Just got an email from Neil Oxman, frequent caddie for
Tom Watson and Philadelphia-based
political consultant, reminding me that tonight (June 14) at 9 p.m., the Golf
Channel debuts its documentary on the late, great Bruce Edwards, Caddie
for Life.
Based on John Feinstein’s book of the same name,
the documentary chronicles the life of Oxman’s
good friend and Watson’s longtime,
loyal caddie, who died in 2004 of Lou Gehrig’s
disease.
Below is the PR release from
the Golf Channel:
Golf Channel’s ÔCaddy for
Life: The Bruce Edwards Story’ Goes Beyond the Game
Documentary provides
platform to raise ALS awareness
ORLANDO, Fla. (June
9, 2010) – The June 14 premiere of the
Golf Channel documentary, Caddy for Life: The Bruce Edwards Story,
not only will recall the inspirational life of one of golf’s pioneers, but also
will shed light on the disease that tragically took his life and how his family
and closest friends continue to fight for a cure.
Based on The New York Times
best-selling book by John Feinstein, Caddy for Life is an amazing and
emotional remembrance of the extraordinary relationship between one of
history’s greatest golfers, Tom Watson, and his longtime friend and caddy,
Bruce Edwards. It also recounts Edwards’ battle with amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, until his untimely and
tragic death in 2004.
Watson and Feinstein were inspired to
tell their stories to remember a great man, but they knew that participating in
the documentary also would provide a great platform to raise awareness for a
disease that afflicts one in 100,000 people every year – and one that has
no cure.
"This gives me the bully pulpit to
speak about ALS," said Watson when interviewed about the documentary. "It
took his (Edwards’) life, and still is taking people’s lives. We need to
continue this battle and make sure we’re doing everything we can to slow this
deadly disease down."
Says Feinstein, "A lot of people aren’t
aware of the story and we can educate them about ALS. If we are able to
raise awareness and funds for research, then the documentary has done a major
thing."
As part of the Caddy for Life
documentary project, Golf Channel has donated $25,000 to The Robert Packard
Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins. The Packard Center is the
world’s leader in aggressive, collaborative ALS research. The Bruce Edwards
Foundation donates 100 percent of its proceeds to the Packard Center, aiming to
provide more tomorrows to today’s ALS patients.
Caddy For Life: The Bruce Edwards
Story premieres June 14 at 9 p.m. ET on Golf
Channel.
No. 10 on SI’s list was the 1971 Open,
in which Lee Trevino and Jack Nicklaus, the two best players in
the game at the time, finished regulation tied for the lead.
On the first tee of the 18-hole
playoff, Trevino remembered that his
daughter had left a rubber snake in his bag.He proceeded to pull out the snake and toss itand Nicklaus’ direction, amusing the Golden Bear. Trevino,
however, went on to shoot 68, winning by three shots.
Trevino also
went on to win the Canadian and the British Opens over the next three
weeks.
No. 4 on
the SI list was the famous 1950 Open at Merion, which saw Ben Hogan, 16 months removed from a near-fatal head-on collision with a bus, with his legs heavily wrapped, limped his way to the
second of his four Open titles.
It was the ’50 Open, of course, that was
immortalized in the Hy Peskin photo
of Hogan lacing a 1-iron into the 72nd
green, setting up a par that led to a three-man 18-hole playoff with Lloyd Mangrum and Philadelphia’s George Fazio.
If you’re wondering which OpenSI ranked as the No. 1 Open
of all time, it was the 1913 Open at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., where 20-year-old amateur Francis Ouimet whipped the Tiger and Phil of their day, Brits Ted Ray and Harry
Vardon.
The most memorable Open in recent history, 2008 at
Torrey Pines, in which Tiger Woods, wincing from broken leg, prevailed in a playoff over
Rocco Mediate, was ranked No. 3.
Count Terry Tumolo, longtime general manager at
Commonwealth National GC, as among those who believe the private club side of
golf is beginning to climb out of the doldrums.
"I would say we are
recovering," Tumolo,
a former board member of the Philadelphia chapter of the Club Managers Association of America with a big-picture sense of the club scene."At times I would almost call it
vibrant."
Tumolo’s optimism, however, does come with a measure of caution."It’s fragile," he said the upturn."This could all blow up and the
positive momentum that a lot of us are enjoying could stall, if there is
another dip in the economy or a world event."
At Commonwealth National, which
is one of several clubs in the area that offer corporate memberships, it’s that
side of their business that is slower to recover.
"It’s tough to depend on
that segment of the market to energize your club," said Tumolo.Instead, he said, it is the "core
golfers" who had been forced to drop their memberships in the past year or two,
who are beginning to return to the club.ÔA lot of those folks are either back or motivated to get back," said Tumolo.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Tumolo believes
junior golf is driving at least part of the recovery at Commonwealth National and at
other clubs with junior programs.
"We didn’t lose one member to
attrition – not one – whose kids play golf," he said."Families are joining so their kids can
play.And we’ve had a bug surge in
female junior golf."
Even with these encouraging
signs, Tumolo
is also quick to point out that many clubs have decreased or altogether dropped
their initiation fees and that only a handful of clubs currently have waiting
lists, even among top-tier clubs.
"Those clubs with $70,000,
$80,000, $90,000 initiation fees, there’s no market for that right now," said Tumolo.
Author Robert Lusetich, golf columnist for FoxSports.com, spent the entire 2009 season tailing Tiger; the result is a mother lode of
insights into life on the PGA Tour, the World No. 1 golfer and the small, tight
circle of intimates that constitutes Team
Tiger.
Of course, when he pitched
the book to Simon and Schuster, Lusetich had no
idea about the whole other secret life Tiger
was living in the shadows.He sold
the publisher on a book about Tiger’s incredible
return from knee surgery to repair a ruptured anterior cruciate
ligament, enabling him to resume his quest of surpassing Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 major titles.
Like virtually all other Tiger-watchers in the media, and most
of Tiger’s inner circle, Lusetich was
oblivious to the infidelities.
Indeed, having journeyed to his
native Australia, where Tiger won
the Australian Masters in November, Lusetich
was at home in Los Angeles, putting the finishing touches on his manuscript,
when the news broke of that fateful car crash in the wee hours after Thanksgiving
that changed everything.
As shocking and unseemly as
the revelations about Tiger’s "other
life" have been, Lusetich
did not completely rethink and rewrite the narrative of the book.He still told the tale of Tiger’s ’09, only with a new final
chapter entitled, "The Reckoning."
Like most members of the
media, Lusetich,
who is a colleague and pal of mine, was embarrassed to have to admit that he
knew nothing of Tiger’s secret life,
nor had he ever seen anything that gave him reason to be suspicious.
"My view of Woods – admittedly from
observations made at the distance of press conferences or media scrums after
rounds but also interspersed with the occasional brief off-the-record
conversation – was that even though he is flawed, he is essentially a
good guy," writes Lusetich.
Tiger did
not cooperate with the book.Lusetich did seek
his cooperation through agent Mark
Steinberg, but "Steiny," as Tiger calls him, said, "No."
Lusetich has no idea if Steinberg,
who routinely rejects similar requests out of hand, ever bothered to discuss
the matter with Tiger.Lusetichnow can’t
help but wonder if Steinberg perhaps
had concerns about what a book of this type might eventually turn up.
Official cooperation or not,
Lusetich
duly notes that over the course of 2009, Tiger
was both "kind and generous with me."
What I especially enjoyed about
Unplayable were some of the details
about Tiger’s relationships, with caddie
Steve Williams and other players,
that Lusetich
picked up over the course of the year. A few examples:
On Phil Mickelson:
-- ...(Steve) Williams confirmed
what most inside golf’s highest circles long knew: Woods didn’t like Mickelson.
-- After Williams got in hot water for calling Mickelson a "prick" during a trip home
to New Zealand, swing coach Butch Harmon,
who had been fired by Tiger years before
and now works for Mickelson,
remarked that golf was a game of "honor" and said he didn’t believe Williams’ comments reflected Tiger’s feelings about Mickelson.
Writes Lusetich:
Harmon’s nose
presumably grew after making that last remark.He, perhaps more than anyone, knew that Woods had had worse
– much worse – to say about Mickelson,
who Woods considered to be a phony
whose public and private personas didn’t exactly gel.
On the Masters:
After shooting a lackluster
70 in the third round, Tiger was furious,
and he headed straight to practice tee at Augusta
National, trailed by his small entourage.First, he chewed out his caddie, Williams, who slipped away to find a sandwich, leaving swing coach Hank Haney alone with Tiger.
Writes Lusetich:
Haney, however,
remained and bore the brunt of a tirade."Tiger was just livid and Hank had to sit there and take it,"
said Williams.
Witnessed by a handful
writers, Lusetich
writes, The incident led to stories that
angered the admittedly thin-skinned Haney.Haney
would over the next week send text messages to several writers admonishing them
for stories suggesting he was on thin ice with Woods.
On Hank Haney:
Among top swing gurus, the
long knives were often out for Haney.
Writes Lusetich:
"My philosophy as a teacher," Haney writes, "is to teach my students to become their own best teacher
by getting them to understand the flight of the golf ball and how it relates to
the swing, with emphasis on swing the golf club on their own correct swing
plane."
Innocuous enough, except that virtually every swing
guru in golf believed Haney’s ideas
were wrong.(Butch) Harmon became the chief antagonist, telling anyone who’d
listen that Woods was ruining his
career, though he was hardly alone in that belief.
A Tour winner, a disciple of 1980s swing guru Jimmy Ballard, told me that Haney had cost Woods countless majors and "should be strung up for what he’s done
to the kid.
On Tiger’s awareness of fans around him:
Writes Lusetich:
One of the misconceptions about him was that he was
robotic on the golf course.The image served him, se he perpetuated it, but it was a myth.Woods
knew precisely what was happening around him and was extremely observant.When an Asian man with a very
effeminate voice called his name several times from outside the ropes at a
tournament, I’d assumed Woods was
too far away to have heard.Later,
I discovered that he’d not only heard him but described him perfectly.
On Tiger’s sexcapades:
None of Tiger’s infidelities shocked Lusetich any more than the one
that occurred at during the Buick Open,
which he won thanks to shooting 63-65 on Friday and Saturday.As it happened, the whole thing was
going on while Lusetich
and Tiger were staying just a few
doors apart in the same Marriott
Courtyard in Flint, Mich.
Writes Lusetich:
The sometimes pornographic actor, Joslyn James, whose real name is Veronica
Daniels, alleged that she had been having a three-year affair with Woods.Perhaps that was true, perhaps it wasn’t.But after reading text messages she
said were from Woods, I had no doubt
that she’d spent Thursday night a few doors down from my room in that Flint
Courtyard.
Woods was indeed
in room 201, as her text messages alleged.He’d flown her in, as he often did with women during
tournament weeks, for a brief rendezvous, most of them lasting two or three
nights.James said Woods warned
her he needed to get up at 4:15 a.m. for the following day’s round, yet she
said after they’d had sex earlier in the evening, he’d had trouble falling
asleep and called her back to his room for another tryst just a few hours
before he had to wake up.She
estimated that he’d had perhaps two hours of sleep by the time the unsuspecting
Williams drove their car to the
hotel’s side entrance.
On Fartgate:
Contrary to YouTube legend, it was CBS golf analyst/jokester David Feherty,
not Tiger, who launched the fart
heard millions of times on the internet. Lusetich
knows because he was out on the course at the Buick Open, standing under a shade tree with Feherty, when the whole thing
went down.
Writes Lusetich:
Feherty then gave
me the news that he’d eaten beans for lunch and his stomach was grumbling."I’ve got one locked and loaded in the
chamber," he said, like a proud parent.Feherty
and Woods had long engaged in farting
contests on the course...
Feherty sensed that
it was his moment to pounce.While
Woods bent over to stretch, Feherty launched
a sick-sounding fart from nearby, so long and loud that both Woods and Williams immediately looked over to him and began laughing.Unfortunately, Feherty had forgotten to turn
his microphone off...
The reckoning:
In the days and weeks after Tiger’s car crash that brought his
world crashing down around him, Lusetich was busily trying to piece together the story that
was being kept largely under wraps by IMG, the golfer’s management group.Where was Tiger?Why wouldn’t he
talk to the cops?
Writes Lusetich:
Woods, meanwhile,
sank to his lowest ebb.His wife,
whose financial security had been sweetened in the immediate wake of the
scandal in a desperate attempt to keep her from leaving then and there, was
devastated by his betrayal.She
consulted divorce lawyers and didn’t want him under the same room.All of her husband’s golf trophies,
which had filled the family home, were removed.
Woods moved into
another home at Isleworth
and changed his phone number.He
was in "the fetal position," according to none source, and didn’t want to talk
to anyone.Long-standing friends,
including Charles Barkley and Mark
O’Meara, publicly lamented the fact that they could not reach Woods.Steinberg drew
much fire from many of Woods’s
friends who were unable to get through to him."He became very reclusive, he was depressed, devastated, and
most of all, I think, embarrassed," said a source close to Woods.
On what might have motivated Tiger to cheat:
There is some speculation
among Tiger’s circle that, unable to
control his sex addiction, he essentially self-destructed, almost deliberately
allowing himself to get caught.
Writes Lusetich:
But the friend also offered another view, one echoed
by others I’d spoken with about Woods’s
marriage: that it was never the idyllic union it seemed.
"He was a late bloomer.Even when he was at Stanford, he was kind of
nerdy.Then suddenly his body
changed and he matured into this confident guy and he made up for lost
time.What I’ve always wondered
is, Did he get married too early?I think he just got caught up in the idea of getting married.I think he jumped into it too soon."
It is intended to be an
occasional essay whose purpose is obvious from the title.Let me be the first to admit that I
totally appropriated the idea from Esquire
magazine, which years ago had a similar feature called, "Why I Live Where I
Live," featuring essays by some of my favorite writers.
To get "Why Play Where I
Play" started, I cast out a line to several well-traveled golfing friends.Steve
Shaffer, a semi-retired lawyer and hopeless golf addict, was the first to
take the bait.He dubbed himself The Vagabond Golfer.
There are many reasons to
favor a certain golf course or courses.Quality, conditioning, price, proximity, the status of the club or
course, difficulty (or ease) of the course, friendly staff and tasty hotdogs
are only a few.For some golfers, "Why
I Play Where I Play" no doubt boils down to force or habit or lack of curiosity
about what else is out there.You
might have different ideas of your own.
While I will seek out "Why I
Play Where I Play" columns from golfers I think you might enjoy reading about, the
feature will only reach its full potential if ordinary readers of MyPhillyGolf also get
into the spirit.Half the fun of
being a golfer is talking about golf and golf courses.
All it takes is 500 or so
words.If you can write,
terrific.If you’ve got a good
story to tell but you’re not so confident of your writing skills, I can help
you with a little editing and ghostwriting.
One of my biggest goals for MyPhillyGolf is to
help create sort of a virtual golf community in cyberspace."Why I Play Where I Play" can help.
The Haverford, of course, is mostly, if not all, all about the hard, cold cash.That’s the way Haverford
Trust founder and vice chairman George
Connell wanted it when he began the tournament 14 years ago, in 1997.
Connell’s idea
was to create a tournament in which, say, a young assistant pro could make more
money in one day playing golf than he could all year working in a pro shop.
Past winners include a Who’s Who of local club pros, including
George Forster, head pro at Radnor Valley CC,
in 2008; Dave Quinn, head pro at Links Golf Club, in
2001 and 2005; and Dave Roberts,
assistant pro at Cedarbrook
CC, in 2002.
Last year, Travis Deibert, an assistant pro at Commonwealth National
GC, won in a play-off against Brian
Kelly, head pro at Bucknell GC,
collecting $40,000.What made Deibert’s victory all the more compelling is that he was soon to be
married.
For golf fans, the Haverford is spectator-friendly.You can walk the course and follow your
favorite pro, or you can do like most people and hang around at the 18th
green, watching guys come away with high hopes or busted dreams.
For as long as I have looked
at old photos and news reels from an earlier era of golf, I’ve wondered about
the difference between those old hickory-shafted clubs of yesteryear and the
high-tech armaments have enjoy today.Now I have a pretty good idea.
On Sunday, to commemorate
the centennial anniversary of the 1910 U.S. Open at the Philadelphia Cricket Club’sSt. Martin’s
course, the club invited members and a handful of guests to play nine holes using
authentic equipment from back in the day.
Nobody had to rummage
through attics or yard sales to come up with the equipment.It turns out there are companies
that rent out the stuff, like Play
Hickory in San Diego, which shipped
the Cricket Club two crates full of bags,
clubs and modern day versions of the old Bramble ball.
To make day feel even more
authentic, quite a few of the 50 or so members participating went to the
trouble to dress up in the garb of the day.
How did the old clubs
play?Not nearly as bad as I
expected.
My feather-light canvas bag
came with six clubs:a brassie, a small-headed fairway wood
with about 15 degrees of loft; a long
iron with the loft of a 2 or 3 iron; a mid-iron
with the loft of about a 6-iron; a mashie
niblick, which approximated an 8-iron; a niblick, which was sort of combination PW and SW; and a simple
heel-shafted putter.
None of the clubs had
anything like the heft of today’s equipment, and the grips were simple wraps of
leather.The ball, which had
convex dimples, felt like any harder rubber ball.
From my first swipe of a tee
shot with the brassie, it was obvious
this was going to take some getting used to.The hickory shaft had the whip of, say, today’s senior
shafts, only without the consistency.But the more noticeable difference was the torque.You could actually feel the club head
twisting during the downswing.
Surprisingly, it didn’t take
long to get a feel for the clubs and adapt my swing.The key was maintaining an even tempo.
On my first tee shot, I teed
the ball too low and hit a bit of a worm-burner foozle.On my next tee shot, I over-compensated
and hit a shallow pop-up.But by
three holes into the nine, the brassie
and I were on the same page -- I was nailing tee shots.
Of course, "nailing" is a
relative term.I don’t think my
best effort went more than 200 yards, even when the shot felt solid.
Come to think of it, the
short irons took more getting used to.No shot with the niblick
seemed to fly true or consistently, and I never quite got the feel for
distances.
I came away with two
double-bogeys, four bogeys and three pars.The highlight of the round was definitely the 30-footer I
snaked in from the fringe.I’d
definitely do it again.