SPECTATOR SPORT
Tee and sand wedges
Frank Keating
'ALL OPENS', wrote W.F. Deedes in Monday's Daily Telegraph, 'represent a fierce examination, but in the post-war years Muirfield has granted its honours only to scholars.' Since Henry Cotton in 1948, the old jug has been lifted at Muir- field only by all-time hall-of-famers — Gary Player (1959), Jack Nicklaus (1966), Lee Trevino (1972), Tom Watson (1980), and Nick FaIdo in 1987. Rest assured that this Sunday's Muirfield champion will not be a fellow who just got lucky for four rounds on the trot.
Two from that illustrious Muirfield list of recent champions intimated this week that it could be their last Open. Both Nicklaus and Trevino are 52. Unless they could be persuaded back, for auld lang syne, to St Andrews in 1995, there would be no more fitting amphitheatre to take a final curtain than Muirfield.
I was late to golf in the big time. In 1976 they sent me up to Birkdale to be legman to the Guardian's legendary and still lamented golf correspondent, Pat Ward-Thomas. I had hurried from a cricket match and looked scruffy and unshaven introducing myself to PW-T in the press tent. 'I say, c'mon, old boy', sighed Pat, appalled. 'Any chance of smartening up a bit? — we're dining with Jack tonight.' Talk about starting at the top. At South- port's Prince of Wales Hotel that evening, I sat in awe as the two old friends chewed the fat. Pat was due to retire in a year or two. 'Just see me out, Jack', he asked. 'I can't end my days churning out reams on college boys in polyester pants who are greedy for money but not for glory.' Anyway,' he added, 'I know you will go, Jack, the moment you admit to yourself you can never ever win another Major.'
Said Jack, those straightforward blue eyes on full beam: 'You may be wrong there, old pal. I daresay, in my dotage, when they push me in a wheelchair for a fishing trip, I'll be dreaming what I've always dreamed about, I guess — making three par § and a birdie on the last four holes to win a Major.'
There was a warm, mutual affection in their laughter as each man, the writer and the written-about, wordlessly agreed on their obsession with golfs compelling daily match-up and its never-ending fight-to-the- death between character and talent. It is an obsession to which Trevino, too, readily admits. When the Mexican from Texas first burst, wisecracking, on the scene in the late 1960s, Ward-Thomas said he had not been smitten by the brash commotion — 'till it soon became patently clear that he was not only a spontaneously funny man, but also one with an endearing generosity of spirit, not altogether common in a gener- ally selfish game'. The truth is that Trevino is a touchingly private man, still coming to terms with the hurts and deprivations of his childhood and youth. His one-liners are all you get --- yet any clutch of them serve as a quickfire autobiography.
'My family was so poor, they couldn't afford any kids. The lady next door had me.'
'There are no rich Mexicans. They make money — then call themselves Spanish.'
'When I turn 50, I'm just going home with my money, have it stacked in bales, and just sit there and grin.'
'When Chi-Chi Rodriguez and I first hit the tour, our caddie suggested we might use a 'sand wedge'. I replied, "Sure, I'll have a ham-on-lye."' 'They say I'm famous for my delicate iron shots — and, sure, when I hit them right they land just so, like a butterfly with sore feet.'
Auld lang syne, indeed.
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