Men in Green by Michael Bamberger

Author:Michael Bamberger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Sometime after visiting Golf Ball in that nursing home I had a moment of clarity. The spine of the tour experience has always been the game and its challenges, which are exacerbated when playing for cash prizes and trophies. Right alongside all that is the call of the road, crisscrossing a country so great in girth and diversity that it can support hundreds of Holiday Inns, each one somehow unique. But our philosopher in Jackson was showing us, in the example of his life, that none of it would mean much of anything if you were doing it alone. In the end, I think what Golf Ball was really doing, in that visit Mike and I had with him, was making a serious nod to the institution of marriage, tour-style. And when I say marriage, I mean a committed relationship between two people in which each person, motivated by love, tries to improve the other person’s life on an ongoing basis. I know, I know: very idealistic.

How sex figures into the whole gestalt of tour life, I don’t know. It’s there because it must be. Whenever you have winners and losers—in sports, in the arts, in business, in politics—isn’t an undercurrent of the whole thing that the winners enjoy more and better sex? The reason Tiger Woods was so effective selling Buicks for years is because he was playing against type. Here was an incredibly successful athlete—a light-skinned black man with a welterweight’s body playing Bobby Jones’s old game—who could be using his exalted status to get anything he wanted. And all he wanted was to drive a brand of safe, sexless family cars.

My writing hero, Roger Angell, revisiting his life at age ninety-three in a New Yorker essay called “This Old Man,” unearthed this gem from Laurence Olivier: “Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.” Well, the golf tour will keep you young like little else, and careers on it can endure for decades. (Then you hit fifty and start all over again.) The Ponte Vedra promotional department tried its best to paper over man’s baser instincts with a painfully bland marketing line: These guys are good. The truth is that the PGA Tour is closer to the NBA than any of us would realize. In other words, loud music, various drugs, sex in all the usual forms: straight and gay, consensual and forced, committed and casual, purchased and proffered, consummated and unconsummated. Golf requires restraint, and for some players its discipline will show up in their sex lives, one way or the other.

I’m not going crazy with this whole carnal theme, and you shouldn’t, either. When Ball said to Raymond, “You and me is married now,” that was a comment devoid of sexual innuendo. Ball was expressing friendship, happiness, security, love. Mike and I both felt what made our visit with Golf Ball such a rich experience was the reservoir of appreciation he showed for the life he had lived and what it had given him. He loved

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