People ask if I've ever had a bad day. One day in the early 1980s outside Flint, Mich., I had just missed my fifth or sixth cut in a row by one shot. My first marriage had dissolved, I was dead broke, my game was terrible and I had an unexplained rash. Standing in the locker room, I had a real stupid idea. I thought, I can punch the locker and break my hand. Collect the insurance and get my life back together. Here comes a hard right hand, over the top, but all I did was dent the locker. I hit it again, but still, nothing, except a bigger dent and some scraped knuckles. Two locker-room attendants ran over and asked what was the matter. I sat there with my face in my hands, feeling like the guy in "It's A Wonderful Life," who couldn't even kill himself properly. I looked up at the guys. "Fly was bothering me; I think I got it," I said. "Where's the tour next week?"
If you find yourself broke and essentially homeless, like I was coming out of my divorce, a concrete storage unit makes for suitable temporary housing. I rented a "U-Lock-It" and actually slept in it a few nights over roughly a two-week period. I was pleasantly surprised by how cheap, comfortable and quiet it was. The amenities weren't much; I had to run an extension cord into the unit to power the night light and space heater. But plastic flowers improved the ambience.
I am the poster child for Attention Deficit Disorder. In the CBS broadcast booth I'm constantly thumbing through magazines while we're on the air. But golf is the perfect sport for someone with ADD. You only need to concentrate for a few minutes at a time, as Lee Trevino proved.
Where do I get my lines? Whatever's hot in pop culture, really. I jot little expressions into my laptop, and if something happens that fits, I'll use one. It's amazing the parallels you can construct between golf and celebrity boxing, the Osbournes, lip-syncing or whatever. Most don't make the cut. Others do, for better or worse.
The "body bags" and "bikini wax" comments were merely the straw that broke the camel's back for me at the Masters. I don't think the Masters people were comfortable with my style from the beginning. One year a ball bounded over the 14th green and I remarked, "Oooh, that one's in the cheap seats." I silently began counting the seconds, and I didn't get to four before [producer] Frank Chirkinian shouted in my headpiece, "There are no cheap seats at Augusta National!" Eventually I found out he had a Batphone connection to [Augusta National's] Hord Hardin, who immediately let it be known this is not the type of thing we say at Augusta.
When I said about the 17th green, "They don't mow this green, they bikini wax it," I'd just read the phrase in a magazine. Moments earlier I was reading a story on the Golden Door spa near my home in Escondido, and it mentioned bikini waxes. Those words were on my mind, and they just popped out of my mouth. The president of CBS Sports, Neil Pilson, was sitting right next to me when I said it, and he laughed and the cameraman laughed. If someone laughs at Augusta, it's a bad sign. Chirkinian himself once told me, "If I laugh about something, it's not funny." Anyway, a short time later I was gone.
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