Ben Crenshaw: Golf’s Answer to Eternal Youth

I wish Ben Crenshaw would get older. I wish he’d have to have glasses or a hearing aid. A few wrinkles around the eyes would help.

He’s going to look 10 years old forever. He’s a veteran on the golf tour, but you still want to buy him a lollipop and ask him where his Mommy is when you see him.

It’s really not fair. He should have this little pot belly like the rest of us old-timers, or his hair should be receding, or he should act like his feet are killing him. He shouldn’t go around looking like a kid who just got his first balloon. Or his first haircut. He should scowl once in a while.

Instead of that, he doesn’t look any different from the first time I saw him in 1970 at the U.S. Open in Minneapolis. He showed up on a tee there and four players wanted to know if he wanted to carry their clubs. The guards wanted to know why he wasn’t in school.

He was everybody’s pet. He had this 420-degree swing where you couldn’t be sure whether the club was going around or Ben was. He finished up like Mary Poppins sailing over chimney tops.

He wasn’t very big, but neither was Ben Hogan. He came out of Texas, too, and everyone thought it was nice that golf was going to be taken over by another Ben.

No one ever came out on tour with the credentials Crenshaw had. Three years in a row he had won the American collegiate championship, a tournament just easier to win than the Masters. He had won national Junior Chamber of Commerce tournaments, he hit a ball that went through two area codes, and he won the first tournament he ever entered as a pro, the San Antonio-Texas Open.

Ben not only played golf, he studied it. With a lot of modern players, this means a study of where their hands are at address, where to put the back foot for a hook and how open to have the blade in the sand.

For Crenshaw, it meant boning up on the history of the Royal and Ancient at St. Andrews, being able to give the yardage and club used on some of Bobby Jones’ most memorable approaches. He knew as much about the derivation and development of the game as Herbert Warren Wind.

Then, something happened. It usually does in golf the first time the young player realizes every putt doesn’t have to go into the hole, every tee shot doesn’t have to land in the middle and every pitch doesn’t have to go over hazards.

It happens to all of them. It destroys some of them. It slows the rest of them.

There is a wall of pain about three to five years out, and Ben Crenshaw hit that going about 100 m.p.h. The wheels came off his game. His tee shots began to chatter out of bounds, his short irons turned into live snakes in his hands, and his head wandered around like a swivel. If you couldn’t find Ben Crenshaw, try the out-of-bounds on the right.

Anybody else, it would have turned their hair white, their dispositions sour and their outlook moody. Ben just plodded along like a little kid with his dog on the way to a fishing hole. When he was good, he was like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead, very, very good. When he was bad, he was horrid.

He threw away more golf tournaments than some people win. He got into a playoff for the PGA in 1981. He was 0 and 5 in playoffs. He could putt like an angel, but a backer once complained that a putt was the only shot Ben could predictably keep in bounds. He knocked a few British Opens into the Firth of Forth or the English Channel.

But he was the favorite of golf galleries everywhere. There was a Huck Finn quality to him. He was the pro from Booth Tarkington. The public loved seeing this little kid with the crooked grin outhitting the giants of the game.

In an era when winning five makes you a superstar, he won a dozen tournaments. When he won the 1984 Masters, there was such a sense of fitness to it that even the guys who finished second and third were happy for him. “Ben deserved it,” runner-up Tom Watson said. “Golf owed it to him.”

Then, on the heels of his greatest triumph, Crenshaw toppled all the way to 149th on the golf ladder. An ailment diagnosed as hyperthyroidism sapped his strength and concentration. People thought he was as long gone as wooden shafts.

You would think all this would age a man. Would make his outlook crabbed, his brow furrowed, his teeth hurt. You would think he would get ulcers. The sight of a par-3 over a barranca would make his stomach knot, his head ache, his teeth gnash. That he would want to throw his clubs into the nearest brook and go home and sell bonds.

Ben Crenshaw just gets younger. He’s the only guy out there at the MONY Tournament of Champions here this week who looks as if he came to the course by tricycle.

His secret?

“I think I learned how tough a game golf is very early,” he reflected after an opening-round 72 the other afternoon. “I went back to play the Country Club in Brockton, Mass. I was only 16 and I had never been out of Texas and I had never seen a golf course like that with trees and brooks and bent grass. I think that’s where I got my fascination with golf history.

“It’s certainly taught me that you had to have a lot more than a good swing and a strong back to play championship golf. You had to be a competitor. You had to accept the fact that the golf ball isn’t always going to go where you want it.”

It’s probably as good a recipe for eternal youth as you will find. Golf, like life, just isn’t fair. You have to learn to shrug off double bogeys. As soon as you learn that, you bounce back to make $388,169 and finish eighth on the money list, as Ben Crenshaw did last year.

But, more importantly, your eyes stay clear, your forehead smooth, your hair curly and you smile a lot. And you always look as if you just got your first pair of long pants, even though you’re going to be 35 years old next Sunday.