Read Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont Online

Authors: Adam Lazarus

Tags: #Palmer; Arnold;, #Golfers, #Golf, #Golf - General, #Pennsylvania, #Sports & Recreation, #Sports, #United States, #Oakmont (Allegheny County), #Golf courses, #1929-, #History

Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (9 page)

BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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Living without plumbing, electricity, windows, or wallpaper, Lee and his two sisters bathed together twice a week in a metal tub over a wood-burning stove filled with lake water. Joe worked as a gravedigger at Hillcrest Cemetery while Juanita cleaned houses for families in north Dallas. Usually left on his own, young Lee entertained himself when he wasn’t harvesting cotton or sporadically attending school.
“It was a lonely life,” Trevino recalled. “I was never around anybody. I was all by myself, no one to talk to. I’d just go hunt rabbits and fish.”
Golf eventually found him. By chance, the Dallas Athletic Club golf course lay just across the street from the dilapidated Trevino home. Though he knew nothing of the rules, Lee learned he could make money off the game. The right side of the seventh fairway caught many wayward tee shots and Lee collected balls, then sold them back to their original owners.
In that same hayfield, he also found a discarded old club.
“In those days, if you could afford to play golf, you could afford to throw away clubs,” Trevino said.
Though the club was left-handed, Lee made do by turning it around and hitting balls with the blade’s tip. Eventually, a second disgruntled Texas golfer tossed another iron—this time a righty—into Trevino’s front lawn, and Lee was on his way.
The club’s caddie master, “Cryin’ Jesse” Holdman, noticed the enterprising kid hanging around the course selling balls to players and offered him a caddie job.
“I feel like I helped raise Lee,” Holdman said years later. “Lots of nights when we finished at the club, I’d take a package of cold cuts over to Lee’s old house and have dinner with his family.”
With nothing but time on his hands as he ditched school and waited for loops across the street, Trevino fashioned a makeshift course out of a nearby pasture and taught himself the game.
Despite his small size, Trevino showed considerable athleticism in Little League and, when he actually attended school, on the playground. Quickly his raw talent produced easy money.
“I caddied for one little old man real late on Sundays, and as soon as we got out of sight from the clubhouse he’d let me play him for my caddie fee, double or nothing. I beat him every time.”
The extra dollars went a long way toward helping to feed his family, so when Lee chose golf over school, Joe and Juanita (neither could read nor write) did not object. Although Lee had mastered the art of ditching the local truant officer, Juanita went before a judge to legalize his absences and received a work permit for her thirteen-year-old son.
Lee persuaded the superintendent of the golf course (today known as Glen Lakes) to hire him and he earned $1,250 during that first year—a substantial sum for a young kid in 1952. In the daily company of older caddies and club members, most of whom were twice his age, he grew up fast.
“I went from a country kid to a cool kitty from the city. I was smoking when I was ten, something I picked up from older caddies, just like the foul language. I was a little boy thrown in with men,” he remembered. “Some of them were dangerous people who carried knives and guns. Hardly a day passed that I didn’t watch a knife fight. We were shooting dice and playing cards and there always were arguments. It was an education of hard knocks.”
Despite earning a livelihood and being surrounded by the golf culture, Trevino did not play his first complete round in a golf tournament until age fifteen, when he qualified for the
Dallas
Times Herald
tournament by shooting a 77 at the Stevens Park municipal course. That first competitive appearance turned out to be short-lived, however, when he lost 2 & 1 in the second round of his age bracket.
Trevino had entered the event only on the suggestion of a local driving range owner, Hardy Greenwood, who had seen him pounding balls endlessly as a skinny eight-year-old. The driving range was just a few miles from Trevino’s home, and Greenwood gave Lee a job, clubs, shoes, and entered him in the Dallas tournament.
With extra money in his pocket and dressed like most teenagers of the day-jeans, leather motorcycle jacket, wide-collared shirts, and boots—Trevino drove around the city courting girls and trouble with the law. One night in 1956, he and a friend stole a set of hubcaps from a member of River Hills Country Club, where he now worked (he had quit the driving range after a falling-out with Greenwood). A policeman managed to crack the case—Trevino put sparkling new hubcaps on his beat-up, 1949 Ford—but let the two boys go after they returned the goods to the rightful owner.
“Confused, unsettled, and almost seventeen,” Trevino turned to the military for guidance (and to avoid an appearance in court). On his birthday, he walked into the local marines recruiting office, passed the enlistment test, and, despite little formal education, was inducted within three weeks. A few days before Christmas 1956, he left Dallas for boot camp in California.
After a rocky start during basic training—“I got hit in the stomach and slapped in the head so many times I lost count”—Trevino trained hard and was deployed as a machine gunner in the southwest Pacific. He reenlisted after his initial two-year hitch and, shortly afterward—to make up for an error that assigned him to kitchen duty—a captain in Okinawa offered Trevino a place in Special Services based on his golfing talents. Not surprisingly, spots on the team were highly prized and hotly contested—it was a heck of a way to satisfy one’s military obligation. Trevino earned his spot but only after he thumped a superior officer who challenged him to a match.
“I didn’t do anything but play golf with the colonels. That’s when I really learned to play. I started out as a private, but after beating the colonels a few times, I rose to sergeant.”
Twenty-year-old Buck Sergeant Lee Trevino returned to Dallas after his discharge in 1960, having realized that golf could rescue him from both a life of poverty and a long-term military career. He patched things up with Hardy Greenwood and returned to work at the driving range. The next spring, he joined the north Texas chapter of the PGA. He soon won several pro-ams at local Dallas and Fort Worth courses.
Though Trevino continued to spend the bulk of his days and nights with a club in his hand, he found time to date a seventeen-year-old North Dallas High senior. Within months, the couple married—they doctored her birth certificate to avoid needing parental consent—and by November 1962 Trevino’s first child was born. His wife was only eighteen.
But Trevino spent much more time on the links than he did with his new family, and one course in particular became his most popular mistress. Just ten minutes from Hardy’s driving range, Tenison Park Golf Club in east Dallas—with its rolling hills, pecan trees, and multiethnic clientele—became Trevino’s home away from home. He eventually moved his young family to an apartment just across the street from Tenison. Trevino insisted he never “hustled” anyone at Tenison, but he had no trouble finding matches and money games there. When he wasn’t working and hitting balls at the driving range, he was playing against anyone who would take up his challenge at Tenison.
Within two years of their marriage, his wife, fed up with her husband’s absenteeism, offered the twenty-three-year-old Trevino an ultimatum. “Either it’s going to be golf or it’s going to be Ricky and me. We don’t know you. You never take us anyplace. Why don’t you get an eight-to-five job like everyone else?”
Trevino remained wedded to Tenison Park and in late 1963 his wife packed up their year-old son and moved out. Trevino spiraled into “a savage uninhibited tear—drinking to excess, eating, in his own words, ‘trash’ foods, sleeping irregularly and seldom in the same place. He lost fifty pounds.”
Given sage advice from his grandfather—“the only way you forget a woman is to find another one”—Trevino soon married another seventeen-year-old high school student, Claudia Fenley. Although Greenwood felt Lee wasn’t mature enough for domesticity (he’d felt the same way about Lee’s previous hasty marriage), Trevino made time one Monday afternoon—his day off—to fit in a wedding after a late-morning eighteen holes.
The groom returned to work the next morning and Greenwood continued to ready Trevino for life on tour. He took his pupil to the 1963 PGA Championship at the Dallas Athletic Club (now relocated in the posh Mesquite suburbs), where Lee had his first chance to see all the tour regulars: Palmer, Nicklaus, Player, and Snead. He also sent Trevino to PGA business school for two weeks to earn credits toward earning a tour card.
Meanwhile, Trevino slowly bolstered his local reputation, reaching the sectional qualifier for the 1963 U.S. Open and placing fifteenth in October’s Lake Charles Invitational in Louisiana. Greenwood’s friends also arranged an exemption for Lee to play in the 1964 Dallas Open, where he made the cut and impressed, among others, his Saturday playing partner, two-time U.S. Open champion Julius Boros.
Within months, Trevino came to dominate the region and rack up local press ink. In November, he won the Northern Texas PGA Assistants tournament, then won the Northern Texas PGA Championship two weeks later. He now felt he was ready, at age twenty-four, for the tour. Having completed the necessary requirements—four years as a club pro, plus the credits earned at the PGA business school—he should have been eligible for a Class A membership as a golf professional and ready access to play on tour (PGA Q School did not begin until 1965 as the standard route onto the tour). All that remained was for Greenwood to verify his four years of work.
“Hardy wouldn’t sign it,” Trevino later said. “He believed I wasn’t ready, that I was too wild and immature to handle the responsibility of traveling all over the country and playing professional golf.”
That fear rested on solid logic. Before the Lake Charles Invitational, Greenwood gave Trevino $600, telling him to keep a record of his expenses. “Instead, I stayed drunk for six days,” Lee admitted.
Furious at Greenwood, Trevino quit his job at the driving range and, bolstered by minimal savings, set out to prove he was tour-ready. In fall 1965, he birdied the first hole of a play-off to win the Texas State Open in Houston, an event that included notable touring pros such as Miller Barber and rookie Homero Blancas. Two months later, he finished second to Blancas at the Mexican Open in Mexico City, earning $2,100.
Trevino’s play grabbed the attention of several Texas businessmen who looked past the rough edges and saw dollar signs in Trevino’s consistent swing. Some set up money matches or sponsored Trevino in events as far away as Panama. In early 1966, Martin Lettunich, a wealthy cotton field landowner and obsessive gambler, who had arranged hustles for Lee before, convinced Trevino to move Claudia and their young daughter, Lesley, to El Paso. Lettunich introduced Trevino to Jesse Whittenton, part owner of Horizon Hills, a club for a hard-drinking, brawling, gun-toting crowd among El Paso’s nouveau riche. Whittenton hired Trevino as the club’s jack-of all-trades so that he could practice with few interruptions while continuing to work toward getting his tour card.
“We discovered Lee quite by accident,” said Whittenton, a former defensive back for the Green Bay Packers who had retired early to pursue his own golfing dreams. “He came to me looking for a job. We put him to work shining shoes, and his golfing prowess became apparent, so we financed him for the pro tour.”
Trevino’s hardscrabble nature fit perfectly with the crowd at Horizon Hills, which managed to attract some high-profile names. In between breaking up fights among club members, Trevino fashioned a legendary reputation on the course. Twice, with dozens of local farmers betting from pickup trucks lined along the fairways, he outplayed young tour sensation Raymond Floyd, who was initially told he had come to El Paso for a high-stakes match against the “clubhouse boy.”
These mano-a-mano matches honed Trevino’s mental toughness and proved invaluable in shaping his later public image. His facade as an unpolished player depended on projecting an image that he didn’t belong on the same course as touring pros or elite country clubbers, most of whom had sharpened their skills in high-profile amateur or collegiate events.
Trevino proved to be a capable tournament player in the Southwest, but no one outside the region knew him. He came up short when trying to qualify in Texas for the 1963 U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, but made it through both the local and sectional qualifiers in 1966, at age twenty-six, when the national championship came to the Olympic Club in San Francisco.
Trevino had never played a course as hilly, contoured, or quick as Olympic, or one set to the U.S.G.A.’s challenging specifications for the National Open. But after a few practice rounds, despite his shoddy bag and mismatched clubs, he felt confident and ready. Paired initially with Harry Toscano and a nineteen-year-old Brigham Young University sophomore named John Miller, Trevino shot 74-73, ten strokes behind the halfway leaders, Arnold Palmer and Billy Casper. Back-to-back 78s over the weekend dropped Trevino into a tie for fifty-fourth place with Johnny Bulla and Long Island club pro Gene Borek.
A mediocre finish in his first U.S. Open hardly discouraged Trevino, who resumed dominating his niche in the Southwest golfing scene. In late September, he won the New Mexico Open with a closing two-under-par 69, then successfully defended his Texas State Open crown with a win over future tour pros Marty Fleckman and Butch Baird at Sharpstown Golf Club in Houston.
In May 1967, Trevino was finally granted his Class A card. Shortly afterward, in the local U.S. Open qualifier, he fired the lowest score in the nation (134 over two rounds). He then took second in the Dallas sectional qualifier to earn a return trip to the U.S. Open, this time at Baltusrol Golf Club in New Jersey. That first visit east of the Mississippi River was major culture shock.
BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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