CHAPTER 12

Golfing with the Golden Bear’s Son and White Fang

GOLF CAME BACK TO ME a little in high school, but mostly, my teenage years centered around team sports—football, basketball, and baseball, which didn’t leave a lot of time for golf. Occasionally, I’d play a round with Dad when we were not in the Keys fishing or diving.

Once I moved to Tallahassee, the country club sports of tennis and golf started to pique my interest. Barry Voltapetti, one of the offensive linemen on the team, loved playing tennis as much as I did, so we would go and turn on the tennis court lights at local apartment buildings on Sunday evenings and play until the wee hours.

Sometimes I’d get invited to play golf, and in turn playing golf became a passion during my first summer at FSU.

The school golf course “Seminole” sat close to The Reservation, a lake that students frequented to go swimming, boating, or canoeing. In addition to being a great man, our athletic trainer, Don “Doc” Fauls, was an avid golfer. Once in a while, I would join him and his assistant trainer, Randy Oravetz, out at Seminole. Doc loved golf, loved to talk about the swing, and he was always willing to offer tips to enhance performance.

Doc remained open to helping rehab athletes from all sports, even professionals. Mark Lye, who played on the PGA Tour back then, would come to Tallahassee to get treatment from Doc. I wound up playing with Mark on several occasions and marveled at the consistency of the ball contact he made and the seemingly effortless swing. Mark’s putting was impressive, too. He putted cross-handed, a style that I’d never before seen. Few professionals putted cross-handed back then, though a lot of professionals use the cross-handed approach today. I guess the success I saw Mark have while putting cross-handed made an impression on me, because I’ve been putting cross-handed ever since. What stood out most from watching Mark play was how he could recover from bad shots. It seemed like no trouble could prevent him from making par. He could get up and down from a water fountain. Playing with him taught me just how good professional golfers were. Mark could seemingly do anything he wanted to do on the golf course, yet he finished with just one career win on the PGA Tour—the Bank of Boston Classic on September 11, 1983.

Eventually, I had the opportunity to play whenever I wanted to at the FSU course. I started to get the itch the more I played and the better I got.

The first time I played a round with Steve Nicklaus was at the FSU course. Unsurprisingly, Steve played like you would have thought the son of Jack Nicklaus would play. He could shoot 74 or 75 without ever breaking a sweat. The things he could do with a golf ball weren’t things guys my age could do. He could draw a ball, do whatever he wanted with it. And the way he made contact, you could tell he was different. He could crush a golf ball. It was scary.

I recall thinking, Geez, if I could ever play golf like that, I’d never step onto a football field. But you had to understand Steve’s confident personality. He came off as, “I don’t need golf. That’s easy.” Having his own unique identity seemed to be his cause, which perhaps was why he played football. God knows what he could have done if he’d played on the PGA Tour, because he was probably one of the better athletes in their family. He stood six-foot-two. He wasn’t six-four like his brother Jackie, but he wasn’t small like brother Gary, who stood five-ten. Gary went on to play golf at Ohio State like his father, before he turned professional in 1991.

I’d bet if Steve had to do it all over again, he would have played golf and tried to make that his profession.

To Steve’s credit, when you played with him, he wasn’t out there just screwing around. It’s been my experience playing with talented golfers like Steve that often they act indifferent about what they shoot. Not Steve. He maintained a competitive nature, though he wasn’t some hotheaded golf brat, either. You’d never see him throw or break his clubs. Steve just wanted to whip your ass on the golf course, just as the rest of us do.

We’d play as much as our schedule would allow.

Whether I played with Steve or others, golf started to become a big part of my life. I began playing more with Dad on vacations and breaks from school.

When I accidently threw and broke my Ping putter, Steve took care of me. That’s what roommates do.

“Here, use this one,” he told me, handing over a Bull’s Eye putter that looked beat up and had white paint flaking off it. Anybody who has ever played golf understands how old clubs wind up in the garage. In that respect, I could only imagine how many old clubs the Nicklaus family had floating around in their garage. Based on that fact, I didn’t feel particularly beholden to Steve’s offering, nor did I attach any real significance to that moment—at least not initially.

I never felt comfortable with that putter the few times I played with it, and I quickly stopped using it. Technology upgrades during that time made the ball come off the putter cleaner and with less shock to the hands. To me, the football player, that Bull’s Eye felt like a butter knife on the end of a stick. Plus, that Bull’s Eye looked like an old putter, so that wasn’t cool! I had no idea that the putter was close to twenty years old. Nor did I know that flat stick had a glorious past, a future to be determined, and a famous name: White Fang!