Page 80 - Golf World (February 2020)

clip around the ear. Within a fortnight,Trevinowould
T
To have reached 80 years old is a fine innings by any
metric – and an exceptional one for someone who, at
the tender age of 36, was struck by a bolt of the great
creator’s finest electric juice. As he hovered a couple
of feet off the ground – the lightning having flashed
off a lake as he waited for a squall to pass during the
1975 Western Open in Illinois, hitting the bag he
was leaning against, then via the steel shafts of his
clubs passing up his back and out his left shoulder
– Trevino experienced the sense of flying through an
ethereal tunnel, faces of friends, foes and lovers
looming in and out of view. All fell calm. Silence. At
this point in proceedings, it’s probably safe to say
that making it to his 37th birthday felt something of
a pipe dream.
But mere lightning – a
force which raises the ‘The docTors
temperature of anything
in its road by 30,000 TreaTed Trevino
degrees centigrade in less said The
than a millisecond – scorch
wasn’t powerful enough
to put paid to this on his shoulder
particular street-fighting were usually only
tough. The doctors who recorded n
treated Trevino that
night said the sort of The morgue’
scorch marks on his
shoulder were usually
only recorded in the morgue. Trevino forced himself
to stay awake all night, fighting a couple of sleeping
pills powerful enough to sedate several wild horses,
staring at the clock on the wall. Every ticking second
confirmed he was still alive.
With trademark grace and wit, Trevino to this day
maintains he “deserved to get hit”, having “set the
whole thing up a week before” at the US Open while
entertaining the gallery during a thunderstorm
interlude. Waving his most recalcitrant club in the
air, he delivered his most famous quip: “Don’t worry
about it! Even God can’t hit a 1-iron!” Fate thus
recklessly tempted, the Lord proved otherwise a few
days later in Illinois, though thankfully His
intervention proved nothing more than a celestial
80 Golf World February 2020 | golfworldtop100.com
be up and about again, competing in the Open at
Carnoustie. It wasn’t the first time he’d bounced
straight back up after suffering one of life’s hard
knocks, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
Riding high dudgeon
Lee Buck Trevino was not to the manor born. Brought
up by his single mother, Juanita, in a Texan shotgun
shack with no running water or – ironically enough –
electricity, he was sent out into the cotton fields at the
age of three. By the time he was five, he was helping his
Mexican grave-digging granddad Joe water the local
cemetery at night. He never knew his father. At a
young age he would get tooled up and go out hunting;
because a kid’s gotta eat. It was a hard-knock life all
right, and yet true to character, Trevino managed to
wring precious drops of positivity from these
inauspicious beginnings. “A lot of people have two
ways to go: down or up. I was alreadydown.Ionlyhad
one way to go!” Trevino found golf at the age of eight.
He would go down to his local course, the Dallas
Athletic Club, and rummage around for lost balls,
selling them back to the members for decent dollars in
austere post-war times. He chanced upon a rusty old
5-iron in a nearby pasture, cut downthewoodenshaft,
and practised every day by hitting apples. He became a
caddie. Games played after work in the gloaming
convinced him he could make more money swinging
clubs than carrying them. He hustled for dimes,
nickels and dollars, usually gambling with money he
didn’t actually have. He had no option but to win.
And he always won. Even when he offered to play
left-handed; even when
he’d use just one club and
who give his opponent their full
handicap; even when he
used a taped-up 32-ounce
sorT of Dr Pepper bottle as a
marks gimmick at a nearby
nine-hole pitch-and-putt,
swinging in the baseball
style, sending his ball a
good 100 yards each time,
i
rarely shooting over 30.
After a teenage stint in the
Marines in Japan, he
became assistant to the pro
at the Horizon Hills club in El Paso near the Mexican
border, where he would regularly relieve the local
gamblers, hustlers and big-rollers of their bankroll.
His most famous win came in 1966 against Ray
Floyd, who had already won a couple of tournaments
on the PGA Tour, and rode into town with a view of
making some easy money in a pre-arranged high-
stakes match with the best player at the club. Floyd
asked a young man, bent over at his feet cleaning his
shoes, who he’d be taking on. “That would be
me,” Trevino announced, putting himself in serious
danger of being cleaned out by Floyd’s jaw, which was
descending at high velocity towards the
floor. Trevino won the first day, shocking Floyd, who
immediately asked for an emergency nine to