Of Course He Hates This Place

The press called him “Thunder.” It fit his last name. It also fit his disposition.

He was Golf’s Vesuvius. Six feet of molten lava waiting to erupt.

It didn’t take much to blow the top off. A missed birdie putt. A clicking camera. Arnold Palmer. Sam Snead. A caddie. The weather.

Tommy Bolt was an equal-opportunity hater.

Off the course, he was charming, amusing, possessed of a genuine sense of humor.

But when he stepped on a tee, there was no room for charm or humor. Tommy Bolt saw a golf course for what it was: the enemy, a tricky, divisive, malevolent sociopath, the modern version of Torquemada’s rack, an afternoon at Gestapo headquarters.

Tommy didn’t trust a golf course. Let the gallery notice the dogwoods, the azaleas, hear the birds sing, listen to the streams ripple. Bolt knew it was all a trick. He was crawling under barbed wire in no-man’s land without a helmet.

You think Craig Stadler is famous for apoplectic rages on golf courses? He was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm compared to Bolt. Tommy practically invented club-throwing. The most famous Bolt story concerns the time at Knollwood Country Club when he had filled the water hazards with thrown clubs and came to the par-five finishing hole with 240 yards to the green. “What’s the shot?” he asked the caddie. “A six-iron,” the boy answered. “A six-iron!” roared Bolt. “How can you expect me to get there with a six-iron?!” “Because it’s the only club you have left, Mr. Bolt,” the caddie told him.

People thought his first name was “Terrible Tempered” because that’s the way wire stories always identified him.

Tommy thought it was physiognomy not personality. “I have this face, don’t you see, looks like I’m mad all the time, even when I’m not,” he protested.

The physiognomy that really bothered Bolt was the golf course’s. Some years ago, they invited Tommy back to Southern Hills at Tulsa, where he had won the U.S. Open in 1958.

It was meant to be a ceremonial gesture, a bow to nostalgia, and Tommy was gracious, affable, even jovial. Until he stepped out on the course. He immediately turned back into Tommy Bolt. The first missed putt did it. He turned purple. The veins in his neck stood out. “How can they expect any man to play a course like this?!” he demanded to know. The committee looked embarrassed. “But Mr. Bolt, you won the Open here 19 years ago,” they reminded him.

Tommy could be Dr. Jekyll. Till they put a golf club in his hands. Then he became Mr. Hyde. He turned into a wolf before your very eyes.

He thought golf had it in for him. He accused the galleries at Greensboro of rooting for Snead at his expense. When someone asked him once if he didn’t think Arnold Palmer had been good for golf, Bolt’s annoyed reply was, “Don’t you think golf has been good for Arnold Palmer?”

Tommy took no prisoners.

On a personal level, at the Indianapolis 500 one year I was hurrying out on a golf course where Tommy was playing. He hailed me over. “Listen to these fans! They’re against ol’ Tom! You got to stop the papers from turning them against me!” he railed.

Tommy, of course, had just bogeyed a hole. I begged off and promised to see him at 18 when he came in from the round.

I was waiting at 18, a par five, when a ball came rolling from the middle of the fairway, a three-wood shot that came to a stop 10 inches from the hole. A sure eagle. Tommy came into view. It was his shot. The gallery was shouting. I started to say, “OK, Tom, we can talk it over soon as you’re finished and. . . .” Tommy put his hands up, interrupted me. He pointed to the fans, smiling. “Listen to those fans!” he commanded. “They love ol’ Tom!”

That was old Thunder. No more colorful rascal ever strode a fairway. In fact, colorful doesn’t begin to describe Tommy Bolt. When he was leading a tournament, he strutted. Like a guy leading a parade. All he needed was a fur hat and a calliope. When he trailed, he moped. You didn’t need a leader board to find out how Tommy Bolt was doing. You just checked the walk, followed the trail of broken clubs.

He was also capable of some of the most incandescent golf ever seen on the tour. He started off 64-62 at Virginia Beach one year. He shot a 60 in the Hartford Open. He shot a 62 with a ball out of bounds in one round of the L.A. Open at Rancho.

He could walk the walk, all right. He was about 6 feet tall, and 5 feet of it was legs. He sauntered when he didn’t strut. He never hurried in his life.

He won 14 tournaments, and the argument has raged with golf scholars for years as to whether he would have won more or won less without his terrible temper.

It didn’t matter. It was part and parcel of Thomas Henry Bolt. He never met a golf course he liked, a green he trusted. “It’s a nice straight putt,” this reporter told him once. “Jim, they ain’t no such thing!” Bolt shot back.

He has finally found a golf course that confirms his worst paranoia. The Stadium Course at PGA West down here where Tom is part of the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf tournament is a 6,800-yard unplayable lie. There are greens surrounded on three sides by chasms, bunkers so deep you half expect St. Bernards to be patrolling them with casks of brandy tied round their necks, a dogleg to hell where, as someone once said, only God can make a three.

It is not a golf course at all, but a firing squad. Where old golfers go to die. The architect, Pete Dye, is known more familiarly as “Pete Death.”

The betting was, Tommy Bolt would finish his round with nothing left in the bag but a towel. There would be 14 clubs sticking out of the ground back there. Tommy would look at the railroad ties for bunkers and sneer, “What time does this course get to Grand Central?”

A lot of us couldn’t wait till Thunder hit this Hall of Horrors. It would be Dracula meeting Wolfman.

But guess what? It was more like Romeo meeting Juliet. Guess who’s only one shot off the lead in the super-senior competition? Guess whose team shot four under par, split the fairways, knocked down pins, avoided the rough all afternoon? Tommy Bolt and partner Jack Fleck, is who.

Not one club flew into the 15 or so water hazards. No lava flowed, no water coolers kicked, no X-rated dialogue.

Of course, Tommy wasn’t ready for a halo yet. Not even a shower of birdies can melt his distrust of a golf course. “Jimmy Demaret said Pete Dye’s designs are the only golf courses in the world you can set fire to,” he sniffed after his round.

If he starts out with a couple of bogeys today, nobody better give him a match. But Bolt mad is a better golf show than most people happy.