Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont by Adam Lazarus Page B

victory (with Orville Moody) to a Singapore caddie scholarship. Years later, on the Senior Tour, Trevino earned $1 million for a hole in one at an event and promptly gave half to the St. Jude Children’s Hospital.
    Perhaps his most memorable gesture came in February 1968. With a heavy heart, Trevino won the 1968 Hawaiian Open—just his second PGA tour win-two months after his close friend and frequent motel mate on tour, Hawaii’s Ted Makalena, drowned in a freak swimming accident in Waikiki Beach. Trevino set aside $10,000 of his $25,000 payday to create a trust fund for Makalena’s children.
    “It was such a tragedy—a fine young man with a wife and three kids wiped out in a matter of minutes,” Trevino said. “I had to figure it simply was his time to go. The Lord wanted him and there is nothing more you can say.”
    Trevino often spoke like a golf mercenary, perpetually chasing prize money and endorsement deals. He was also notorious for being a spendthrift (“I could give him $15,000,” Claudia told the Pittsburgh sportswriter Myron Cope in 1968, “and he’d blow it in a week. Money means nothing to him”). So it was not surprising that his public obsession about making a million dollars overshadowed his low-key philanthropy. Professional golf’s version of Robin Hood, Trevino not only instilled pride in poor and minority communities as a sporting hero; he looked after those who had once been poor children like him.
    “The world’s a funny place ...” he said with trenchant irony. “When you have no money, no one will do anything for you. If you become successful and pile up enough money to buy anything you want, people deluge you with gifts you don’t need and try to do all kinds of things for you.”
     
    WHEN HE RETURNED TO AMERICA, Trevino’s star radiated nationwide. He was on the cover of Newsweek and Time magazines and both Dallas and El Paso honored him with “Lee Trevino Day.” In addition to collecting a second straight Vardon Trophy and PGA Player-of-the-Year awards, he was named Sports Illustrated’ s “Sportsman of the Year,” edging out, among others, boxer Joe Frazier, who that March had handed Muhammad Ali his first loss to become heavyweight champion of the world.
    Trevino was arguably as good in 1972, winning three PGA events and successfully defending his British Open crown by holding off Nicklaus with a memorable downhill chip on the seventeenth green at Muirfield. Even more heroic was his play a month earlier in the 1972 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. A serious bout with tracheobronchitis, an infection of the windpipe and bronchial tubes, could not keep him from competing, even though he spent several days in the hospital immediately beforehand, and his doctor urged him not to play. Loaded up with painkillers and antibiotics, Trevino pulled within one of the leader after three rounds but ran out of stamina during the cold, windswept playing conditions of the final day.
    Trevino had been tremendous on the course that year. But off the course, personal melodramas drained his time, energy, and peace of mind.
    Trevino broke his two-year Masters boycott in April, but a ticket mishap prompted tournament police to attempt to throw his caddie, Neal Harvey, off the course during a pretournament practice session. Trevino confronted the police and threatened to withdraw if Harvey was not allowed to caddie. This embarrassing public controversy only fueled the behind-the-scenes drama, as Trevino was already on thin ice with Masters chairman Clifford Roberts after refusing Roberts’s invitation for coffee one morning by saying, “Just tell Mr. Roberts I don’t drink coffee.”
    Later that August, Trevino arrived in Boston only the night before the U.S. Industries Classic began at Pleasant Valley Country Club, and didn’t have time to play a practice round. With Nicklaus absent, a high finish by Trevino would spring him back into the race for the 1972 money title. But after shooting a