No Laughing Matter

But the putt stopped “about 3½ to 4 feet short,” as Green estimated. If he missed it, he would be in a playoff with Graham the next day.

“I could hear people laughing at that. ‘Oooh, he’s got a little gut-stringer here,’ ” he says. “I had a ball mark on my line, so I called an official over for a ruling, and he told me I could fix it. Then I called Andy Bean over, and he agreed with me, then I fixed it.”

Green crouched over the ball with the 55-year-old hickory- shafted blade putter he had obtained in a swap with a high-school buddy.

“I had asked Shayne what he thought,” he says, “but he was quiet. I asked him again. He said, ‘Straight in.’ I said, ‘Thanks a lot.’ I don’t like straight putts. That’s the hardest putt for me. I had to play it straight, not a little right or left. I want to play it left-center or right-center. But it went in. I don’t know how I played it, but I played it properly. I don’t know how.”

For all the commotion about the death threat, Hubert Green knew that he was alive and well and the U.S. Open champion.

“I don’t think they told me it was a woman who called,” Green says. “And if it was a woman, I have no idea who it could be. I don’t know that they ever got her name. I never looked into it. I never asked any questions. I never worried about it. I didn’t believe in it. I also have no idea who the men were who were coming to shoot me. I didn’t ever worry about it. I just told my caddie to walk ahead of me, and I walked back with the policemen behind my caddie. The next year at Phoenix, there was a message on my locker, something along the line of ‘Sorry I missed you last year at Tulsa on 15. We’ll see you today.’ I gave it to the field staff and went to play. It had to be a joke.”

His cancer was not a joke. During a routine dental examination in 2003, cancerous growths were discovered on his left tonsil and the back of his tongue. In six weeks of chemotherapy and radiation at Shands Hospital in Gainesville, Fla., he lost more than 40 pounds. He also lost much of his golf game.

“I’ve been out for four years now, and according to my doctors, they’ve had no one who had a relapse after four years of being clean of that same type of cancer. I still can’t eat very well. I can’t swallow food. I have to wash it down. I wash it into my tongue. My voice changes every day. Sometimes I’m a tenor, sometimes I’m a bass, sometimes I can’t talk at all. It varies according to the time of day. I’m better in the morning. I have coffee and I clean my throat out. I have to drink a lot of liquid shakes, my protein. I’m diabetic. I can’t play much anymore. I can’t compete the way I’d like to. It’s no fun being a filler.”

He hasn’t had a top-25 finish on the Champions Tour since 2003, but he still hits balls at Birmingham (Ala.) CC, where he grew up.

“I love to practice, always have,” he says. “I’m not playing at the level I’d like to, so I’m trying to get more distance and my fairway woods are terrible. Before I got sick, I beat Hale Irwin in a seven-hole playoff on Long Island. I was only five yards shorter than Hale off the tee then; now he’s 30 yards longer than me. I had so much radiation, the muscles in my shoulder have given me a smaller shoulder turn. I never had a big turn in the first place. My stamina’s not what it used to. And when I practice, I hit out of a building sometimes because I’m supposed to stay out of the sun, thanks a lot. Doctors don’t care about your golf game, they care about you living. But I’m definitely positive. I’m alive.”

As alive as when he won the 1977 U.S. Open after that death threat.