Mark Calcavecchia, the tour's anti-Tiger, is a refreshing mix of wit and unconventional wisdom
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Mark Calcavecchia is a mess. A big, beautiful, rumpled mess. And he really doesn't care who knows it, which is exactly why everyone is so fond of him. His feet hurt, just like ours.
There is no better quote in golf than Calc. When he won the 1989 British Open, he joked about there not being enough room on the claret jug for his whole name. There is no bigger heart, either. When his caddie, Eric Larson, was in prison for a drug offense, Mark was the only person who visited him at all four of the places Larson did time. After he paid his debt to society, Larson had his job on the bag waiting for him. When a boyhood friend was trying to qualify for the '01 British Open, Calc drove the 90 minutes to the course and walked across the dunes with a sweater wrapped around his waist, a beer in his hand and his usual message, "Come on, let's go make some birdies." If you're Calcavecchia's friend, you're in for the long haul.
"Calc has evolved only because of age and wives," says his old buddy, Ken Green. "I don't believe Calc's ever really grown up, to be honest with you. Calc's still Calc."
At 47, Calcavecchia is an elder statesman with a jalopy for a body and a Peter Pan complex for a soul. He wears his foibles on his sleeve like service stripes and would rather be in a bowling alley than on ESPN's SportsCenter. If the King of the Hill needed a golfer to hang around in the back yard, Calc would be his guy.
"Golf is just a game," Calcavecchia once said, "and an idiotic game most of the time. " He has the perfect brain for golf, wired for electric shock. To Calc, golf is nothing but an endless series of tragedies, some of which are hopelessly comic once your blood pressure returns to normal and you step back and look at it. He watches leader boards because, "I like to know whether I don't need to do anything stupid or whether I need to try to do something stupid." What golfer doesn't understand that and what ordinary citizen does?
"Every time you go out with the guy, you have the potential for something extraordinary, off the wall," says David Roschman, who grew up with Calcavecchia in Florida. "Ten years later, you're laughing your butt off."
On a February day at their modest home in Phoenix, Mark and his second wife, Brenda, are packing to make the shift from west to east for the Florida swing where Calc would nearly win twice (at the Honda Classic and PODS Championship). Calcavecchia will wind up, ultimately, at Augusta National -- 20 years after he nearly got a green jacket, finishing a shot behind Sandy Lyle and his famous 7-iron out of the fairway bunker on the 18th hole. There's a pile of "Boston Legal" DVDs on the counter. Brenda makes sandwiches for the flight, wrapping extras for the pilots. They're taking a private plane so they can bring their three dogs. Mark more or less apologizes because they're not flying commercial.
"Sometimes," says another of his boyhood friends, Dave Pesacov, teaching professional at The President CC in West Palm Beach, "it almost seems like he's embarrassed [by] the success he has had." The dogs all have predominantly white coats. Mollie, a boxer puppy, Miss Ellie, a Dalmatian, and Brutus Buckeye, a Jack Russell, sit as if they are in a commercial for cell-phone reception at the top of the stairs, keeping a watchful eye on the activity below, not yet certain they're included.
- Keywords:
- Jim Moriarty,
- Mark Calcavecchia,
- Masters,
- Ryder Cup
