He Took Golf on the Road to Monterey

No one loved golf like Bing Crosby. No one did more for the game. I never had a conversation with him in the 25 years I knew him that didn’t begin or end with golf.

“How you hittin’ them?” was his standard opening line.

Bing had great respect for golfers. He regarded them as the last of the great freebooters in American society, the logical successors to the guys who hit the wagon trains, panned in the Yukon, drew down on the Clantons, raised the pot or shot the rapids.

If there’d been no golf they’d have been working the riverboats somewhere with a checked vest and a sealed deck. They were self-reliant, patient, cunning. They left nothing to chance. They lived by their wits and their 9-irons. They weren’t team players, they were loners. They lost with a shrug, won with grace and had the nerves of guys who walked airplane wings or steel girders.

It was no secret that Bing longed to be one of them. He dismissed his major talent as groaning and crooning, but he never dismissed his golf game as hacking.

He really put golf on the sporting map. Before him, it was hardly America’s pastime. It was a game most Americans thought was played by Warren G. Harding, John D. Rockefeller and the people who owned steel mills and railroads.

When Bing invited the golf pros and a few of his movie cronies to play in an improvised tournament down in Rancho Santa Fe in 1937, no one knew it at the time but he had revolutionized the way the game would be played.

Golfers were not exactly the social elite at the time. They were widely perceived to be roughnecks out of Texas or hillbillies out of the Blue Ridge who made their real money hustling the big rich out of hundred-dollar Nassaus on the plush Florida hotel courses.

Crosby changed all that. His so-called Clambake drew immediate attention to the game, made it a major press attraction and put it on the Rialto.

Bing himself was a good player, a 2, and solid enough to tee it up in the British and U.S. Amateurs. He played a meticulous game, as straight and structured as one of the ballads he sang or movies he made.

The fans who came to the Clambake had no idea who Sam Snead or Porky Oliver were, but they knew who Douglas Fairbanks, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Zeppo Marx, Bill Frawley, Richard Arlen and the various football and baseball heroes were. They flocked to the tournament with their autograph books open and their eyes wide. They learned about golf by osmosis.

When the war was on and the tournament was on hold, Hope and Crosby drew World Series crowds to golf exhibitions they gave. The lesson was not lost on the progenitors of the PGA tour.

After the war, the Crosby, and its founder, moved north to the Monterey Peninsula area. Crosby struggled to keep it to its original stag-party format, but public fascination took it out of his hands. The Crosby became not a 54-hole giggle for a bunch of pals and a case of whiskey, but an important part of the winter tour, maybe the important part.

It went to 72 holes and, as bad as the weather could be at Monterey in January, it was still better than three-quarters of the rest of the country. It became a prime TV show. It outrated every other golf tournament in the world--the Masters, U.S. and British opens, the PGA.

The public proved it would far rather tune in to see Jack Lemmon in a sand trap than Jack Nicklaus on a green.

An invitation to the Crosby became as highly prized as an audience with the Pope. Once when I was interviewing Bing at his office on a sound stage in Hollywood, the temperature of the dialogue dropped 80 degrees and Crosby’s eyes became as arctic blue as an ice cap. Later, puzzled, I asked a friend what he thought had happened.

“Do you remember what you were talking about at the time?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I told him. “I was asking him how he picked the 100 amateurs to play in his tournament out of the 10,000 requests he got.”

“Oh,” soothed the friend, “he just got scared you were going to ask him for an invite!”

That is how hard it got to be to make the Crosby lineup. Only the elite of three worlds, golf, business and entertainment, needed apply.

It is impossible to measure the worth of the Crosby to golf. It changed the format of every tournament ever played. A pro-am became an integral part of nearly every tour stop played.

Tournaments lined up to get celebrities to front for their shows, to attract other celebrities. It was a legacy of the Crosby, and the take from the pro-am frequently paid the nut for the whole tournament.

But if you think golf was grateful, you don’t know golf, where ingratitude, you might say, is par for the course.

Golf had the decency to mind its manners while Bing was alive but has spent the time since trying to wrest the format--and the tournament--away from the Crosby heirs, to turn it over to some faceless conglomerate, some monolithic savings and loan operation, insurance company or communication monopoly.

They want to make it the AT&T; Clambake, indistinguishable from the Kemper Open or the Manufacturers Hanover or American Express Classic.

Don’t bother to bring your autograph books. Kathryn Grant Crosby, Bing’s widow, has turned the lights out and stopped the music. It ain’t the Crosby anymore, whatever it is. The Crosby family has picked up.

I have the feeling they’ll be followed by a lot of people. I doubt you’ll get Jack Lemmon doing shtick in a sand trap for Somebody’s Trust and Guarantee. I don’t think Clint Eastwood will make their day either.

I know you’d never get Ben Hogan or Sam Snead or Dutch Harrison or the original Rhythm Boys to show up.

It was a grand, 44-year-old party while it lasted. But the crashers have taken over. They usually do.

There’s one good thing: They won’t have Bing’s problem of turning down 9,900 people who want to play in it anymore. They may have trouble finding the 100 who do.