in Boston.

  Before there was a steel clubhead there was a steel shaft. Rules makers in America approved the steel shaft in 1924. Macdonald Smith and some others of the period fiddled with it, but it didn’t catch on until Billy Burke won the 1931 U.S. Open at Inverness in Toledo using steel shafts.

  A man has to remind himself that Bobby Jones won all his majors and the Grand Slam swinging hickory, and without the modern sand wedge that Gene Sarazen invented in 1932.

  You can thank America for the fact that you don’t have so many clubs in the bag, it plants your caddie into the ground like a potato. It was our USGA that put the fourteen-club limit into effect in 1938 after a two-year argument that was called a discussion. At the time there were caddies lugging more than thirty clubs in a golfer’s bag. It happens that Harry Cooper’s bag contained twenty-six clubs when he won the Western Open in 1934.

  We have been given the credit for numbering clubs. Prior to this, irons were known as a niblick, mashie, spade-mashie, mashie-niblick, mid-mashie-niblick, and something similar to a mid-mashie-niblick-scooper-lifter.

  For better or worse, there are many other things America has contributed to the game. Just off the top of my Hogan cap, I can think of the $2 Nassau, the gangsome, cartpaths, square grooves, Softspikes, Tour caddies, Tour gurus, courtesy cars, hospitality tents, Babe and the LPGA, college golf, autograph hounds, the $500 green fee, the handicap thief, seven hundred ways to cure the slice, and the Tour Wife, which comes in two flavors today: blond and naturally blond.

  Of course there will always be things to criticize about our contributions, but we’ll do the criticizing, thank you. In fact, I’ll start. For example, take the sports agent. Please.

  IS YOUR COUNTRY CLUB OLD MONEY OR NEW MONEY?

  AS SOMEONE WHO comes from money—I was born with a silver brassie in my golf bag—it’s no problem for me to tell you whether a country club is Old Money or New Money.

  In fact, I’m often asked to explain the difference. The people who ask are usually public-course hackers I stop to chat with when I find them standing by the side of the road staring at the overheating radiators in their old Plymouths.