HARVEY WAS INDUCTED into his second hall of fame in 1985. He was the only golfer that year in the Texas Sports Hall of Fame class, which included pitcher Nolan Ryan and five Texas-born football players. Joe Hornaday, the Austin newspaper reporter who had written many times about Harvey and his pupils, nominated him with a passionate letter to the induction committee. “For seven decades, Harvey Penick has been practicing the art of golf teaching like no one before,” Hornaday wrote.
Austin Country Club had moved the year before to the residential development near Lake Austin, where Pete Dye designed a lavish course with six holes along the water. Tinsley and his wife Betty Ann helped Harvey and Helen move to a small townhouse near enough to the club that Harvey could take his personal golf cart to the course. There he parked in a spot designated for him and stationed himself in the shade of an oak. He minded the starter sheet and gave lessons from the seat of his cart.
Harvey no longer wrote often in his notebook. He showed it to no one. He barely gave it much thought anymore. He was eighty years old with less and less to do each day.
Fifty-six players were invited to Austin that spring to participate in the Legends of Golf Tournament at Onion Creek. The field included many players Harvey knew and admired, men he considered friends: Arnold Palmer, Jack Burke Jr., Dow Finsterwald Jr., Jay and Lionel Hebert, Don January, Paul Runyan, Gene Sarazen, Sam Snead, and Harvie Ward.
But the appearance of two new contestants that year inspired Harvey to postpone all lesson appointments, arrange for a ride to Onion Creek, settle in his chair on the first tee, and wait for their arrival.
The tournament had invited Kathy Whitworth and Mickey Wright. Nothing could keep their teacher from being there when, in a sense, his two LPGA Hall of Fame players came home.
Wright, now fifty, had last played tournament golf five years earlier. The expectation of winning every time she played had begun to cripple her ability. She began suffering an adverse reaction to sunlight. Flying made her anxious. She also developed neuromas, abnormal growths in the nerve fibers in her feet, which made walking difficult, even in loosely tied sneakers. She endured two operations. The prohibition of carts on the LPGA Tour ensured her informal retirement from competition in 1969. But the Legends of Golf had no such regulation. At Onion Creek, Wright could ride.
She had won eighty-two tournaments in her career, most of them between 1957 and 1968, when she averaged nearly eight titles a year. She won four U.S. Women’s Open championships. Only Betsy Rawls, another pupil of Harvey’s, had won as many.
The only player with more was Wright’s partner that week at Onion Creek.
Whitworth was forty-five years old in the spring of 1985, a six-time champion in the LPGA majors, still a regular competitor on the tour, and still a committed devotee of Harvey and his lessons. She traveled to Austin in part to see Harvey and in part to see Wright. But she also wanted to see how well she could play with the men.
No women had ever competed with the seniors. Babe Didrikson Zaharias famously had played in three PGA Tour tournaments in 1945. But the five-year-old Senior PGA Tour, still establishing its footing among the regular men’s and women’s tours, had never invited a woman to play. The addition of Whitworth and Wright brought a wave of attention that week to Austin, which was hailed for its spirit of inclusion. All Harvey wanted to do was see the two women he considered something close to daughters.
“When you or Mickey hit a good shot,” he told Whitworth, “I get goose bumps.”
Wright and Whitworth gave their teacher plenty to remember. They birdied four of the first six holes at Onion Creek. They shot 65 in the first round, four shots under par and three behind the leaders, Billy Casper and Gay Brewer. “I’m just following Mickey,” Whitworth chirped, happy to be in Austin, to have seen Harvey, to be playing with Palmer and Sarazen and Snead. “Isn’t Mickey great? It’s like old times, almost.” Whitworth made five birdies on Thursday. She chipped in for one of them on the par-5 eighteenth hole. “I felt so nervous,” Wright acknowledged after the round. “Like a teenager who never held a golf club—scared to death. I don’t think I’ve ever been that scared.” She and Whitworth started the second round in a tie for sixth place among the twenty-eight teams.
They faltered on the second day, finishing with a 72. “You don’t recapture the magic,” said Wright, who had started practicing in December and played her first full round in five years on February 14, her birthday. She even traveled to Austin a week before the tournament to prepare. But, she said, “you don’t go back twenty years. I knew that before I came here. I thought, ‘I’ve got four months to catch up for five years.’ And I don’t know [that] there’s a way to do that.” They shot 69-69 on the weekend, ending the tournament at 3 under par and eighteen shots behind January and Gene Littler. But in three of the four rounds, the women beat the men they played with.
The experience left Wright in a reflective mood. She had loved playing with her friend, and she had felt that welcome rush of adrenaline when her 7-iron stopped four feet from the hole at the par-3 seventeenth hole in the third round. She smiled when she remembered her approach at the par-4 sixteenth colliding with the flagstick. But Wright also accepted the inevitable consequences of a hasty return to competitive golf after so many years away from it. “Quitting a sport is like quitting cigarettes,” she said. “It’s not easy. You don’t want to start something again that’s so hard quitting. That’s kind of how I feel about golf.”
A week later, Whitworth rejoined the LPGA Tour. She won the United Virginia Bank Classic. It was her eighty-eighth official victory. It also was her last.
Whitworth began to cull her schedule soon after. She wanted to do more teaching, to share what she had learned from Harvey three decades before at the country club. When he found out about her plans, Harvey invited her back to Austin, where he told her: “There are some things you need to know.”
The dynamic had changed. Harvey shared different ideas with his longtime pupil, ones that had more to do with teaching than learning. He advised Whitworth to think like a beginner again. He wanted her to remember what had resonated when she lay on the bed in that motel room in Austin, pantomiming her grip. He asked her to think about how he went about encouraging students to make commitments like that. “As a player, you didn’t need to know that,” he told her. But teachers did. Whitworth marveled at Harvey’s range as a teacher. How could one man teach players one way and teachers in another?
Harvey was the honorary starter at the last Legends of Golf Tournament at Onion Creek, this one in 1989. Don January and his partner that year, Sam Snead, shook Harvey’s fragile hand before their rounds.
It had been years since January had seen Harvey. They knew one another from the Labor Day tournament at the country club, which January had won in 1954. January had chased the West Texas pro-am circuit with Morris Williams Jr. in the early 1950s, gunning from town to town for Friday qualifying, Friday night barbecue dinners and dances, thirty-six holes of better-ball play on Saturday, and then again on Sunday. Like Williams, January had enlisted in the air force. When he returned from the service, he needed someone he trusted to ascertain his readiness for the tour. So he called Harvey.
January had been living in Lampasas, about an hour northwest of Austin, and practicing at Hancock Park, the municipal course his father managed. January had played little golf in the air force. He went six months without playing a competitive round. When he’d arrived at the country club that day in 1955, January complained to Harvey that he felt uncertain of his swing—a swing that had helped Bill Maxwell and Joe Conrad and his other North Texas State teammates win four NCAA championships.
Harvey watched January on the putting green. He watched him hit a half-dozen balls each with a short iron, a middle iron, and a long iron. He asked the slender Texan to swing a driver.
Fifty-nine years later, January recalled: “He never said a word.” But when January asked Harvey that day if he was ready to play with Hogan and Nelson and Snead, Harvey had an answer. “Go,” Harvey told him.
“It gave me a hell of a lot of confidence,” said January, who won ten times on the PGA Tour and twenty-two titles on the Champions Tour, including a Legends of Golf trophy in Austin. When he saw Harvey at Onion Creek all those years after the one-word affirmation, January felt a keen sense of gratitude.
It wasn’t merely for the encouragement in 1955. Harvey had formally endorsed January’s promotion to professional golf. He was one of the required two registered professionals, along with Tod Menefee of San Antonio Country Club, who had signed January’s application to join the Texas section of the PGA.
Harvey was beginning to feel vulnerably old at the close of the 1980s. The pain in his back was so severe that it kept him from standing straight, and he resembled an ambulatory question mark, rarely proceeding at a pace faster than a shuffle. Barely able to look up, he learned to remember shoes—he recognized people from the color of their saddles or the pattern of their oxfords. His condition rarely allowed him to spend a comfortable day on the range, where he longed to be because it was all he knew. He wished he could be the man he once was: strong, durable, tireless, able to stand in the sun for as long as it took to watch a student, new or old, swing the bucket or the weed cutter.
But he was not that man anymore in 1990. He was tired now. His back ached. He sometimes was disoriented. The first indication that Harvey was becoming too frail to teach came in November 1990. His wife Helen wrote to the country club, suggesting that her husband might not be able to continue his lessons.
Louis R. Brill, the president of the club’s board of directors, replied to Helen Penick in a letter dated November 20. “As you well can imagine, we are all very sad to hear that it’s possible he may not be able to return to us,” Brill wrote. “Obviously, the Austin Country Club will not be the same without him—in many ways Austin Country Club is Harvey Penick.” Brill informed Helen that the board voted on November 9 to extend “an indefinite salary continuation plan for Mr. Penick. This means that Mr. Penick will continue to receive a monthly salary even though he may be unable to return to work.”
Harvey was admitted to St. David’s Hospital in Austin, where doctors discovered he had cancer in his prostate. His frustration with old age deepened into a sense of hopelessness. His search for purpose seemed futile. When his family visited Harvey at St. David’s, they encountered a man who seemed ready to surrender. “Every day when I left the hospital, I thought it was for the last time,” said his son, Tinsley.
Harvey looked like he was going to die.
His spirits brightened in late 1989 when he learned that he had been named Teacher of the Year by the PGA of America. He wrote Patrick Reilly, the president of the organization, and told him the announcement was the best moment of his life in golf since the day he became the head professional at Austin Country Club in 1923. “My teaching methods have been mostly a result of conversations and observations with my peers in the PGA,” Harvey explained in his letter to Reilly, “and while fundamentals of the golf swing have changed very little over the years, the new understanding of muscle involvement, the new appreciation of psychological factors and the new methods of presenting ideas are constantly being updated and revised and I will continue to learn. When I stop learning, I will stop teaching.”
Harvey knew that he would not attend the ceremony in his honor. “I now teach from a golf cart,” he wrote. “Please know that I would be with you if it were humanly possible, and I pray that in some way my fellow members of the PGA realize they made an old man feel almost young again and very happy.” Harvey mailed the envelope with melancholic pride.
The idea for a golf book returned in March of the next year. A lawyer in Houston who had taken a lesson from Harvey recently had encouraged Tinsley to consider putting together a collection of his father’s most treasured truths for publication. The lawyer, Harris Greenwood, a friend of Harvey’s since the late 1950s, even suggested a title: Keep It Simple.
“Golf needs a book by Harvey Penick,” Greenwood wrote to Tinsley on March 21, 1990. “The book needs to have all of his tips, advice and opinions on the game and some of the game’s players.” Remarkably, Greenwood grasped the central feature of Harvey’s appeal and lore long before the Little Red Book. “Many of the stories that you will get have probably been so embellished over the years that they actually bear little resemblance to the truth,” Greenwood wrote. “But I think that part of Harvey’s story is pure mythology. There are so many people who love your dad and would want to contribute and help in this project that you would be absolutely flooded with material if you will only ask.”
Greenwood thanked Tinsley for his consideration. He wondered if Harvey might enjoy a reunion of his University of Texas players someday. He said he regretted not visiting Harvey more often.
“It made me feel almost like it was 1959 to have that lesson,” Greenwood wrote.
Tinsley considered the idea, but he was worried that his ailing father would not live to see it come to fruition. A reunion might be good for him. So might a book project about his life in golf. His first concern, however, was doing whatever it took to get Harvey well. After that, anything was possible.
Harvey rallied and went home from the hospital. His longtime friend and teaching understudy, Barbara Puett, recognized that Harvey needed extra care: “We knew he needed someone there all the time,” Puett said. So she organized a campaign to raise money. She sent a letter to his former players at Texas and others he had helped over the years, often at no charge. “It’s time to pay for your lessons,” the letter said. Kite, Crenshaw, and Davis Love III, whose father played for Harvey at Texas, donated $5,000 apiece. The campaign raised more than $60,000. Soon Harvey had his own nurse.
Most of his women were now retired. Crenshaw and Kite continued to win on the PGA Tour, but only Crenshaw had won a major championship, the Masters in 1984. It began to look like Harvey’s boys would only have one. Nevertheless, Harvey was immensely proud of both of them. He knew they expected more. So had he. But they were good men with good families and good reputations in a game that valued honor and dignity. What else could Harvey ask of them? What more could he want?
The spring of 1991 became a season of tender reflection for the old teacher of golf.
Harvey had turned eighty-six in October. He had survived cancer. He had imprinted his gentle lessons on so many successful players, from the women who formed the LPGA to Crenshaw and Kite, now two of the most admired players on the men’s tour. He had done what he could do. Harvey now was becoming acutely aware of time—time gone by and time remaining. He began to think about the encouragement he’d received in years past to write a book, to share for posterity what he knew about golf.
In the past, Harvey had entertained the possibility of writing a book but had always talked himself out of it. He found it difficult to identify with an occupation as intimidating as that of author. He considered himself a conduit—a modest steward of a game he had loved since he was a boy with a bag of clubs on his back, with little regard for compensation and even less for self-promotion. But his acceptance of his mortality had changed him. Harvey began to also accept that his defining contribution to golf would occupy him until the end of his life.
So one fateful morning in the spring of 1991, Harvey asked his nurse to take him to the club. She helped him into his golf cart on Fawn Creek Path, crossed Westlake Drive, and turned right on Long Champ. They whirred down the shaded street, flanked by million-dollar mansions with European sedans in the driveways, past the sixteenth green surrounded by a grove of live oaks, and up to the familiar iron gates. The guard waved them through.
The nurse parked Harvey under the old tree that had sheltered him on so many mornings and afternoons from the piercing Central Texas sun. He watched squirrels flit at the wheels of his cart. He noticed a noisy, belligerent grackle hopping from branch to branch over his head. For a little while, he reconsidered his decision, but by that hour he surely had convinced himself of its rightness. He had come to feel that he had been selfishly hoarding in the old red Scribbletex notebook a body of knowledge that belonged to everyone who played golf, not just to him and his children. He entertained the possibility that he had been allowed to study golf for eighty years so that he might spread what he had learned to anyone who wanted to know. As Harvey would write later: “This gift had not been given to me to keep secret.”
Harvey summoned Tinsley, who was in the shop.
He told his son what he wanted to do.
Bud Shrake said he would be there as soon as he could.
Tinsley could barely contain his joy. He returned to the shop, foraged through his desk for a telephone number, picked up the receiver, and dialed. A big, brassy voice answered the ring. Tinsley spoke briefly, explaining what his father had shared moments before. It involved a visit, Tinsley said. Now, if possible.
Bud Shrake said he would be there as soon as he could.