Bam! Driving the Pyramids

PHOTOS OF RORY MCILROY AT the pyramids at Giza circulated a couple of weeks ago during the Egyptian Open. This one is my favorite. Young Rory has launched a drive that looks like it will split the pyramids (if it draws just a bit).

“Three years ago, I would never have dreamt I’d be able to do something like this,” Rory said. “It’s just really cool.”

Mark Tullo of Chile (and also a product of North Carolina State University) won the Egyptian Open by a stroke to secure full playing privileges on the European Tour for the 2011 season.

−The Armchair Golfer

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(Image courtesy of Alan Ewens on behalf of Egyptian Open)

Afternoon Tea With Gary Player

SINCE GARY PLAYER TURNED 75 on Monday, I thought I should share a story about the Hall of Famer and one of the Big Three along with Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.

The problem is, I don’t have a Gary Player story. I haven’t met golf’s first globetrotter. I have seen him play on a few occasions. Author friend John Coyne had a terrific Player story, though. He told it to me when we attended the 2008 Masters and watched Player walk up one of Augusta’s fairways.

It’s 1969. You’re traveling through South Africa and decide to pick up the phone book and find the listing for Gary Player. There it is. You call and the South African golf great and five-time major winner (at that time) invites you over for tea. No kidding, that’s how it happened.

Here’s the story in John’s words:

I interviewed Gary years ago at his home in South Africa when I was visiting all the countries I hadn’t seen when I was with the Peace Corps. Gary invited me to his farm for tea one Sunday afternoon.

His father was there, a retired mine worker, as well as his step-mother. Gary’s wife was playing in a golf tournament. She, too, was a fine player, a South African women’s champ.

Gary had designed his ranch home so that each room was a collection of items he had picked up from around the world. For example, he had a Western Room full of saddles, horse gear, and wild west paintings from America. There was a Spanish Room, as well as an Asia Room.

In the doorways of his kids’ rooms he had a bar installed so that his boys (Vivienne and Gary have six children) could do one or two chin-ups entering and leaving their bedrooms. It is not for nothing that Gary is nicknamed Mr. Fitness. (He is also called the Black Knight for his history of always wearing black when playing tournaments.)

Gary was a poor kid who lost his mother when he was 8 or so, and started to play golf at 14 when his father took out a loan to buy him a set of golf clubs that he could play with. His father worked in the gold mines of South Africa. Gary had a brother who is a famous environmentalist.

Gary only finished secondary school and then turned pro. His father wrote a letter to Bobby Jones more than 50 years ago asking him to invite young Gary to the Masters, saying how great his son was, and it worked!

When I visited Gary back in 1969, he kept talking about the “winds of change” coming to South Africa as he led me around the farm and introduced me to his African workers, all of whom he knew by name. I was there, of course, during the apartheid years. It took over 20 years before apartheid finally ended in South Africa.

Player later said his views about apartheid began to change as he traveled the world. Nonetheless, many assumed that he supported the system. He had said so in his book in the mid 1960s.

At the 1969 PGA Championship in Dayton, Ohio, someone threw water in Player’s face. At the 1971 U.S. Open at Merion, he received death threats. That same year, Player invited Lee Elder to play in the South African PGA Championship in Johannesburg. It was the first integrated golf tournament in South Africa’s history.

In 2004, Charlie Sifford, the first black man inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, asked Player to handle the introduction. In his speech, Sifford called Player “my man forever.” A product of a racist system, it seems to me that Player had a genuine conversion.

Gary Player was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1974. He has 165 professional wins, including 24 PGA Tour victories and nine majors.

−The Armchair Golfer

(Images: Keith Allison/Flickr)

Rod Spittle, a Win for Obscurity

ROD SPITTLE WON THE AT&T Championship this past weekend the same way Bernhard Langer and Fred Couples win Champions Tour events. Spittle shot the lowest score, a 12-under total of 201 that tied him with multiple-winner Jeff Sluman. Then he dispatched Sluman on the first hole of a sudden-death playoff.

But, if you’re like me, you’re asking two things: 1) Who in the name of Allen Doyle is Rod Spittle? 2) And what on God’s green fairways is Spittle doing winning a Champions Tour event?

Spittle, 55, had no status on the Champions Tour, which meant he had to play in Monday qualifiers to try to grab one of the three or four available spots in the small fields loaded with former PGA Tour stars. They used to call Monday qualifiers “rabbits.” Spittle has been a rabbit for five years. He has made it into five tournaments this season.

Thanks to the unlikeliest of wins, Spittle now has a one-year exemption on the Champions Tour. He also received a check for $262,500.

A native of Ontario, Canada, and lifelong amateur who played collegiate golf for Ohio State, Spittle left a sales and marketing career in corporate insurance to turn professional at the age of 49. His wife also quit her job, the couple sold the house, and they hit the road to, well, not glory and riches.

The Spittles did have some financial backers, but it was still a risky proposition, a choice the two-time Canadian amateur champion figured he had hundred-guessed.

Spittle’s best year was 2007 when he won $325,000. Last season was a big fat goose egg.

“We just kept plugging away,” he said.

The stability of a regular income gone, the plan didn’t make much financial sense. That’s the nature of some dreams. Today, Spittle is glad he didn’t have the good sense to give up.

−The Armchair Golfer