Golf's Life Lessons by Richard Allen

Golf's Life Lessons by Richard Allen

Author:Richard Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510740723
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2019-05-14T16:00:00+00:00


Tenacity

Victory is everything. You can spend the money, but you can never spend the memories.

KEN VENTURI, COLONIAL NATIONAL INVITATION, CBS-TV, 1983

Mr Ken, I don’t mind telling you, but when you picked my name out of the hat, I wasn’t too pleased. I wanted to get one of the favorites, but I want to tell you something. You’re the damndest golfer I ever saw in my life.

CADDIE WILLIAM WARD TO KEN VENTURI AFTER THE 1964 U.S. OPEN

The 1964 U.S. Open was held in a cauldron of heat at the Congressional Country Club in Washington, DC. The temperature was over 100 degrees, the humidity was stultifying, and the air was so still it shimmered. On top of all that, Congressional was the longest course ever selected in the tournament’s 69 years.

American Ken Venturi didn’t go into the tournament with high hopes. Two years earlier, he had pinched a nerve in his back, which almost paralyzed the right side of his body. His golf game suffered terribly, and he had found himself in the doldrums for three years, racked by self-doubt. By 1964, he was 94th on the money list and practically broke. He had resorted to asking friends for sponsor exemptions to tournaments—even the shirt company that sponsored him had decided its money was better spent elsewhere.

This was all a far cry from Venturi’s early golf career, when he’d been a whisker away from winning The Masters, not once but three times—in 1956 (as an amateur, he came in second by a shot after leading by four going into the final round), 1958 (tied for fourth), and 1960 (second by a shot after Arnold Palmer birdied the final two holes). Nonetheless, in 1964, Venturi successfully qualified for the U.S. Open for the first time in five years. At the time, he carried with him a letter written by San Francisco priest Father Kevin Murray, telling Venturi that the pain and the turmoil he had undergone would be the bedrock of a new character, that the new Ken Venturi would possess a strength of spirit that would not yield.

Venturi’s opening round of 72 left him four shots behind Arnold Palmer. A second-round 70 kept him in the hunt, and a 66 in the third round propelled him to within two shots of leader Tommy Jacobs. But Venturi, a native of mild-weathered San Francisco, was not used to the heat, and it started to show late in the third round, when his body began to shake with heat exhaustion. “I don’t think I’ll make it, Ray,” he said to playing partner Raymond Floyd on the seventeenth tee. He subsequently missed short putts on that hole and the eighteenth.

In 1964, the final two rounds of the U.S. Open were still being played on the same day (it was the last year that this would happen), and players were given less than an hour off between them. After he finished his third round, Venturi was taken from the eighteenth green to the clubhouse, where he lay down on the floor.



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