CRENSHAW, MEANWHILE, won the 1967 Texas State Junior Championship at fifteen, hitting tee shots off of rubber mats at Brackenridge Park in San Antonio, imagining the old Texas Opens of the past, when Snead and Hogan and Hagen and Harvey’s mentor, Jack Burke Sr., had conquered Old Brack. He qualified for the 1968 U.S. Junior Championship, becoming one of 1,599 entrants invited to The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. The trip, and the place, would alter his life.
Crenshaw could barely contain his excitement about the trip to New England. His father planned excursions to walk the Freedom Trail and the Liberty Trail. They bought tickets to a Red Sox game. The younger Crenshaw had never been farther east than St. Louis, Missouri. But he knew from reading his favorite book, The World of Golf by Charles Price, that he would be playing the course where Francis Ouimet, a twenty-year-old former caddie, won the 1913 U.S. Open in a rain-streaked playoff over the famous English professionals Harry Vardon and Ted Ray.
Crenshaw had never played bentgrass fairways. He had never putted on bentgrass greens. The variety of The Country Club’s holes left a profound impression on his young imagination. “I had never seen comparable natural relief on a course,” he remembered two decades later. “Such rolling fairways, such deep bunkers, such shallow greens, like the one on the seventeenth hole, which Francis Ouimet birdied on the last regular round and again in the playoff.”
He lost in the quarterfinals. Larry Griffin, the junior champion of New Orleans, beat him on the eighteenth hole. But Crenshaw gained so much more. His reach now extended beyond Texas. His points of reference seemed to multiply in one week. “Even though I didn’t win,” he later wrote, “I grew up a lot.” Brookline altered the world profoundly and permanently for Crenshaw. The experience emboldened his golf. Crenshaw returned to Brackenridge Park in 1969 for his second Texas junior title. He won the annual Firecracker Open at Lions in July, one of eighteen tournament trophies he collected in his dizzying senior season at Austin High School.
And he began to think about the crisp and certain promise of the beyond. He wanted everything in golf. He burned to compete. He yearned to see and play and be charmed again by places like The Country Club. Harvey had polished Crenshaw well. The boy who wanted to be the best was close enough to want the best the game could offer.
“If you were a young player and thought you were pretty good, all you had to do was watch Ben swing and see how much farther he hit it to wonder about your own ability,” said Terry Jastrow, an excellent junior player at the time from Midland. “There was something else that convinced you. A bunch of us would be on the practice range beating balls. With everybody else, Harvey Penick would spend an hour. But when he got around to Ben, he would look at him for a minute or two, smile, and tell him to go play golf.”
Kite and Crenshaw challenged Harvey to think carefully and creatively about his role in their golf lives. He understood that his two young charges had almost opposite needs. On one level, Crenshaw and Kite were mutations of the same strain. They were born to fathers who witnessed the rise of Hogan and Nelson. They were sons of a robust, independently minded state ideally suited—in climate, wealth, topography, and untethered ambition—to nurturing young players of a sport whose identity was emerging in Texas at a furious pace. Crenshaw and Kite simply came along at the right time and into the orbits of the right people. They were children of tremendous privilege, not only because they were wealthy, but because their support systems made so much possible. Their families gave them every opportunity to do what they wanted to do. If that meant chasing golf balls down the gilded fairways of Austin Country Club, let them, by all means, chase golf balls.
Kite and Crenshaw may have been fundamentally brothers in many important ways, but Harvey recognized that they were not the same boys at all. He saw Kite’s basic need for order and answers. He knew Crenshaw responded better to abstraction and questions. Harvey decided to prohibit them from witnessing one another’s lessons because the message he wanted to impart to Crenshaw might hurt Kite, and vice versa.
But his pupils learned together in one important sense. Kite and Crenshaw grew as players because they so often competed together. They learned from one another how to lose. And they learned how to win.
The two entered the 1967 Jaycees Junior Golf Tournament at Morris Williams Golf Course, where Kite had won his state championship. Crenshaw was in the ninth grade at O. Henry Middle School. He was the reigning Austin men’s city champion. Kite shot 70 to lead him by two after the first round.
Kite shot 2-under 34 on the front nine on the second day. Crenshaw flailed, making the nine-hole turn at 3-over for the round, five behind Kite. He lost another stroke at the par-4 tenth.
They were young and cocky and imminently capable of anything, which explains how Kite played the next eight holes at 4 over par and Crenshaw, settling into a trancelike rhythm, played them at minus 3. Kite lost by a stroke.
Crenshaw won the Texas State Junior later that year, beating Wayne Fenick of Brownsville, nine and eight, over thirty-six holes of match play. Kite was a favorite to win that summer at Brackenridge Park, but Crenshaw intervened. Kite won the consolation match instead.
Kite did win the Texas-Oklahoma Junior in June 1968, by a staggering eleven shots. He took the Firecracker Open a month later in Austin. A month after that, Kite delivered a final-round 66 at Lions to capture the Austin junior title. “It was about time I played good,” he said brusquely. “I haven’t felt that I’ve played good in the tournament until today.”
One more significant tournament remained on the Austin amateur circuit: the biggest trophy in Austin golf, the 1968 men’s city championship, was won each year by the best amateur in five counties. The golf community buzzed. Kite entered the tournament with three recent trophies and momentum. Crenshaw, now at Harvey’s old high school, Austin High, came to Morris Williams as the defending champion.
Kite shot a blazing 7-under 65 in the opening round. Crenshaw shot 70. He followed with another 70 to Kite’s 71, then shot 69 in the third round. Kite wavered there, shooting 75.
Crenshaw nipped Kite by a shot in the fourth round, his 70 to Kite’s 71. People actually came out to watch. They felt like they were seeing the future of the PGA Tour. And they were.
Harvey’s boys finished in first and second place. There was Crenshaw from old West Austin, with his cascading hair and his charmingly crooked smile and his disdain for the monotonous humdrum of practice, again holding a trophy every dreamer in Central Texas sought to win. There was Kite, with his relentless quest for precision through practice and his enduring itch to prove so much, watching the newspaper photographers take pictures of Crenshaw with the trophy he wanted to be his.
“He’s a tremendous putter,” Kite said that day. “The best in the state.”
“I made the putts I had to make,” Crenshaw said.
They were the humble, accepting words of boys in golf about to become men in golf. To those who lingered for the trophy ceremony that afternoon at Morris Williams Golf Course, their achievements so far seemed wonderful and promising and intriguing. No one—not Kite, not Crenshaw, not Harvey himself—could have predicted how much more Harvey’s boys would accomplish. But everyone at the golf course that afternoon felt the ground shifting.
Kite had committed during his senior year at McCallum to playing golf at Texas, a decision that pleased Harvey immeasurably. A former pharmacy student at Texas named George Hannon had succeeded Harvey as the golf coach. Harvey considered Hannon a dear friend, even a protégé. The retired coach wanted his successor to carry the Longhorns to heights he had never reached. Harvey knew a player like Kite could factor into getting there.
Harvey had worked closely with Hannon at Lions Municipal Golf Course, where Texas had played many conference matches, and he respected Hannon’s ability to lead. Hannon regarded Harvey as a mentor. “Harvey taught me all the golf I know,” Hannon said.
The two met in 1942. Hannon was a freshman at Texas, uninterested in trying to qualify for the varsity golf team but eager to play on weekends and after class. Harvey liked Hannon, who caddied for him when he played with Hogan at the Lions exhibition in 1950. Harvey also asked Hannon to accompany him at teaching seminars for the Texas section of the PGA. The two of them created scripts for the visits to other Texas golf clubs; Hannon, the confederate in the crowd, asked the predetermined questions. Harvey answered with rehearsed aplomb. They were a brilliant road team.
Harvey often asked Hannon if coaching at Texas might interest him someday. The obligation was light: recruit, arrange qualifiers, organize a tournament schedule, make sure the station wagon had a tank of gas, give each player three golf balls per tournament, $6 a day for meals, and $10 for a hotel room. “They would make a little money off of that,” Hannon said.
When his opportunity came, Hannon accepted with deference and grace.
“There is a certain amount of prestige involved,” he said when his appointment was announced. “It’s always tough to take over another man’s job, and it’s doubly hard to step into a big pair of shoes,” he said. “But I wouldn’t have taken the job if I didn’t think I could do it.”
Like Harvey, Hannon had a long Texas pedigree. He was born in 1924 in Kemp, enrolled at the university briefly, interrupted his education for three years to join the Army Air Corps, and returned to UT in 1945. Hannon never played on the Texas golf team, but he became friendly with Harvey’s players when he returned to college from the service and worked as the starter at Lions Municipal. He became a golf professional in 1950 and eventually joined Dallas Athletic Club as an assistant. It was a fortuitous opportunity for Hannon, who was asked to assist the Southern Methodist University golf team between lessons and given other duties at DAC. Hannon drove the team station wagon.
Hannon left Dallas in 1960 when Tom Penick, Harvey’s older brother and the man who allowed the two black youths to play in 1951, announced his retirement as the head golf professional at Lions. Hannon got the job. The two years he spent there—between his appointment as Tom Penick’s successor and his appointment as Harvey’s with the Texas golf team—allowed him to watch Harvey on the lesson tee.
“He has an almost uncanny knack of being able to spot defects in a student’s swing and give him a maximum amount of help,” Hannon said. “I have tried to pattern my teaching after him.”
Hannon understood that the Texas golf team needed to return to prominence, especially given Texas A&M’s rise in the conference, and he accepted the challenge of his new undertaking, which paid $500 a year. His duties with the city included running golf operations at the new municipal facility under construction near the airport on the east side of Austin. Morris Williams Golf Course, named for the father and son whom Harvey considered family, was scheduled to open in 1964, Hannon’s first year as the UT golf coach. Hannon was certain to be busy.
The transition went as smoothly as anyone could have imagined. The Longhorns won the 1964 Southwest Conference Championship in Lubbock, led by medalist Pat Thompson. The team repeated in 1965. Randy Geiselman of UT won the individual title. Hannon took particular pride in the championship that year (and so, privately, did Harvey): the Longhorns had won the championship in College Station—the home of Texas A&M.
University of Texas golf was on the rise again. The Longhorns had a new coach and a new home course at Morris Williams. Hannon had changed the fortunes of the Texas golf program.
Harvey, meanwhile, had a good feeling of his own about what lay ahead for the Longhorns.
Kite and Crenshaw were getting better and better. They developed a natural and lasting kinship through golf that would endure through every stage of their careers. But they also were creating a formidable personal rivalry. Each wanted to be the best player in the city. And that meant beating the other. They lived to win.
That much was clear when both of them had only innocent, boundless dreams. One early evening in 1964, Kite and his father, Tom Sr., were driving home to North Hills Drive after a devastating finish at a junior golf tournament. Long before they had established their pattern of alternating glory, Kite had just lost to Crenshaw. He was nearly in tears. Crenshaw was thirteen years old at the time, and Kite was fifteen.
He had told his father many times how desperately he wanted to play the PGA Tour. Good, Tom Kite Sr. would tell him. Keep working. But that evening the father looked at his son with sympathy and blunt disbelief. “If you can’t hold your own with him [Crenshaw], how are you going to make it on the tour?” he asked.
Kite had no answer. But the question filled him with even more resolve. He would learn to hold his own against Crenshaw. He would learn to hold his own against the world. The boy who believed in working hard knew that this belief could take him where he wanted to go.
He would make it.
At the university, meanwhile, Hannon was gradually changing the entire scope of the Texas golf program. He installed a fall season, making golf a year-round sport. His teams won four conference championships in his first six years as head coach. But a different coach at a different school was beginning to put pressure on the preeminent golf program in the state. Texas was losing its footing.
Dave Williams, the head coach at the University of Houston since 1952, had won seven national championships from 1956 to 1970. The Cougars had competed in three different small conferences until 1960, when Houston went independent. Houston wanted to join the Southwest Conference, with Texas and the other big schools, but there was a complication: the Southwest Conference played tournaments in the match-play format. Williams believed that his teams had a better chance to succeed in stroke play, which involved thirty-six holes on the first day of a tournament and eighteen on the second. The evidence for that belief was his record and his team’s results: in the spring of 1970, at the Border Olympics tournament in Laredo, Houston beat Texas by eighteen shots.
Hannon often had coffee with the other Texas coaches each morning on campus. At one such gathering in 1970 (another year Houston won the national title), athletic director and head football coach Darrell Royal asked Hannon: “What do we have to do to compete with Houston?”
“They play a different game than we do,” Hannon replied.
Hannon was certain that Texas could challenge Houston if the conference adapted its tournament system to the prevailing format of the times. Match play, the ancient British style of competition, was vanishing. The PGA Tour no longer did match play, and few recognized competitions beyond the USGA national amateur championships did either. “We need to play stroke play,” Hannon told Royal.
Royal suggested that Texas boycott all Southwest Conference matches, playing only invitational tournaments, if the other schools refused to switch. “If they don’t change it, we’ll pull the whole thing out,” Royal told Hannon. The other schools declined. Hannon kept his word. The Longhorns played a full schedule of tournaments that season, but no round-robin conference matches. And they advanced all the way to the final round of the national championship with a faint chance to win.
Ben Crenshaw never thought seriously of playing golf anywhere but Texas. He could have signed with any school in the nation, but he loved his hometown and wanted to live and play near friends and family. He also wanted to be able to see Harvey as often as he could.
With Crenshaw as a dazzling freshman and Kite as a junior runner-up to Lanny Wadkins at the 1970 U.S. Amateur, Texas had been ranked number one in the nation for most of the season. But the Longhorns finished three rounds at the NCAA Championship in the spring of ’71 a distant fifteen shots out of the lead. The mood the night before the final round was grim. Hannon told his team he thought the Longhorns needed a team score of 12 under par to stand a chance.
“I thought at the time that if we shot twelve under, the other teams will start choking a little,” said George Machock, a senior. His teammate William Cromwell hoped Texas could fight into a top-three finish. Florida had the lead, with Wake Forest and Houston in close chase. The miracle in the desert of Tucson, Arizona, was less than twelve hours from beginning.
Kite opened the last round in a fury. He birdied the first four holes at Tucson National. He eagled the fifth. After nine holes, Texas trailed Houston by five shots and Florida by four. Playing in the last spot for the Longhorns, Crenshaw played the eleventh through fifteenth holes in 4 under par. He holed out a wedge on the eighteenth for eagle. His 7-under 65 was a formality for the team. Texas won by seven shots.
Crenshaw shot a tournament-record 15-under-par 273 and won the individual medal, the first for Texas since Ed White did it for Harvey back in 1935. The team’s 13-under score of 275 set another NCAA Championship record.
“The spark was Kite,” said Machock. Kite shot a final-round 68 after his torrid start. “What he did was phenomenal.” The team postponed its sixteen-hour drive back to Austin and spent the evening in Tucson to celebrate. Houston, which finished second, was long gone by the time the first UT national championship team retired for the night.
“It was one of the best—no, make that the greatest—team performances I’ve ever seen,” Hannon said.
Texas repeated in 1972. The Longhorns again beat Houston, this time in Cape Coral, Florida. Kite shot a final-round 68 for the individual lead, then watched Crenshaw, the sophomore All-American, hole a twenty-five-foot putt to tie him. The two shared the individual NCAA championship, a first in the seventy-five-year history of the tournament, because the NCAA allowed no playoff. “Both are disappointed,” Hannon said after the championship. “They’re teammates and good friends, but no one won.”
After the trophy presentation, Kite searched for Crenshaw. “You’ve got to be the world’s greatest putter in the clutch,” he told him when he found him. “Tying is like kissing your sister.”
“No,” Crenshaw corrected. “It’s like kissing your brother.”
The two shared a laugh. Then they began to think about their futures. Crenshaw would go home to Harvey, return for his junior year at Texas, and win a record third NCAA individual championship. Kite had played his last collegiate tournament. He would go home to Harvey and prepare for the PGA Tour—just as he had promised his father he would do, all those years ago in the car.
“I’m glad it’s over,” Kite said. “Coach Hannon is a super coach and I owe him more than I can ever repay, but now I can get on with the pro tour, and what I’ve been building toward.”
He announced his plans that summer of ’72.
He had just finished nineteenth in the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach Golf Links. He was the second-lowest amateur on a California course that would figure profoundly in his career in golf. He had played on the U.S. World Amateur Cup team in Spain. He had been amateur runner-up at the Masters the last two springs, and he had played in a Walker Cup at St. Andrews in Scotland.
“I’ve met my first goal by completing four years at the University of Texas,” Kite told a student reporter with The Daily Texan upon his announcement.
He had so many more.
“He is a talented, committed golfer with every reason to succeed as a professional,” Harvey told the Texan. He had no idea how right he would be.
Harvey maintained a full teaching schedule into the early 1970s. When Kite and Crenshaw were traveling, he saw Whitworth or Rawls, whose career was nearing its end. A steady parade of new and old members filled his practice range on Riverside Drive. Harvey returned to his notebook often.
He began to enjoy a broader national profile. In the summer of 1970, he was invited to the All-American Golf Dinner in New York, where the best college golfers in the nation were honored. Harvey had to rent a tuxedo. He appeared with his old friend Byron Nelson. Vice President Spiro Agnew attended. Harvey and Helen stayed in an apartment on Fifth Avenue. “I think this is a nice honor,” he said modestly.
He conducted a growing series of seminars for the PGA. Most of them were in Texas, but Harvey sometimes ventured to Arkansas, Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, New York, and Tennessee. He traveled one summer weekend to Cedar Ridge Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a three-day workshop with other club professionals. “When I started playing golf, it was not the business that it is today,” he told them. “We played in tournaments solely for fun.”
Harvey joined his longtime friend Jimmy Demaret at a seminar in Houston. Speaking in front of 150 fellow professionals from the Southern Texas section of the PGA, they led a discussion about the golf swing. When they finished, Demaret smiled. “Harvey has been speaking two hours and used the word ‘I’ once,” Demaret said. “Such humility. I wish Jack Burke was here.”
But Harvey’s humility was accompanied by a growing fatigue.
Harvey was sixty-six years old in the early winter of 1970. He had been associated with Austin Country Club for nearly six decades, and he’d been the head professional for nearly five of them. The thought of retiring left him uneasy. But Harvey sensed a need to slow down.
He told his son Tinsley, who had been his assistant since leaving a teaching professional position in Colorado in 1969, that he was ready to relinquish his title. He planned to maintain his teaching schedule, but he wanted to spend more time at home with Helen and less time monitoring inventory in the shop. Harvey thought it was an ideal time to bring another Penick to Austin Country Club. The club voted to approve Tinsley Penick as the successor to his father. Tinsley accepted gladly.
By this time, Harvey’s reputation as a teacher of great players had exceeded his more modest one as a consummate club professional who had devoted his life to his membership. Jim Trinkle, reporting for Golf magazine, came to Austin to interview Harvey for a profile. “Harvey tightens nuts, bolts and screws in the golf games of people we see in golf’s weekly television dramas,” Trinkle wrote. He noted that Harvey seemed “made of leather, barbed wire and India rubber.” Trinkle studied Harvey’s wrinkled skin, crinkled by decades in the sun. “You can read the Dead Sea Scrolls in that chipped, weathered face,” he advised. Harvey had no interest in discussing his features for the golf writer. “Here,” he blurted, rising from his chair and handing Trinkle a putter. “Hit this ball toward that hole.”
Trinkle’s story about Harvey occupied five pages in the April issue of Golf. It was the first large-scale feature published about the Austin Country Club professional. Trinkle mentioned Kite and Crenshaw and the many women Harvey had taught, including Rawls and Whitworth, and shared anecdotes about Davis Love Jr. and Canadian PGA champion George Knudson, who said of Harvey: “Harvey is the only man I really believe knows all there is to know about this game.” The story included a sidebar listing nineteen observations Harvey had made about practice, putting, chipping, club selection, and the idea that every player should have what his friend Jimmy Demaret called “a choke stroke.” Like the low cutoff fade that Jack Nicklaus later made famous in major championships, a choke stroke “repeats under pressure,” Harvey told Trinkle. “If you can make a good, basic shot you’ll rarely have to attempt a fancy one.”
The club announced the transition from Harvey to his son Tinsley on January 1, 1971. Harvey insisted that his son issue the remarks. “I couldn’t be happier with my promotion,” Tinsley told the Austin newspaper. “Austin is the greatest place to live in the United States and we have a fine membership at this club.” The brief article included no statement from Harvey.
The dynamic in Austin golf was shifting in other ways. The city was nearing 300,000 residents. There were two other country clubs in the city, both of them on the more prosperous west side, and a second municipal course had been built. Austin Country Club remained one of the best golf courses in the area, but the dining and banquet facilities, largely unimproved since 1950, were barely used by members. Revenues were sinking.
Another country club was beginning to take shape on twisting, flood-prone Onion Creek in the southeast corner of the city. Demaret had started work on the early stages of what would be the Onion Creek Club, which retained the three-time Masters champion as the principal designer of its eighteen holes.
The owner of the bald cypress- and pecan-lined property had met Demaret years before at Champions Golf Club in Houston. Rex Kitchen, the president of a construction company in Austin, had gone to Houston in the early 1960s with Austin Country Club members Jimmie Connolly and Charlie Crenshaw, Ben Crenshaw’s father, to watch the annual Champions Cup matches.
Founded in 1957 by Demaret and Jack Burke Jr., Champions was the site of the 1967 Ryder Cup matches and the 1969 U.S. Open won by Orville Moody. The club staged its invitational matches as a way to attract the finest amateurs in the country. The competition brought spectators from around the state, including Kitchen, who had a 750-acre cattle ranch in South Austin along Onion Creek.
Kitchen was not a golfer, but he did appreciate the beauty of Champions. “He said, ‘You know, I have a pretty piece of property in Austin. I would like to have something like this in my memory,’” Demaret recalled before Onion Creek Club opened.
After Kitchen died in 1965, the idea continued to intrigue Demaret. He said he circled the land four times in an airplane and saw a golf course waiting to be discovered. “God designed it,” he said, “and we loaned some equipment to finish it.” Demaret also knew an opportunity when he saw one. Austin had only three private golf clubs—not very many for its size—and the city was growing south. Onion Creek seemed both a chance to capture a market and a certain way to make money.
Connolly and Demaret created a partnership to buy the land in 1969 for $812,500. Demaret routed the holes, construction began in 1971, and the course was complete in 1973.
A celebrity outing christened Onion Creek Club on June 2, 1974. The cast included Bob Hope, Mickey Mantle, singers Phil Harris and Tennessee Ernie Ford, professional golfers Jack Burke Jr. and Jay Hebert, country-music crooner Willie Nelson, and Darrell Royal, the folksy, immensely popular head coach of the University of Texas football team who had won three national championships.
None of them imagined that the new course they played that day would matter as much as it did to American golf in 1978, when a small group of retired players from the PGA Tour traveled to Austin for a reunion.
Back at his own country club, where he no longer worried about the daily operation of the golf shop, Harvey gave more thought to writing. The notebook in his rolltop desk resembled nothing coherent, but he began to see a void in his own library of instruction books, which he maintained and displayed with great pride at his home behind the twelfth hole.
When he looked at his collection, he saw Rights and Wrongs of Golf by Bob (Bobby) Jones, published in 1935. He saw Down to Scratch by Abe Mitchell, published two years later. There was How to Play Golf by Ben Thomson, A New Way to Better Golf by Alex Morrison, Sam Snead’s Natural Golf, and a personal favorite, How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time by Tommy Armour, presented to him in 1953 by one of his earliest elite women, Betty Jameson. “Fore!” Jameson had inscribed inside the cover. “Harvey, with fond affection and deep gratitude—both for you and your ability as a great teacher.”
Harvey cherished the book because Jameson gave it to him near the end of her decorated career, a season of reflection if there ever was one. But he also treasured it because he revered the author. Armour, an original Scottish-born professional from the Braid Hills of Edinburgh, had won the 1927 U.S. Open, the 1930 PGA Championship, and the 1931 Open Championship at Carnoustie. He also had been an influential teacher. Like Harvey, he believed that good golf began in the hands. “Get it right, and all other progress follows,” Armour wrote in the book on Harvey’s shelf.
Harvey never forgot Armour. He kept a fuzzy black-and-white photograph of the “Silver Scot,” sitting on a bench with a club between his dark stockings, on the surface of his rolltop desk, where he could see it every day. Under the photograph were Armour’s words: “I can tell you all you’ll need to know in ten minutes.” Armour had spoken those words, but Harvey lived them.
Harvey noticed a clear theme among the books in his collection. They were written for players, not teachers, and mostly beginning players at that. He wondered why there were so few books for teachers. Harvey understood that reading about how to play golf could help an aspiring player. But he also knew that the golf swing needed to be rehearsed, to be felt, in order to become efficient.
He’d had opportunities earlier. Betty Hicks, the LPGA professional who corresponded often with Harvey, tried to persuade him to write a book of instruction, but Harvey rejected the idea. “I told her the publishers wouldn’t give anything for a good one,” he said in 1974. “They would want something controversial.”
Harvey had no interest in controversy. Friction ran against his gentle, pacifist nature. But sharing his ideas in published form intrigued Harvey, especially the prospect of a book written explicitly for golf teachers. He appeared to be thinking seriously about that possibility in the summer of 1974 when he and Helen traveled to Levelland to visit their daughter and son-in-law.
Billy and Kathryn Powell moved to Levelland, on the Llano Estacado west of Lubbock, when Harvey’s son-in-law joined South Plains College as its first athletic director and women’s basketball coach. They joined Levelland Country Club, where Harvey met Charles Richards, the editor of The Surveyor newspaper, for an interview on the country club grounds. A picture accompanied the article: Harvey, in his seventy-first year of life, looked tan and sinewy in his white golf shirt. His face wore an expression of patient accommodation—he was getting accustomed to these reporters and their questions—as the Surveyor photographer snapped the shutter in his face.
In the interview, Harvey discussed his insights into his own limitations as a teacher—limitations he recognized, accepted, and even, with self-effacing modesty, valued. The interviews he’d granted over the years customarily teemed with deferential humility. Harvey took great care in his public statements to deflect credit for the success of his students or for his reputation. He referred to himself many times as a “guide”—a word suggesting that his involvement in, say, the rise of Rawls or Whitworth or Crenshaw or Kite had amounted to little more than providing supervision, like a parent standing nearby to catch a child learning to ride a bike. (His students, however, bestowed much of the credit for their successes on Harvey. It’s likely that at one and the same time everyone was right and everyone was wrong.)
The editor of the Levelland newspaper asked Harvey pointed questions about the nature of golf. Why should older players avoid long irons? Why should beginners practice their short shorts to develop their full swings? “I don’t know why,” Harvey replied, declining to speculate. “Except having seen more shots in my life than anybody else, I just know that it’s true.”
The editor pressed Harvey for answers. Harvey provided none.
“Again, I don’t know the reasons,” he said. “I never say I know anything will work. Anyone who says he knows something, I’m leery of them.”
The notebook Harvey maintained in Austin never masqueraded as a repository of reasons. The notes he made did indeed represent answers, but not to questions involving the nature of things. Harvey knew what he knew because he had seen it work.
He knew taking dead aim worked. But could he explain it? He knew swinging the bucket worked. But could he unpack its physics? He knew giving luck a chance gave players a high probability of scoring. But could he explain luck or chance? Could anyone? Harvey’s methods functioned on the simple premises of reliability and repeatability—two critical dimensions, both physical and mental, of playing good golf. He was almost childlike in his approach to helping others grasp the game. He was far more interested in effect than cause. If you do this, he seemed to say, this will happen. Why question truth?
Decades later, long after Harvey had died, Tom Kite said that his longtime teacher knew far more than the Levelland interview implied. “He understood the way the body worked,” Kite said one winter morning in 2014. “He understood the limitations that people had in their bodies. He totally understood what made the golf swing work.”
Kite often solicited other instructors, but Harvey taught Kite the fundamentals. He knew Harvey as a golf teacher as well as anyone. “Just because he didn’t share that with his students because he didn’t want to clutter their minds doesn’t mean he didn’t understand it,” Kite said. “If you came in and said you were hitting the ball too high, he knew multiple ways to get it down. He knew the best ways to get it down.”
Kite told a story about one of his part-time instructors, Chuck Cook, who later worked with Payne Stewart and Jason Dufner. Cook apprenticed under Harvey. He once told Harvey that he was struggling with a nasty hook. Harvey never asked to see Cook’s swing. Instead, he asked Cook to retrieve his persimmon from the trunk of his car. Harvey examined the wear spots on the grip of the club. He studied the streaks of color on the sole, determining how the club brushed the wooden tees. He angled the face of the club in the light, so he could see the wear marks from contact with the ball. He then prescribed adjustments. Harvey never saw Cook swing but identified problems in his grip and release, Kite said. “That’s knowing what’s going on,” he said.
As the interview wound down that July afternoon in Levelland in 1974, the editor asked Harvey to remember the finest round he’d seen Kite or Crenshaw play, or their best tournament. Harvey said nothing.
“A shrug of the hands,” Richards wrote.
“Dates and scores, things like that, don’t stick in my mind,” Harvey said. “If I ever saw you hold a club or hit it, I’d remember that. A year or two from now, if I saw you swing a club in another fairway, I might not remember your name. But I’d remember you as the fellow from Levelland.”
The fellow from Levelland reminded Harvey that he recently had been on a show with his friend Cactus Pryor, a famous broadcaster in Austin. Pryor had asked Harvey to recall his best round of golf. Harvey told Pryor he couldn’t remember it. But Pryor could. It was a 63, the course record at the Riverside location of Austin Country Club. “Things like that don’t stick to my mind,” Harvey told Richards in Levelland. “Golf swings do.”
Richards had one more question: Would Harvey ever write a book?
“I wouldn’t mind, later on,” Harvey said. But he then clarified his answer: “It would be to help teachers teach,” he said. “I don’t think I’d do one for golfers, as far as how to play.”