"Lee Trevino: Cantinflas of the Country Clubs"

by Mulligan Stu on Dec 29, 2007 3:26 PM EST Comment 1 comment

That's the title of the 1971 Time magazine article about Lee Trevino that I referenced in yesterday's post about Jack Nicklaus. (Extra credit if you know who Cantinflas was.)

The title is a little ironic, because Trevino always hated country clubs. He had a standing invitation from Ben Hogan to play golf with Hogan at Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth, but never took Hogan up on the offer. Trevino even skipped The Masters several times because he wasn't comfortable at Augusta National. (When he did play, he'd change his shoes in the parking lot to avoid having to go inside the clubhouse and mingle with the country clubbers.)

lee trevino This article appeared after Trevino won the 1971 British Open, which followed victories earlier in the year in the U.S. Open and Canadian Open (which was a much bigger deal in those days). Trevino thus became the first person to win all three national championships in the same season. (Editor's note: I originally said Trevino was still the only person to accomplish this feat, but commenter Scott pointed out that Tiger did it in 2000.) I suspect it was the first in-depth portrait of Trevino to appear in a major publication outside the golf magazines. It's probably the article that established some of the better-known stories about Trevino, and I highly recommend it. It's a great read.

Although among the stories about Trevino this article helped establish is one that isn't true: That Trevino "startled" Nicklaus by throwing a rubber snake at him on the first tee of their 18-hole playoff at the '71 U.S. Open, and that thrown off his game by the stunt, Nicklaus couldn't beat Trevino. Poppycock. What happened - as Trevino and Nicklaus have explained many times, and as is obvious in the video that pops up every now and then - is that Lee had a rubber snake in his golf bag (why? who knows) that he pulled out or knocked out while digging around in the bag. The crowd laughed, Trevino played to the crowd and showed off the snake. Nicklaus, sitting on a railing on the opposite side of the tee box, asked Trevino to throw the snake his way, which Lee did. Jack wasn't "startled" as the Time article claims, or thrown off his game. He took the lead in the playoff. Trevino was just too good in 1971.

But other than that, the article does a great job navigating the legend and lore already building up around Trevino, and includes the story of his 71-day road trip to play a Panama tournament and his hustling golfers by beating them using a Dr Pepper bottle as his "club."

There's lots of stuff about gambling, although my favorite Trevino gambling story is left out. In the mid 1960s, when Trevino was a club pro in El Paso, it was not uncommon for big-money gamblers to stake great golfers and arrange matches that might require traveling cross-country. And that's how some money men came to hire Raymond Floyd - already a winner on the PGA Tour - to travel to El Paso to play some unknown club pro in a high-stakes match.

Floyd arrived and headed into the clubhouse, where a short, squat attendant took care of his requests. At one point Floyd finally asked the "help", "Hey, any idea who I'm playing today?" The guy replied, "Yeah, me." It was Trevino.

Trevino whupped Floyd the first day, but Floyd evened it up on Day 2. And by that point everyone had had enough of the club pro who wasn't the easy mark Floyd and his backers were imagining. The money men took Floyd and got out of El Paso.

A few excerpts from the article:

In a game that demands the concentration of a watchmaker, Trevino confesses that "the only time I stop yakking is when I'm asleep." A methodical player like Nicklaus will go an entire round without uttering a word. Lee the Lip chatters before, after and sometimes even during a shot. "You know," he will say as he tees up, "I've got to be the only Mexican"--thwack goes his drive down the fairway--"who's never been in a detention home. I just never got caught." On another hole, he will announce: "Five years ago, I was teeing up on dirt. Now I've got tees" --thwack--"with my name on 'em." Orville Moody, one of Trevino's close friends on the tour, recalls how Lee shocked an unsuspecting gallery in Singapore when they were teamed in the 1969 World Cup matches. As Lee lined up a 20-ft. putt, the customary funereal hush fell over the crowd. Slowly, deliberately, he drew back his putter and then suddenly said, "With a million-dollar swing like mine"--tap--"I can't miss." He didn't.

Not all the pros appreciate the way Trevino courts the crowds. "All the world loves a loudmouth," says one image-conscious veteran. "But sometimes Lee can be so coarse"--a reference to Trevino's predilection for jokes about "booze and broads." Most players agree, however, that he may be one of the best things to happen to golf since the steel-shafted club. "He sure brings the people in," says Frank Beard. After one tournament. Beard recalls, he saw Trevino "packing up his car, wearing his cowboy hat and his cowboy boots. I couldn't help noticing that he had more people watching him load his car than I'd had watching me shoot my 66."

Trevino's no-sweat image belies his devotion to the game. On his first day at the 1968 Masters, he played 36 practice holes, followed that with nine holes on a pitch-and-putt course and then, after a shower, ended at midnight on a par-three course, going another nine holes in sports coat and alligator shoes. Prior to last year's British Open, he spent eight full days hitting 600 to 700 practice shots a day learning how to hook the smaller English ball. "I play every day," he says. "Even if I'm taking some time off, I'm out there beating balls. You got to hit the ball in this game until your hands bleed."

Trevino's desire to buy a big hunk of life for me and my kids" is a drive born of deprivation. He does not know who his father was and has never tried to find out. "Rich people like to talk about their backgrounds, their ancestors and where they come from," he explains. "We were too poor to care. We were too busy existing." He was raised in the rural outskirts of Dallas by his mother Juanita and his maternal grandfather Joe Trevino, an immigrant gravedigger. Their four-room frame house --located "about two miles over in the country"--had neither electricity nor running water. Lee had to improvise his boyhood games. Basketball was played with a tennis ball. A taped beer can served as a football.

The golf balls, though, were for real. The Trevino house stood in a hayfield next to the seventh fairway of the Glen Lakes Country Club. In between was a fence, and little Lee was soon turning a tidy profit on that happy coincidence --collecting balls that sailed over the fence and selling them back to club members. Expanding his business, he welded two rake handles together, fashioned a chicken-wire scoop on one end, and went fishing for more strays in the water hazards. "I cleared maybe $10 a day," he recalls. When he was six, he found a discarded wooden-shafted No. 5 iron, sawed it down to size and began hitting horse apples. Bored with make-believe, he eventually "made me a two-hole course in the pasture, and when they cut the hay in summer I had me the plushest course you ever saw."

When Lee returned home in 1961, he was ready for a little action. He found it at Dallas' Tenison municipal golf course, where there were plenty of wallets waiting to be tapped. His challenge was hard to resist: he would play with only one club, give an opponent his handicap, and winner take all. Trevino claims that he and his trusty No. 3 iron never lost. When things were slow, he would take on all comers on an obstacle course that began on the first tee and then angled across a railroad crossing, down a gravel road and through a tunnel before ending back on the course. Business was so good (he was averaging $200 a week hustling) that he took an apartment across the street from the course so he could get an earlier start.

While working evenings at Hardy's Pitch-N-Putt, Trevino would attract a crowd by playing with a quart-size Dr Pepper bottle wrapped in adhesive tape. If the stakes were right, he would match his bottle against any challenger's clubs. Rarely shooting above a 30 on the nine-hole course, he says, "I never lost a bet using that bottle." He did lose a few suckers. "On the driving range once," recalls his longtime friend Arnold Salinas, "a guy bet Lee he couldn't hit the 100-yd. sign. Lee looked at him and said, 'Which zero do you want me to hit?' The guy backed down."

Trevino quit his job at Hardy's in 1965 and decided to go to the Panama Open with an aspiring Dallas sponsor. Unfortunately, neither Lee nor his backer could afford the plane fare, so the two men spent 71 days driving to Panama, sleeping in the car, grinding up horse trails and bouncing down boulder-strewn river beds. Trevino placed fifth in the tourney, won $716.16, and flew back to Dallas. ...

Word of Trevino's feats soon reached Martin Lettunich, a wealthy cotton farmer who had been steadily losing bets to a hot local golfer at the Horizon City Country Club in El Paso. Seeking revenge, Lettunich telephoned Trevino in Dallas and offered to pay his expenses if he would come to El Paso and play the home-town star in a "sociable game." Trevino. who was broke as usual, agreed to come, instantly. "I shot a 65 and 67 and beat him like a tom-tom. I turned him every way but loose." That earned Trevino $300 and the chance to become a teaching pro at Horizon City. The salary--$30 a week--did not interest him, but the prospect of more "sociable games" and the opportunity to hone his game did. He accepted.

Will success spoil Lee Trevino? Never, he says, confident that his trying times are behind him. Thanks to the nitty-gritty experience of his hustling days, he says the pressure of competition never bothers him. "A $5 bet and only $2 in your pocket--that's pressure." What did get to him, though, was all the promoting and partying. Easily lured out for a night of carousing with friendly Fleas, Trevino all too often would live up to his happy philosophy: "I love livin'. Why go to bed? I like to party because I missed a lot of nights when I couldn't afford parties. I get my five hours' sleep." Asked what the toughest feature of the Greater New Orleans Open course was, he answered: "Bourbon Street." After tying for first place in the National Airlines Open in Miami last year, he stayed up half the night drinking beer and betting on jai alai. Next day, teeing up for his play-off with Bob Menne, he said: "Shoot, I was just coming in this morning when he was getting up. Man, a guy can get loo much rest." The psych worked. On the second hole, Menne lipped out a 2-ft. putt for a bogey, and Trevino was $40,000 richer.

Now that he can afford steak instead of his old diet of Texas hash and Kool-Aid, he has a problem keeping in shape ("Five feet seven and a half is a little short for 185 Ibs."). His avowed goal is "to win a million bucks. After that, I might slow down a little and go see what my kids look like. The way I'm spending money, I have to win a million." Although he is determined that "the next generation with my name won't have to be laborers," he confesses that "money is just pieces of paper to me." Knowing that, Claudia handles the family finances. "We can go out to shop for a pair of socks," she says, "and he'll spend $500." An eager gambler, Trevino has been known to blow a wad in a poker game, hit his wife for some money ("Honey, give me a check for a couple of hundred"), and hustle across the border to bet the greyhounds at the Juarez dog track.

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