Tony Jacklin, the consummate British gentleman-golfer, was about to tee
it up against Lee Trevino in the World Match Play in England. The money
was good, the wind favorable, the gallery agreeable, and the breakfast substantial. All Jacklin wanted now was a little peace and quiet.
“Lee,” he said, “is it all right if we don’t talk today?”
“Sure, Tony,” Trevino said. “You don’t have to talk. Just listen.”
This was 1972, a point made to illustrate that at the time Trevino had
been at the top rung of the game for about four years. He had entered talking, he continued talking throughout his career, and to this day he talks
and then some.
Poor “Jacko.” It was neighborly of him to make the request. But if he
wanted Trevino to be quiet, all he had to do was ask him about hustling.
That stops him in his tracks.
Call Trevino anything, but don’t call him a hustler.
This is not a chapter out of some morality play. It is simply a view into
a man, as he sees and perceives himself. The man is Lee Trevino, one of the
most remarkable people ever in the history of sport, much less of golf.
Trevino will be remembered for one of the greatest careers in golf history.
People don’t start any lower at anything.Arnold Palmer had to carry water for his mom to wash clothes and
dishes. Gary Player was facing life down in a gold mine, like his dad. Well,
Chi Chi Rodriguez and Carlos Franco had it bad. Chi Chi licked his milk
off a fork to make it last. Franco came from humble-nothing in darkest
Paraguay. But Trevino came out of poverty in Dallas, Texas, United States
of America—a dirt-floor, no-electricity, no-running-water, no-anything
poverty. “My family was so poor,” he once said, “when somebody threw
our dog a bone, he had to call for a fair catch.”
He never knew his father. He worked the Texas cotton fields as a kid, in
the heat and the dust. He caddied when he grew big enough to wrestle the
bag, about age eight. He never got to the eighth grade. He learned his golf
from himself, digging it out of the dirt, like Ben Hogan. He made a fortune and lost it—or was relieved of it—and made a comeback.
In his twenty-two years on the PGA Tour, including time off after being
hit by lightning and suffering a bad back, and with a swing generously
described as unorthodox, he won twenty-seven times, including two each
of the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship. (The
Masters is its own story.) He entered the 2003 season looking for his thirtieth win on the Senior PGA Tour. Wisecracking all the way.
This is the short version: Trevino will be remembered as the Tex-Mex
urchin out of the Dallas gutters who saved himself and conquered the world
with wit and wood shots. Trevino also will also be remembered as a worldclass talker.
Golf is a solemn procession at best. Not for Trevino. He chatters with
anyone about anything—the bouquet and volume of the local wine, a hotdog shop, last night’s ball game, the British idea of cuisine, Arnie Palmer,
the graphite shaft.
Perhaps most of all, Trevino will be remembered as the rascal who spent
his early years hustling unsuspecting souls on the golf course. At which
assertion Trevino might be very happy to hand you your head.
That’s the story of Lee Trevino as hustler. “The Portrait of the Golfer as
a Young Dog.” Or how Lee Trevino once got stuck in the first bathtub in
the White House.
That’s an exaggeration. But that’s OK. Lee Trevino is an exaggeration.
Someone once noted that whatever gets into print passes into history.
And it’s an article of faith for advertising folk, propagandists, and the like
176 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
that a story told with conviction becomes the truth, true or not. Which
brings us to “Trevino and the White House bathtub.”
In 1917, H. L. Mencken, a newspaper columnist famed for his acidic
wit, wrote about the first bathtub in the White House. He described it in
detail. He said it had been installed by President Millard Fillmore. It turned
out that Mencken was just having a little fun. The piece was a total fabrication. When he realized that people believed the thing, he was appalled
at their gullibility. “They swallowed it as gospel, gravely and horribly,”
Mencken noted. He wrote a retraction, trying to stop the spread of the fiction. It didn’t take. The tale became fact. It even showed up in an encyclopedia or two. Chances are that Trevino never took a bath in the White
House, but he did end up in that bathtub.
At the 1973 U.S. Open at Oakmont, a golf writer went to Trevino just
before a practice round.
“Lee,” he said, “I’d like to do a story on you that’s never been written.”
“Yeah?” Trevino said. “Like what?”
“Like,” the writer said innocently, “your days as a hustler.”
Trevino stiffened like the Marine he had once been. He clenched his jaw,
like he was trying to crack a walnut with his teeth.
“Sir,” Trevino said, “I have never been a hustler in my life.” And he
turned and tramped down the fairway. So much for the “Merry Mex.”
There was the matter, however, of all those hustler stories. And then
there was the Dr. Pepper bottle ploy. The same writer looked up Trevino a
couple years later, at the 1975 Ryder Cup, and carefully reopened the subject, with the proviso that Trevino hear him out and not skull him with
something. Trevino cackled. “I got that mad, huh?” he said. “But that’s
right—I’ve never been a hustler. It’s just, you believed all them damn stories from sportswriters, that’s what.”
What it came down to was semantics. It may be semantics to some, but
to Trevino it was a matter of honor. To some the word hustler means someone who works hard, who really keeps at it. To others a hustler is a cheater.
Any decent dictionary will offer you the choice. Trevino knows hard work.
Few have worked harder. But a hustler? In his mind, that’s a cheater.
But how about playing guys with a big Dr Pepper bottle? He’d tape the
neck, hit the ball like a fungo in baseball, and then putt with it. He’d play
a par-three course and get a half-a-shot a hole. Wasn’t that hustling?
Talking His Best Game • Lee Trevino 177
“If I gave you that bet, do you think I could play with that bottle?” he
asked.
Sure.
“Right,” Trevino said. “But there was nothing hidden. It was just a crazy
bet.”
Trevino frequented other courses and did plenty of gambling, but he
is best known for playing at Tenison Park, a municipal course in Dallas.
“Hustle-heaven,” some used to call it. It was home to the notorious
“Titanic” Thompson, who was always inventing ways to pluck a pigeon.
For example, betting $5 he could throw a peanut over the clubhouse.
There’s no way to throw a peanut over a clubhouse. Unless the shell’s been
emptied and filled with lead!
It’s easy to see how Trevino, hanging out at Tenison, could get painted
with the same brush. Thompson would beat a guy right-handed, then offer
to play him left-handed, to let him get his money back. Thompson was a
natural left-hander. “But I made him once, for $5—left-handed,” Trevino
said. “We were playing along, and we came to the last hole, and I said, ‘Five
dollars says I can beat you left-handed on this hole,’ and he says, ‘You got
it.’ I hit his driver and his nine-iron, and I made five and beat him. He
said: ‘You know what? You’re a goddamn freak, that’s what. . . .’ ”
Trevino got Seve Ballesteros once, only they didn’t have a bet down.
They were playing a TV exhibition in Scotland, and of course Ballesteros
was outdriving Trevino all day. Then they came to the hole Trevino had
been waiting for. Trevino dug at him. “OK, Seve, I’ve been letting you outdrive me all day,” Trevino said. “Now take your best shot, and I’m going
to outdrive you.”
Ballesteros would silence the chattering Tex-Mex. He bombed a drive.
He turned to Trevino and grinned. Try that. Trevino, who needed about a
drive and a wedge to match Ballesteros, squinted down-range, then
smashed one fifty, sixty yards past him. Ballesteros was silently beside himself. The TV crew was awestruck. “Seve didn’t know it,” Trevino said, “but
on that hole the fairway slopes away over there. You catch the slope just
right, the ball will roll forever.”
So it’s this simple: To Trevino, a gambler gambles, a hustler cheats. And
he doesn’t cheat. A short course in hustling: “You lie about your handicap,”
Trevino said. “If you’re a five, you say you’re a ten. I never lied about my
handicap. I never established one. I’d say I don’t have one. I’m scratch.
178 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
“You put Vaseline on your club faces. Takes the spin off the ball. And
in the old days, when the smaller British ball was legal, guys would sneak
it in on you. Easier to play. Then there’s protective coloration. Some hustlers carefully rubbed cornstarch on their hands and face. With a golfer’s
tan a guy can hardly say he hasn’t played in a month.”
So Trevino spoke his piece. And then somewhere, maybe fifty years from
now, some encyclopedia entry will start out, “Lee Trevino, who started his
career as a hustler from Dallas. . . .”
Lee Trevino has had his share of tests. The first was just being born. Then
there was the lightning—almost getting killed. Also seeing his fortune disappear in the dust of a New Mexico real estate adventure. And the crippling bad back, having to hang upside down . . .
The lightning hit at the 1975 Western Open. Trevino and Jerry Heard
were waiting out a rain delay at the thirteenth green, near a lake. Trevino
was sitting against his bag. He remembered a stupendous crack and being
lifted off the ground. Then his ears ringing, his hands jerking, and not
being able to breathe.
Trevino figured the lightning had skipped off the lake, then gone
through the steel club shafts in his bag and up his back. He also figured he
nearly died. He remembers the emergency room doctor practically apologizing for having almost no experience with lightning victims. “They normally go straight to the morgue,” she explained. Later Trevino would say,
“In case of lightning, walk down the middle of the fairway and hold your
one-iron over your head. Because even God can’t hit a one-iron.” Or:
“When God wants to play through, you let Him.” That’s deathbed humor.
Trevino doesn’t laugh at lightning.
Take, for instance, the time he was at Firestone, at the ninth tee. Lightning suddenly crackled in the distance. Trevino broke from a standing start
and didn’t stop running till he danced up the veranda steps at the clubhouse, spikes and all, and bolted through the glass door and into the grillroom. Firestone’s ninth is a par four, about 470 yards. “You think Carl
Lewis is fast?” Trevino cracked. “Lightning comes around, and he’s gonna
eat some dust.”
The lightning left him with a damaged back that kept him from one of
his true loves—hitting balls. He used to hit maybe five hundred a day. He
escaped with his life, but there was the matter of his game turning to mush.
“I’m retired from practicing,” he’d crack. The doctor limited him to twentyTalking His Best Game • Lee Trevino 179
five, thirty warm-up balls before a round and maybe fifteen minutes of putting. If he pushed either one, his back would go into spasms. Part of his
regimen was to hang upside down on the motel room door, in some kind
of harness.
By the summer of 1982 he required more back surgery. It may have
saved his career. “If I had to play in pain again, I would have retired this
year,” he said at the time.
“The pain was constant from May of 1981 until now. It took me two
hours each morning before I could tie my shoes. I couldn’t practice. I
couldn’t really play. All I could do was crawl off the golf course each day
and go lie down.”
Yet always the wisecracks. He told the British Open press corps once that
the doctor told him not to practice. “I told him I had to,” Trevino said. “And
he said, ‘How long you been playing golf?’ And I told him, since I was a kid.
And he said, ‘Hell, you don’t know how to do it yet?’ ” Trevino had more
surgery and emerged triumphant. “Hell, I’m playing better than ever,” he
said, “now that I’m not allowed to lift anything heavier’n a can of beer.”
He got a scare in March 2001, at the Senior Tour’s Siebel Classic. He
was among the leaders in the second round. At the thirteenth tee he was
at the top of his backswing when his back went into spasm, dropping him
to his knees. He had to withdraw. But he came back to play. Not only play,
but make the most valuable single golf shot in history. In the ESPN Par-3
Shootout, a made-for-TV exercise with Phil Mickelson, Paul Azinger, and
Raymond Floyd in the field, he canned a seven-iron for a hole in one worth
$1 million dollars. He got an additional $10,000 for being closest to the
pin. “That was my first spasm since the doctor straightened me out in
1982,” Trevino said.
“Yeah, it was scary at first. I thought, oh, no. Then I thought maybe it
was a kidney stone. I’d gone through that before. It turned out I had put
on too much weight and I was laboring on my backswing, putting strain
on my muscles getting the club back.” The episode passed; Trevino took
off the weight and went back to work.
Trevino arrived in golf at just the right time. There must have been a
script somewhere. The game already had larger-than-life figures in the late
1960s. Jack Nicklaus and Arnie Palmer. Billy Casper and his buffalo diet.
Doug Sanders and his renegade wardrobe. And Gary Player, totally improbable for his size.
180 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
And if Player was improbable, then Trevino was impossible. Not only
poor, but a graduate of a driving range, handyman at a daily-fee dust track
in West Texas, and a guy with a swing better suited to hitting a running
cat in the behind with a mop. In a game that worships silence, here was a
bright stream of happy talk and one-liners. And also a guy with a reputation for plucking pigeons.
Trevino first came to national attention at the 1967 U.S. Open at Baltusrol, in New Jersey. It was his first trip east of the Mississippi. He couldn’t
afford a rental car, so he had to walk to dinner along the road and got
splashed by cars. He had to do Chinese most of the week. He didn’t own
a jacket or suit, and in this strange new world he found himself barred from
the restaurants he could easily reach.
He was just three shots off the lead going into the final round, right
behind Nicklaus, Palmer, and Casper. The U.S. Open is famous for nonames popping up, but they’re usually up there only in the first round,
maybe the second. They don’t dare stay up there through the third, not
once they realize where they are. But Trevino had the golf world wondering, Who is this guy?
He even made it to the leader board early on the back nine in the fourth
round. Then he shook a little, shot a 70 for a 283 total, and finished eight
strokes behind Nicklaus. Trevino won $6,000. He was stunned. It was more
money than he’d ever had in his life. And now he knew he could play. He
had wanted to join the PGA Tour. Now he had to.
It went from amazing to incredible in just one twelve-month cycle.
Trevino won the Open the following year, 1968, at Oak Hill. It was his
first victory on the Tour. The irrepressible Tex-Mex from Dallas was beginning to make the impossible look easy while stamping that oddball swing
on the psyche of a nation increasingly fascinated by golf.
He won the U.S. Open again in 1971, at Merion, beating Nicklaus in
a play-off. There he got tagged with the hustler thing again. The papers
would say that he had tried to gain the edge by scaring Nicklaus with a
rubber snake. Trevino and Nicklaus had tied and went to an eighteen-hole
play-off the next day.
At the first tee Trevino, rummaging around in his bag for a fresh glove,
found a rubber snake he had bought for his daughter and had left in the
pocket. He held it up to the gallery for a gag, and everybody laughed. Nicklaus chuckled and asked Trevino to toss it over and let him see it. Trevino
Talking His Best Game • Lee Trevino 181
flipped it to him. Trevino went on to shoot 68 and beat Nicklaus by three.
Some writers wrote that the snake was a psych job. Some still do.
In 1959, when Trevino was in the Marines and stationed on Okinawa,
he played a match with a Taiwanese named Lu Liang Huan—none other
than Mr. Lu, a little guy in a funny little hat. Mr. Lu whipped him, ten
and eight. They next met in the 1971 British Open at Royal Birkdale. Mr.
Lu was best known for wearing a silly little hat the Brits called a trilby and
politely lifting it at every opportunity. He also was known as the guy who
almost won the British Open. Trevino led him by five with only nine holes
to play. He won by just one shot.
Trevino won the British Open again the next year, 1972, this time by
beating Nicklaus by one, thereby killing Jack’s chance for the Grand Slam.
Nicklaus arrived at Scotland’s Muirfield having won the Masters and the
U.S. Open. This was Trevino the Jack-Killer.
They say no one remembers who finishes second. But Nicklaus can’t forget—second in the 1968 U.S. Open by four shots, second in the ’71 U.S.
Open in a play-off, second in the ’72 British Open by one, and second in
the ’74 PGA by one. Put this another way: Trevino has one of the greatest
records in golf. He’s won six majors, four of them over Nicklaus. Tom Watson is the only player close to him. Nicklaus has also been second to Watson four times but in eight majors.
“There’s no mystery to it,” Trevino said. “There was nothing psychological about it. There was no gamesmanship. I kept it in the fairway is all.
I don’t care if a guy hits it forty yards longer—if he’s in the woods, I’m
gonna win that hole. If you hit every fairway, eventually you’re gonna beat
a guy.”
But a Grand Slam over Nicklaus or anyone else was out of the question.
Trevino could not win the Masters. Sometimes he wouldn’t even play in it,
and when he did, he’d avoid the stately old mansion of a clubhouse and
change his shoes in the parking lot, coming and going. Some said this
showed that Trevino, who had been in many exclusive golf clubs, was a little Tex-Mex kid who felt he’d got too far north of the border at stately and
imperial old Augusta. Or that he was mad at Augusta National. Nonsense,
Trevino has said many times. But the golf world has never been completely
convinced.
Trevino insisted it was simply the course itself that was unsuited to his
game. He hit a low ball, left to right. Augusta National favors a high ball,
182 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
left to right. Then completely without rough, Augusta also favored the long
ball hitters. They didn’t have to restrain themselves. Trevino was always
moderately short, never long-long. His strength was deadly accuracy.
Trevino also confessed at Augusta he’d talked too much. He has told the
story often, of how talking to Charlie Sifford way back he’d said he had no
chance to win at Augusta and so he probably wouldn’t go back. Overheard
by a reporter, who wrote the story, it became simply a matter of pride.
“I should have just swallowed pride and gone on and played,” Trevino
said in his book They Call Me Super Mex. “But I felt everyone was wondering if I was as good as my word. . . .” And so he passed up the Masters
in 1970 and ’71. “That was the greatest mistake I’ve made in my career,”
he said.
Then there were other issues. In 1986 he objected to having to pay $90
for a badge for his son, Richard. It wasn’t the money, he said. It was the
principle of not allowing family in. And so it went. God knows what the
real answer is. Maybe the contradiction is Trevino himself, in a world that
hardly understood him. It certainly became confusing. Indeed, it still is.
At the 1988 Masters, Trevino uttered the ultimate rejection. “I hope to
God they don’t send me an invitation,” he said. “I’m going to pray they
don’t. I don’t want to be here.” In 1989, at about age fifty, he was in the
final year of exemptions into the Masters. He received what was likely to
be his final Masters invitation. He was among the first to accept.
Some critics insist that there’s a dark side to Trevino. They say that what
you see isn’t really what you get. They say on the golf course he’s the Merry
Mex, yakking and laughing. Off the course he’s a brush-off artist and a
loner. His defenders—if he needs them—argue that nobody ever suggested
that the two are mutually exclusive in anybody. Early in his career he’d pull
practically all-nighters—golf all day, party far into the night. Soon enough
he saw where that road was headed. Then at restaurants the autograph
hounds made life miserable and put dinner out of the question. So he began
leaving the course and holing up in his hotel, taking room service, watching TV, putting on the rug. Maybe it’s not a dark side. Maybe just a private side. Who doesn’t have one of those?
Trevino has an easy answer to all this.
“Once I’m off the stage, I’m totally a hermit,” he’s said.
Sixty-three during the 2003 season, Trevino will leave golf with a number of legacies. The first is simple: just because you’re not born with a silTalking His Best Game • Lee Trevino 183
ver spoon in your mouth doesn’t mean you’re going to steal one. And an
effervescence that is as serious as it is funny. Another is that talent and
ambition can do wonders, but only if mixed with hard work. And then
there’s the old standby: the indomitable spirit. It got him there, and he
intends to stay. “I’m never going to quit,” Trevino said. And pity the slings
and arrows that try to touch him. “How can they beat me?” he once
quipped. “I’ve been struck by lightning, had two back operations, and been
divorced twice.”
