Just today I learned that one of my favorite golf writers, Michael Bamberger, has a new book coming out in March. The new book, The Ball in the Air, is being described as “an exhilarating love letter to the amateur game as it’s played—and lived—by the rest of us.” I am going to do my best to get hold of a copy of the new book to read and review here at Will o'the Glen on Golf, but in the meantime I would like to post a review that I wrote for his 2015 release Men in Green, posted to my former online outlet, Examiner.com, which went dark in 2016 (taking four years of my content with it, unfortunately.)
So here it is, my review of Michael Bamberger’s 2015 book, Men in Green:
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One night at dinner during the 2012 Ryder Cup matches at Medinah Golf Club outside Chicago, Michael Bamberger, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, wrote down a two-column list naming 18 Americans – 17 men and one woman – who are legends in the world of golf. All 18 are associated with the game in the period from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, the years when golf was maturing into the big-money sport it has become. Out of that list came a quest, of sorts; a plan to track down as many of those 18 as he could and ask them a few simple questions – “What was it like?”, “Who did you hang with?”, “How does then look to you now?”
Drawn to golf in the late 1970s as a teenager growing up in a small town on Long Island, Bamberger’s formative years in the game were populated by the names on that list he drew up in Chicago: Palmer, Nicklaus, Watson, Venturi, Crenshaw – just to name a few. So, inspired by the baseball classic The Boys of Summer, Bamberger took up the challenge posed by his list of names, crisscrossing the United States over the next couple of years to talk to as many of the “legends” as he could.
Out of his travels came the book Men in Green, in my opinion one of the finest works of golf-related non-fiction to be published in many years. His quest led him down paths he never anticipated traveling when he began, raising questions he couldn’t have known would arise, and from those paths and out of those questions came revelations about the names on the list, and himself, that will resonate with readers who grew up in the game in those years, as Bamberger did.
In keeping with his position in the game “The King”, Arnold Palmer, opens and closes Bamberger’s physical and temporal journey through the landscape of golf’s mid-20th-century heyday. Along the way, Bamberger checks in with the next-biggest name from the period, Jack Nicklaus, as well as Tom Watson, Ken Venturi (just weeks before his death), Hale Irwin, and Curtis Strange – all names off the “Living Legends” side of his original list. Accompanying him on many of these visits is his friend, and a name off the “Secret Legends” side of the roster, Mike Donald, a long-time PGA Tour and Champions Tour pro. Donald is a veteran of the Tours whose biggest claim to fame among the golfing public is his narrow loss to Hale Irwin in the 1990 U.S. Open.
The strength of Men in Green, aside from the depth that comes from Bamberger’s whole-hearted investment in the game of golf, is the intimate, personal-history glimpses it affords the reader, glimpses into the PGA Tour in the Palmer-Nicklaus-Watson era – pre-Tiger – and the interconnections between the players, caddies, golf writers, and even officials, of those times.
This was an era when the PGA Tour chartered airline flights to carry players and their families from tournament to tournament, when there was more of a family atmosphere than there is now, yet still some hints of the old rough-and-tumble Tour. The world of the PGA Tour wasn’t as corporate as it is nowadays – there were no entourages of swing coaches, short-game gurus, mental-game seers, and publicists, and many players were still driving from one tournament to the next. There was still something of a Mad Men-like sensibility to the times – a pretty woman was a “good-looking broad” (according to none other than Arnie himself!) and the players’ after-hours entertainment might include drinks with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, or Sammy Davis, Jr.
The beating heart of Men in Green, and the part of the book which has left an enduring impression on me, is the interwoven tale of Arnold Palmer and Ken Venturi. Remembered now more for his 35-year career in the broadcast booth with CBS Sports than for his playing days, Venturi was a promising young amateur in the mid-1950s, a native San Franciscan of Irish ancestry who nevertheless identified more with the Italian-American heritage of his stepfather, Fred Venturi, longtime manager of the pro shop at San Francisco’s Harding Park golf course.
Bitter disappointment at the Masters tournament, the ultimate golf venue of the ultimate gentleman-amateur golfer, Bob Jones, led Venturi to abandon his oft-declared plans to maintain a career as an amateur, like Jones, and not turn professional. The best-known of Venturi’s disappointments at Augusta National came in the 1958 Masters, the result of a controversial ruling involving Arnold Palmer, who was playing with Venturi when it happened.
The repercussions of that rules controversy, along with the fallout from harsh statements Venturi made to the press after a final-round 80 at the 1956 Masters, rippled down through the years, and Venturi watched as Arnold Palmer ascended to a position in the golf world, albeit as a professional, that he had aspired to. It becomes apparent, through Bamberger’s accounts of interviews with Venturi, that the revered elder statesman of the game was a very bitter man for much of his life, and somewhat given to embellishing recollections of past events to his advantage.
Connections abound between not only the big names, the “Living Legends” on Bamberger’s list, but between the less well-known “Secret Legends” whose stories weave in and out of the narrative. Serendipitous discoveries turn up at every corner, in conversations with an old-time Tour caddy, Adolphus “Golf Ball” Hull; retired CBS Sports producer Chuck Will; and even a couple of ex-Tour wives: Conni Venturi (Ken’s first wife), and Polly Crenshaw Price, another first wife – Ben Crenshaw’s ex.
The title, the cover illustration, and the release date (April 7, 2015 – two days before play began at the 78th Masters Tournament), tend to give the impression that the book is a look back at past Masters champions. That’s a fine subject, and five of the names on Bamberger’s list are past champions of the event, but this book is so much more than that. Men in Green is a look back to the formative years of the current state of the game, by a man who was growing up in the game, and with the game, in those same years. There is nostalgia and revelation in equal parts, all tempered by the love of golf that shaped the author’s life in so many ways.
Golf fans will know Michael Bamberger from his 20-year career at Sports Illustrated, and perhaps from his earlier books To The Linksland and This Golfing Life, also non-fiction travelogues through the landscapes of golf and life. A few years ago Bamberger teamed up with his friend and fellow SI staff writer Alan Shipnuck for the fiction hit The Swinger, but it is the insight and emotion he brings to his non-fiction works that is his strength, and the reason why every fan of the game of golf should read Men in Green.
