The New Life Of Bob Goalby

Until Bob Goalby became golf's leading bookkeeper at the Masters, he was a touring professional whom the world could casually take or let be, one of those hordes of consistently decent players in brown slacks, knit shirt and baseball cap who occasionally win a Motor Rubber Coral Festival Open Classic. He was a guy who really attracted no more attention to himself than the average banana-ball hitter on your nearest public driving range. He was simply hard-working, durable, unpretentious Bob Goalby from Belleville, Ill. Fore, please.

To insiders, however, Goalby did have a few distinctions. He was so opinionated in matters dealing with the game, rules, regulations and PGA bylaws that he bore the underground nickname of "the bulldog," a stand-up guy. As a shot-maker, he also struggled with the best-known hook on the tour. At times Goalby could hit balls that curved like the Gulf of Mexico. Finally, he could get very angry, which normally resulted in talking out loud to himself as he trudged over the fairways. "There goes Goalby," a fellow pro once said, "playing his usual onesome." As a matter of fact, he did play a onesome at this year's L.A. Open. Angered by the slow play of the other two members of his threesome, Goalby moved on ahead and finished the round by himself. Some of his pals say he once threw himself in a water hazard because of a wild hook. Just grabbed himself around the chest and hurled himself in, as Ky Laffoon once held his putter by the neck under a pond and furiously stuttered, "D-drown, y-you, d-dirty...." Bob Goalby says he's tenacious, all right, but he never threw anyone in the water, least of all himself, and that, in fact, he is more normal than most of his contemporaries, although it is getting hard to stay that way because of all this Augusta business. For example, almost every day now for more than a month somebody has come up to Goalby and offered seven hundred million dollars for him to play Roberto De Vicenzo down the main street of, oh, Juneau, Alaska for the real Masters championship.

The year 1968 has emerged as the looniest ever in sports. It could already be stamped as the year of the nonwin. Just consider: two world heavyweight champions have been crowned, neither of whom could whip the real champion, Muhammad Ali, if they drove tractors into the ring. Jean-Claude Killy won the biggest Olympic ski race after two men were disqualified on a fogbound day when no one could see what happened. Forward Pass won a Kentucky Derby three days after it was run because the announced winner, Dancer's Image, turned out to be a barnyard hippie. And in the midst of all this, Bob Goalby won the Masters because the man who apparently tied with him, Roberto De Vicenzo, approved a scorecard that had more mistakes on it than a map of Italy. It is enough to make you think that there is sure to be another Black Sox scandal in baseball this year and that the Super Bowl will be played at a Supreme Court hearing.

Precisely because Bob Goalby is made up the way he is, which is tough and realistic, he has proved to be a lot less bothered by the Masters debacle than most people might think. Not once has it entered his mind to rip the green blazer from his athletic, 195-pound frame and give a pocket and a sleeve to Roberto. He wouldn't even approve an asterisk by the confused Latin's name in the record book. Goalby played hard and beautifully at Augusta that week, the best golf of his 11-year pro career. Down the stretch on Sunday afternoon, talking to himself as always, he hit clutch long irons that amazed him and he was practically destroyed emotionally before he was even told about De Vicenzo's mistake.

"Of course, I would rather win it another way," he says. "But I feel that I did win under the Rules of Golf. I think I played good enough to win. That I earned it. I think I'm the Masters champion."

Goalby also says, "Only the golfer knows how well he's really playing. You know when you've got a pattern going, when you've got the rhythm. I felt it early in the week. I was playing really good in practice rounds, four and five under every day. For seven rounds, in fact, including three practice rounds, I was 24 under par, which is pretty good, and I holed every putt because, well, in practice we had a little action going and I had to."

As for the rule that cost Roberto a tie and resulted in various storms of outrage around the country, Goalby is even more brutally realistic. He doesn't believe anything can be changed that would help, other than a quiet place to go over the card at the end of a round. "That's when you can think about what you shot," he says. "Hell, you can't walk off a green, fired up about what you're doing and concentrating on the next hole, and stop to fill in a score-card. Most of us, I'd guess, write down the scores after about eight holes and then after 17. You're really the only person who knows what you're shooting. I put down the wrong score for Al Balding once and he got disqualified, but he didn't blame me. You're the one who knows whether you've soled your club in a bunker or if a ball has moved on you and you deserve a penalty. And after a round is when you have time to think about your score."

For the benefit of those who have been walking in space or Montana, Goalby won the Masters—his first major championship—when De Vicenzo approved a scorecard that had three mistakes on it after he had shot 65 in the final round to tie Goalby at 277. He approved a 4 instead of a birdie 3 on the 17th hole, a 35 instead of a 34 on the back nine, and a 66 instead of a 65. While it was Roberto's playing companion, Tommy Aaron, who had marked down the wrong numbers accidentally, it was Roberto who hastily okayed the card and left the scorer's table. There was no alternative under the rules but to let the score stand.

"All the fuss has come up because I won it on a rule at the end of the round instead of on a rule at the beginning," Goalby says. "Suppose Roberto had been 10 minutes late for tee-off time and had taken a two-stroke penalty, and then we had tied in score. He would have lost because of the two strokes. He would have lost under the rules but no one would have thought it was so bad." Goalby's supposition brings to mind the overlooked fact that once before at the Masters a player lost a chance at the title on a penalty. In 1960 Dow Finsterwald suffered a two-stroke penalty for practice putting on a green during the first round. He eventually finished two strokes behind Arnold Palmer, the winner, but had he not been strapped with the penalty he perhaps would have met Palmer in a playoff.

Nevertheless, this year's Masters sent everyone, including many of the players, out to search for the proper villains in the incident. Who was it, or who were they? Bob Goalby has received more than 100 letters telling him he was. That, of course, is ridiculous. Was it Tommy Aaron? Was it the Masters officials? Was it the crotchety old Scot who wrote the rule? Was it the USGA and the Royal and Ancient who have kept it? Maybe it was Ho Chi Minh. Who was it?