HARVEY AND SHRAKE continued their visits for the third and fourth books through the summer of 1994, but Shrake could tell that his friend was struggling. Harvey turned ninety in October. Simon & Schuster sent a magnum bottle of champagne as a gift. No one opened it. Harvey wanted badly to infuse the next two books with the same wisdom and humor that had so charmed his readers since 1992. But he often found it hard to simply rise from his bed in the morning.
He rarely left his home on Fawn Creek Path. Excursions, such as they were, required immense coordination between his full-time nurse, whomever Harvey was planning to visit, and someone to drive him there. In one of his last appearances in public, Harvey arrived at his Golfsmith academy on an October afternoon to robust applause from the gathering of thirty men and women in golf shirts of 1990s-vintage primary colors and bold stripes. He doffed his cap as his nurse rolled his wheelchair past a bag of golf clubs bearing his name to the front of the Penick Room on the ground floor of the company headquarters in North Austin. On the yellow walls hung through-the-years portraits of Harvey and his famous players. A bronze bust of Harvey sat in the corner on a marble column. Harvey paid no attention to these relics.
He sat with his head cocked slightly to the left, swallowing often to clear his throat. He wore a purple plaid shirt, loose and bunched at the cuffs. It was buttoned to the top. A navy vest hung on his small, bony shoulders, like a tent draped mid-assembly on its poles, and liver spots speckled his face. He listened now through hearing aids secured under wings of white, wispy hair. Harvey’s infirmities seemed to diminish a bit when he came to his golf schools to tell the stories from his books, both to people who had read them and to people who would hear them for the first time.
Harvey was under his physician’s directions to not be away from home for more than two hours. He often violated that order when he went to his schools, which gave him the rare opportunity to go outside, to be in the presence of golf. “He tried to come to every school that we had,” recalled Jim Hopkins, one of the veteran instructors at the academy and the proprietor of the namesake school after it left the property outside Golfsmith. Harvey insisted, even in failing health, on keeping appointments.
The applause settled that October day. Harvey held his hat in his fragile lap and peered through gold wire-framed glasses.
“If you play golf, you’re my friend,” he managed.
Crenshaw announced cheerily that Harvey had just turned ninety. “I went to visit him on his birthday the other day,” Crenshaw said. “The first thing I said to him was, ‘Harvey, congratulations. You broke ninety.’” Crenshaw laughed. Harvey laughed. Everyone laughed. The room carried a sense of moment: of Harvey’s birthday, of the success of the books, of the confluence of knowledge and the thirst for it, of the connection between hickory-shafted golf on sand greens and the majesty of the game at that moment in 1994.
“I tell you, we ran a good time out there,” Harvey said, reflecting on a memory his mind had retrieved. He looked at Crenshaw, who waited for Harvey to finish the thought. “I get goose pimples out there when they hit a good shot,” his teacher said. “That’s the truth.”
Crenshaw had just concluded his twenty-first season on the PGA Tour. He had won his eighteenth tournament, the Freeport-McMoRan Classic in New Orleans, in April. He later tied for eighteenth place in the Masters and ninth in the PGA Championship, and he had just finished with a final-round 65 in the Texas Open, where he shared eighth. Crenshaw had made twenty cuts, sixteen of them in a row. Now he was forty-two. And the baffling revolution of his brilliance, forever orbiting its own mystifying sun, appeared to restore itself that autumn of ’94 to a position of hopeful light.
What, Crenshaw had to wonder, might the spring of 1995 hold?
At Golfsmith that day, Crenshaw and Harvey volleyed stories for more than thirty minutes. Harvey recited his chronicled experiences with Titanic Thompson, Herman Keiser, and Jimmy Demaret. The participants leaned in to better hear Harvey’s soupy drawl. “Have we talked about Joe Kirkwood?” Harvey queried the room.
Kirkwood, an Australian trick-shot specialist in the 1920s and ’30s who toured the world with Walter Hagen and played that exhibition match in 1924 with Harvey at the old Austin Country Club, could stack three golf balls and strike only the middle ball with his club. He could drive a golf ball from a tee in the mouth of a woman lying between his feet. He could hit a ball from the face of a watch without scratching the crystal. Harvey especially liked it when Kirkwood plopped a sand-bunker shot backwards like a boomerang, over his head and onto the green.
“Joe Kirkwood was the best trick-shot artist I ever saw,” Harvey wrote in his first book—in the same chapter where he mentioned that he used to entertain baseball fans between doubleheader games at the old park in Austin.
When I walked out to home plate, the crowd took one look at me in my plus-fours knickers and plaid socks and started booing. They quieted down some when I started hitting curves to the right and to the left. Then I placed one ball on top of another with a bit of putty. I hit the bottom ball 125 yards with a seven-iron, and the top ball popped into the air so I could catch it in my hand. Almost any good player can do this trick, but the people in the stands didn’t know that.
Another story: “I had a rubber hose, the kind you put air in your car tires with. It had a grip on one end and a three-wood head on the other. I hit a few shots with that rubber hose, and people started cheering.”
Harvey missed Joe Kirkwood. He once told him, “You’re the only man who ever held a club right to suit me.” Harvey missed a lot of the men from that era, charismatic figures in cashmere cardigans and wool trousers, the personification of golf when golf was still a novelty in Texas. He missed the stage-show dimension of golf, the feats of coordination and concentration that no one really tried anymore, not with so much money at stake in tournament golf.
Harvey regretted that. Now golf was all about swing planes and shoulder positions and coil and a draftsman’s preoccupation with utility and angles. “Hitting trick shots is a dying art,” Harvey wrote in his book. Resignation seeped from his words.
“[Kirkwood] turned out to be a good friend,” Harvey said that afternoon at Golfsmith. “You can’t believe what he could do with that golf ball.”
Sensing that Harvey was already beginning to tire, Crenshaw solicited questions to draw the gathering to a close. A man rose and asked Harvey how to calm the anxiety of playing the first shot of a round. Harvey asked someone nearby to repeat the question into the hearing aid in his left ear. He steeled himself, then straightened slightly in his wheelchair. “That man hasn’t read my books,” Harvey said with neither accusation nor blame. He seemed emboldened by the query. “Take dead aim and hit that golf ball,” he said. “Forget everything else there is. Take ten seconds, five seconds, before you hit that ball. Then take dead aim at that golf ball and hit it.”
The answer burdened the air. The man who asked the question appeared to wait for more, but Harvey had nothing more to contribute. What more was there? Even now, when Harvey was ninety years old and would be dead in six months, he resisted the opportunity to complicate the truth when the truth was as obvious as three short words: take dead aim.
The man sat down.
“Any questions? I’ve probably used up all of my time,” Harvey said.
Another participant raised his hand. “You and Harvey obviously have such a special relationship,” the man said to Crenshaw. “What do you think made him such a great teacher of golf?”
“I’ll say this,” Crenshaw replied. “I’ve seen a lot of teaching and I’ve read a lot about teaching. He has spent a lifetime learning what, and how, to say to a lot of people. He does not want the game to be complex. There’s so much knowledge in that head there. He’s seen so many shots. But the key thing is his heart.”
Harvey smiled weakly.
The two of them—the teacher and the pupil—shared a few light anecdotes, trying to illuminate in some new way what had happened between them since that day at Austin Country Club when Charlie Crenshaw brought his six-year-old son to meet Harvey and Harvey took the Crenshaw boy outside for his introduction to golf.
“He teaches like an old Scot,” Crenshaw continued, “the Scottish immigrant pro who came over at the turn of the century. They didn’t say very much. They taught the grip, and they taught the stance. They didn’t say many things. But what they said was meaningful.”
Crenshaw glanced at Harvey. “I’ve enjoyed it,” Harvey said.
Sports Illustrated observed Harvey’s birthday that year with a short article in the October 31 issue. Tim Rosaforte, who later became an on-air talent at the Golf Channel, told his readers: “Helen [Penick] realized that a second career, as an author, had given her ailing husband a reason to live.” Many of Harvey’s friends and family members had also noticed that the books had given Harvey purpose and an identity. They gave him a reason to rise in the morning despite his aching back, his failing eyesight, and his muffled hearing. Harvey never wanted to be a celebrity. He never thought it possible. But then he was one, and he was as happy as he had been in a very long time.
“There’s not one person who saw my dad five years ago who thought he’d be around now,” said Tinsley Penick, who remained the head professional at the club. “Every spring I’d say, ‘God, this old man’s seen another spring.’ You think in the winter that he’ll never make it, and he just keeps going.”
Harvey loved being the elderly emerging author of books that people loved and having the opportunity to answer letters and to sign his name on the frontispiece of a handsome book bearing his name. Simply knowing that people from far away found wisdom and joy in the words he had kept to himself for so long delighted him. The popularity of the books validated his decision that morning under the oaks at Austin Country Club.
“I could never have imagined anything like this,” Harvey said. “I was a C student in school. It was hard for me to read a page. But they’ve been sold all over—in every country.”
The books held more curative power than any bottle of medicine on Harvey’s nightstand. But there was only so much he could will himself to do. Harvey lingered through the holidays and into the early weekends of the 1995 season on the PGA Tour, which he viewed as a more hopeful sign of spring than even the first winds from the south and the first blooms of the bluebonnets on the quiet roads in the hills. He tried to concentrate on his new books. He tried to tell himself that people were counting on him. And then he got sick.
Harvey contracted pneumonia in March 1995. He and Shrake continued to work on the next book, but Harvey seemed to accept that he might not live to sign a copy.
Harvey provided Shrake with three shoeboxes of papers and asked him to rummage through the garage to see what else might be there. The two collaborators read letters from older players who’d written to Harvey after they’d read the red and green books.
“Harvey’s purpose in making his final book was to entertain and enlighten seasoned players,” Shrake wrote, “reveal to them his beliefs, and encourage them to continue their romance with the most mysterious, most cerebral, most frustrating and supremely satisfying of all games that can be played by one person alone.” Harvey had to read the letters with a magnifying glass.
He wrote his last note on March 3. That night, a Friday, Harvey’s lungs became so congested that he had difficulty breathing, and an ambulance was summoned to take him to St. David’s Hospital. He spent a week there. Then he went home and spent his final days of relative mobility in his wheelchair, parked on the deck outside, where he read his mail with his magnifying glass and signed books stacked nearby.
Three weeks before he died, Harvey asked to be placed in his bed.
He weighed eighty-four pounds. One morning Shrake walked into his bedroom and found Harvey struggling to write in his notebook. The old teacher shook his head. “I can’t do it anymore,” he told Shrake, who recalled the story in his foreword to the fourth book. Shrake looked at the notebook that morning on Fawn Creek Path to see what Harvey had written. The page was nothing but scribbles and circles and scrawls, like graffiti. “I know what I’m trying to say,” Harvey told Shrake, “but this pen won’t say it.”
Shrake knew his friend and book partner was beginning to die.
Harvey no longer left his bed at all. He barely ate. He often was lucid enough to hear about the latest marketing deal related to the books, the most recent royalty payments from the publisher, or the status of other projects, such as the new Little Red Golf Letter, a monthly newsletter published by Belvoir Publications in Greenwich, Connecticut. He could page through the latest Golfsmith catalog, for instance, and see the new clubs that Tom Wishon, the company’s club designer, had created with Harvey in mind. The cover of the newest catalog included an image of Harvey and the caption “A Lifetime in the Making.”
Inside were nineteen pages of pictures and specifications for the 1995 line of clubs, shafts, grips, and ferrules. There was the Harvey Penick Master Cavity line of irons. The Harvey Penick Classic Player. The Harvey Penick Classic Lady. The Master metal wood and the Classic Player persimmon wood and the Weed Cutter—a nod to his favorite teaching tool—fairway wood. Harvey could only look at these pictures of golf equipment. His deteriorating body no longer permitted him to grip them, to feel their weight in his hands, to give them a good waggle or two. “Harvey is still hanging on,” Shrake wrote on March 27 to his editor in New York. “But the Little Red Light is getting close.”
Crenshaw had tied for forty-second place that month at the Nestlé Invitational. After missing the cut a week later at the Players Championship, he flew home before the Freeport-McMoRan, the tournament he’d won the year before in New Orleans, and took his family—his wife Julie and his daughters Katherine and Claire—to Cisco’s on East Sixth Street, his favorite Tex-Mex restaurant for Sunday brunch. There the Crenshaws met Scotty Sayers, his longtime friend from Austin High School and now his business partner and agent. Sayers came with his own daughters and wife. It was an ordinary gathering of old friends who had known each other since childhood. Nothing suggested the consequences of that Sunday in March.
The Crenshaws left the restaurant to go see Harvey. They stopped to pick up flowers on the way. When they arrived, they found Shrake in the living room with Helen. “You’d better hurry,” Shrake told Crenshaw. Crenshaw walked to the bedroom. Julie and her daughters waited with Helen and Shrake.
“A few minutes later,” Shrake said, “I was surprised to see Harvey roll over on one elbow and hear him loudly and distinctly say, ‘Go get the putter,’ to begin the last lesson with Ben.”
Harvey had Ben fetch a hickory-shafted Gene Sarazen putter from the garage. Harvey asked to see Crenshaw’s stroke. He reminded him to keep his hands ahead of the ball. He also told Crenshaw to keep his faith. “All you need to do is trust,” Harvey said.
Crenshaw kissed Harvey before he left. He flew to New Orleans the next day.
He played with Davis Love III in the first two rounds of the Freeport-McMoRan. Love opened with rounds of 68-69, but Crenshaw shot 73-74 to miss the cut by four. “His game was all over the place,” Love said. The little lesson with Harvey, with the Sarazen putter on the carpet of his bedroom, failed to save Crenshaw on the fast and sloping greens of English Turn Golf & Country Club. “Even his vaunted putting game was ill,” Love wrote. “He was so frustrated with his flat stick that he started putting with an iron on the last three or four holes.” Love assumed Crenshaw was concerned about Harvey back in Austin. “Ben was distracted,” Love concluded.
On Saturday afternoon, as Crenshaw packed for his week in Augusta, Love shot 66 in New Orleans. He needed to win to join Crenshaw at the Masters, a tournament he had played five times since his debut in 1988, once finishing, in 1992, as high as a tie for twenty-fifth.
Harvey spent the last week of his life sleeping fitfully, fighting for breath. But he insisted on signing more books. “He wanted to finish what he needed done,” said his son, Tinsley.
He also wanted to see the first Sunday in April, when the country club had scheduled a midafternoon event to reveal a statue in his and Tom Kite’s honor. His illness weakened him so gravely the night before, however, that his wife wondered if he would live through the night. “I can’t die tonight,” Harvey told Helen. “I want that ceremony tomorrow to be joyous, not mournful.”
It was joyous indeed. More than five hundred people assembled on the lawn at Austin Country Club for the long-planned unveiling of a statue that had stood in shrouded sentry over the golf course since the middle of March. Club member Don Davis, a lawyer and accomplished sculptor, had arranged with one of the club’s golf professionals, Jackson Bradley, to build a bronze casting in honor of Harvey and Kite, who had demurred equally. “Mr. Penick said, ‘No, I don’t deserve to have anything done,’” Davis said that spring. “Tom said, ‘No, I don’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Mr. Penick.’”
Both Harvey and Kite had nonetheless agreed to meet with Davis, who started his project by collecting more than one hundred photographs of his subjects. The artist interviewed Harvey and Kite, took measurements of their dimensions: height, waist, inseam, outseam, the widths of their shoulders, the lengths of their arms, the shape of their hands, the texture and thickness of their hair. He mapped their faces with a caliper. Harvey surely respected the precision that Davis brought to his tribute to the man who had contributed so much to golf in Austin and in Texas.
Davis molded Harvey’s and Kite’s heads at his studio in Aspen, Colorado, and made their bodies in Austin. He cast the sculpture at Deep in the Heart Foundry in Bastrop, out in the lost pines of Central Texas east of the capital. In October, when Davis was satisfied with his progress, he asked Helen Penick to examine his work to ascertain its accuracy and authenticity. “She walked up to it and said, ‘Well, hello honey,’’ Davis said.
Contented, Davis shipped the life-sized, 1,500-pound creation to Davenport Ranch (where the club had moved in 1984) about five weeks before the ceremony. Harvey was very sick and getting no better. Tinsley Penick wanted to take no chances.
One morning when his father felt well enough to leave the house, Tinsley asked a Golfsmith employee to drive his father across Westlake Drive and up to the club, where the young man helped Harvey from the car and guided him down the cart path he knew so well. They passed the familiar pro shop, the copse of oaks under which Harvey once waved to players and wished them good fortune for their rounds and reminded them to take dead aim, swing the bucket, chip under the bench, mind their grip, and rid their thoughts of anything beyond hitting that ball—to give luck a chance. The men stopped between the tenth and first tees.
Tinsley met them there. “Look,” he told his father. “It’s you.” Harvey studied the rendering through failing eyes. Yes, he thought. It is me. In the sculpture, it looked to be about 1970, Harvey reasoned. He was wearing a short-sleeve shirt buttoned to the top, leaning on a middle-iron, and watching Kite, whose figure the artist had positioned in a flowing, balanced attitude of exquisite follow-through. Harvey noticed the face—his own face. He was smiling just a little. His timeless gaze out into the yawning canyons of the golf course seemed to suggest he had just detected a chorus of angels down by the holes on the lake. Davis, the sculptor, described it as “the look of satisfaction on Mr. Penick’s face on seeing a famous golfer’s swing.”
In the precarious days before the ceremony, Harvey hoped to attend the gathering. He even chose the ensemble he wanted to wear. But he was listless, weak, spectral in his bedclothes, unable to rise, and barely strong enough to notice that someone trying to tidy his room had picked up a bundle of flowers in his bedroom. Harvey rose slightly. “You can’t take those,” he rasped. The flowers were important to him. The Crenshaws had brought them to Harvey before they left for New Orleans. The arrangement needed to stay where he could smell it.
In the kitchen, Harvey’s daughter Kathryn fixed her father an egg. He barely nibbled it. He looked at Kathryn and said in his small voice, “I just can’t do it.”
The family decided that Kathryn’s husband Bill would stay with Harvey, and the rest of them prepared for the short drive to Austin Country Club. Harvey remained in his bed, under a purple floral-print comforter, moving very little. “He was hanging on to life, giving us a last lesson about grace and fearlessness,” Kite said. Soon everyone left the house, hoping Harvey would be alert enough to listen to their accounts of the ceremony when they returned. They stepped outside. The sky was crisp. A lazy breeze blew. It was a warm, buoyant, brilliant Sunday in Austin, the second afternoon of April 1995.
Some of those attending the ceremony wore wide-brimmed straw hats in the bright heat of the Central Texas sun. Many in the crowd appeared to have hastened over from church. There were charcoal suits, paisley ties, polka-dot dresses with wide, white collars and broad shoulder pads. The green tarp covering the statue rippled under a cloudless sky.
Club president Fred Davis stood at a wooden dais and said that he had been taking golf lessons from Harvey since March 1975. He added that when asked recently at another golf course about Harvey’s approach, he answered: “He is simple but not simplistic, reserved without being passive, disciplined but not rigid, and confident without being presumptuous.” Davis concluded: “Harvey Penick is effective without affectation.”
Tinsley spoke next. He wore a double-breasted navy blazer and sand khakis, the kind of understated and neutral ensemble his father would have worn. He even looked like his father did when he was fifty-seven: chalk-white hair, narrow at the waist, and tanned from so many afternoons on the practice line at the country club. “Thank you all for coming out to honor my father today,” Tinsley said in his airy voice. He looked up from his notes. “He is with us in spirit.”
What he said next resembled an early but timely eulogy, a summary of and affectionate tribute to his dying father’s ninety years of life, which would end in a matter of hours. Tinsley described how his parents met in the church. He reminded the gathering that Harvey often talked about his eighth birthday, because that was when he was deemed old enough to join his four brothers in the caddie yard at the new country club.
Tinsley mentioned 1923, when Harvey became the head professional, and he mentioned 1971, when his father retired. “He has always described himself as a lucky man who was privileged to be able to work outdoors, doing something he loved, with friends and people who shared his love for the game,” Tinsley said. He added, in case there was any question, “I wish my father’s health would have permitted him to be with us out here today.”
When it was Kite’s turn to speak, he asked everyone to imagine, when passing the statue they were about to see, a different image in the place of his own. He wanted everyone to feel a part of it. “Put your own face right there,” Kite said, referring to his on the statue.
Published accounts from that afternoon suggest that Kite returned to Fawn Creek Path and was with Harvey when he died. Journalists used the touching anecdote in stories about Harvey’s death. The scene has appeared in books and magazines and endured in oral histories; followers of Harvey tell the story because it beautifully and symmetrically closed an important circle established in 1963 when the Kite family moved from Dallas to Austin. But no such encounter happened.
Kite fetched a golf cart after the ceremony to play a round of golf. He had struck his drive on the third hole and was motoring down the cart path when an assistant professional caught up with him and told him Harvey was dead.
The false account that put Kite at Harvey’s house that afternoon included another familiar, but untrue, detail. That day Davis Love III, the son of one of Harvey’s fondly remembered players at Texas in the mid-1950s, had the final-round lead at the tournament in New Orleans, which Love had to win to qualify for the Masters the following week.
In the false account, Kite told Harvey that Love had indeed won. It was supposed to have been the last message Harvey heard before he died.
But in fact he never heard the news.
The events in New Orleans did, however, factor into the sentiment, symmetry, and closing of circles brought to Augusta in the week after Harvey’s death. Love had bogeyed the seventeenth and eighteenth holes at English Turn, forcing a playoff with Mike Heinen. Both made par on the first hole. They processed to the tee of the 190-yard par-3 seventeenth, where Love had made that bogey minutes before. Heinen’s shot landed in the fringe; Love’s 6-iron never wandered from its line. His true birdie putt from three feet meant an invitation to the Augusta National the next week.
“I’ve collapsed a lot this year,” a drained Love said after the playoff. “I feel like I’ve always stayed positive, but something always happens. I hit a bad shot. I just fail to execute. I like to think it was the pressure of trying to win and get into the Masters, and maybe now I can relax. I’ve been thinking too much about the Masters.”
Harvey slipped away before he knew that. His daughter, Kathryn Powell, had appeared from the living room to check on her father. Harvey was fidgeting with his bedsheets, she said, and she tried to straighten them. “I’m so tired,” Harvey whispered.
“Those were his last words,” Kathryn recalled in December 2013, sitting on her sofa in Brady, where she sees her father’s golf-cart placard—TAKE DEAD AIM!—each time she walks through her den. Her father’s rolltop desk was there too, up against a bank of windows. Harvey’s yellowed labels remained on the eighteen small drawers. PETTY CASH RECEIPTS. KEYS. BANK. TAXES. Kathryn had had many opportunities to remove them, but the precisely worded old labels were a warm reminder of her father. She stared outside, at the now-leafless trees of looming winter. She could see Harvey under the purple floral comforter, telling her on that Sunday afternoon in April on Fawn Creek Path that he knew.
“He put his head down,” Kathryn remembered. “Then he just died.”