On Par by Bill Pennington

Author:Bill Pennington [Pennington, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Lee Trevino was hitting balls into a net in the garage of his Dallas home. Sixty-four years old at the time, Trevino still did this for hours. He would do it more often but his back doesn’t allow it. Trevino was talking about the golf clubface.

“You know what is the most misunderstood thing in golf?” he asked without looking at me. “Everyone wants to talk about swing plane, hip turn, weight shift, and the X-factor.”

Trevino was swinging as he talked. He would start a sentence:

“And meanwhile, the single most important thing . . .”

At this point, he would take the club back in that inimitable outside-in loop of his and pause.

“Is the clubface . . .”

He would then complete his swing, contacting the ball in the center of the clubface. Trevino stopped to lean on his club (a favorite pose).

“But does anyone talk about the clubface?” he asked. “Don’t answer that. Because I’ll tell you. The answer is ‘No.’ The clubface is the man. You know when guys yell after a shot, ‘You da man!’? That’s who they are talking to—they’re talking to the clubface.”

Trevino was going to give a clinic the next day, and he was showing me the shots he was going to hit. He explained, then demonstrated how he was going to curve the ball left to right, then right to left, then low to high, then high and soft. He said he would hit some shots that did seemingly impossible things, like curve 40 yards and hit a single tree. He never stopped talking as he did this.

Trevino’s history is well known: a Dickensian childhood in Dallas at a home with no electricity or running water that happened to be near the seventh hole of a private golf course. He picked cotton as a child, later became a caddie, worked at a driving range, taught himself to play golf, and left school in the eighth grade.

“But I did go to college,” Trevino said. “I delivered a Christmas tree to SMU every year.”

The golf range, likened to the one in the movie Tin Cup, was converted to a Christmas tree stand every winter.

He enlisted in the Marines at seventeen, which he said toughened him for life.

“Drill instructor punched me in the face fifteen minutes after I got there,” he said. “I just got back up and stood at attention.”

He kept playing golf as a Marine, and since he was a good, betwinning partner of officers on the golf course, he got to play a lot. When he returned to civilian life, he became a club pro. With a wealth of determination, he made it to the PGA Tour in 1967 and was named Rookie of the Year. But his swing was so unorthodox people called that season a fluke. In his second year, he won the U.S. Open, the first of six major championships.

As Trevino said: “My first year on tour I told all these jokes as I walked around the golf course and people ignored me. No one laughed at all.

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