John Newport - The Fine Green Line: My Year of Golf Adventure on the Pro-Golf Mini-Tours

J OHN P AUL N EWPORT

My Year of Adventure
on the Pro-Golf Mini-Tours

Broadway Books
New York

Contents

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2000 by Broadway Books.

THE FINE GREEN LINE. Copyright 2000 by John Paul Newport. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Newport, John Paul, 1954
The fine green line : my year of adventure on the pro-golf mini-tours /
by John Paul Newport.
p. cm.
1. GolfTournamentsUnited States.
2. Newport, John Paul, 1954I. Title.
GV970.N49 2000
796.35266dc21 99-089271

eISBN: 978-0-7679-0895-5

v3.0

A certain man of La Mancha filled himself with
books on knight errancy, so then in fact he began
to feel it proper that he become errant himself
and go out in the world.

M IGUEL DE C ERVANTES S AAVEDRA
Don Quixote

Preface:
A Fine Green Line
Runs Through It

F ORT W ORTH , T EXAS , where I grew up, is a semifamous golf town. Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson both grew up there, rival caddies and players from the east side. The Colonial National tournament in Fort Worth is the oldest PGA Tour event held continuously at the same site. Dan Jenkins, the funniest golf writer of all time, hails from Fort Worth and went to the same high school I did, R. L. Paschal (although much before my time). Back in the sixties, Jenkins wrote a funny, much-anthologized article in Sports Illustrated called Glory Days at Goat Hills about gambling at the bone-dry Worth Hills municipal course, which was a block from my house and where I hit my first golf ball.

Even so, growing up, I hardly gave golf a second thought. I was of the opinion, like most of my peers in Texas at the time, that only two sports mattered: football and spring football. All my athletic dreams as a boy, which is to say all my dreams period, revolved around playing quarterback at Baylor University and then leading the Dallas Cowboys to an NFL championship. I devoted myself to football. For a period of two or three years in my early teens, I disciplined myself to throw a hundred passes a dayrain or shine, cold or heatmostly through tires and hoops set up in my backyard. As a result, I actually did get pretty good at throwing the old pigskin and was quarterback of my high school team. But I couldnt get an athletic scholarship to Baylor and so ended up at Harvard. I played football there for a year but hurt my knee and lost interest, in no small part because football players ranked absolutely lowest in the status sweepstakes among early-seventies Radcliffe girls. I might as well have been a Nixon Republican. And so all my years of athletic toil came to nothing.

But then, in my early thirties, I discovered golf. And to my delight and surprise, I had a knack for the game.

It wasnt as if Id never played golf before. Back when I was ten or eleven, I had spent many desultory afternoons whacking shag balls on the aforementioned Worth Hills golf course, which the city of Fort Worth had recently sold to Texas Christian University for an eventual expansion of its campus. It was the perfect way to learn how to hit a golf ball: no pressure, an open field, and the opportunity to do the one thing you really care about doing at age ten: hit the snot out of the ball. For a couple of summers during junior high school, some buddies and I played a couple of times a week at the old Benbrook muni on the edge of town, though I never recall any of us breaking 90 without serious cheating.

And that was it, with maybe a half dozen isolated golf experiences in the interim, until one splendid autumn afternoon in Vail, Colorado, in 1985.

At the time I was a writer for Fortune magazine and had somehow been picked to help represent the editorial side at an ad sales conference at the Snowmass resort. One of the main qualifications for being an ad salesperson for Fortune back then was a low golf handicap; a lavish golf outing with customers was the primary sales technique, and the publisher himself was a single-digit member of Pine Valley. Naturally one of the primary orders of business at the conference was daily golf. In the first afternoons round I played in a fivesome with the publisher, and on the fifth holeI will never forget itI accidentally caught a drive dead on the screws. It was an exhilarating feeling I had never had before. All my various limbs and body parts happened to fire in precisely the right sequence, the clubface hit the ball smack in the middle, and the thing took off like a rocket.

Holy shit! the publisher said. Those glorious words are seared in my mind.

He was so excited by my drive that he paced it off: 340 yards. Granted, at over a mile of altitude golf balls travel at least 10 percent farther than they do at sea level, plus the wind was with us, and the drive had cleared a crest and landed on the downhill fairway. But stillit was certainly the best shot I had ever hit in my life. For the rest of the round the publisher kept looking at me funny, as if waiting for another miracle. It never came, though I did pull off a handful of other decent shots with my long irons. After we putted out on the final hole, he took me aside, clamped both hands on my shoulders, looked me full in the face, and said, You simply must take up golf.

I must admit, I was flattered. And obviously, I took his advice. Within a week of returning to Manhattan, I purchased my first set of clubs. Unfortunately, the publisher was fired before I could get good enough at golf to rate an invitation to play Pine Valley.

O VER THE NEXT few years I became a card-carrying golf addict. This wasnt easy, living in Manhattan. In the summers I rented a beach house with friends in the Hamptons and spent many miserable predawn hours waiting in line to get onto the only decent public course in the area, Montauk Downs. Whenever I traveled for business I took along my sticks, if only to hit balls at a decent driving range somewhere.

My infatuation with the sport was baffling, even to me. Almost none of my friends in New York played golf. Most, in fact, viewed the game as a shameful, bourgeoisie absurdity (this was before the golf boom certified the game as acceptable to yuppies). But I was forever dreaming about the next fix.

Part of golfs appeal must have had to do with the divorce I was going through. It was a refuge. In my personal life I hardly knew which end was up, but on the golf course the rules were clear and order prevailed. Plus, you had the tweeting birds and the gentle breezes and the bright green grassthe same elements that make sanitariums such pleasant places to spend time.

And I was continually getting better, which was good for my battered ego. In only my second summer of adult golf I broke 80 by holing out a wedge shot on the eighteenth hole. Seventy-nine! Seventy-nine! Seventy-nine! I shouted like an idiot from the fairway. In the rush to high-five my playing buddy, I forgot about the club in my hand and almost fractured his nose.