Read Online Men in Green by Michael Bamberger - Free Book Online

I’m the only one left who was there and I have the card,” he said.
    He knew the scores and he knew the stories behind the scores. He was the source. He was the man.
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    Mike and I were under Ken’s spell, engulfed in his old-school, fly-straight, DIY values, golfing and otherwise. We were sitting with a man who knew how to dress, swing, eat, drink, swear, tell a story. We were with a man who was a central figure in golf’s greatest generation, the gang who made their mark in the prosperity of the 1950s, when a pair of leather golf shoes, hand-sewn in Massachusetts, might weigh six pounds at the end of Saturday’s wet round. Ken was taking us wherever he wanted, and it was a pleasure.
    By way of his TV work, Ken was a significant presence for me through high school and college. Ken was the doorman to the Masters, always respectful. Later, in my brief stints as a tour caddie, I got a different impression of him, as a man with an unattractive macho streak, a superiority complex, and the best seat at the bar. I got a third version of Ken some years after that, when I spent parts of two days with him for an SI story. I remember telling my boss that I was overwhelmed by how wrong my impression of Ken had been. He had charisma and warmth. The way he was connected to his own past was so endearing. Every question triggered a story, and he gave no rote answers. He just slowly sipped his Crown Royals and talked. What struck me most was his devotion to his second wife, Beau, then in the late stages of brain cancer. Her end was coming, and any visitor would have seen the same thing: Ken was heartbroken.
    When Ken retired from CBS, I wrote a farewell piece. For that story, I sat in a corner of the broadcast booth at the Kemper Open as Ken worked the final tournament of his long career. One person after another came in to pay tribute. The most telling thing was how moved the players were by his retirement and how much the players meant to Ken. They looked at Ken Venturi and saw their fathers and their boyhoods.
    In more recent years, I helped Ken write several first-person pieces for which he instructed that his writer’s fee go to a hospital in Loma Linda where he had received treatments for cancer. When he gave lessons, his entire fee, typically five hundred dollars, went to charity. One favorite was for the training of guide dogs. Another was the Stuttering Foundation. (He was a recovering stutterer.) He had the servant heart. Ken had been the host of a charity golf tournament that in a single year raised nearly $1 million for the construction of a sixty-bed shelter for victims of domestic abuse. It bears Beau Venturi’s name. Ken gave at the office, at home, in public, in private. Ken gave.
    His life, with all its ups and downs—three marriages, money problems and health problems, a publicized DUI arrest late in the day, horrible play and brilliant play—was like an old-time movie, with James Garner playing Ken. You’d need a slightly older man to play the Supportive Parish Priest. In various books and magazine pieces about the ’64 Open, there’s often a section about Father Murray, from St. Vincent de Paul in San Francisco, and the inspirational letter he wrote to Ken on the eve of the tournament, when Ken was, as they used to say, down on his luck. That letter led Ken to a Catholic church in Washington, D.C., on the eve of the Open, and that visit, as Ken told and retold the story, made all the difference. Ken was a devout Catholic, and redemption as a life theme ran deep with him.
    Everything ran deep with him. That’s why we, his viewing public, responded to him like we did. That’s why total strangers, who knew him only from TV, would call out to him, “Hey, Kenny !”
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    Many of Ken’s dinner stories were about Hogan, who came off as a second father figure. (Byron Nelson and Eddie Lowery did,