AT THE RYDER CUP matches that late summer at Oak Hill in Rochester, New York, the PGA of America organized an evening banquet in Harvey’s name. Many of the game’s top teachers were on the invitation list. Tinsley prepared twelve pages of remarks, editing them by hand up to the moment it was his turn to speak. They spanned his father’s career, from his early days at the original country club to his years as the University of Texas coach to his final lesson with the old putter and Crenshaw two weeks before the Masters.
“My dad always said that the day he stopped learning would be the day he stopped teaching,” Tinsley told the gathering. “He must have been learning right up to the day he died, because he never stopped teaching. You may have heard the story about Ben Crenshaw visiting my father in his bedroom a few days before Ben was to leave for Augusta this year. Ben told my father he was having a little trouble with putting.
“My dad asked Ben, ‘Have you been taking a couple of practice strokes before each putt, and imagining the ball going into the hole?’
“Ben said, ‘You know, I don’t think I have been.’
“My father said, ‘Go get a putter and let me watch you take a few strokes on the carpet.’
“A little over a week later,” Tinsley continued, “Ben won the Masters. So if the question is, ‘Would Harvey Penick’s methods work today?’ I guess the answer is, ‘Yes, they do.’”
The Texas Sports Hall of Fame in Waco dedicated a room in Harvey’s name on December 1, and the Penick family donated the original Scribbletex notebook to the hall. There the Harvey Penick Tribute Room joined exhibition spaces for former Baylor football coach Grant Teaff, former Texas coach Darrell Royal, and heavyweight boxer George Foreman. The ceremony on that December day included a golf outing at Ridgewood Country Club.
“He gave to all of us,” Kathy Whitworth, who attended the ceremony, told the gathering. “He always made everyone feel special.”
Harvey’s name endured, and his academy at Golfsmith continued to flourish. At the end of 1995, Charles McGrath of the New York Times wrote a four-paragraph appreciation of Harvey, describing the hole he had left in golf. He noted the Calvinist nature of the Little Red Book: it taught that “golf is character, and the quality of your shots depends on the quality of your soul. That this was so in Penick’s case is abundantly clear.” McGrath suggested that Harvey “approached golf as a branch of the liberal arts.”
About a year after Harvey died, Terry Jastrow found himself thinking again about 1965 and ’66, the summers he had left Midland to be in Austin, picking up range balls for Harvey with canvas tubes. Now, three decades later, Jastrow still played golf often and was a member at tony Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles. He even had a single-digit handicap, but he had never attempted the PGA Tour, as Harvey had once thought he might. Instead, Jastrow embarked on what would be a very successful career in television, including eighteen years with ABC Sports. He had supervised coverage of the ’92 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, struggling to coordinate a dozen broadcasters and pick footage from forty television monitors as his old friend from those summers at the country club marched through the Pacific wind on that Sunday afternoon. Jastrow cried for thirty minutes after Tom Kite won.
He now was the Emmy-winning president of Jack Nicklaus Productions, a company in Santa Monica involved in televising golf. Jastrow had both the means and the desire to create something in his teacher’s memory. He also thought he had the perfect idea: a Senior PGA Tour tournament in Austin. “I wanted to celebrate Harvey,” Jastrow said.
He asked Kite and Crenshaw for their endorsement, which they gave. He contacted the PGA Tour, where he had many acquaintances, including the commissioner, Tim Finchem. Jastrow sought the blessing of Harvey’s family.
On September 7, Tinsley wrote to Jastrow to express his “unqualified support” for the creation of a tournament in his father’s name and suggested a venue: the Onion Creek Club, where Jimmie Connolly and Jimmy Demaret had invited their friends from the old days of the PGA Tour to gather in 1978 for the original Legends of Golf.
Jastrow discussed the possibility with Finchem, who liked the idea of returning the senior tour to its rightful home in Austin. The tournament schedule was already in place, however, and new tournaments were being planned for the future. There was simply no room for another one.
But Jastrow had another idea. On October 22, 1996, he wrote to Tinsley and Helen Penick about the possibility of having a women’s tournament in Harvey’s name: “As you both so well know, Harvey taught even more great women players than men. Given the tremendous growth of women’s athletics in general and especially their new appetite for the sport of golf, the timing for such an event could be excellent as we make our way towards the 21st Century.” Jastrow sent copies of the letter to Kite, Crenshaw, and Texas governor George W. Bush, and he also contacted LPGA commissioner Jim Ritts.
“It was only fitting,” Jastrow remembered. “It was the confluence of a lot of great things.”
Ritts and other officials at the LPGA liked the idea immediately. They appreciated Harvey’s imprint on women’s golf in the early years of the association, but they also recognized that his influence spanned generations. The LPGA even had a current player in Austin, Cindy Figg-Currier, who had sought Harvey as a teacher when she joined the University of Texas women’s team in 1978. Figg-Currier was the reigning Michigan state girls’ high school champion when she enrolled at Texas that fall. She knew nothing about Austin, and she knew no one there, not even Harvey.
But her head coach at Texas, Pat Weis, lived two houses away from Harvey and Helen behind the country club on Penick Circle. Harvey often asked Weis if he could help any of her players, and while she knew he would accept all of them if she asked, she politely limited her recommendations. In this case, she knew Figg-Currier needed a friend in Austin.
The relationship lasted until his death. “He was always kind,” Figg-Currier said. “It didn’t matter to him whether you were Tom Kite, the ladies’ club champion or a ten-year-old. Harvey was the closest thing to God that I can imagine.”
The LPGA announced the new tournament in the fall of 1998. The Philips Invitational Honoring Harvey Penick was planned for the following May at the Onion Creek Club. The press conference included Ritts, Jastrow, and Tinsley and Helen Penick. “We will have no trouble getting top players,” Ritts said. “This tournament will become one of the most important on the LPGA Tour from day one.” The winner, Ritts added, would receive a Texas cowboy hat, a small brass bust of Harvey, and a dozen yellow roses. Ritts then presented Helen with a bouquet.
“Harvey would be so pleased about this,” she said, “because he always did like the women.”
A field of 144 players assembled the following spring of 1999 for the first tournament in Harvey’s name, marking the first time since 1962, when Sandra Haynie beat Mickey Wright in the Civitan Open, that the LPGA had visited Austin. The participants included Juli Inkster, Meg Mallon, Laura Davis, and Michelle McGann, but organizers privately were disappointed. The top players in the LPGA—women such as Annika Sörenstam, Se-ri Pak, Karrie Webb, and Nancy Lopez—declined to enter, citing its proximity to the U.S. Women’s Open, which was two weeks away.
Akiko Fukushima won that week. The tournament seemed to gain broader traction in 2000, when twenty-seven of the top thirty players on the LPGA money list traveled to Austin. Forty thousand spectators watched Laura Davies, the brash and long-driving Englishwoman, win with a 5-under 275. But the cheers were brief. The title sponsor, Philips Electronics, ended its support after two years.
California model Kathy Ireland sponsored the 2001 tournament, which continued to carry Harvey’s name. Rosie Jones won in a thrilling, one-hole playoff over young Korean player Mi-Hyun Kim. Those cheers were even briefer. The tournament was left with no sponsor to finance the $1.3 million cost of staging the event.
Ritts was wrong. The tournament never became important, at least not to anyone with the financial means to support it. The invitational honoring Harvey lasted three years. There were no more yellow roses to give.
The fifth and final book was published in 1997. The original title of the anthology, A Harvey Penick Reader, later was changed to The Wisdom of Harvey Penick. Shrake selected 199 stories from the other four titles, including “Take Dead Aim” from the red, “Tommy Wins the Open” from the green, “Helen” from the white, and, fittingly, “Home” from the blue.
The epilogue was Tinsley Penick’s address before the 1995 Ryder Cup matches at Oak Hill.
The PGA of America rewarded Crenshaw with the captaincy of the 1999 Ryder Cup team. The appointment thrilled Crenshaw, particularly because the matches would be played at The Country Club in Brookline, the course that had so broadened his perspective when he played the U.S. Junior there in 1968. His U.S. team that year fell four points behind Europe after the first two days of play. No team from either side had ever overcome a four-point deficit in Sunday singles play.
Crenshaw invited Governor George W. Bush to the team hotel on Saturday night. Bush recited William Barrett Travis’s letter from the besieged Alamo in 1836. “I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due his honor,” Bush read. Crenshaw then asked each player on his team, a squad that included Harvey’s friend Davis Love III, and their wives and girlfriends to speak.
Robin Love was last.
She conjured the spirit of Harvey. What would he say if he were here? she asked.
“Take dead aim.”
The U.S. team won the next day.
It was nearly dark after the closing ceremony at The Country Club on that historic Sunday in New England. Scotty Sayers, Crenshaw’s childhood friend and business manager, was walking near the practice range when he saw Helen Penick.
“You’ve got to come say hello to Ben,” he told her.
He escorted Helen into the clubhouse.
“Ben, look who I found,” Sayers said.
Crenshaw was delirious with joy and sticky with champagne. The two held a long embrace.
In 2002, Harvey was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame.
Tinsley Penick received a letter in May from Jack Peter, the chief operating officer of the hall, notifying him that his father had “joined a very special group of individuals whose accomplishments and contributions to the game of golf will forever be remembered and respected.”
The inductees that year included Tommy Bolt, Tony Jacklin, Bernhard Langer, Marlene Hagge, and, coincidentally, Ben Crenshaw. More than one thousand people attended the outdoor induction ceremony—televised nationally on the Golf Channel—that balmy November evening in St. Augustine, Florida, under a three-quarter moon. Harvey’s was the fifth class enshrined since 1998, when the World Golf Village opened. He joined ninety-five other members, including his old friend and putting mentor Horton Smith; his inspirations in Francis Ouimet and Bobby Jones; his former pupils in Betty Jameson, Betsy Rawls, Kathy Whitworth, and Mickey Wright; and his contemporaries in Demaret and Hagen and Hogan. He was among friends.
M. G. Orender, the president of the PGA of America, presented Harvey’s candidacy that night to his son Tinsley. “He was America’s gift to golf,” Orender said. But Crenshaw wanted to say more. In his speech, emotional and halting, Crenshaw evoked Harvey at every one of his own rites of passage. He described their introduction, when Harvey placed Crenshaw’s young fingers on the cut-down mashie and said, “Now, just leave your hands there.” Although he played for a different coach in college, Crenshaw said, “Harvey was watching us, always.” He cited the 1995 Masters, when he played with what he called the abandon of a child. “We buried our friend and, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know what happened.” He scanned the crowd for the women who learned under Harvey. He gave them a knowing nod. “When you hear pupils talk about him, it’s love,” Crenshaw said. He read “Home,” the essay from the third book, the one he recited the week after the ’95 Masters. And then he looked at Tinsley.
“We’re lucky we had you in our lives.”
The First Tee of Greater Austin named its new facility for Harvey in the summer of 2003. The property in East Austin opened with a public nine-hole course and, fittingly, a succulent short-game practice area for players of all ages and ranges of talent. The ceremony on a warm July morning included tributes from Tinsley Penick, Cindy Figg-Currier, and LPGA Hall of Fame member Carol Mann.
“I believe there will be a beam of light that shines down on this place,” Mann said.
Helen Penick died five days after Christmas in 2006, at the age of 101. She was buried next to Harvey.
Edwin “Bud” Shrake died from cancer in the spring of 2009. He was seventy-seven. The service included music from Ray Benson and Willie Nelson; Jerry Jeff Walker played at the gravesite at the Texas State Cemetery and could barely get through the music without sobbing. Shrake was buried beside Ann Richards.
Shrake had spent the last good years of his life contented, in comfortable wealth, and with sustained sobriety. He sometimes opened the files and boxes he kept in his cabin in the woods, the repositories of his life in letters and film, to take stock of his contributions.
When he explored the boxes devoted to Harvey and their books, he might have seen the eulogy he delivered at Harvey’s funeral in 1995: “What is it about Harvey that the world fell in love with? I think it was his spirit. He was always wisely powerful, always positive. Harvey spoke in simple words, and if you listened, sooner or later you understood.”
Shrake might have read the rest of the eulogy. He might even have seen these words:
Harvey Penick, who was known and loved all over the world, never really left home. Except for a few tournaments and teaching seminars, Harvey stayed at home in Austin, at his beloved Austin Country Club.
The world came to Harvey.