SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — Welcome to the Open! That is, our Open, our national American championship, even though this Shinnecock Hills golf course, built by Shinnecock men, seems airlifted from Scotland. The South Fork of Long Island is a giant sand pit, really. American linksland, if there were such a thing.
You’re going to hear a lot in the coming days about the changes to the course, in its maintenance and the rest. Forgive me: I’ve been to this Shinnecock course often over the years, as a caddie, reporter and playing guest, and I would say the course barely changes at all. To me, it’s a heaving, pale field of windblown bumpiness. Shinnecock Hills is beautiful, in a grim, timeless and challenging way. As is golf: beautiful, in a grim, timeless and challenging way. The still ball, a golfer over it, bravado and doubt swirling in the northern reaches. It’s true for them and it’s true for us. The clock’s second hand drags. When you’re going good, a waggle can feel like it’s taking for-ev-er? Right?
Golf does time in weird and wonderful ways. Michael Murphy invites you into “Golf in the Kingdom” with this: “The game was invented a billion years ago — don’t you remember?” Golf likes wind, too, and this holy week on deck looks to be a windy one, as you would hope, for a course airlifted from away. Here (again) is John Updike, courtesy a long-ago linksland roam: “This was happiness, on this wasteland between the tracks and the beach, and freedom, of a wild and windy sort.” One player will leave this 126th U.S. Open, and the sixth one played here, particularly happy. He’ll have his name on a trophy forever.
On Father’s Day in 1986, Raymond Floyd won the second Open played here at Shinnecock Hills. An hour or so after Floyd’s victory, I found myself sitting in the press tent one row behind Joe Gergen, a sports columnist for Newsday. Gergen was wearing a short-sleeved shirt patterned with little flowers and he was writing on a typewriter. He paused now and again to laugh about something with the writer on his right elbow. I was 26. I carry the image happily to this day.
I just reread the story Gergen filed that night. (Thank you, Newspapers.com.) His first quote is from Floyd: “Quite often, I express my joy with tears.” Gergen’s whole column, really, revolves around Floyd’s eyes. You get a bit and ride it out — I was starting to pick up on that. Golf and writing were already elemental parts of my life, but more cement was poured that night. A couple weeks earlier, Gergen had written a generous column about my first book, an account of my brief stint as touring caddie. A 40th-anniversary edition of that book has just been published. The march of time.
I almost can’t believe it, the eye-blink of it all. I can see my childhood mornings almost in real time. Maybe the same is true for you. There are the papers on the gravel driveway of our house in Patchogue, about 30 miles west of here. Our neighboring village, Bellport, had a municipal course where for $50 a year I played all the weekday afternoon golf I wanted, through high school and college. (We played fast to finish.)
My brother and I, as kids, read Dave Anderson and Red Smith in the sports section of the New York Times, Russell Baker on its Op-Ed page, the “On Language” column by William Safire, loads of others, Cap’n Crunch observing all through cereal-box eyes. I had a gym teacher in 8th grade who taught an intro-to-golf class, plastic balls aimed at basketball hoops. That class changed my life. My first U.S. Open (in a manner of speaking) was in ’74, at Winged Foot, mostly by way of the newspaper coverage, along with the broadcast. Watson, Trevino, Palmer. Hale Irwin won. Watson won the British Open one year later. I was mesmerized.
Good luck has a shelf-life of forever, doesn’t it?
A bookish junior golfer in Western Pennsylvania read my wee caddie memoir, my first book, as a 12-year-old — and as a thirtysomething became my editor. (My good luck.) This new edition is all him, plus Brad Faxon, who wrote an introduction for it.
At the ’86 Open at Shinnecock, Faxon, then a young touring pro and now (we all know) a veteran broadcaster, was the first alternate, ready to play if somebody pulled out. I caddied for him in the Tuesday and Wednesday practice rounds. When nobody withdrew, he flew to Chattanooga to play in a much smaller event there. He won. I traded in my caddie badge for a press pass and got to see Joe Gergen in action Sunday night. A few months later, I was hired as a high school sportswriter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. The editor said, “I like the way he got around the country on the cheap, doing that caddying thing.” (Cheap flights on People Express — my pathway to a big-city daily.) Suddenly I had colleagues who actually knew Joe Gergen and Dave Anderson, among my other deadline heroes.
Hero worship is barely a thing anymore. Maybe we were expecting too much. Tiger Woods was always good about working on his golfing weaknesses. Apply as you wish. The other parts are the other parts. The unbridled joy Paul McCartney gets from music, his own and others, how inspiring is that? When he was 24 and 44 and 64, you could see that joy all over his impish face, and you still can, 84 knocking on his door. (You don’t work music, McCartney says; you play it.)
Roger Angell, the late baseball writer and writer writer, was at the peak of his powers in his 90s. An inspiration. Gary Player used to say, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” Whole worlds in that. Yes, a lot of XY here. Pardon me as I scream and shout, glowing cellphone in hand, for this foursome: Susan Orlean, Kate McKinnon, Bonnie Raitt, Meryl Streep. (Writer, comedian, musician, Meryl Streep.) The names alone make you want to turn up the volume, do a little dance, raise your game. Don’t they?
The first U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills was held in 1896. I was on hand for the next four, in 1986, 1995, 2004 and 2018. And I have a press pass — a media credential — for this one. Luck-eee. Forty years later, Joe Gergen’s example continues to inspire me. This typing life.
As we finished up a nine-hole round earlier this year (on the gentle remnants of a U.S. Open course), one of my regular playing partners said he hadn’t read my first book.
“Please don’t,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
“It’s terrible.”
“Then why are they bringing it out again?”
“Well, it has a certain charm.”
In 1985, when I was trying to be a professional caddie, the Pebble Beach pro-am was still named for Bing Crosby. By ’86, Bing was out and AT&T was in. I feel like I caught the PGA Tour in its last year as a mom-and-pop operation. I had a caddie-yard mentor named Killer, who won the 1979 Open with Hale Irwin at Inverness. When my pro missed the cut at the U.S. Open at Oakland Hills in ’85, we spent the weekend parking cars on our hosts’ front lawn. At the B.C. Open in Endicott, N.Y., I stayed in a boarding house for $5 a night. I was a recovering English major trying to make it as a vagabond caddie. The stakes maybe sound low but they were high then. They were high to me.
I didn’t know what I was doing, not as a caddie, not as a writer. But I did love it, the whole thing. The golf, the scene, the tingly excitement, the attempt to capture it all in typed words. Forty years later, nothing has changed, except now I know what everybody of a certain age figures out eventually. George Bernard Shaw said youth is wasted on the young. Pithy and true. This is not pithy but is painfully, gorgeously true: It goes too fast. This week will go too fast. It all goes too fast. Dance while you can.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com
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