Collier promised to let me know what the medical examiner had to say about the cause of Benton Bergmeister’s death. So I headed for the tournament pressroom, where about ten fellow members of the Fourth Estate had gathered to report on the first round of the tournament, just getting underway.
I could see where Honie had her work cut out for her. On a typical first-round day on the PGA Tour, there would be at least thirty reporters, writers and photographers hanging around, looking for stories. By the weekend, that number would triple, depending on the size of the city. Now, Miami is a pretty big media market, but only ten sportswriters had stirred themselves to attend the big doings of the LPGA visit to their town. Actually, only eight. The two guys I knew in the pressroom were Barley Raney from the AP and Penny Schoenfeld, a stringer for Golf World magazine.
Barley is an old and happy drunk. Short and heavy-set, his face is a riot of capillary explosions, as though someone had taken his face and shoved it against a plate-glass window a hundred times in a row. His heyday as a golf writer had been back in the Sixties: He had covered the ascension of “King Jack” and the Fall of the House of Palmer. Now, although well past retirement age, Barley was still hanging on. He had no doubt volunteered to cover the LPGA for AP, which allowed him to continue to follow the sun around the country, pounding out his thirty graphs a week, plus notes. Whether or not any of the AP’s subscribers actually used his stuff was beside the point – he was doing the only thing in life he knew how to do.
Penny covered maybe a dozen women’s events for the magazine. I think she was married to someone rich and worked not so much for the money, which was bad, but for the chance to get out of the house on occasion. She wasn’t a bad writer, but she rarely, if ever, left the air-conditioned comfort of the press room. I remember watching her play golf once, down in Myrtle Beach, and I don’t ever want to see that again.
The rest of the “crowd” were the locals—some TV and some print. They sat around waiting for something to happen, and on the first day of a tournament, that can be a long wait. Out on the course, the early tee times featured the Tour’s younger and not-yet-famous players. Later tee times were heavily seeded with the tour’s better players, since the fans usually don’t come out in any numbers until after lunch.
Sitting in the front of the press room, a telephone glued to her ear, was an attractive woman, mid-forties, wearing a nice blue dress with a fashionable scarf affixed jauntily on one shoulder, a string of pearls and some dangly earrings. I guessed her to be Karla, Honie’s boss, fresh in from Texas.
“Say!” I yelled loudly toward the front of the room and at no one in particular. “Are you going to have a press conference or just release an official statement about Benton Bergmeister?”
I watched as the lady in the blue dress looked up in surprise, murmured something into her telephone and hung up.
One of the TV guys – he wore a very nice tan – looked over at me.
“Who’s this Bergmisher?”
“Bergmeister,” I corrected him. “He’s the commissioner of the LPGA Tour. Or was, I guess, since he just croaked. The cops are crawling all over his room upstairs right now.”
“No shit?” the TV guy yelled. Nothing like breaking news to crease the follicles of the blow-dried set. He leaped to the nearest phone and began to frantically dial. The other reporters woke up en masse and began firing questions at Karla. I just smiled. Hacker kicks over beehive and watches chaos ensue. It’s a role I am most justly famous for, if I do say so myself.
“Hold on, hold on,” Karla in blue was saying, trying to get control of the situation. “I’m not hiding anything. I was about to make an announcement, but I was just waiting for the go-ahead from the police first.”
“Bullcrap, lady,” Barley yelled at her in his ear-piercing basso profundo. “You was holdin’ out on us. Now give!”
Karla sighed. “All I can tell you is that Benton Bergmeister, the commissioner of the LPGA Tour, was found dead in his room this morning. The police are investigating and the Dade County Medical Examiner will be releasing information later today concerning the cause of death.”
“Was there foul play involved?” Penny Schoenfeld asked.
Karla blanched and shook her head. “No, Penny, we don’t have any indication of that at this time. But that’s why I wanted to wait until …”
“Do you think that the fact that Benton Bergmeister was about to announce his resignation as commissioner had any bearing on his death?” I shouted out. Giving the beehive yet another well-placed kick.
Karla rocked back as if someone had just slapped her. But, being the true public relations professional, she quickly recovered her composure. “I don’t know where you got that information,” she said coldly, “But I suggest you double-check it. Sounds like a rumor to me.”
Slick, I thought. She dodged the question without answering it straight out. Trouble was, ole Barley Raney had spent a lifetime working around slick PR types, and he, too, noted the evasion.
“C’mon, lady,” he growled, “It’s getting hip-deep in here. Was Bergy ‘in’ or ‘out?’ Guy was always fun to drink with,” he added in a typical Barley nonsequitur.
Karla paused a moment before she answered this time. Another good PR move – make sure you can control the answers. “Benton Bergmeister was scheduled to retire in two years,” she said carefully, throwing me a glare. “That’s when he would have reached the mandatory retirement age set by the LPGA’s policy board. There had been some discussions between the board and Benton concerning early retirement, but as far as I know, no final decisions had been reached.”
Barley looked over at me and threw me a wink. “He was out,” he growled, and reached for his phone.
“Now, hold on,” Karla said, looking worried all of a sudden. “I have to insist that you act responsibly in this matter and not resort to printing half-truths or rumors without verification. I would hope that as professional journalists, you would await the facts in this matter and not …”
“Professional journalists, my ass,” boomed a voice from the back of the room. “They ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of stiffs and rewrite men, the lot of ‘em!”
We all turned to see Big Wyn Stilwell making her way up to the interview stage at the front of the room. She was dressed in her golf outfit, a loud, pink-check thing.
“Hey Wyn,” Barley boomed at her. “You got something about ole Benton?”
“Well, yes, Barley, as a matter of fact, I do,” she said, settling into a chair and picking up the microphone as if she was to the stage born. Karla, the PR lady, showed immense relief at having a higher authority take command of the damage control. When the boss is present and talking, there’s no longer any need to cover one’s own ass, so Karla stepped back into the shadows and let Big Wyn take over.
“I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with Benton for the last five years,” Wyn started. Her face had become serious and earnest. “I was shocked to hear this morning of his passing, and I know all the players share my sense of dismay and grief. Benton Bergmeister did great work for the LPGA, and his time and talents will be sorely missed by us all.”
It was a perfect speech, hitting all the right notes. It was both bravura and bull. The press lemmings were writing down every word she said. It was time for another kick to the beehive.
“Is it true that Benton had discussed his resignation with you two days ago?” I asked.
Big Wyn glanced in my direction. She smiled, but her eyes were cold and hard.
“Absolutely not,” she said grimly.
“Was he troubled by the state of management of the Tour, specifically the high degree of day-to-day control over the business affairs of the Tour by the Player’s Council?” I pressed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Barley snap to attention. I’m sure he had never heard a question like that tossed at Big Wyn Stilwell.
A couple of dangerous-looking red spots appeared high on Big Wyn’s cheekbones. But, to her credit, she kept her anger bottled up.
“Benton had never said anything of that kind directly to me,” Wynnona said slowly. “I guess you’ll have to ask the other members of the council if he expressed concerns to them.”
“So to your knowledge,” I asked, “Bergmeister was not upset about his job and his continued usefulness and was not on the verge of walking out?”
“No,” Big Wyn answered. But her eyes narrowed as she suddenly understood what I was doing. I knew she would deny all hints of trouble in the hen house. But by asking them in public, I was putting a bug in the ears of my fellow reporters. Benton Bergmeister’s death was a news event, for sure, but not an especially significant one. But, on the other hand, if there was some internal squabbling going on about the Tour’s management, well, that was a pretty good story. And it put Big Wyn right in the headlights.
She knew this, instinctively, and knew she had to do something about it. Quick.
“Benton’s health had not been the best in the last few months,” she said now. “He and I had talked some weeks ago about the possibility of his taking early retirement if he didn’t start to feel better. I told Benton that of course we needed his services, but that his first responsibility was to himself, his family and his health, and that we would understand if he felt he was jeopardizing any of that by continuing to serve as our commissioner. After we had that chat, he had been feeling much better, so the subject was never brought up again. We all thought he was in good shape heading into the summer, but …”
She left that thought dangling. Poor Benton. The Grim Reaper had come calling unexpectedly. What a shame.
“Does he have a family?” I asked.
Big Wyn’s head came up and she looked at me. This time I saw, for a fleeting instant, a predator’s glint in her eyes. It was that glint of victory when the kill has been completed and the prey lies in the grass, bleeding from wounds of throat and viscera, eyes open but unseeing, waiting to be devoured. It was just a fraction of a second, that look, but I caught it and in those nanoseconds I heard the plaintive howling across the grassy plains, the primitive beating of the breast, the thump of the drums in the background announcing the victory.
“He was married once,” she told us. “But divorced some years ago. I believe he had a daughter.”
That was all she said. But the remembrance of that look sent chills racing up and down my spine.