Bill Knight, PGA Tour Archive via Getty Images
I settled back in my aeroplane seat – an economy one, unfortunately – and thought about what lies ahead. It was March 1982, and I was setting off on my first visit to the Players Championship. I was excited. The London I was about to leave behind was grey, cold and often wet. I hadn’t seen any professional golf since the World Match Play Championship at Wentworth the previous autumn. Almost as relevant, I hadn’t been able to play much golf because Highgate, then my home course in north London, was often muddy and cold and sometimes waterlogged.
Florida promised to be sunny, and the thought of sunshine on my back was warming. As the newly appointed golf correspondent of The Sunday Times and successor once-removed to Henry Longhurst, I had my suitcase in the hold, my sturdy steel-framed typewriter in the rack above my seat and some British newspapers and golf magazines to read on the flight. I was booked to fly to Jacksonville, collect a car and drive to the Sea Turtle Inn on Atlantic Beach, one I would come to know well in the coming years. From there I would file my copy by making reverse-charge telephone calls to my office in London and then go for a run along the beach before plunging into the hotel’s swimming pool.
And now, here I am again, poised to leave my home in England and be taxied to Gatwick Airport to board a direct flight to Orlando that may well be less comfortable and almost certainly is longer than my flight four decades ago. I am still travelling in economy, I’m afraid. The Players was in March for my first few years, moved to May in 2007 and returned to the third month of the year in 2019. This year’s Players is its 50th; it will be my 42nd.
It has traditionally, though not always, been the start of my four or five annual trips to cover golf in the U.S., and if I have been doing those since 1982, then I have a fair claim to being one of the game’s most travelled writers/chroniclers. I can’t challenge Gary Player as the most travelled golfer, but in terms of air miles I reckon I might have overtaken the late Tom Ramsey, the Australian golf writer who came to Europe and then on to the U.S. annually for many years. One unchallengeable fact: Ramsey was best man at the first wedding of the Australian Rupert Murdoch, a serial proprietor of newspapers, and whenever Ramsey’s first-class travel was queried, he replied: “I think Rupert would want it. He likes me to travel in style.”
Forty or so years of the Players means I saw Jerry Pate’s dive into the lake adjoining the 18th green, taking Deane Beman, PGA Tour commissioner, and Pete Dye, the course designer, with him. That was in 1982. I was there five years later when Sandy Lyle beat Jeff Sluman in a playoff, thus becoming the first European to win the championship – and still one of only a handful to have done so. In 2002, Craig Perks chipped in to eagle the 70th hole on Sunday, sank a long birdie putt on the 71st hole and then chipped in again on the 72nd. What a way to win. I remember Nick Faldo’s astonishment at realising that Greg Norman’s record total of 264 in 1994 meant the Australian had averaged four rounds of 66.
I had some extra vigour in my reporting of the 2008 event because Sergio García parred the 17th to beat Paul Goydos in the first playoff for 21 years. And even more so in 2019 when Rory McIlroy nipped Jim Furyk by one stroke. And, sadly, I was there on the Friday of the 2020 event after it had been ended because of a pandemic and Jay Monahan urged everyone to get home and look after their loved ones. Little did we know then how much damage COVID was to do around the world.
Sometimes I sat in a very comfortable barber’s chair. It was easy to talk to players in those days. They seemed more friendly and less stressed.
The media centre in the old clubhouse was down in the basement and was normally the cart shed. Everything went on above it. One year, I met Ernie Els for an interview in the Crow’s Nest restaurant, atop the pyramid-shaped building. On numerous other occasions I would while away time as I waited to see a player by sitting in the locker room, reached by an outside staircase. Sometimes I sat in a very comfortable barber’s chair. It was easy to talk to players in those days. They seemed more friendly and less stressed.
As I waited for my interviewee, I looked around, slightly awestruck. There were free telephones for players to use. The leads were so long that the player could get up, walk to his locker, get some papers out and return to his chair all the while with the telephone clamped on his shoulder and his head cocked to the earpiece. Pink message notes headed “While You Were Out” were stuck to players’ lockers.
An attendant came into the room carrying dozens of boxes of new golf balls. I had never seen so many before, and I watched, wide-eyed, as he went from locker to locker, peering at the names on the outside of each and opening them and placing three or six boxes of balls inside. Sometimes he added new golf gloves as well. While this was going on, other attendants, also wearing white jackets, bustled about picking up pairs of shoes and taking them off to a distant room from which came the continuous hum of a cleaning machine. Dry cleaning was collected to be taken away and when returned, hung inside the player’s locker.
I was most struck by what stood on a shelf above the four washbasins: cans of shaving cream, cans of skin-saver lotion, deodorant spray, Lime Eau de Cologne, Vitalis V7 hair tonic, Aqua Velva after shave, York mouthwash gargle, New Image professional ph-balanced hair spray, four razors, two tall jugs the size of big coffee cafetières filled with a green liquid in which stood six black combs, fully teethed. Piles of fluffy white towels were placed at the end of each washbasin. There were four showers, and by the entrance to each were paper slippers. All this was a polar opposite of what happened at most British golf clubs where a comb or two, probably missing teeth, might be lying beneath a mirror, and some smallish towels might be available for anyone who wanted to take a shower, which might be cold. There might be one tube of sunscreen but no razors, mouthwash, hair spray or skin-saver lotion.
In those early years of my trans-Atlantic trips, I became inured to the jarring words or phrases I heard in the U.S. “Croissan’wich” was one. A courtesy-car driver told me: “We had a fairly serious fatality on this road last night.” In a bar I saw a sign that read: “We have live recorded music.” A tattoo parlour advertised itself as follows: “Tattoos while you wait.” Player after player said things like: “This is unquestionably possibly the toughest course I’ve ever played, I reckon.”
I indulged in some of the U.S. food I came to like so much. Peppermint Patties became a favourite. So did Thousand Island dressing and Fig Newton biscuits. And breakfast of two eggs sunnyside up, hash browns, whole-wheat toast and jelly washed down by lashings of coffee at Waffle House was, and remains, one of my all-time favourites.
Forty years have come and gone during which I have been able to do what I dreamed about doing as a schoolboy, namely to write about golf. How lucky is that? And just think, I have been paid to do it as well.