ON A STICKY Texas morning in the late summer of 2013, the only son of Harvey Morrison Penick settled into a heavy wooden chair and prepared to trace the arc of time. He sat less than two miles from where his father once had an epiphany, then thought to buy a cheap notebook, fetch a ballpoint pen, and sit down to write.
Tinsley Penick unraveled a button-and-clasp archival box that September morning with long, curved fingers. They were the fingers of a golfer, just like those of his dad, and those of the many champions who absorbed their swingcraft from Harvey’s short, infrequent, yet potent words. At seventy-five, Tinsley resembled his late father in sharp silhouette: tall, lean, brittle, abrupt joints, a frame bent at the hips in a posture of modest supplication. But he most evoked Harvey in the length of his face, which carried the same narrow nose and crisp, gentle, topaz eyes that had seemed to parse the movement of a golf swing at the level of an atom.
“Let me get my glasses,” Tinsley said.
There was no sound but his airy voice that morning in the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, a gallery space and research facility on the fifth floor of Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin. The box he prepared to open held the notebook that his father maintained for more than half of the twentieth century. No one knows precisely when Harvey began recording his notes, but it was certainly sometime in the early 1930s, more than a decade after he became, at the age of eighteen, the first Texas-born golf professional. No one knows when he wrote his last note either.
Yet millions of people around the world now know the essence of those words left in dainty strokes of ink. They are some of the most famous observations about golf in the history of the ancient game. They’re the ideas that became Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book and four subsequent titles—not counting a twentieth-anniversary edition of the original published the year Tinsley met with me on the campus of the University of Texas to page through the 6,365 words in the Scribbletex notebook together for the first time.
This project began, in a circular way, on Christmas Day 1992. I wasn’t much of a golfer then. But I did hope to become one, and that connected me to Harvey and his book.
My maternal grandmother, a kindly hairdresser named Lola Martin who played golf to an excessive handicap but found high joy in the random and wicked vagaries of the game, left the Little Red Book for me in bright wrapping paper under her hand-cut Christmas tree in Raytown, a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. It’s been with me through my many moves from city to city, from shelf to shelf, and finally to Texas.
Texas is where I did become the player I hoped to be. It’s where I met Tom Kite and Ben Crenshaw and Tinsley Penick and the hundreds of other golfers who populate the sprawling tree of influence that Harvey left when he died quietly in his home as the sun set one April evening in 1995. I wish my grandmother could see me now, writing the early words of the first biography of Harvey. The last time I saw her, she was in a nursing home, where she had been for a long time, rendered infirm by a series of strokes. When she became so frail that my mother summoned the family home to Missouri, the grandchildren took turns sitting at her bedside overnight so our grandmother would not be alone. It was my night to sit when she died, with my hand resting on her arm.
“From Grandma Martin,” she had written inside the cover of my Little Red Book. The book became my bellwether, not only because my grandmother had given it to me, but because, to me and millions like me, it felt like a sacred text, close to holy for anyone who wants to play in the fewest swings and divine the richest pleasures of the game. I’ve read those 175 pages so often that the spine of the book has begun to disintegrate, and now it’s as delicate as an old rubber band. I can tell which of the seventy-nine tiny chapters—call them lessons if you wish—resonated most with me in 1992. I marked them with an X in red ink on the table of contents. The most important ones got two.
“All of these things in here I’ve heard many, many times,” Tinsley said as he followed his father’s words with his fingernail. We were halfway through the notebook, and I’d been watching for about an hour as Tinsley traced the blue-lined pages. Years after Harvey’s death, the Penick family donated to the Stark Center the many cardboard boxes of newspaper clippings, interview transcripts, magazine stories, photographs, relics, books, albums, audio recordings, and videotapes they had collected about Harvey. The family had curated the life of a man who rarely left the tight radius enveloping the home where he was born, the four other houses he owned, the three Austin Country Club locations where he taught, and the plot where he is buried under a wide Texas live oak, marked by a modest stone where people leave golf balls for the caretakers to collect. But the boxes in the Stark Center validate a monumental existence: Harvey’s reach in golf crossed continents and generations, and it is hard to imagine the birth of golf in the American Southwest taking place without him.
Tinsley and I talked some, but mostly we just read together in silence, as people do with priceless texts in museums. We paused at a page near the back, where Harvey had noted in the light lead of a pencil an observation that his pupil Kathy Whitworth, who won a record eighty-eight times on the LPGA Tour, had once shared with the Dallas Morning News.
“Harvey was to me what Merlin was to King Arthur,” the shaky cursive read.
This is a story about a Merlin and his vast court of King Arthurs.
Tinsley introduced himself to me at the door of his house in early 2005. He had invited me to his house in the hills of northwest Austin, where he lived in retirement with his cheerful wife, Betty Ann, to tell me about Harvey. We sat in the bright sunlight of their living room and talked for a story I was preparing to mark the tenth anniversary of his father’s death, which was a solemn occasion in Austin, the city that still loved him and always will.
I told Tinsley about my grandmother. I told him about the marks in my Little Red Book. I revealed to him that I thought his father meant as much to modern golf as carbon means to the universe, because I’d already written this line, even before the first interview: “In death, Penick lives.”
My editors at the Austin American-Statesman evidently agreed with that rather sweeping assertion. The line ran above the fold on April 5, 2005, on the front page.
We didn’t know it at the time, but Tinsley and I were having the earliest conversations for this biography, the first comprehensive treatment of Harvey’s life beyond the anecdotes that he and Bud Shrake sprinkled like cane sugar inside the four books they wrote together.
Harvey lived for ninety years. He was born when only two golf courses existed in Texas. It was an era of hickory shafts, sand greens, and plucky little caddies like Harvey, who fell under the spell of golf as an eight-year-old boy carrying a handful of clubs for a quarter at a ragged little country club with a tree that provided members with a good place to tether their mounts. By the time of his death, a week before a graceful Masters Tournament whose outcome will forever defy reason and logic, Harvey had seen hickory evolve into steel and graphite. Over the course of almost eighty years, he had witnessed a parade of great American players, from Francis Ouimet and his stunning victory at the 1913 U.S. Open to Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen, from Jack Nicklaus to Tiger Woods, from Betsy Rawls to Mickey Wright and Kathy Whitworth, from Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan to Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite. Many of them had been his pupils. That made them his friends.
He chose a quiet, uncomplicated, and uncluttered existence, even when he was a famous and wealthy author whose name readers saw in the New York Times. “It didn’t take much for him to be happy,” Crenshaw told me in the spring of 2014. “He had a wonderful job that he loved. He had a lot of fulfillment, helping people.” Harvey spent most of his life in close proximity to a creaking two-story house on Cedar Street in central Austin, near the northern edge of the University of Texas campus, where his parents raised him and his four brothers. Three Penick boys caddied at Austin Country Club. Harvey was the youngest. The other two left the club, but Harvey never did. Even after he retired as the club’s head professional in 1971, he remained for more than twenty years as the starter at the first tee and the most respected instructor in Texas. He never left teaching. “Harvey knows as much about the basics of golf as any man in the world,” the great Byron Nelson once remarked. Harvey never stopped learning. He never quit watching with those topaz Penick eyes. When people wonder where Harvey learned his covenants of golf, the answer is clear. He saw them.
Harvey lived a singular and, some would say, one-dimensional life. He took his family on one vacation, to the Texas coast in 1946. There is one picture of that occasion. Everything else he did, he did in the service of golf. He spent almost every day of the week at the country club, first as a caddie, then as a shop assistant, then as a head professional, then as a starter—for seventy years a teacher, for his entire life a disciple.
Harvey followed the paths of his Scottish forebears, men who rose from the caddie yard to become the earliest golf professionals in America. He was, in the exquisite words of the incomparable Herbert Warren Wind, a “fine example of the old American pro, the homebred who had spent all of his life in the game, gathering knowledge as a stone gathers lichen.” In the early 1900s, Americans such as Harvey came to the golf profession by learning to shave hickory shafts, file the beveled edges of irons at a workbench, and bind the whipping around crude ferrules where the heads and shafts met, by watching a lot of golf, both good and bad, and by playing it. No one that far back went to school to study golf. No one took tests or studied merchandising or agronomy or business. Instead, they went outside to practice and teach and think. The education of a golf professional in those years came from watching and doing.
And writing. Harvey wrote down many notes about the game. He jotted them on pieces of paper that he stored in his desk, and when the volume reached a level of impending chaos, he drove to the store and purchased a bound Scribbletex notebook, 9⅛ inches tall by 5¾ inches wide, manufactured in Texas by Southwest Tablet of Dallas, with fifty sheets, ruled on both sides in blue. It was the kind of notebook a student might buy for English class. The cover was red.
Harvey tabbed his pages under sections: swing, lie, turn, and the like. He wrote in blue, black, and green ink, and sometimes with a number 2 pencil. He did not write down ideas. He did not write down theories. What he did write down were truths. Harvey filled his Scribbletex with cold, unadorned proof: drills and images and aphorisms that he believed because he had seen them work, time and time again. They were neither fanciful nor complex. They were the earliest whispers of what would become the most popular and best-selling sports book of all time.
When he finished an entry, Harvey would store the notebook in his heavy wooden rolltop desk, in view of no one but his son, and not then until many years after he’d begun writing in it. It was his personal effect, and it might have remained no more than that but for a windy day in 1991 when Harvey—eighty-seven years old, frail, diminished, exhausted, and acutely aware of his own mortality—listened to his conscience.
“One morning last spring I was sitting in my golf cart under the trees on the grass near the veranda at Austin Country Club,” Harvey wrote in the opening chapter of the Little Red Book, published in 1992.
I was with my nurse, Penny, a patient young woman who drives us in my golf cart a few blocks from home on days when I feel well enough for the journey. I don’t stay more than an hour or two on each visit, and I don’t go more than three or four times a week because I don’t want the members to think of me as a ghost that refuses to go away. I don’t want to cut into the teaching time of any of our fine club professionals, either. I can see Jackson Bradley out teaching on the practice line, and there are moments when I might want to make suggestions, but I don’t do it. However, I can’t refuse to help when my old friend Tommy Kite, the leading money winner in the history of the game, walks over to my cart and asks if I will watch him putt for a while. Tommy asks almost shyly, as if afraid I might not feel strong enough. His request makes my heart leap with joy.
Harvey reflected a great deal as an older man. He had the time for contemplation now that he was no longer required to sustain the schedule he once kept.
I spend nights staring at the ceiling, thinking of what I have seen Tommy [Kite] doing in tournaments on television, and praying that he will come see me. If Tommy wants, I will break my rule that I never visit the club on weekends, and will have Penny drive me to the putting green to meet with Tommy on Saturday and Sunday morning, as well as on Thursday and Friday. I know it exasperates Penny that I would rather watch Tommy putt than eat the lunch she has to force on me.
Bud Shrake, a novelist, screenwriter, and former Sports Illustrated reporter who lived in the hills near Austin Country Club, was sitting with Harvey in a golf cart one spring afternoon in ’91. A shiny Texas grackle hopped through the branches above. Squirrels skittered through the Saint Augustine grass. Harvey wondered: Had he been selfish? Was it wrong to hoard this knowledge of his? Had he been granted these eighty-seven years of life, more than seventy-eight of them in the company of golf, so that he would pass along what he had learned?
Yes, he decided. Yes, he had.
“I want to show you something that nobody except Tinsley has ever read,” Harvey told Shrake. He handed him the Scribbletex. “Would you get it into shape to be published?”
The two of them met every Saturday morning for months. Shrake recorded their visits on cassette tapes, audio archives that capture the voice and spirit of a man who spoke about golf and life in the same sentence. Their interactions were brief. Harvey was getting weaker. But he was committed to the Little Red Book. Writing it and the other books gave him reason to live. He survived until his friends came to tell him, on the Sunday afternoon before the 1995 Masters, about a bronze statue of Harvey and Kite unveiled that afternoon near the veranda at his club. He died knowing they thought it was perfect.
Harvey was buried in an old cemetery in Austin, just blocks from the original Austin Country Club, where his life’s work had begun in 1912. On the morning of his funeral, passersby on Loop 360 could glance to the east of Pennybacker Bridge, which spanned Lake Austin, and notice that the flags at the club hung at half-stick.
Ten years later, Shrake and I talked about that day for the story I was preparing for the Austin American-Statesman. He said, “More than anyone I have ever known, Harvey lived his life by the Golden Rule. That quality may be at the bottom of what has attracted the world to him.”
The books Shrake wrote with Harvey hint at that life. They reflect on the players who learned under Harvey: Kite and Crenshaw; Whitworth and Rawls and Betsy Cullen; Davis Love Jr., who played for Harvey at the University of Texas, and his son Davis Love III; Wright and the Sandras, Palmer and Haynie; amateurs Ed White, who won an NCAA Championship under Harvey at Texas, and the incomparable but doomed Morris Williams Jr., who nearly won a national championship himself and surely would have captured many professional titles had he lived long enough.
Harvey’s books endure as meditative and personal testimonies about encounters with greatness, about the rise of golf in Texas before Texas became the important golf state it is now, about what changes and what remains the same, and about the meaning of friendship. The books sketch a life richly lived, but their scraps of anecdote leave spaces in that life. This book is an attempt to fill in those spaces.
I remember my last visit in 2005 with Shrake, who was trying to explain to me the undertaking he embraced that morning when Harvey summoned him to his cart under the trees.
“It was like a sacred obligation,” Shrake said.
So this is for me.
KEVIN ROBBINS