{"id":9712,"date":"2024-07-18T12:15:40","date_gmt":"2024-07-18T18:15:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theaposition.com\/tombedell\/?p=9712"},"modified":"2024-12-24T23:38:31","modified_gmt":"2024-12-25T05:38:31","slug":"different-ways-around-the-course","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tombedell\/golf\/personalities\/9712\/different-ways-around-the-course","title":{"rendered":"Different Ways Around the Course"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"playing-from-the-rough-9781668005972_lg\"<\/a>When he retired from a high-powered three decade-plus career with ExxonMobil as engineer and executive at the age of 58, Jimmie James knew he\u2019d need some kind of challenge to keep his active mind sane. As he details in Playing From the Rough<\/em> (Simon & Schuster, $28.99), his wife inadvertently supplied it when she managed to arrange a round of golf for him at Augusta National.<\/p>\n

With that rarefied tee time in hand, Jones began putting his engineering skills to work in plotting a scheme to play all of the courses on Golf Digest<\/em>\u2019s Top 100 list. Not a new idea, perhaps, but James set himself some additional goals\u2014to accomplish the feat in a year\u2019s time and, as far as possible, relying strictly on invitations to the mostly private courses, rather than making direct requests. A plan he acknowledges could have been complicated by his being a Black man.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal was not just to play all of the courses but to see if strangers would voluntarily help me. I wanted to see if America could still be a place that was generous enough, enthused enough, and willing enough to help a stranger achieve his dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since he lets us know in the early pages, there\u2019s no need of a spoiler alert to say that he succeeds, \u201cwithout a day to spare. I flew 73,284 miles, drove another 17,472, and spent eighty-two nights in hotels or other people\u2019s homes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks to his globe-trotting career, James had the resources and travel reward points to pull off what he admits is a \u201cfrivolous odyssey,\u201d his \u201cpanoply of privilege.\u201d But he clearly also needed the personality to pull it off, one he forged in his youth, which was beset by terrible poverty, a drunken and violent stepfather, yet fortified by a steadfast mother.<\/p>\n

So the narrative doesn\u2019t read like a mere lark. As he goes from course to course in the book James flashes back to his difficult childhood in east Texas, but shows how his clear-eyed view of it turned him into a goal-setter with ambitions he began ticking off as accomplishments\u2014first in his family to finish high school, first to go to college\u2026.<\/p>\n

It surely helped, too, that James had a decent game\u2014the entire trip took him 8,797 strokes on courses that were far from pushovers. He may relate a few too many of those strokes in the course of the book, but the pleasure comes from the company he winds up keeping. As he succinctly puts it: \u201cGolf is a solitary sport best played with as many people as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

<<<>>><\/p>\n

\"Legendary+Caddies_cover\"<\/a>Until 1975, when Lee Elder broke the color line at the Masters, all the players were white and all the caddies were Black. And say what you will about Augusta National\u2019s racial history, the caddies took little umbrage; many came from the largely Black Augusta neighborhood of Sand Hills, and they saw caddying as a chance to step up in life.<\/p>\n

The frequent path was to begin caddying at the Augusta Country Club and then graduating, so to speak, to the adjacent Augusta National, and if lucky snagging the bag of a Masters player when the tournament rolled around in April.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a little hard to believe that it\u2019s been 41 years since it all changed\u2014when in 1983 the tour pros were finally allowed to bring their regular caddies to the Masters. Thereafter, only Carl Jackson emerged from the former caddie ranks to loop for a Masters winner\u2014Ben Crenshaw, in 1984 and 1995.<\/p>\n

In The Legendary Caddies of Augusta National<\/em> (Blair, $19.95) Ward Clayton revisits the subject of his 2004 book, Men on the Bag: The Caddies of Augusta National<\/em>, in what is essentially a revision and an update. The update is poignant, as most of the Black caddies have now passed on.<\/p>\n

Clayton was also one of the producers of the 2019 documentary film \u201cLoopers: The Caddie\u2019s Long Walk\u201d (reviewed here<\/a>) which had a lot of Augusta material in it as well, so he knows the territory, and he\u2019s stocked the book with a ton of great stories about the caddies and the players they looped for.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s Jackson and Crenshaw to be sure, with the emotional finish to the 1995 Masters, scant days after Crenshaw had been a pallbearer at his mentor Harvey Penick\u2019s funeral. But there\u2019s Stovepipe (last name uncertain), who wore a top hat while caddying for Gene Sarazen during the latter\u2019s double eagle at the second Masters.<\/p>\n

\"Carl<\/a>

Carl Jackson on the bag<\/p><\/div>\n

There\u2019s Iron Man Avery (Nathaniel), who caddied for all four of Arnold Palmer\u2019s Master victories; Willie (Pete) Peterson, on the bag for five of the six Jack Nicklaus wins, tying him with Willie \u201cPappy\u201d Stokes for the most caddie wins, though Pappy\u2019s were with four different players (two with Ben Hogan).<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s Dead Man Willie Perteet, so nicknamed because he was once attacked and stabbed by a former girlfriend and some of her friends and left for dead. He was actually assumed dead and as he put it, \u201cThey took me to a room in the morgue\u2026 [a] few minutes before the inquest I suddenly rose up, and that orderly ain\u2019t been seen \u2018round town since.\u201d<\/p>\n

President Dwight Eisenhower changed his nickname to Cemetery, and that\u2019s the way it remained as long as Perteet remained Ike\u2019s caddie at Augusta, from 1948 to 1957.<\/p>\n

<<<>>><\/p>\n

\"Life<\/a>I\u2019ve played golf in several countries with Ann Ligouri, and we often joke that she once took an elective golf class from my brother-in-law during her undergrad days at the University of South Florida. Since then Ann has gone on to a sterling career in sports broadcasting. Nonetheless, I will gently chide her the next time we meet for her overuse of the exclamation point.<\/p>\n

Beyond that, there\u2019s little to criticize in Life on the Green<\/em> (Hatherleigh Press, $18), a collection of twelve interviews she conducted with a dozen inarguable greats of the game: Padraig Harrington, Tom Watson, Jan Stephenson, Amy Alcott, Nicklaus, Gary Player, Dottie Pepper, Renee Powell, Crenshaw, Annika Sorenstam, Nancy Lopez and Bernhard Langer.<\/p>\n

The subtitle of the book is \u201cLessons and Wisdom from Legends of Golf,\u201d but these are life lessons, not playing lessons. Some of this gets a little platitudinous (Nicklaus seems particularly windy in this regard). There are undoubtedly lessons and parallels between golf and life, but golfers, no matter how legendary, aren\u2019t philosophers. So there are only so many ways one can highlight the need for patience, goal-setting, trust, faith and positivity. Renee Powell may have the most powerful chapter in the book, since she had to battle chauvinism and racism, as only the second Black women to join the LPGA (Althea Gibson was the first).<\/p>\n

But when the players get down to some specific anecdotal material about actual tournaments or Ryder Cup or Solheim Cup matches, things take off. Nicklaus somewhat redeems himself here, but Watson is even better in talking about his rivalry with Nicklaus, about the Turnberry \u201cDuel in the Sun\u201d of 1977 or the near miss in the 2009 Open Championship that Watson almost won at age 59, again at Turnberry,<\/p>\n

\"2024<\/a>Crenshaw talks more about that poignant 1995 Masters (and Carl Jackson) and the amazing comeback at Brookline at the 1999 Ryder Cup. Harrington has an unusual take on how, \u201cI perform my best with fear. When my back is to the wall, I am great in that situation. I struggle the most when I\u2019m confident.\u201d<\/p>\n

And reading Bernhard Langer on his battles with the yips should be enough to instill fear in any golfer. Harrington should feast on this chapter.<\/p>\n

This piece originally appeared in the June-July 2024 issue of <\/a><\/em>Golf Oklahoma<\/a>, in somewhat different form.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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