Lee and Me at the Open

I Got UP that morning feeling pretty good. Pretty loose, ready to go all the way around Pebble Beach one more time without losing my concentration. Sports are concentration as much as anything else. Any professional athlete will tell you that the competition is a lot more mental than physical when you get to a professional level. In my case, I guess you'd have to say it was almost all mental.

I think my varied background is what made my whole golf career possible. The acting came first. from high school right up through college. Then I decided there was more security in software. By software, I don't mean Tupperware; I mean computer software--all the advanced new programs for the advanced new computers. I knew that was where the future was, and that was what finally made me the most loved and famous and awesome golfer of all time. And modest, too. I'm still modest, but now I've got real good reasons to be.

I was the most loved and famous and awesome for a while, anyway. For a while, they said Nicklaus was a decent club player compared with me. Jones was a high school hacker and everybody else, from Hogan to Watson, never should have left the Putt-Putt, It's damn sure nobody else ever shot 260 to win the Masters by 23 strokes. Dan Jenkins from Sports Illustrated was so star-struck, he used to knock over a Jack Daniel's bottle every time I came into the clubhouse. They were all like that.

Not anymore, damn 'em. Now they call my career "meteoric," with the emphasis on when I hit the ground.

Anyway, the guys at Golf Magazine called me up to see if I'd write a story on that last round at Pebble Beach. You'll notice they didn't ask for a series of stories, even though I was the biggest thing that ever happened to the game. Nowadays, most people want to forget about me. The blazer guys especially want to forget about me--Frank Hannigan and Beman and the rest of them. You'd think I was a baboon with the clap the way they stay away from me.

Golf didn't ask me to be on its advisory staff, either. Well, that's OK. I turned them down before, when I was hot. Who wants to sit around a table with Johnny Miller and Tom Weiskopf and three other guys who look just like Jerry McGee? All the young ones look like Jerry McGee. Must be their Amana hats.

No, Golf doesn't want me on its Jerry McGee staff now, but that's OK with me. I guess Weiskopf's off it now, anyway. I think he bogeyed his first article, withdrew and went home. Ha-ha. Little Tom Weiskopf joke there.

Used to be, magazines had to run after me just to get a quote to put in their book, and then they'd put my name on the cover, like I had a whole article inside or something. "Orval Greene On Bunker Play," the cover would say, when all they had inside was something I said coming off the course, like, "I don't care if they fill up all the traps with Jell-O. I'm never in 'em."

So, looks like I've got this article to write. Might as well get on it--I need the money. Alimony. You probably remember Billie Lou. They had a whole issue of People about us when we got married under the press tent at the '82 Open. Maybe some of you guys remember her as the Playmate of the Year a few years ago. I think she's Warren Beatty's playmate now.

Like I said, I felt pretty loose that Sunday morning. Knew I could keep it going and make it look good. The program called for me to hit a tree on two and make a bogey, then get it back with a spectacular bird from the trap on three. It was a good program, and I was smiling and joking around with the writers while I knocked back a chicken-fried steak and three eggs for breakfast.

Then I went out to the putting green and dropped a few balls. I played Spalding Dots, even though Wilson made a ball called the Greene Champion, which was a solid piece of white stuff--kind of like a round tooth. I knew it was going to be a great day. I sniffed the sea breeze. I didn't know then that I was about to take seven on the Par Five of Life.

•

Let me tell you how I worked the whole thing out. A buddy of mine at Kansas Instruments helped me put together a microcomputer small enough to fit in a golf ball. We did it as a demonstration--to show the boss we could get a pretty sophisticated machine down to that size. It made for a great demonstration: "Look here, J.B., we've got a Titleist X-out here with all the knowledge of the Library of Congress inside."

It didn't go much further than that. There's not much call for smart golf balls in the Business Office of Tomorrow. The boss gave us a pat on the back and said maybe we could get the thing to make a hole in one every time, har-de-har.

Well, he was close.

If I had the layout of a golf course, I figured, I could lay out the yardage in two dimensions and feed the perfect placement of each shot into the memory of the little computer. Then it would just be a matter of setting all the perfect placements in order, so the ball would go into the fairway from the tee, then go to the next programmed spot, in the right sequence. It took about a month of tinkering before I had a ball that knew where to go for every shot in a whole round of golf.

The problem was that the ball didn't know how to get there. If you hit it from the tee with an inside-out swing, the baby would just hook right into the bushes, knowing all along that it ought to be in the middle of the fairway 290 yards out. The problem was propulsion. It took a while, but I solved it.

Now, they're not paying me near enough to get me to let the secret out, but I will tell you one thing. The reason I always used the Spalding Dot, when all the other pros played Pro-Staffs and Titleists and Tourneys, was the key. You know that little black spot on the Dot? Well, if you ever took a magnifying glass to my ball, you'd see it should really have been called a Spalding Exhaust Pipe. Clever, huh?

So, I had me a sophisticated little computer with an automatic-guidance system and propulsion from the oxygen-ation of hydrogen fuel (which was in the liquid center). I was ready to take on the tour.

It worked pretty well, but some of the bugs weren't worked out right at the start. They gave me a few scares, like the time in the Byron Nelson when I hit a drive that went about 700 yards--"Hot damn! That wind in Texas shore do kick up, don't it?"--but I got them all straightened out and settled down to the business of becoming the most loved and awesome and all that stuff golfer.

You think it'd be really hard to get a computer in a golf ball? Then you just don't understand how advanced our technology is, pal. All I had to do was program the thing to go to its preordained spot every time it took a hard jolt. That way, it wouldn't take off like a rocket when I tried to putt. Since the sequence of 36--40 shots was all locked in the night before, when I sat down in the hotel with a layout of the course, nothing could go wrong.

I was on my own on the greens, of course, but then I hardly ever fixed it so I'd be more than ten feet away. If I three-putted, so what? I'd have five or six tap-in birdies a day, anyway, and I could always put in a few flag-biters the next day, if I missed too many.

The toughest thing was to make it look convincing. If you're going to beat Tom Watson by 15 strokes in the Crosby, you damn well better not look like Andy Williams when you swing or somebody's going to suspect something. I had played in college (number-two man at Kansas State in a down year), and I worked with video tapes of Sam Snead's swing for three months until our swings started to look quite a bit alike. So, then, all I had to do was look pretty reasonable out there and I could start practicing my wave to the crowd.

Guess you're probably ready to hear about that last day at Pebble Beach by now.

I was paired with Trevino and with Danny Sterling, the kid from Wake Forest who would wind up low amateur. They both put their tee shots on one right down the pipe, but nobody really cared, of course. I was the hot ticket, and the Greene Goblins were lined up ten deep in the gallery. I had a nine-stroke lead, and the program was for a straight, dead-solid-perfect drive off the first tee. It took off like an ICBM, about six feet off the ground the first 50 yards. Then it started to rise and didn't come down until the gasps did and I was a good 60 yards farther out than the other two guys.

I heard Ben Wright intone "Dear God . . ." into his ABC microphone and headed down the fairway the way you would if you'd just hit a 310-yard drive off the first tee on the last day of the Open.

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Things went fine all day long. Made a couple of bogeys on eight and nine, just to keep the folks by their TVs, while Lee was starting to get real hot. I wasn't worried, though. Does General Motors worry if Schwinn sells a few extra bikes?

Lee and I were the only red numbers on the board as we came to the turn. I was 11 under and he was minus four. Crenshaw was even (Wright insisted he was "level"). Ben is the best damn second-and-third-place finisher in the majors the world will ever know.

The ball was working like a charm. I could have shot 63 on a good day, but the putts weren't falling. Maybe you remember that nobody ever called me a great putter, because I was actually just a club player out there with the guys on the tour. So I always missed my share of four-footers. Anyway, I still had four strokes on Lee, coming to 16. Everybody else was out of it by then. It was ticking me off a little that Lee was staying so close--I had at least ten strokes on the rest of the field. He kept cracking jokes and making birdies, but I knew my birdie-birdie-birdie finish was coming up, so the old Mex would need an eagle and two holes in one to catch me. I wasn't too worried.

Sterling hit first, at 16. He'd just made birdie to bring him back to eight over for the day. The low ams usually don't shoot the lights out on the last day, playing late with their heroes, and I could tell the kid idolized the hell out of me. I hit next--a real thunderball, down the left side. We had to wait for Lee to finish telling a joke before he hit: "What's the difference between a nymphomaniac, a prostitute and a housewife? A nymphomaniac says, 'Is it over?' A prostitute says, 'It's over' and a housewife says, 'I think I'll paint the ceiling yellow."'

Lee said his wife would get on him pretty good for that one, then he hit a high fade out into the middle and followed me into the fairway.

I waited for him to hit. He took a six iron and put it into the trap on the left. He looked over at me and smiled and said, "Well, amigo, unless you start taking sevens, this is about over, isn't it?"

Sterling hit a six about 40 yards over the green and nearly died of embarrassment.

I got to my ball and looked it over, took an eight and concentrated hard on making my swing look like Sam's. I knew that if I slipped and still hit the ball, or even if I forgot which way the green was and faced the tee and hit it that way, the ball would head straight for the heart of the green. It was important to keep up appearances.

Lee moseyed over and looked at my ball.

"How come you play a Dot?" he said.

"I like 'em."

"No click. Everybody else plays Pro-Staffs."

"Well, they tend to explode when I hit 'em." I thought I might as well lay it on thick.

He looked down at my ball. "Looks like that one already did."

"What?"

"The stuffings are coming out."

He was right. I tried to keep my eyes from bugging out of my head. I'd put a smile in the ball somewhere along the line.

"You got a jolly little golf ball," Lee said.

"Yeah. Must have skulled one somewhere."

"It's even got teeth."

"Huh?"

"The smile's even got teeth."

My little chips and microprocessors were trying to slip out through the smile.

"Well, I better hit it before it gets any worse."

I put a desperate Gerald Ford swing on it, and the ball acted like a missile with its guidance center falling out the bottom. It fluttered and pushed a little black smoke out the exhaust pipe and hit about 60 feet past the pin. Still, the programming held true and the ball backed up 56 feet, until it was right next to the pin.

Lee looked a little suspicious by this time. "A lot of bite on that ball," he said.

I gave him a queasy grin. "Must have been the teeth, I guess." As I hustled up to the green, the crowd was giving me a standing ovation.

I was just reaching down to replace my ball with an intact backup ball when one of the blazer guys stopped me and asked to take a look. He was the tournament director.

He took it out of my hand and rubbed it on his blazer. Some of the chips were starting to fall out now. He squeezed and sparks popped out of the smile.

The tournament director looked at me and said. "I don't think this is a regulation ball."

I said, "Damn that Spalding company! I should have been playing Pro-Staffs all along, just like Lee said."

"We'll have to take them all and examine them. I'll have someone bring you a dozen new balls." He turned and got in his cart.

"Wait a minute!" I yelled. "You can't just take my balls!"

"What is this material on the inside of the ball?"

"How do I know? Maybe it's a bomb. Maybe somebody's trying to kill me."

As he zipped away through the gallery, he said, "We'll find out."

I stood there and watched the blazer chug away with my career in his pocket. A kid brought me a dozen regular Spalding Dots, helped me open a boat and take one out, then pushed me in the direction of the green. The crowd crunched in around me. My caddie handed me my putter and said, "Hey, you been cheatin', man?" All in all, it was a bad moment.

Lee came over and said he was sorry if he'd caused me any trouble. He mumbled something like, "Muchachas siesta por favor, amigo, tostada burrito yoyo bolos," which he translated as, "You never stop trying as long as you've got the balls."

I was an 11 handicapper with good form and an ordinary golf ball. I had two holes to play and a four-stroke lead. My brains were trying to slide out through the smile in my face.

Just then, I realized I had found my way into every golfer's dream. There I was, standing over a putt for a five-stroke lead in the last round of the U. S. Open, looking across the green at Lee Trevino, who had just saved par to stay close. Millions of people were watching on TV.

I stood over the putt and looked at the hole, a long four feet away, and watched my hands shake. Then, over a monitor somewhere, I heard Jim McKay say, "And now Orval Greene, the Greene Machine, bids to close the door on Trevino and take his place in the lore of this great game . . ." and I knew I couldn't let down every duffer who ever dreamed this dream.

I glared at the hole, like Nicklaus, and gripped my putter and held on until it stopped shaking. I put it behind the ball and waited for minutes, and then I drew the blade back and brought it through.

I made it.

The crowd went nuts. Lee looked a little surprised, but he came over and patted me on the back. We went to 17, the par three. I had a five-stroke lead with two to play. I had the honor.

•

People have asked me ever since why I didn't just hang it up right then, knowing the blazers were going to find out about the ball and kick me out on my rear.

Did you ever think what you'd do if sometime you woke up and you were standing on the stage at the Met, with 200 people all dressed up behind you and a full house in front of you, and you were wearing a big helmet with horns? Well, you'd sing, wouldn't you?

I stood over the ball on the 17th tee and glared again, just like Nicklaus. I took a smooth practice swing and a deep breath, and then hit a worm burner off the tee. It bounced down over the ladies' tee and into the rough out in front of me and stopped a good 75 yards short of the green. The ball just sat there, dead, like a lump. It was a real ball, all right.

Sterling stuck a three about 12 feet from the flag, and then Lee threw in a two iron even closer.

I got to my ball and hit a wedge into the trap at the back left of the green. Didn't have to wait for anybody--I was still away. My caddie started running up toward the green, embarrassed to be connected with my last two shots.

My bunker shot just made it out onto the edge of the green. I was still away. I got the ball down in two, since my first putt rifled into the back of the hole and only went six inches by. Lee and the kid both made their birdie putts, and my lead on Lee was two strokes.

The 18th at Pebble Beach is that famous par five that winds its way around the Pacific. The Pacific is that famous ocean that drinks up balls that wind the wrong way on the 18th. The other two guys hit big drives down the left side, flirting with the water. My driver was shaking in my hand like an electric eel, but I held it down and popped one about 175 yards from the tee, out into the right rough. Then I rushed out and hacked at a three wood. That only went 100 yards.

I was still about 275 yards from the green. I could have taken a fairway wood and tried to get it close to the front, but I decided on a two iron. If Lee made par (and anybody who birdies the 18th at Pebble on the last day of the Open deserves to win and be made king besides), then a bogey would still win for me.

I turned to my caddie with my teeth clenched. "Gimme a two iron. I'm going to win this thing."

He said, "I can't understand you when you got your mouth closed."

"A two! I want a two!"

He handed it over, and I waggled a little. It was quiet everywhere in the world.

I backed away, waggled again. I saw Ben Hogan in my mind, and Palmer charging, and Player, and Miller on the last day at Oakmont, and Trevino at Merion and Nicklaus everywhere. I nailed that two, and it took off low and then rose and didn't come down again until it was just 20 yards short of the green.

The crowd went wild, and I grinned right in the face of Frank Hannigan and all the other blazers who wanted to do me in.

•

Well, you know how it all wound up. Lee made that beautiful eight-footer for his par, and I needed a downhill four-footer with a little left break on it for a one-stroke win.

It was just a little one, the kind you'd call a gimme if you were playing with your pals on Sunday morning. But they don't have gimmes in the Open.

I looked at it for a good five minutes, just standing there glaring at the black dot on the ball--that little black spot of paint with no exhaust pipe in it. I looked at it some more, and still the ball didn't move.

Lee said, "Winter's coming, amigo."

Wright whispered, "And it appears that at last, the great man is going to strike his tiny spheroid, and will it find its way into that marvelous pit or will it stay, like a rebellious child, at the entrance and refuse to go in?"

My caddie whispered in my ear, "You better make it, honkie."

Like I said, it was downhill, so I just started it rolling.

It seemed to roll forever before it got in the neighborhood of the hole, picking up speed all the time.

It started its break late and just caught the right lip and spun all the way around, until it was on the right lip again and I was looking at that black dot on the ball as it hovered on the last blade of grass between it and the bottom of the cup.

•

You probably remember the whole scene. Lee and I both fainted dead away, and the kid Sterling fell to the green in imitation of us. We looked like the end of Hamlet, the three of us there flat on the green, our putters lying next to us like swords.

The ball wavered.

The blazers clustered around the back of the green, waving their arms like chickens. They were trying to decide which one of us should be revived first. They decided on Lee, since he had honors on the hole.

The TV guys were getting excited, shouting into their microphones, showing close-ups of us sprawled on the green, with insets of the ball, teetering.

Then the fans just lost control and broke through the ropes and came pouring out around us. And that, of course, jarred the ground, and the ball fell in.

When they put smelling salts under my nose and brought me around, they had my trophy and my permanent suspension waiting at a red-and-white-striped table in front of the clubhouse, and that was the end of my brilliant career.

•

So, it was fun while it lasted, even if they do treat me like a doggy scooper now.

I spend most of my time now watching video tapes of Garo Yepremian. You know, a football is a lot bigger than a golf ball, and I'm working on a real smart one.

I know no N.F.L. club is going to want to give me a tryout, but maybe I can force their hand.

Last week, I kicked a field goal at the Rams game. From section 24, row UU, seat 31.

"I glared at the hole, like Nicklaus, and gripped my putter until it stopped shaking."