Breaks on Greens Differ From Those on Beams

Courage is a much overused word in my profession. It has been used to describe everything from boldly going for a green over 200 yards of water to trying to slip a fastball past Henry Aaron with the bases loaded.

Some people think courage is facing down a lion with a high-powered rifle and scope sight, but others know that it’s staring down at one with nothing more than a short spear and a flimsy shield.

Lee Trevino once said that courage was not playing a guy with tattoos and a scar on his cheek for $100, it was playing him for $100 when you only had $10 in your pocket.

Reggie Smith once said that stress was not playing center field in Yankee Stadium, stress was trying to feed your family when you were unemployed.

So Walt Zembriski will have to smother a laugh when someone refers to his courage in pulling off a dangerous shot in the senior division of the MONY Tournament of Champions at La Costa. He knows that real courage is walking an eight-inch steel beam on top of a skyscraper in a high wind with a rivet gun on a short wire.

Courage is not hitting a high iron, it’s walking one. Courage is not risking your nerves putting for $100,000, it’s risking your life riveting for $13 an hour.

You see, to play golf, Walt Zembriski first had to take off a hard hat and asbestos gloves and come down 50 or 60 stories to sea level. He was one of those guys putting up high rises 1,000 feet above Manhattan or New Jersey traffic.

If you’re one who gets the bends and turns faint looking out over the parapet of the Empire State Building, if you even hate to look out a window above the 50th floor, just imagine a guy who stood there, pounding rivets, a quarter of a mile in the air with nothing beneath him but a skeleton of steel girders.

Even a circus aerialist has nets. The only thing to break Zembriski’s fall was the ground. Or the Hudson River if you consider that any improvement. From that altitude, it, too, would be like falling on concrete.

The worst thing that can happen to you if you miss a seven-foot putt is you lose out on some of Bob Hope’s or ABC’s money. You misread a steel beam, you don’t drop off the money list, you drop off the universe.

Zembriski has seen a lot of his pals miss the cut on the tour. But they get to tee it up the next week. He’s seen half a dozen of his pals miss a step and they have missed the cut forever.

There was Red Dalton, for instance. Walt had lunch with him the day Red stepped off that tour. Those were the days before the walkie-talkie method of communication. Dalton was signaled by flags where to take his stand on the 11th floor. The signal was missent. Red took a stand on a beam that was not fastened. He plunged to his death on the rocks below as the beam up-ended like a berserk seesaw.

Walt saw five others pass him on the way down to their deaths. Another toppled into an empty elevator shaft when a barrier broke.

You play golf in 75-degree weather in the Sun Belt. You go up in a high-rise scaffold if it’s zero. You wear a glove in golf only to keep your grip from slipping. You wear a hat to keep the sun out of your eyes. You wear a glove on a building shaft to keep the rivets from burning your palms. You wear a hat to keep the debris from slashing your skull.

Even the gloves didn’t help Walt when two steel cables came together across his right hand and snipped the end of the thumb off. They rushed him to the hospital where the thumb was sewed back on. It’s no help in his putting because there’s no feel in it but, fortunately, the right thumb doesn’t come into play much in the golf swing.

Then there was the time the crane was swinging a load of lumber over the floor where Walt was standing. Someone misjudged the trajectory. Instead of going over Walt’s head, the load came swinging right at it.

He had two choices. He could leap, but since the nearest point of relief was 20 stories down, that was really not an option, it was a calamity. Or he could grab onto the front edge of the lumber and hang on for dear life as it swung past. This, Walt did. And he swayed out over the city, clinging precariously to a cluster of 2 x 4s. He had to dig splinters out from under his fingernails for weeks.

After that, how could a 25-foot, two-break putt ever make his heart pound or his throat go dry? How could a low iron to a guarded green ever top high iron with a load of lumber coming at you? What par-five could ever make your hands sweat?

Walt got into the construction business originally because he couldn’t keep up with the big boys on the regular tour. He got his card. He played the gutty game of the short knocker who had to work with four-woods where Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer were feathering seven-irons. He couldn’t keep up.

So he left the green grass and the manicured greens for the treacherous slides of prefabricated steel. He traded in his visor and alpaca sweater for a hard hat and asbestos gloves and went to building high rises for senior citizens and senior partners of Wall Street. It’s a profession so dangerous that they prefer to import sure-footed young braves from the Blackfoot tribe to prowl the skeletal towers of downtown Manhattan.

Walt climbed down when his marriage broke up--his father-in-law was in the construction business--and tried the mini-tour, the golf loop for players a cut below star level, trying to crack the regular tour. Walt was successful enough so he never had to climb into an outside elevator again. He won 15 tournaments there in a little more than five years.

How did he keep his game during his years of walking high iron?

“I put down a carpet in the basement of my home in Jersey. When it was snowing out, I practiced chipping and putting on it.”

As soon as he got to be 50, Walt ran to the senior tour. At first, he had to qualify on Monday mornings. That is stressful but not to be compared to being 50 floors up when a gale moves in.

In 1988, Walt broke through. He won the prestigious Vantage Championship in Palm Desert, where he was the only player in a Who’s Who field of senior golfers to break par. He pocketed $135,000.

The senior tour now has its Mr. X, Miller Barber, and its Mr. Z, Zembriski. And this week, in the MONY senior division tournament, Mr. Z has a chance to become the game’s latest millionaire.

Why do comparative unknowns like Walt succeed where the superstars seem to fail in the seniors? Walt has a theory.

“They don’t practice enough,” he says. “They think they can come out and throw a ball on the tee and win everything. They don’t practice like they used to when they were on the regular tour.”

That may be the reason. On the other hand, it just may be they know they don’t have to go back to walking high iron if their low ones don’t work.