Lee Trevino

The only times the talking would stop were when he was either over his shot or back in his hotel room, the sanctuary this outwardly sociable creature would retire to without fail once his day’s work was done.

 

“Once he steps off the course, he’s one of the least sociable, least outgoing guys on tour,” said Dale Antrum, formerly the PGA Tour’s public relations director. “He never, I mean never, eats outside his room. He’s the all-time loner when it comes to fraternizing with other players off the golf course.”

 

Trevino liked to compare this facet of his personality to Muhammad Ali: “In front of a camera or a group, he’s loud,” adds Antrum, “but if you catch him alone in a room, it’s very difficult to hear a word he says.”

 

He had a long memory too. After winning at Oak Hill he remarked: “When you’re successful, everybody wants a piece of you. I hadn’t seen my sister in several years. Now, I’m the sweetest guy she’s ever seen.”

 

Perceived personal slights on his first appearance at The Masters led to him changing his spikes in the car park for years, even insisting that Georgia’s April garden party had no right to be called a major. Perhaps the fact that Augusta National did not suit his natural fade had something to do with his lack of enthusiasm.

 

By 1975 Trevino was up there with his heroes, dividing up the major titles with Nicklaus and Gary Player and entertaining galleries with both his sharp one-liners and exquisite shot-making ability. After scoring his maiden professional victory at the 1968 US Open, he added another in a banner 1971 season that also included victory in the Open Championship at Birkdale. A year later he broke Tony Jacklin’s heart and stopped Jack Nicklaus from adding the third leg of a possible Grand Slam by chipping in a phenomenal five times on the way to defending the Claret Jug at Muirfield. A first PGA Championship two years later suggested the good times were set to roll on.

 

But during a rain break in the 1975 Western Open a shaft of lightning bounced off a lake and struck Trevino and his playing partners Jerry Heard and Bobby Nichols. The lightning shot through the metal shafts in Trevino’s bag and into his back, leaving four burn marks on his left shoulder where the lethal charge exited his body. Lucky to escape with his life, there was nevertheless a price to pay and a year later Trevino was sidelined after an operation to repair a herniated disc in his back. The enforced layoff was painful for a man who could think of nothing better than filling every daylight hour with golf; but it did give him time to reflect. He had squandered his first fortune with an assortment of bad investments and the inner fire, he felt, had begun to dwindle: “I was drinking a little bit, running around, raising hell. My game was kind of going downhill, I wasn’t practicing and working hard. I wasn’t being led astray, I was doing it on my own.”

 

The newspapers wrote him off, saying he would never compete again. This, however, was all the incentive he needed to rekindle the desire that had got him to the top in the first place. He would be plagued with back complaints for the rest of his career, possibly a legacy of that trademark, flat baseball swing, but the competitive instinct never again deserted him. Indeed, squandering a second fortune might have spurred him on to the glorious swansong of his regular tour career, a sixth and final major at the PGA Championship of 1984 at Shoal Creek, Alabama. Trevino was 44 years old when he saw off Lanny Wadkins and Gary Player to lift the Wannamaker Trophy.

 

Now on his third marriage and winding down a Champions Tour career that saw him add three Senior Majors and nearly $10 million in prize money, Trevino remains one of golf’s great enigmas. The man dubbed Supermex, who said “My swing is so bad I look like a caveman killing his lunch”, will play until the day he drops dead.

 

“I don’t know what I’d do if I quit. Doctors, lawyers if they quit, they play golf. I can’t be a brain surgeon.”

 

The game should be supremely thankful for that.