You Wouldn’t Believe It, but Dream Came True

Every sportswriter has his favorite fantasy.

He dreams of the lone Indian who comes into Louisville on Kentucky Derby morning, leading a roan by a rope, and proceeds to win the race by 20 widening lengths over the field.

Or, he likes the story of the kid who’s walking across the Notre Dame practice field where the star player has just punted a ball and he picks it up and drop-kicks it back over the star’s head.

Then, there’s the legend about the street kid who climbs into the ring with the heavyweight champion in an exhibition and proceeds to belt him out in three rounds while the world gasps. It’s sure box office. The stories of Black Beauty, Broadway Bill, Rocky I, II, III or IV, the legend of George Gipp always sells. The triumph of the primitive over the Establishment fuels everyman’s dreams.

So, how about this as a super plot for the silver screen, a TV mini-series or even a Broadway musical? Would Frank Capra have loved this? Would Irving Berlin have wanted to do the score?

There’s this poor but honest son of a sharecropper, one of 18 brothers and sisters, forced to drop out of school at an early age to help out at home. Life is a Dickensian novel, a kind of sun belt Bleak House.

Our hero is a slow-walking, slow-talking, Jimmy Stewart kind of character who makes a bare living selling dry goods and jewelry out of his car trunk to migrant crop workers who have to work too late to go to stores and too early to go to the bank.

He sticks a diamond in his teeth, not for flash but for advertising, his stock in the trunk of his car, and he’s open for business 24 hours a day.

Here’s the good part: He’s passing through Rochester, N.Y., with his harvesting caravans when a group of friends lure him onto a golf course.

Now, our leading man is 23 years old and he has never even seen a golf club up close in his life. In his mind, golf is a game like polo or tiger hunting, something people only do in newsreels.

But, he goes along with the gag. He takes a No. 1-wood out of a bag, steps up--and hits it straight down the fairway.

And, Calvin Peete has been in one ever since.

There’s probably no one in golf since Ben Hogan or the young Jack Nicklaus who ever hit a golf ball straighter, more often, than Calvin Peete.

Golfers always worry if they can fade the ball, hook the ball, feather it, knock it down, punch it or explode it. Peete just sends it right down Broadway. He takes the A train.

No one picks up golf at age 23. To excel at golf, you have to take up the game in knee pants. Your father has to be a pro or your family rich. You have to start playing in a whole bunch of junior tournaments or member-guest shindigs, and you refine your game by getting a scholarship to the college of your choice.

Nobody walks in off the street and birdies the first three holes and, 10 years later, is winning tournaments against guys who have been playing all their speaking lives, and, 20 years later, is probably the best player in the game today.

Even Horatio Alger Jr. wouldn’t try that story line.

Golf is not a natural activity like jumping a hurdle or catching a pass. It more nearly resembles staining a window. It requires meticulous attention, unwavering concentration and, usually, a lifetime to perfect.

When Calvin Peete won his first tournament, at Milwaukee in 1979, the golf world thought: “That’s nice. Now he’ll be able to take that home and look at it in his trophy room when he gets older.”

When he won a second tournament--at Milwaukee again--the reaction was: “Well, he’s got one course he can play.”

When he won four tournaments in a year, and began to win them in yearly multiples, the reaction became: “Well, that’s one game he can play.”

Calvin Peete may just be the best player in the game today. He’s won more tournaments in this decade than any other player. He’s won more money. Whatever yardstick you apply, Peete qualifies.

He leads the tour in driving accuracy and greens hit in regulation figures in the ‘80s. He is third in scoring average.

Calvin Peete is the Grover Cleveland Alexander of golf. He has pinpoint control, he piles up victories, he never panics. Pressure? Pressure is selling a consignment of yard goods or semiprecious stones to bad credit risks. Pressure is a flat tire on the Massachusetts Turnpike at 3 o’clock in the morning.

Calvin Peete embarrassed himself only once in the tour pressure cooker. It was in the MONY Tournament of Champions a year ago when Calvin, unaccountably, began to backhand putts on the fifth hole of a so-so tournament for him.

“I don’t know what came over me. It wasn’t like me,” he says. “Curtis Strange said, ‘What should I put down for a score?’ and I had to admit I really didn’t know.”

Peete atoned in the best way he could. He came back last week and won the tournament, beating the tournament record by six shots. It was his 10th tournament victory in the ‘80s and his 11th overall. Only 47 players in history have won more.

Calvin, who has done all this in spite of a withered arm suffered in a childhood fall, is the player the tour has had to shoot at as it went through the Bob Hope Chrysler tournament here this week.

But his story transcends golf. To overtake and outperform the flower of American golf after spotting them 20 years is burro-wins-Kentucky-Derby, homemade-raft-shoots-rapids kind of drama, the stuff that made Disney famous. It’s unfortunate they’ve already used it because they have just the title for it, too: “The Natural.”