THE REMARKABLE SUMMER of ’92 sustained Harvey with strength and purpose. The Little Red Book sold briskly. Letters arrived in stacks. When Harvey felt well enough to go to the club, members brought their friends to his cart so they could shake the hand of a celebrity. Harvey signed hundreds of books. Shrake offered to procure a stamp molded with his signature, but Harvey refused. He wanted to do it the right way.
A month after Kite’s triumph at Pebble Beach, Crenshaw won the Western Open, giving him his sixteenth PGA Tour title and Harvey another trophy to admire. Harvey watched every shot on his television near the club. “He’s crippled, and he can’t hear, but his mind is mighty brilliant,” Helen Penick told a reporter from Dallas. Then Harvey got on the phone. “You can’t believe how I feel about those boys,” he said of Kite and Crenshaw. “I don’t have the words.”
A few weeks later, Harvey opened a letter from Esther Newberg, Shrake’s agent at International Creative Management. The publisher intended to print 50,000 additional books. Harvey could barely believe what he was hearing.
The September 21 issue of People magazine featured a cover photograph of Princess Grace, with a posthumous photo essay inside. The magazine that week also included stories on a retreat in New Jersey for HIV-positive families, a controversial veterinarian in Texas who bred primates for research, retiring Miss America chaperone Ellie Ross, Harry Truman, Garry Shandling, celebrity TV weatherman Bryan Norcross, fired and disgraced State Department analyst Felix Bloch, the First Cat “Socks,” and Superman. And there, on page 140, was a half-page picture of Harvey in a bucket hat and a seven-paragraph celebration of the Little Red Book. “Lore of the Links,” the magazine called it. Harvey was quoted: “What it says about playing golf has stood the test of time.” What being in People said about Harvey was even more meaningful. He was a crossover talent: a folksy, celebrity golf teacher with a transcendent appeal. Harvey Penick, the grown-up caddie, was a worldwide maker of news and object of fascination.
James Michener, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist then living in Austin, called Shrake one evening and asked him to arrange a visit with Harvey. Shrake dialed the Penick house, and Helen answered. Shrake told her to tell Harvey that the author of more than forty books, including one that had won the biggest prize in fiction in 1948, wanted to meet Harvey in the morning at the country club.
Helen cupped the receiver and told Harvey of the plans.
“James Michener, the writer?” Shrake heard Harvey’s voice inquire through the muffled telephone.
“Yes, Harvey,” Helen Penick replied. “He doesn’t want a golf lesson. He just wants to meet you.”
“But he’s a famous man. Why, he’s a very famous writer.”
“Don’t you want to meet him?”
“Well, sure, I’d like to meet him, but I don’t know what I would have to talk about with a famous man like James Michener.”
The two authors met the next morning at 11:30. They sat in Harvey’s golf cart and talked about writing and books. Harvey cherished that visit, as he did the time Ernie Banks, the ebullient former Hall of Fame baseball player for the Chicago Cubs, traveled to the country club for a golf lesson. A representative for Michael Jordan, the basketball player, sent word of Jordan’s interest in taking a lesson with Harvey. Letters of similar interest arrived from all over the world. Everyone wanted his or her moment with Harvey Penick. Everyone wanted a swatch of his good and common sense.
Those close to him wondered how the attention would affect the modest old gentleman from Austin. They were thrilled for him, but they also were concerned about the hot glare of fame and attendant stress on his health. Yet Harvey responded with youthful aplomb. All the attention was like the medicine he needed.
“The book has given Harvey new life,” Helen Penick said. “He used to sit in his chair and sleep because he couldn’t hear. Now he signs books. Billy Graham sent Harvey a wonderful letter of thanks after he received a copy. He quoted scripture from the Bible about an old man who helped others by sharing his knowledge. This year has enriched our lives.”
On October 4, the Little Red Book became the number-one advice book on the New York Times best-seller list. It had been on the list for twelve weeks. John Garrity, a journalist with Sports Illustrated, interviewed Harvey about the sensation his first book had become. “You just wouldn’t believe that a grown caddie could get so much out of life,” Harvey marveled to him.
Shrake spent a lot of time with Harvey as the first north winds of fall blew through Central Texas. They sat in Harvey’s living room, or sometimes on the deck, as Shrake dealt copies of the Little Red Book for Harvey to sign.
On bad days, it took as long as ten minutes for Harvey to address just one book. Shrake noticed that Harvey often included the inscription, “To my pupil and friend.” Shrake asked him why he wrote those words.
“If they read my book, they’re my pupil,” Harvey replied. “And if they play golf, they’re my friend.”
Shrake pondered that idea for weeks. It made perfect sense, of course. It spoke to the core of Harvey Penick—of his earliest ideas about golf at the old Austin Country Club, of his earnest concern for the welfare of the game and the people who played it, of his devotion. Late that year Shrake was on the telephone with Jeff Neuman, their Simon & Schuster editor. Shrake mentioned his conversation with Harvey.
“There,” Neuman said, “is the title for our sequel.”
Harvey and Shrake signed their new contract on January 26, 1993. It included a royalty schedule identical to the one for the first book: 10 percent on the first 5,000 books, 12 percent on the second 5,000, and 15 percent on the 10,001th copy and beyond. The advance: a stunning $500,000. Harvey Penick, an eighty-eight-year-old golf teacher who rarely charged more than $20 for a lesson, had just signed his name for a half-million dollars.
Simon & Schuster announced the new book a month later. The Little Red Book had spent thirty-two weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, twelve of them at the top. There were 450,000 copies in circulation, making it “the best selling hardcover sports book of all time,” read a news release from Simon & Schuster. It had passed Season on the Brink by John Feinstein, Men at Work by George Will, and Bo Knows Bo by Bo Jackson and Dick Schaap. The new book, jacketed in green, would “pick up where THE LITTLE RED BOOK left off, with the same mix of simple wisdom, sound golfing instruction, and good common sense that has made THE LITTLE RED BOOK such a phenomenal success,” the publisher trumpeted.
That book, meanwhile, was being printed in languages Harvey had never heard, in nations he had never seen. It had been serialized in the United Kingdom in the Sunday Telegraph and Golf Weekly. It had readers in Australia, Italy, Japan, Poland, and even Thailand.
The old caddie was a famous man wherever golf was played, which was everywhere.
Shrake and Harvey convened early in the winter of ’93, conducting their recorded conversations about golf and life in the sunlight strobing through the sliding-glass doors of Harvey’s living room. They talked about the success of the first book, and how the second book could do just as well. “I’m glad to see it making that money,” Harvey told Shrake. “And I’m so proud that golf has made such strides. It’s unbelievable. I get letters every day from people.”
“That’s wonderful,” Shrake said.
“I tell you,” Harvey said. “The best part of golf is the association of golf.”
Golf Digest, which had published the early excerpt from the first book in May 1992, was planning to devote its December 1993 issue to the second book. But Harvey was a brand now, the modest and charming teacher who provided a counterbalance to what had become for other teachers—but didn’t need to be—the complicated business of teaching the golf swing. To satisfy the raging interest of its market, the magazine wanted to harness Harvey’s energy in its pages again.
The editor of Golf Digest offered Harvey an appointment for 1994 as a member of its “professional advisory staff,” with his name appearing on the masthead. Harvey would write ten one-page instruction pieces of five hundred words each, with ideas approved in advance, and be paid $2,000 for each article. Golf Digest would retain world periodical rights; Harvey would agree to write for no other publication. Jerry Tarde, the editor, hoped to announce the agreement to readers in the issue excerpting the green book.
The summer before, Golfsmith International, an Austin retail company, founded the Harvey Penick Golf Academy and began planning a series of instructional sessions based on the Little Red Book. The company, which did most of its club-component business through catalogs, hired Bryan Gathright, a Texan living in Colorado, to create the academy at its new forty-acre corporate headquarters and practice range along Interstate 35 north of downtown.
Carl Paul and his wife Barbara had founded Golfsmith in 1967. They operated their component business from their home in New Jersey until Carl’s brother Frank joined the growing company. Golfsmith moved to Austin in the early 1970s, and in 1975 the brothers opened their first store. When the company attached Harvey’s name to its new academy venture, Golfsmith and its four hundred employees were selling $80 million worth of golf equipment a year. The company also conscripted Harvey to design a line of clubs.
Gathright left a job as the director of a junior golf tournament in Aspen to join the venture. He was happy to go back in Texas. He’d grown up in Teague, a small town east of Waco, and been childhood friends with Dale Morgan, a highly regarded golf professional from nearby Fairfield who supervised the golf division of a private club in Austin. He’d been captivated by Harvey’s book. Gathright moved to Austin in January 1993, met Harvey, and concluded that he had just encountered a man so singularly committed to his craft that “I didn’t know if he chose golf or golf chose him.” The two of them convened at least weekly for the next seven months. Gathright wanted to make sure the Harvey Penick Golf Academy taught golf the way Harvey taught golf.
Gathright supplied his academy instructors with a teaching manual derived from the lessons in Harvey’s books. The manual included quotations from Harvey:
The day I stop learning is the day I will quit teaching.
It’s the simple things that last.
The prettiest swing in the world won’t do any good unless you can hit a spot.
A good putter is a match for anyone. A bad putter is a match for no one.
The woods are full of long hitters.
The teacher who makes the fewest mistakes is the best teacher.
The thirty-one-page manual cited the books, including page numbers. It became the bible for the Harvey Penick Golf Academy.
The academy opened on July 15, 1993. Participants paid $598 for a hotel room, transportation, three days of instruction with professionals trained by Gathright, and their own copies of the Little Red Book, which they were expected to memorize. At its peak, the academy employed twenty-two instructors and hummed at full capacity—twenty to thirty participants from the United States and beyond—for twenty-six days a month.
The agreement between Golfsmith and Harvey stipulated no personal appearances. Harvey was in the building one day, examining the golf clubs the company made with his name on them, when someone informed him that an academy session was under way outside.
“Well,” Harvey said, “can I go and say hello to my students?”
Other emerging obligations pulled at Harvey, who was delighted to meet them. He spent most of his days in a wheelchair, his old body folded into place like a crumpled straw, but his mind and heart seemed as full of life as they were when he was playing the Texas Open in the 1920s.
A production company from Dallas pitched the idea of a video to complement the lessons in the Little Red Book. For the occasion, Harvey selected a dark tartan cardigan with dark brown trousers and a navy ivy cap stitched with the Austin Country Club crest. At the end of the day of filming, the crew had finished its work, but fortunately did not pack up the cameras before catching the following scene:
Kite, Crenshaw, and Harvey remained on the range. An upstart wind brushed the tops of the live oaks. No one really cared to leave.
Kite sat on the base of the Hogan golf staff bag lying on the turf. Crenshaw leaned against the fender of cart number 59 with Harvey folded inside, alarmingly thin, holding the handle of the weed cutter in his sinewy hands, his long underwear visible under the cuffs of his brown trousers. They talked about golf swings and Tommy Armour III. Harvey explained again, because it mattered a lot to him, how a teacher must listen. He said he learned much from his former players, who came to the University of Texas and shared their experiences with their early teachers, the head professionals in Midland and Houston and Waco and Dallas. Harvey, Crenshaw, and Kite talked about the importance of simplicity in the golf swing and the teaching of it. They invoked dead aim.
Crenshaw offhandedly mentioned to Harvey an ache in his right thumb. That turned the conversation toward the grip, which brightened Harvey’s eyes like flares. Harvey suddenly had an idea. He asked Crenshaw to take a club and assume his stance, someplace where the teacher could get a good view of his old friend. Then he asked Crenshaw to take a few swings.
“Let me know what the balls do,” Harvey told Kite.
Crenshaw swung.
“Where was that ball?”
Crenshaw swung again.
“Was that good or bad or medium, Ben?”
Crenshaw scraped another ball between his feet. He fired.
Harvey asked Crenshaw to adjust his hands on the club. They discussed the boys from West Texas who came to Harvey to play at Texas, right-to-left slingers, like Billy Munn from Midland, whose four-knuckle grips propelled shots that carved the wind like skinner blades.
Another one, Harvey told Crenshaw.
“Which way did it fall?”
“Perfect shot,” Kite said.
“That’s what it sounded like,” Harvey said. He examined the marks in the grass Crenshaw had made with the iron, like the dollar bills Walter Benson Jr. used to leave at Lions.
“I study the divots,” Harvey said.
Kite hit some shots too. But it was getting late. The air began to cool, and the tartan cardigan Harvey wore was barely keeping him warm enough. They had been there an extra hour, remembering players, remembering tournaments and putts that had won or lost them, laughing some, meddling with grips, watching swings, decorating the range with divots.
It was Lions Municipal Golf Course before urethane-covered golf balls and titanium drivers and 7,500-yard golf courses.
It was the 1960s again at the Perry Maxwell course on Riverside.
It was persimmon and balata and teaching golf through stories.
It was the 1970s, when Kite and Crenshaw were winning national championships for Texas.
It was the 1980s, when the players returned home between PGA Tour starts.
It was just like it used to be. Except it wasn’t. And Harvey had broken his rule, the one he had gently but firmly enforced for thirty years.
He’d granted Kite and Crenshaw a shared lesson.
With the publication of the green book, interest in Harvey burst beyond the golf magazines and sports pages. He was the vintage rags-to-riches trope: a former hardscrabble caddie, now a famous celebrity. He was the classic late-bloomer story: high school graduate turned best-selling author at the age of eighty-seven. He was the mystic-poet: conduit of wisdom, with no regard for attention, doing what he did for the love of it. He also was the anti-Texan, a slayer of stereotypes: meek, modest, grateful, graceful, amused by the fuss over his simple books. Harvey represented a wholesome theme suited for any medium. Especially TV.
Day One, an ABC newsmagazine on the air from 1993 to 1995, sent correspondent Michel McQueen to meet Harvey at the country club. The advance team arranged interviews with Kite, Crenshaw, Shrake, Sandra Palmer, and Tinsley Penick. A former reporter for the Washington Post and White House correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, McQueen served as a participant-reporter. The story was called “The Old Pro.”
Cameras filmed Harvey as he sat in his cart with an afghan over his lap, thumbing through the Scribbletex and wishing players good fortune in their rounds. An unidentified man wandered over and asked Harvey, awkwardly and self-consciously, for strokes on the back nine. Harvey misunderstood the question. Another unidentified man described for the camera the power of Harvey’s optimistic belief that he could help anyone play better golf if they committed to it. “Harvey Penick’s number-one lesson,” McQueen intoned. “Love of the game comes first.”
McQueen repeated the now-familiar lore preceding the publication of the books: that Harvey had intended to save his notebook for his son, that not even his most loyal pupils had seen it. “But failing health changed his mind,” McQueen said gravely.
Shrake: “I had a chilling feeling that there was something really special there, that I had been called over here to perform some kind of a duty. And the duty was, I think, to preserve Harvey Penick’s words and teachings, for everybody, forever.”
Tinsley Penick: “Three years ago he was in the hospital. He had a fractured spine, many other ailments. He was depressed, disorientated. I’d go by to see him every day, as would other people, thinking this is the last time I’m going to see this man. And to go from that point to where he is now is unexplainable. It’s as much of a miracle as anything I’ve experienced.”
Crenshaw: “The book is filled with so many other things, other than golf. It’s a way to live. It’s a very nice approach to life. Harvey just leads by example.”
McQueen: “What is almost as amazing about Harvey Penick is that the wisdom he has bestowed on all those weekend duffers is the same advice he has given to some of the greatest players on the professional circuit today.”
Palmer: “I kind of think he’s a saint.”
McQueen and Day One further unspooled the hagiography through an anecdote Kite shared on the broadcast. Kite revealed that Harvey had agreed to give lessons to a paroled felon who had confessed to his crime and apologized. That admission was all Harvey needed to hear. But certain officials at Austin Country Club objected, Kite said. “The board of directors threw a tizzy.”
Harvey insisted that his new pupil deserved the grace offered by golf.
“The board of directors relented,” Kite said.
McQueen, a beginner at golf, procured an iron and met Harvey on the range for a made-for-TV lesson. Her first effort plinked the metal wheel of his electric cart. “Harvey, I almost hit you!” McQueen said, aghast. Her next ball hopped a few feet away. She looked horrified.
“Get your hands pointed at your left leg,” Harvey said.
McQueen adjusted.
“A little more.”
McQueen complied.
The broadcast neglected to report how many takes it required, but McQueen eventually produced an actual golf shot. The ball leaped up and away.
“Look at that!” Harvey exalted.
He clapped feebly. He was thrilled. Harvey was getting better at these interviews, more comfortable as a public figure whose growing reach extended beyond Austin, beyond even golf. He knew what journalists wanted now, and he could oblige. But he clearly felt most at ease when he helped McQueen experience her first real golf shot, which seemed spontaneous and improvised and organic, unlike the scripted questions of a formal one-on-one. Harvey told McQueen that he hoped she would take up the game. She smiled tenderly.
“What is life if you don’t have friends?” he asked her.
“Now,” he said, nodding at McQueen, “make it two times in a row.”
Texas Monthly staff writer Gary Cartwright, who had known Shrake since their boom years at newspapers in Dallas and Fort Worth, pitched a profile of Harvey and his rise from the caddie yard. The magazine commissioned noted Austin photographer Michael O’Brien to make the accompanying portraits. O’Brien scouted locations one autumn day at the country club. He found two settings he liked: the cart barn and, appropriately, the practice range. He arranged to meet Harvey and Shrake on an October afternoon in 1993 for the picture.
Harvey arrived in an unpretentious navy sweater from Ballybunion Golf Club in Ireland over a knotted red tie. He wore one of his smart ivy caps in gray tweed, his best brown shoes, and an expression that suggested to O’Brien sincere flattery. He offered O’Brien his hand. “He said he couldn’t imagine any magazine paying this much attention to him,” the photographer said. With his back pain worsening by the week, Harvey could stand for just a few minutes at a time. O’Brien arranged him and Shrake on a wooden bench, with the range behind them, illuminated by a strobe. He scattered a garden of red-striped golf balls at their feet.
O’Brien snapped seventy-five frames that afternoon with a Hasselblad camera and eighty-millimeter Zeiss lens. He later selected an image that struck him as emblematic of the friendship between the two men. Harvey sits nobly with his hands in his lap, his lips pursed, his head high, his diminutive frame shrinking into the slats of the bench. Shrake, sturdy and tall, leans forward slightly in a cardinal red sweater. Neither man smiles. They project honor and dignity. “The circumstances of life have brought them together,” O’Brien said. The composition endures as a study in quiet pride.
Many years later, the photograph became part of the permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The golf teacher and his unlikely collaborator would reside forever and together with presidents, philosophers, statesmen, authors, artists, musicians, inventors, composers, poets, civil rights activists, four-star generals, and the founding fathers of the United States.
In December, subscribers to Golf Digest magazine received an edition whose cover was bathed in green. A diffuse, watercolor portrait of Harvey, wearing a bucket hat and a tie under his ACC sweater, occupied half of the page. “Exclusive: Harvey Penick’s NEW Little Green Book,” it announced in bold white letters. The ten-page feature, written by Harvey as a member of the magazine’s professional advisory staff, supplied readers with a casserole of new observations, stylistically identical to those in the first book. The Harvey Penick brand continued to grow.
Jeff Neuman traveled to Austin from New York in the spring of 1994. He, Harvey, and Shrake discussed a possible third book, maybe even a fourth.
The first and second books had been written for anyone who played golf. The idea for the third was that Harvey had much to offer two particular audiences: women and older players.
Shrake had been thinking about the idea for some time. After Neuman left, he composed a one-page letter to his agent, which he sent overnight on May 16, 1994. In it, he proposed the title Harvey Penick’s Little Blue Book: Learnings and Teachings for Women, Seasoned Citizens . . . and Other Lovers of the Game.
Shrake clearly was calculating the project from a marketing angle as much as from a writing angle. “I sense from hanging out around golfers of all sorts that we need to make a little space between the second and third Harvey,” he wrote to Esther Newberg. “The Green book and the Red book should keep feeding off each other. I don’t see how a person can read one and not eventually read the other. Harvey Penick has many devoted readers, but a Blue Book this Christmas would be too much, too soon, I believe.”
Shrake and Harvey agreed to write two more books of 50,000 to 60,000 words each. The third book would be written for women. The fourth and final book would be for seniors. Simon & Schuster committed to an astounding advance of $2 million, payable in six installments of $333,333 each from signing on June 23 through publication. The manuscripts were scheduled for delivery in December 1994 and August 1995.
The two collaborators began planning their visits again.
“At the age of ninety he is as busy as he has ever been in his life,” Shrake wrote to his agent in May 1994. “Despite his crippling pain, he loves to teach and feel needed. He is gaining strength, and once again you can hear his voice clearly on the practice range.”
Shrake interviewed others that fall as well. He spoke in September to Mary Lena Faulk, Betty Jameson, Sandra Palmer, and Mickey Wright, then hurriedly wove together the stories due in December to Simon & Schuster. Then it would be time to start on the fourth and final project.
Shrake told Wright on September 16 that the events of the last three years had given Harvey something close to a new identity. “What a great feeling it is to feel wanted,” Shrake said. “He had sort of been, more or less, discarded by the world for so long. He goes out now to Golfsmith and gives lectures once a week and he tells me he feels like Bob Hope. They laugh at every word he says.”
“Isn’t that wonderful,” Wright said. “It couldn’t happen to a nicer man.”
Rick Rogers, a lawyer who had taken golf lessons from Harvey since the 1960s, gave the Little Red Book to Mark Allen Doty, the pastor of the First United Methodist Church in Corpus Christi, Texas, where Rogers lived. Doty used the book in one of his sermons. Facing his congregation one Sunday morning, he admitted that he had never played golf, that the appeal of the game eluded him. But Harvey and his message, he said, gave him a new way to think about something that did matter to him: the beatitudes in the Gospel of Matthew.
“The power of Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book is that it tells us not only how to play the game of golf successfully, but it also reveals something about the nature of the man who is doing the advising,” Doty said that morning in church. “The same holds true with respect to the Sermon on the Mount. It not only tells Christians how to live but emphasizes the importance of Jesus.”
Doty called Harvey a “master teacher.” He noted that his “drawing power is the same as all great teachers—for they really teach themselves.”
By the end of the year, the Little Red Book had sold 800,000 copies.
The green book, And If You Play Golf, You Are My Friend, sold 400,000 in its first month in stores.
Harvey continued to make regular appearances at his Golfsmith academy. But his worsening health curtailed his personal lessons, which provided the close-quarters interactions he considered most rewarding.
Harvey’s last authentic lesson, with a bag of balls on the green grass of a practice range, where he could divine meaning from the depth and direction of a divot—the kind he believed in most—took place a year before he died.
Billy Munn, who played for Harvey at Texas in the mid-1960s, was on the fifth hole at Midland Country Club in April 1994 with two friends. One of them was George Tucker, who had won a national championship under Harvey’s successor, George Hannon, at Texas. The other was Al Boudreaux, a five-handicapper who could play like a fifteen- and who, on that day in April, executed a shot so poorly that he declared to Munn and Tucker that he was abandoning the game forever. Munn called Harvey later that day.
His old coach told Munn to bring his friend to Austin. Munn, Tucker, and a reluctant Boudreaux boarded a flight the next morning. They arrived to sun and a seasonal springtime breeze from the southeast. They rented a car and drove to Harvey’s home, expecting nothing more than an examination of Boudreaux’s grip and perhaps a cursory evaluation of his posture. When they arrived, however, Harvey, now eighty-nine years old and ailing, was wearing his golf hat. “Let’s go to the course,” he told his visitors from Midland.
Munn and Tucker lifted Harvey from his chair. “We literally carried him and put him on the golf cart,” Tucker recalled. They whirred over to Austin Country Club and helped Harvey to the practice range, where he watched Tucker swing a fairway wood and casually suggested that he adjust the position of his head. Then he motioned for Boudreaux.
Harvey and Boudreaux spent an hour together. They worked on alignment and aim. Munn and Tucker kept waiting for Harvey to end the lesson, but the old teacher seemed to want it to last as long as it could. “He couldn’t see,” Munn said. “But he could hear. He could hear those shots. He didn’t have to see them.” Occasionally, Harvey asked Munn or Tucker where a particular shot flew. Where’d that one go? How about that one? Soon, Harvey’s nurse appeared. She informed him that he needed to break for lunch. Harvey declined. “This is doing more nourishment for my soul than food ever would,” Harvey told her. “I’m going to watch some more.”
And he did.
Nineteen years later, Boudreaux, Munn, and Tucker sat around a table, dipping tortilla chips in tomato salsa at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Midland, where they still lived and played golf at Midland Country Club. They reminisced about their visit with Harvey with laughter and silent nods. They remembered how, in their next round together after the lesson, Tucker shot a 4-under-par 32 on the front side. “I was the opponent,” Munn said. Boudreaux played the best golf of his life for the next six months. He did not abandon the game.
Harvey did not abandon him that morning in Austin. “He was seventy-five and healthy that day,” Boudreaux said. “I know right here”—Boudreaux tapped his chest—“that that day was as good for him as it was for me.”