Golf: The Man & the Myth

He was, to read the stories, a real-life Ragged Dick: a poor Mexican shoeshine boy who never knew his father, who learned to play golf by hitting “horse apples” with a sawed-off broomstick in a hayfield, who labored for $30 a week as a teaching pro until—hey, presto!—he won the U.S. Open and found fame and fortune. “Well,” sighs Lee Buck Trevino, 28, “I used to tell sportswriters the truth, but they would just print what they wanted to, anyway. Now if they want to say something, I just let them say it.”

Trevino the man hardly needs Trevino the myth. Ebullient and extroverted, a wisecracking four-letter man who worries only about his weight (“Five foot seven-and-a-half is a little short for 180 Ibs.”), Lee is one of the most colorful champions golf has produced. “The only time I stop yakking,” he says, “is when Im asleep. I even had to quit smoking on the golf course because I nearly choked to death while I was talking.” After he won last week’s Open at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, N.Y., with a 275 that tied Jack Nicklaus’ record, somebody asked Trevino what he planned to do with his $30,000 winner’s check. “Buy the Alamo,” he said, “and give it back to Mexico.”

Down to Size. Life was never really all that tough for Lee. True, his parents were divorced when he was two, and he was raised by his grandfather, a gravedigger in Vickery, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. But “our house was about two miles out in the country,” he says, “and we had it rent free. It was nice out there. We even had a lake behind the house.” Next door was a country club; in between was a fence, and little Lee turned a tidy profit on that happy coincidence—collecting golf balls that strayed over the fence, selling them back to club members. “I cleared maybe $10 a day.” Combining pleasure with business, he took up the game himself— playing with a discarded, wooden-shafted No. 5 iron that he discovered one day and sawed down to size.

At 17, Lee joined the Marines and was shipped to Okinawa. “For the first 18 months, I was a machine gunner,” he says. Then he shot a 66 in a tryout for his division’s golf team—and spent the remaining 2½ years of his military career in special services, playing in tournaments in Japan, Formosa and the Philippines. Mustered out in 1961, he went back to his old driving-range job and supplemented his income by hustling suckers for bets at Dallas’ Tenison Municipal Golf Course. His favorite trick was to play with an adhesive-wrapped soft drink bottle instead of a club. “I used a Dr. Pepper bottle,” says Lee, “because it is smooth, while a Coke bottle is rough. I used the family size, the quart bottle. People would bet me that I couldn’t hit the green or make a-putt—and I usually won the bets.”

To the Dogs. By 1965, although few U.S. fans had heard of him, Trevino was already making an impression on his peers. He won the Texas State Open and finished second in the Mexican Open, meanwhile working as a teaching pro at El Paso’s Horizon Hills Country Club. His basic salary was indeed only $30 a week, but with his coaching fees, he says, “I was making more money than the guy who owned the club.” He picked up another $600 in the 1966 U.S. Open at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, playing with an unmatched bag of clubs (“I must have had seven different brands”); last year, better outfitted, he placed fifth and won $6,000 at the Open in Springfield, N.J. That persuaded Trevino to become a regular on the pro tour—a gamble that has paid off handsomely. In a year, Lee has won $110,899 in official prize money, acquired a new $25,000 home, a one-third interest in the Horizon Hills club, and a business manager.

Will success spoil Lee Trevino? Not likely. Last week, after putting the touch on his wife Claudia (“Honey, let me have a couple of hundred, will you?”), Lee headed for his favorite relaxing spot: the greyhound-racing track in Juárez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso. “I never win anything,” he confided. “I’m the worst picker of dogs in the world. I couldn’t win a race if there was only one dog in it; he’d probably jump the barrier and disappear.” It was, of course, Lee Trevino Night at the track. “They had signs up, and mariachis, and everything,” said Trevino, who actually cashed five winning $2 tickets and seemed genuinely awed by the attention he was getting. “Jeez,” he said, “you win a golf tournament and, well, you’re the winner of a golf tournament. But you win the Open, and you could probably run for President.” His gallery finds that a good idea.

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