[Author’s Note: Earlier this week, Jay celebrated his 20th anniversary as a sports writer. There will be special articles throughout the holiday season and beyond here, at jayflemma.com, iHeartRadio, Golf Course Trades, NASJA, and all of Jay’s other sports writing outlets. For today, our plucky, puckish, irreverent, and inimitable storyteller pal – “that loveable curveball” as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Marino Parascenzo put it - is going to cue up a highlight reel of the last 20 years. Have fun. We know Jay will.]
BOISE – Right about now, that old Grateful Dead lyric comes to mind: What a long strange trip it’s been…and trust me, you don’t know the half of it.
Nights writing until 2:30 a.m., hanging out in restaurants with wi-fi so I could write and eat at the same time, criss-crossing the country for countless mile after countless mile, hitting every deadline, and – oh, by the way - juggling a high-octane law practice and a life alongside. I sometimes think that if I were a cat, I’d be on life seven of nine by now.
Grateful. That word leaps to mind first and foremost, and I’m not talking about the rock band. I’m talking about the Privilege and Honor – capital P, capital H – to a) have a ringside seat for history; and b) to write and broadcast about it to you, Dear Readers. It’s tough putting s story together one good word at a time, but when I hear you say, “I read that! That was great!” that’s what I live for.
And trust me, it’s a hard, HARD job, at least to do well and maintain a career. When I walk into a sporting event media center, I have every major newspaper sitting in front me, the national magazines on either side of me, and the broadcast TV outlet writers in the row behind. If I don’t write as accurately, insightfully, and interestingly as they do, I don’t get to keep the gig.
Happily – whaddya know! - I survived, even thrived this long. I went from green and grateful to being a wily veteran. Who knows? Maybe if I keep at this long enough, I might get good at it. In the meantime, let’s reminisce a bit. I’m feeling nostalgic.
2005-1014 – GOLF OBSERVER, CYBERGOLF, GOLF CHANNEL, AND MORE
2005 was effectively my rookie year, but I made the most of it. Blogs were just catching on and going viral, and I started jayflemma.com at the start of the first wave of grass roots golf writers. I concentrated mostly on travel, but would also opine about the sports issues of the day, like the Steelers in the Super Bowl, or the NBA draft, or steroids in sports. I tried to just have an original, passionate, and observant voice. (And not make spelling grammatical, or punctuation errors…)
Four months later I got the call that I had been selected to be the first independent blogger credentialed to cover the finals of any national sporting event in America – the 2005 U.S. Open at Pinehurst.
As one of the other bloggers wrote when the news broke, “THINK BLOG = WASTE OF TIME? THINK AGAIN!”
So there is the first bit of wisdom. Plenty of people have asked to write for me over the years, but only one of them actually ever wrote an article and sent it to me for submission. So if you really, REALLY want to write, you have to sit down and practice it over and over again. Writers aren’t born, they are trained and practiced.
Michael Campbell won that week. What a letdown. Thank you, Tom Meeks, former USGA Championships Committee Chair who was so married to “harder is better” when setting up golf courses for the Open that he turned the most fabled venues in golf into Mickey Mouse obstacle courses that too frequently produced goofy winners. During Meeks’s tenure, all too often, the golfer that won played the best defensive golf (however boring and workmanlike that might look on TV), but not the most spectacular golf would take home the trophy.
But beginning with 2006, Tom Meeks was relegated to the Girls Junior (where I’m told sternly by Pete Kowalski, “he did a nice job, Jay!”) Mike Davis took the reins and instituted “graded rough” – whereby the further offline you hit your tee shot, the taller the rough was. Sort of a “let the punishment fit the crime” theory. Davis also began using shaved chipping areas around many of the greens instead of just thick, 6-inch rough around the greens, allowing the players more greenside options than just the lob wedge. I wrote back then that we needed at least five years of data to see what impact that change would have, ten years data would be more probative.
Well now 20 years later we have a clear answer: Davis was right. “Cost of rough is down more than a quarter of a stroke, from roughly 0.75 to 0.55, making recovery more likely and more exciting. Moreover, the shaved rough has made the greenside game far more exciting, letting the players showcase their short game skills rather than hacking out of a spinach patch with a lob wedge. As a result, winning scores have been consistently lower and excitement has been significantly higher.
But oh those poor girls at the Junior! I deem that an ironic twist a la Dante’s Inferno: Meeks gets to spend the rest of his career fending off angry parents like a middle school teacher on report card day. I hope they vented their spleens at him. But it also highlights the second bit of wisdom – in golf, harder is not better.
Golf Observer picked me up on the basis of my hustle that week and on the strength of an in-depth piece I had recently published on Bandon Dunes and Pacific Dunes. I remember my first assignment for them - a massive task – a biography of Old Tom Morris. I had three days to do it, and I didn’t know anything about him except that he was Scottish, won Open Championships, and had a son with the same name. Thank goodness for Melvyn Morrow and my editor Sal Johnson’s sterling connections in the sport. Shocker: the story was well received!
Wisdom nugget number three: you’d be surprised what you can do when you try hard.
2006 was the breakout year. Jeff Shelley of Cybergolf picked me up, and this began a decade of monthly stories and U.S. Open and PGA Championship coverage from the media tent. Winged Foot entranced me, and has been a beloved of mine for all these years, especially each summer before the U.S. Open when I cover the Anderson Memorial – the de facto World Championship of fourball golf.
Phil fell put of the sky like Icarus that week, unforgettably losing that three shot lead with three holes to play. We all died a little that day along with him, especially all the fans who sang “Happy Birthday” to him all the way around the course. Who’d have thought a gambling addiction would turn him traitor to the PGA Tour. Is the old saw true? You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain? Discuss.
In 2007 I fell in love twice. First at Oakmont, which even more than Augusta National is my favorite tournament venue. Grassed over ski runs: that’s what mighty Oakmont resembles. Plus, Pittsburgh is a terrific sports city. When the Open returned in 2016 the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins had just won the Stanley Cup, so I took that Wednesday from the practice round and covered the victory parade down Pittsburgh’s Canyon of Heroes.
That same year, Oklahoma won me over so much, when I covered the PGA won by Tiger, I’ve returned twice for fun. Oklahoma is a hotbed of classical golf architecture and important golf history. Never forget, Perry Maxwell was an Oklahoman, and both his solo career and his partnership with Alister Mackenzie produced some of the most iconic courses in golf. Oklahoma Golf and Country Club, Old Town Club in North Carolina, Michigan’s Crystal Downs and, of course, Augusta National. I’ll return to play Oklahoma City any time I’m within four hours. I’ll just remember to start hydrating about 18 months before a summertime visit.
Woods won again at Torrey in 2008 with that unbelievable Saturday charge (six-under over the final six holes). I never saw such magical golf in my life. It looked then like – as sports writer Dan Jenkins would put it – the only things that could stop Woods would be an injury or a woman. Little did anyone realize that Jenkins was right on both counts, and that would be the last time we saw Woods hoist a major championship trophy for 11 years.
There was one other assignment that stood out from 2008 – my coverage of the Senate hearing where Roger Clemens was accused of lying to Congress. I got the last seat in the Senate Hearing Room that morning, and you can see me peering over everyone’s heads, tucked away like a real-life version of “Where’s Waldo?” The picture snapped of the swearing in ran in everyu major newspaper in America, including the New York Times, front page, above the fold. Jeff Shelley sent me the Seattle Post-Intelligencer form that day. He saw my mug peering back at him as he ate his breakfast.
That’s one for the scrapbook and the grandkids,, if I ever have any.
2009 was WEIRDSVILLE! We had four off-brand winners of the major championships – Angel Cabrera, Lucas Glover, Stew Cink, and Y.E. Yang. Cabrera recently spent two years in an Argentine prison for “gender violence,” including assaulting, threatening, and harassing his partner of two years, Cecilia Torres Mana. The spy novels bookish Lucas Glover reads are far more exciting than him. Stew Cink – nice guy – ruined what would have been the greatest golf tournament in history by filleting Tom Watson in a playoff at Turnberry. And Y.E. Yang, who dresses like he’s sponsored by Garanimals – that’s 1980s matching kids’ outfits, for those of you scoring at home – Yang forever ruined any goodwill he had with the media and fans by attacking Dan Jenkins over a harmless Twitter joke.
And, of course, 2009 brought us the Woods sex scandal. And for 11 months in ‘09 and ’10, I had scandal duty every day. I actually interviewed three different mistresses (and thank you to those who made the introductions for me. I still talk to one of them. We both root for the Pittsburgh Steelers…).
No, I’m not dishing anything more than what was written. I wrote plenty back then. Go the jayflemma.com archives if you must. As for the rest, I’m a lawyer, a journalist, and an Italian. You get triple the silence.
What’s the wisdom for Tiger Woods in all of that? If there are two things people hate in this life, it’s a dirty old man and a clean little boy. Woods tried to be both.
I got my first view of the majestic grandeur of Pebble Beach that year, as well as my first interview with the inimitable Pete Dye. I miss both Pete and Alice, and their embracing a young gunner of a writer warms me still to this day. I ultimately interviewed Pete over seven times, publishing much of the work over the course of various major tournaments held at his designs. We lost not only a great architectural light with their passing, but great friends of the game as well.
Therein lies the next bit of wisdom - middle class work ethic, gracious neighborliness, and family values such as the Dyes had never go out of style. No matter how banal and nihilistic Madison Avenue and the legacy media may become, people and middle class Americans are still the backbone of this country and the soul of our great game.
In 2011 Rory McIlroy rewrote almost every U.S. Open championship scoring record, including lowest aggregate, lowest 36-holes, lowest 54 holes, and lowest 72 hole score-to-par. It was a dominating, indeed swashbuckling performance. We got an encore at Kiawah Island a year later, rewriting almost every PGA Championship record in the process.
2012 was the year Webb Simpson continued Olympic Club’s streak of crowning shotmakers and grinders rather than swashbucklers. A year later, Juston Rose won hos oly major to date at Merion, edging out Phil Mickelson by one shot. (Again, Phil? Really? This again? Seen your act before; I want my money back!). And a year after that Martin Kaymer ran over everybody at Pinehurst with the precision German engineering of a BMW. It was surgical, indeed Tiger-esque.
And as the 2014 major championship closed, so too did an important chapter in my life, my time in New York City. My parents had taken ill, and I had to move my base of operations north, upstate. But when one chapter closes, another more interesting one begins.
TO BE CONTINUED…
