Favorite Golfer EVER

[rollhead]

[clinthopson]

My buddy Seymour Black who taught me how to hit the damn thing.

[rollhead]

John Daly my all-round role model for good-ole-boy-dom.

[Scott Dolan]

My boy!!!!

Played his high school golf right down the street from where Kelly works. Good ole Helias High.

Your achetype midwestern Catholic school boy.

[rollhead]

Don't forget Arkie, too.

Didn't know Daly was a Catholic school boy. I went to Catholic High in Little Rock myself. Have more in common with him than I thought.

My brother has his refrigerator decorated with pictures of him posing with John Daly. Makes me jealous everytime I see them.

Daly's family moved from California to Dardanelle, Arkansas when he was five, and he began playing golf the following year. The family subsequently moved to Fredericksburg, Virginia, then to Jefferson City, Missouri, then back to Dardanelle where John graduated from high school.

Daly attended the University of Arkansas, where he was a member of the golf team. He turned professional in 1987, and won the Ben Hogan Utah Classic in 1990.

[Captain Hate]

Anybody responding Arnold Palmer deserves a severe bitchslap/beatdown.

[Chris D]

Jack.

[Captain Hate]

Jack.

*Clasp*

[Brian Olewnick]

Had to root for one guy, among all the pastels and plaids, in black...

[clinthopson]

Arnold Palmer

[Scott Dolan]

Didn't know Daly was a Catholic school boy.

Yep.

Had a kid intern where I work over the summer a couple of years back. Snotty little fuck who wouldn't work to save his ass.

Well, he goes to school at Helias. I asked him one day what his plans for the future were he said "I'm going to play professional golf, just like John Daly".

Real grounded this punk was.

[Surfer]

Yep.

Had a kid intern where I work over the summer a couple of years back. Snotty little fuck who wouldn't work to save his ass.

Well, he goes to school at Helias. I asked him one day what his plans for the future were he said "I'm going to play professional golf, just like John Daly".

Real grounded this punk was.

"All My Exes Have Rolexes"

[Scott Dolan]

Hahahahaha........


You remembered!

[rollhead]

[rollhead]

[MRS]

The Pirate

[MRS]

"Yes! Yes! Rocca has done it!"

[hornplayer]

My Dad. He totally loved the game, and was fortunate to be able to play through his 95th summer.

I've followed Pro Golf since I was old enough to say Ben Hogan, and had many favorites over the years, including Dr. Cary Middlecoff, Jack Nicklaus and Calvin Peete, but I think the Tiger is my all-time favorite. Damn! He makes it look sooooooo easy!

[MRS]

Happy Father's Day

[walto]

Easy. Dave Hill, of course. (And why the hell does Brian O. care so much that Gary Player has the best bowel movements on the tour, anyway? Hmmmmm.)


Asked what Hazeltine lacked, Hill replied, "Eighty acres of corn and a few cows. They ruined a good farm when they built this course."
Ba-da boom. The man was just warming up. "If I had to play this course every day for fun," he continued, "I'd find me another game. Just because you cut the grass and put up flags doesn't mean you've got a golf course. Mr. Jones' foreman had the blueprints upside down. I've associated with idiots before, but he [Jones] passes himself off as an intelligent man. My two kids could lay out a better golf course than that."

That Hill finished alone in second place, seven strokes behind Tony Jacklin, only serves to authenticate his legacy. A mix of heart-chilling bluster and jaw-dropping honesty, Hill says he played his best golf when angry, which may be one reason he ended up majorless. If he'd won a PGA Championship or stolen a U.S. Open, things might have been different. As it stands, his role in golf history is that of a hardcore dissenter, his reputation defined by one 20-minute interview in which his primary motivation could have been to get a few laughs.

"I think he relished it," says Dave's younger brother Mike, a three-time winner on the regular tour who has 18 victories as a senior. "He enjoyed saying those things, and in his heart maybe he didn't want them construed as they were. I was at Hazeltine, and I thought what he said was funny. I think he said it to be a funny guy, and the press thought it was funny, but the people in Minnesota obviously didn't."

The backlash, of course, was immense -- spectators mooing in Hill's backswing, heckling him from tee to green over the final 36 holes, following him en masse to make sure his weekend was a miserable one. Funny thing was, it wasn't. "I had a great time," Hill says. "They'd moo, and I'd play along, pretend I'm dancing around cow pies. I had five people rooting for me Saturday. By the time I teed off Sunday, I had half the crowd on my side."

Hazeltine and Hill both have undergone substantial refinements over the years, their rough edges softened by common sense and time. No longer is the suburban Minneapolis club an unfit place to contest a major championship -- Robert Trent Jones' son Rees is among those who helped turn a puerile pasture into a superb test of parkland golf. About a year after he trashed the place, Hill was asked by the elder Jones for his opinions on an early renovation. As the two toured the grounds in a cart that afternoon in 1971, Hill felt vindicated. Somebody was actually listening.

To that end, the jaded sourpuss who alienated so many of his peers, who should've had a suite named after him in the PGA Tour doghouse -- the man who started a fistfight with J.C. Snead (four inches taller, 60 pounds heavier) on the practice range at a 1991 senior tour event -- has mellowed. Or at the very least, found some flatter ground on which to make his stand. "When I finished with my divorce [from his first wife, in 1973] and the judge awarded me my children, I walked out of that courthouse and it was like the weight of the world had been lifted," Hill says. "I wasn't mad anymore."

Sometimes, reality can be found in the strangest places. Amid a pile of cynicism and skepticism, harm and hyperbole, Dave Hill will always emerge. "That's the way I've lived my life," he says. "If you don't like the answer, don't ask the question. You're gonna hear it exactly the way I feel, and it's gonna be the truth."

Hill says he had a blast at Hazeltine after fans reacted to his trashing of the course.

To understand the man is to know where he came from, which is where he remains today. Born and raised 75 miles west of Detroit, in the rural Michigan town of Jackson, Hill grew up on a 60-acre farm, baling hay, feeding pigs and minding vegetable patches. Only after 12 hours of chores was he able to sneak onto the adjacent CC of Jackson, where the par-3 sixth hole bordered the family property. A tiny kid, Hill wasn't allowed to caddie until he'd turned 9. By the time he was 13, he'd come up with all the answers.

"He was caddieing for a guy named Andy Andrews, a very good player, in one of the big club competitions," says Hill's longtime friend, Kenny Dillon. "Andy had hit his tee shot on 17 [a par 3] into a bunker and wanted to putt it out because there wasn't much of a lip to deal with. Andy says to Dave, 'Let me have my putter.' Dave hands him the sand wedge. Andy asks him again, but Dave won't give him the putter. This goes on for a couple of minutes.

"Finally, Andy says, 'Look kid, I want the putter.' And Dave says, 'OK, here's your putter and here's your bleeping bag -- I'm going in if you're not gonna play the bleeping shot the way it was meant to be played.' I only wish I'd kept a journal of all the things he has done and said over the years."

Hill made the tour at age 21 and immediately realized his dawn-to-dusk work ethic was his greatest asset. He hit hundreds of balls each day, becoming something of a poor man's Hogan. He won twice in 1961, the second in a stretch of 17 consecutive years among the tour's top-60 money winners. In 1969 Hill finished second in earnings and posted the year's lowest scoring average, which earned him the Vardon Trophy. He had a number of weaknesses as a player, but when it came to iron play, he had very few peers.

"Guys like Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, Billy Casper and Gene Littler, they were just so much better when it came to putting and course management," Hill says. "I wasn't in that class. I was close, but I could never keep it all together. My fairway bunker game was horrible, and I was a terrible putter on fast greens. Either I'd run the table with my putter or go around in 35, 37 putts. If I could have putted in the early '60s like I do now, I'd have added a few more victories to the list."

Hill had no idea his best days were long gone when he agreed to write his tour memoirs in the mid-1970s. He was closing in on 40, married for a second time and supposedly more relaxed, but you wouldn't have known it by reading Teed Off, golf's answer to baseball's behind-closed-doors classic, Ball Four.

On Gary Player, Hill wrote: "He runs and lifts weights and eats health foods. That's all well and good, but I get tired of hearing him brag about it. So what if he has the most perfect bowel movements on the PGA Tour?"

On Tom Weiskopf: "He's spoiled and conceited ... I've never wanted to have anything to do with Weiskopf because he can go weeks without speaking to you."

Hill's revealing book, Teed Off, matched his mood, but at 65 he's mellowed -- a bit.

On Bruce Crampton: "He's one of the few people I know who you can look at for the first time and dislike. He's cold and deliberate and can be rude to little people when he isn't getting his way. He's an only child and a spoiled man."

There are detailed accusations of cheating, a wonderful passage on the effects of pre-round sex, plus a blow-by-blow account of how Chi Chi Rodriguez cost Hill a Kemper Open in the early 1970s. "Chi Chi was off a tree for a few years there," Hill explains. "The guy spent the day talking in the middle of my backswing."

Few players were left untouched, and though just about everybody was praised in one form or another, Palmer and Player were among those angriest at Hill for his divulgence. "I said Arnold liked to look at pretty girls in the gallery," Hill says. "Heck, we all did that. If you don't look at the pretty girls in Fort Worth or Phoenix, you're either blind or gay."

Twenty-five years later, Teed Off remains a fascinating piece of golf journalism -- a window to the soul of an intelligent, tormented, iconoclastic man. "It offended a lot of people," says Mike Hill. "I'm not sure Dave would do that again. It was one of those youthful, get-even things. He was gonna tell his side of things, and he found somebody to print it."

The man who came to the door of a large wood-framed house near Jackson does not seem like a pariah. There is a slight paunch on his wiry build, but he's still wearing sansabelt slacks, and it's not like he bought them last week. He sticks his butts into a cigarette holder before he smokes them. If nothing else, Dave Hill is old school.

He says he doesn't worry too much about the past, and there's no reason not to believe him. What's done is done. "I've always gotten along with [Nicklaus]," Hill says. "We've had our differences -- Arnold and I have had our differences, but I don't have a problem talking to Arnold or talking to Jack. I've had my run-ins with just about everybody."

Perhaps the most serious occurred 11 years ago at the Transamerica, a senior tour event in Napa, Calif. Hill and Jimmy Powell had gone to the far end of the practice range while trick-shot artist Dennis Walters performed his act. When Walters finished, several players began hitting balls from the other end. "We waved our hats to tell them they were [landing their balls] close to us," Hill says. "Guys started aiming left. Rocky Thompson was there. He aimed left, too."

J.C. Snead apparently did not -- on purpose, according to Hill -- and when one of Snead's practice shots hit a cart occupied by Hill's current wife, Joyce, the little man felt he had no choice. He charged down the range, and if any words were exchanged, they did not diffuse the tension. "He swung a 1-iron at me and broke it over my left shoulder," Hill says. "I went at him like he had a rifle with the butt of my [club] sticking out about eight inches. I was gonna try to hit him in the Adam's apple. Honest to God, I was trying to kill him. If I hit him in the Adam's apple, he was gonna swallow his tongue. I missed by about three inches."

Although Hill suggests he got the better of Snead, a few brief accounts of the incident say the larger man prevailed. Asked why he would go after a man so much bigger than he, Hill responds like a man who considers fear a four-letter word. "It don't make no difference," he explains. "When I get mad, it don't matter. Common sense just goes right out the door. They made fun of me from the time I was in fifth grade, and I fought every day. Now I didn't win many, but I got my licks in. An ass-whipping is easy to take as long as you get a few licks in."

Both players were fined and suspended -- Hill remembers getting three or four weeks off and says former commissioner Deane Beman reduced Snead's penalty after he appealed. As for his current relationship with Snead, Hill says, "We're great now. We were great before, but he wasn't thinking. He was going through a divorce. He didn't know that a golf ball could kill you."

By 1996 Hill had reached the end of the road on the senior tour. No measure of his sanity can be conducted without appraising his 40-year relationship with a man named Al Glick, who owns and operates Jackson-based Alro Steel. It was Glick who bailed out Hill long ago with a $13,000 investment on his career -- the two have never seen so much as the need for a written contract since.

On this diabolically warm July afternoon, however, the two men are opponents in a four-ball match with Dillon and an out-of-town visitor. After missing a 10-footer for birdie on the first hole, Hill rattles off four birdies on the next five holes. His only bad swing on the front nine comes when he yanks a 7-iron left of the ninth green. After a mediocre flop shot, he rolls in a downhill 35-footer to shoot 31.

He still shows up for 20 to 25 corporate outings each year for Alro, although it's difficult to tell whether he does them as a favor to Glick, to make a decent living or to keep himself sharp. With Dave Hill, the reason for doing something has never been as easy to comprehend as the result. "Some of the things written about him over the years have been so far off," Glick says. "He's honest, dependable -- when he gives you his word, you can take it to the bank."

You might want to make the trip in an armored truck.

[Jazzooo]

Take your best shot--I'm going with Tiger Woods. I just watched part of his amateur championship round when he was a freshman. He's so beautiful getting out of trouble.

[groover]

I'm not a big fan of the sport, so I'll go with Rodney. No respect, yeah, I know.

[MRS]

. . .almost page two and no JMO, CRIMINAL!

[Ron Thorne]

I'm with hornplayer . . . my Dad! He was a superb golfer, one of the finest amateurs in the state of Florida for many years.

Dad introduced me to many pros over the years, including his good friend and our favorite -- Slammin' Sammy Snead, who used to go quail hunting with him frequently.



I had the good fortune to also meet (ones I can remember) Ben Hogan, Dr. Carey Middlecoff, Julius Boros, "Terrible" Tommy Bolt, Byron Nelson, Billy Casper, Gene Littler and Doug Sanders.

[frankenmeister7]

dad loved Ben Hogan and my favorite was Tony Lema.

i know i am young but dad taped whatever he could on his days off when Lema was at the Medina golf club.



even went to the crash site in Lansing, Illinois to see the plane that took him and his crew.

money, jewels and bodies floating in the pond.

after that era i would have to say Arnold Palmer and Gary Player.

[bluenoter]

Lee Trevino

[bluenoter]

Second place--D. Duck

[gonzo]

no one, golf is painful to watch.

[Deadlift]

Lee Trevino

Yup. Lee.