Three brushes with greatness

By Gary Larrabee

Hooking and shanking around the North Shore golf scene this month, focusing on three of the greatest names in the history of the game: Gary Player, Pine Valley Golf Club and Herbert Warren Wind.

First, a few words about Player. I had interviewed him at The Masters and the 2001 Senior Open at Salem, but never got a one-on-one opportunity to speak with him until he played a corporate event at Turner Hill for software giant SAP last month.

The fit-as-a-fiddle Player looked half his age and played and conversed with a variety of SAP executives as if this were the most exciting day of his life. The man’s energy level is incomparable.

“Why not have fun with these guys out here?” Player said. “I love golf today as much as I did 50 years ago. The game’s given me happiness beyond my wildest dreams. A day like this is a pleasure beyond words. The sun, the people, the landscape. Loved the golf course, by the way.”

After the three-time Masters champion concluded business with the SAP golfers and your humble servant, the man’s true colors appeared. As Player made a bee-line for his stretch limo and the ride to SAP’s 8,000-person banquet in Boston, 19-year-old Methodist College student Colby Wallitz, a summer member of the Turner Hill pro shop staff, stopped Player in his tracks and asked a question. It was the perfect time for Player to shake Wallitz off and tell him he had done his gig and was out of there. But that isn’t Gary Player.

Player stood in the foyer of Turner Hill’s clubhouse, the limo idling only steps away, and answered not one, but five of Wallitz’s questions about conditioning and diet as if Colby was the most important person in the legendary golfer’s life. Well, at that moment Player probably believed Colby was. That’s the Gary Player respected and admired around the golfing world, most of all by his peers.

Two days later, I was standing on the first tee on a glorious spring morning at Pine Valley in Clementon, N.J., with Salem Country Club members Hank Ramini and George Burke and our host Bob McCoy, who also plays at Ipswich Country Club and Baltusrol Golf Club in New Jersey. If you recall, McCoy was featured in the August 2004 issue of North Shore Golf after playing the world’s Top 100 courses in 100 days.

“If time could stand still, maybe I should pray for it now,” I quipped to my partners as we prepared to hit our drives. I was the only player among the four who was taking on the sand dunes, mammoth greens and generously wide fairways of the par-70, 6532-yard layout for the first time. We were not going to play the course from the tips even if club founder/course designer George Crump appeared out of the golf heavens and made a tear-jerking plea.

Simply put, Pine Valley is justifiably one of golf’s most revered shrines. Eighteen daunting and beautiful holes. Dazzling elevation changes and vistas. Sand and pines everywhere. A modest, unassuming but wonderfully accommodating clubhouse without a front door befitting its sacred status in the golf world.

Every tee shot is intimidating but the fairways are extraordinarily wide and the greens are as big (good news) as they are sloped and undulating (bad news). No video, no images, no written word can give the course justice. You have to see it in all its glory to fully understand what Pine Valley is all about.

Lastly, the Ernest Hemingway of golf journalists, Herbert Warren Wind, died May 30, at 89, after a dogged battle with Alzheimer’s disease. When he stopped writing golf a decade ago, I wrote that golf journalism would never be the same. How could it after losing its Hemingway? No one could wax poetic about the game like Wind, Brockton born and a Bedford resident the last seven years. The life-long bachelor, who wore his trademark tweed clothes seven days a week, 12 months a year, gave “Amen Corner,” the three-hole stretch at Augusta National, its name.

His two-volume history, The Story of American Golf, and his compendium of New Yorker golf articles, “Following Through,” are on the shelf of every serious reader of American golf. We had some great lunches at his favorite spot, Dalya’s, in Bedford. Those brief visits were like a Shakespearean scholar’s pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon.

Wind’s style of humor? In describing his lengthy articles, he quipped, “I needed 5,000 words to clear my throat.”

He had two of the most enjoyable days of his retirement at Salem Country Club, reuniting with some of his aging peers at the 1991 Mass. Open and 2001 U.S. Senior Open.

Personally, he was as powerful a dose of inspiration in my career as I ever received, along with that of Bill Kipouras, whom I worked closely with during all of my 20-plus years at The Salem Evening News. So when Wind demanded to write the back cover endorsement for my North Shore golf history, The Green and Gold Coast, it was the finest compliment I ever experienced as a journalist.