MAJOR HAUL
shared a handful of old, handeddown clubs with the other caddies to play three short holes they had marked out behind the caddie barn.
Before and after serving in the US Marine Corps, Trevino worked on the construction team of a nine-hole course, mowed the grass and collected balls at a driving range and learned how to tinker with golf clubs along the way.
“I ruined more golf clubs than I can remember!” admits Trevino. “I have a workshop here in the house and I’ll probably burn the house
Joker: Trevino with a fake snake he’d dropped at the 1971 US Open down one of these days. I probably have 150 putters, but I never had as many as Arnold Palmer. He had thousands of them. Arnie was a hoarder. He kept everything. I’ve seen it. If Arnie had lived alone, he would not have been able to get into the house.”
Trevino made his US Open debut in 1966 at the Olympic Club and tied for 54th. He wasn’t even going to enter in 1967, so his first wife, Claudia, sent in the form and the $20 entry fee without telling him. Trevino was scraping around for money at the time, and once he had eased through US Open qualifying, he had to borrow $400 to pay for the trip to Baltusrol in New Jersey. He only had one pair of golf shoes and 12 clubs in his bag. It was the first time Trevino had travelled out east beyond the Mississippi river, but he finished fifth, pocketed a cheque for $6,000 and the tournament invitations began to arrive. Suddenly Trevino was a tour golfer and he finished 1967 as Rookie of the Year.
Under the radar
By the time he pitched up at Oak Hill in New York for the 1968 US Open, he was yet to win on tour, and while he arrived with a pair of recent runner-up finishes, Trevino remained an outsider. But he was fearless and in form, and when he started the final round just two shots behind Bert Yancey – who was by now a four-time winner on tour – Trevino revelled in his underdog role. While Yancey fell away with a finalround 76, Trevino held strong to shoot 69 and win by four shots from Nicklaus.
In his book They Call Me Super Mex, Trevino wrote: “There were thousands around the green and
five policemen escorted me through the crowd to the clubhouse. I hadn’t had so much attention from the cops since I backfired my 1949 Ford on North Central Expressway when I was 15.”
And this time the cheque was for $30,000. Trevino would not have to worry about travel costs again.
Trevino started a tradition that day that many have since attributed to another Major Champion – to wear a red shirt with black trousers for the final round. Trevino also wore a black cap and even red socks. He owned the look and continued to wear red and black on final-round Sundays. He calls them his “payday colours”, and like fans of Tiger Woods today, Trevino’s fans started appearing on the fairway ropes decked in red and black.
Years later, when Trevino won a tournament sponsored by Chrysler and was given a car, he ordered it in his payday colours and gave it to his mother-in-law.
“I love Merion”
Trevino winning at Oak Hill in ’68 is one of the great US Open stories, but of Trevino’s six Major victories, the one he cherishes just above the others is his second success in the US Open, at Merion in 1971.
“I was very proud to have won that ’68 US Open, but at the time I didn’t have a clue about what it really meant,” confides Trevino, who did not start playing golf competitively until he represented the US Marines while based in
Okinawa, Japan, in 1958, at the age of 19. “I wasn’t familiar with all this stuff. You could talk about The Masters or the USPGA Championship, but a tournament was a tournament to me. I still saw myself as a journeyman. I was just playing golf like everybody else. I didn’t know who the favourites were each week, I had no clue. I just turned up and teed up.
“A lot of golfers have claimed one Major and then never won anything else, so winning my second US Open was my greatest moment, and because I beat Nicklaus in a play-off. That’s when I became accepted on tour and by all the players. That was the moment when I felt for the first time that I really belonged on tour. That’s when I started to relax and have more fun.”
“I was very proud to have won the 1968 US Open, but at the time I didn’t have a clue about what it really meant”
It was also on that day that Trevino came out with one of his greatest one-liners, stating: “I love Merion and I don’t even know her last name.”
The 1971 US Open was the second time Trevino had left Nicklaus as runner-up in their national championship. It happened again at the 1974 USPGA Championship, with Mrs Mayberry’s trusty putter leaving Nicklaus in the shade by one, and again in The Open at Muirfield in 1972, with Nicklaus again finishing a single shot behind Trevino as he claimed back-to-back Claret Jugs. Nicklaus would later concede: “Of all my contemporaries, Trevino was the hardest to beat.”
“That comment is the feather in my hat,” says Trevino. “I was so proud when I heard Jack said that. It was his coach Jim Flick who told me. I said, ‘What? You’re joking!’ I get goosebumps telling you this now. I am proud of a lot of things that I have done, but I have never received a greater compliment. Not when that comes from the greatest golfer of all time.”
Lightning strikes once
It is a great shame that one of the most famous Trevino stories is the one that nearly killed him, when he was struck by lightning during the
“Trevino was the hardest to beat” 1975 Western Open at Butler National Golf Club.
The incident was laced with irony, too, as just the week before Trevino was struck, he was playing in the US Open at Medinah when the klaxon blew for a weather warning. “I’m not scared of lightning,” Trevino told the gallery, “I’ve made my peace with the Lord and he promised he wouldn’t throw any darts at me.” Trevino retired that joke, but the lightning bolt had shot through his back and out of his left shoulder, and dissolved the lubricant between his vertebrae on its way through.
Lower-back trouble would plague ‘Supermex’ for the rest of his career, although it couldn’t stop him winning one more Major, the 1984 USPGA Championship at Shoal Creek in Alabama, at the age of 44. He got well paid for filming a TV advertisement for a mattress company, too, but we’ll never know how much more damage Trevino could have done on the golf course during the late 1970s and early 1980s had the lightning not struck.
Today, Trevino could not be happier to be taking a back seat from pro golf and its affiliated industries. “When I can see my glass is full, I’m not going to try to drink out of yours,” he says. Even the paraphernalia of Trevino’s remarkable career is shut away in an upstairs bedroom.
“You wouldn’t realise a golfer lived in this house,” he says. “When people come over I don’t want to have to answer questions about golf! I don’t need reminding, I have a good memory. I remember the Majors; the shots, the golf courses, who I played with.”
Trevino rarely even plays 18 holes, although he holds memberships at three local clubs: Dallas National, Maridoe and Preston Trail, and he practises most days at the pristine, tour-level Dallas National. Since recent eye surgery, Trevino can even see where he’s hitting the golf ball. He wasn’t blind like a kitten but it wasn’t good.
“I was having a lot of trouble with my eyes,” he admits. “That’s what happens when you get older. The doctor said he could put lenses in surgically. Gary Player tried to get me to do this a long time ago, so I went in and God Almighty, I could see like a hawk.
“I called my doctor and said, ‘I’m suing you. I’m talking to a lawyer.’ He asked, ‘What’s the problem?’ I said, ‘Well, I thought I was hitting the ball really well until you gave me these new eyes, and now I can see where my ball is going and you’ve ruined my life. I’m hitting the ball terrible!’”
So Trevino can see things as clearly now as he ever did. He could still roll in some of those testy 20-footers, too, if he could only get his hands on a blind putter again.