The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate by Dan Jenkins

Author:Dan Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Wide Open

I’m gonna be a Spaniard instead of a Mexkin as soon as I get some more money.

—LEE TREVINO, on the eve of winning the U.S. Open championship

Super Mex is what he called himself. Super Mexkin. A laughing tub of enchiladas in bright red socks with a caddy-hustler’s game from Dallas. That was Lee Trevino. Then came the cross-handed sergeant, Orville Moody, who had a name like a bowler or a dragstrip mechanic and who didn’t even have a hometown to be poor from. Just Sergeant Moody from fourteen years of Fort Hoods and Koreas. And, suddenly, there they were, implausibly and inconceivably, out there among the striped ties and gold pins, the blue coats and armbands, enhancing the tradition of the Nobody in that incorrigible old shrub-judging and weed-stomping contest known as the United States Open Golf championship. Gentlemen, play away. Mexkin, play away. Sergeant, hit it.

Here was the Open, as it is so simply known, almost seventy years old as it neared the end of the 1960’s, crammed with all the class and propriety, the crustiness and aplomb that men like Bob Jones and Ben Hogan, like Harry Vardon and Gene Sarazen, like Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, had given it. Here was the Open, exaggerated into the greatest tournament in the world, played from year to year on only the most aristocratic and brutal courses, offering a title which guaranteed a wealth and fame that no other golfing event could match. But there came these two Nobodies, this Mexkin at Oak Hill in Rochester in 1968 and then this sergeant at Champions in Houston in 1969, serving as a reminder that the Open is for all the people and that somebody must have been right a long time ago when he said that nobody wins the Open, it wins you.

Before the Mexkin and the sergeant most enthusiasts of the game thought they knew what the Open was supposed to be. Some club named Oak-something got doctored up to look like a Scottish moor, a group of men who looked like delegates to a world money conference moved onto the veranda, a flag went up and Ben Hogan won for the two dozenth time while Sam Snead lost again. Before Hogan it was always Jones. And after Hogan it was a blend of Boroses, Caspers, Middlecoffs, Nicklauses and Palmers. Somebodies.

Oh, of course, there would be these metaphysical years now and then when players with names like Lee Mackey, Bob Gajda, Bobby Brue, Rives McBee, Les Kennedy and Al Brosch would seize the first round lead or shoot a course record the second day. But they would follow up those rounds with characteristic 91’s and return to their club jobs back in Willoughby, Ohio. A couple of them had won, as Sam Parks, Jr., did in 1935 at Oakmont and as Jack Fleet did in 1955 at Olympic, but those occasions were so rare that they were written off as the natural catastrophes that occur to any lasting institution. A catastrophe every twenty years is not so bad.

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