A life long Player - A clinic with Gary Player

These clubs will do anything but cook,” says Player, holding up a Callaway hybrid. “I once made a joke in an interview that if I could choose between this club and my wife, I’d miss her. When I got home that night there was a hybrid lying in my bed, wrapped up in a negligee”. Cue a slow rumble of guilty middle-aged laughter from the crowd. Player then hits a high fade with the club in question.

“Look at that. Look. At. That. I could never hit that height with a 3-iron. Never. Even when I was winning majors. If any of you think you can hit a 3-iron like that, you’re kidding yourselves. None of you should have a 3- or 4-iron in your bag. Not one of you.” He’s on a roll now. All the famous Player traits are there: the boyish enthusiasm, the intensity and the lifelong, ingrained need, to pick a fight.

As the session breaks up, the punters make their way out to play on Wentworth’s East course for a shotgun start. Player and I head for the quiet of the famous clubhouse and take a seat in the old ballroom, which is now used to hold functions and conferences. “This used to be the changing rooms,” he says, pointing to the corner of the room.

“That’s where Ben Hogan sat. I waited at that door to have my photo taken with him. Fifty minutes I waited for him to come in. I wanted to check my height against him.” Hogan is a hero, the best that ever lived he says. “Nobody has come close to hitting the ball like him– the quality of the strike, and the swing. If you gave him the equipment we have today, it would be incredible what he would have done.”

Gary Player is one of a small handful of people whose career links Hogan to today’s Tiger Woods era. His remarkable playing career yielded nine majors, stretching from his first, the Open Championship at Muirfield in 1959, through to the 1978 Masters, when he beat Hubert Green and Tom Watson by a shot.

Thirty years on from that afternoon at Augusta, Player retains the ability to generate headlines, most recently with his views on drugs in golf. He said at a press conference on the eve of last year’s Open Championship at Carnoustie: “I know for a fact – that there are golfers, whether it’s HGH, creatine or steroids, that some golfers are doing it [taking drugs]. And the greatest thing that the R&A, the USGA and the PGA can do is have tests at random. It’s absolutely essential that we do that. We're dreaming if we think it's not going to come into golf.”

Given the storm his comments created, and the criticism he took, you’d think he might shy away from the topic. Not a bit of it. “People are still oblivious. Colin Montgomerie asks how can human growth hormones [HGH] help us in golf? Well, it’s simple. It means you can hit it 40 yards further! It makes you so sharp, and you can practice three times as hard. They are ignorant, these people, they don’t understand.”

Since Carnoustie, the R&A and the USGA have announced their own drugs testing policy. This was to aid golf’s journey to the Olympics, which requires random drugs testing, and not, they say, a decision taken in response to Players’ comments.

The heat from the media and the locker room is not something that bothers Player. Such controversy is part of the brand. “Nobody did weight training before me. I’ve got cuttings saying ‘This man is mad, he won’t last’. When I won the Masters in ‘61, they said I’ll be finished at 35. I was ridiculed every day of my life.”

His tendency in conversation is to quote unnamed sources, making it difficult to verify what he presents as facts. When he talked of knowing players who had taken drugs, he supported this by saying ‘one man had told him’, and that he’d taken an oath not to disclose his source. Similarly, when I asked him to support his statements, he said that it was not his role to out drug takers.

Interestingly, he mentioned a Sports Illustrated article on drugs, which he says backs up what he is saying. “Eighty percent of athletes across the world are on performance enhancing drugs,” he says. “We are going to lose this battle. It’s getting worse. We’ve got 15-year-olds in America dropping dead because of what they’ve taken. As we find methods to stop it, the scientists are finding methods to hide it. I had a dinner with an IOC drugs expert who told me four 21-year-olds dropped dead in a cycle race in Geneva.

“You cannot win the Tour de France without taking some form of performance enhancing drug. Look at what’s happening in schools now. These boys of 15 are being told that they have to take drugs if they want to make the team, and their mothers are telling them to do it because they can’t afford the scholarship.

“I was in the gym the other day at the Open. This young boy was working out and he looked in incredible shape. He said, ‘You know, I went to college in America and my nickname was Bones, I was so skinny. I told my coach that I have to get stronger. They put me on stuff I don’t know what it was’. You should see this kid; he had huge muscles.”

Has golf been complacent? “Golf hasn’t seen what this stuff can do. Golf was the last sport to adopt the policy. There have been people taking beta-blockers, which is number two on our list, but they weren’t doing anything wrong because there wasn’t a policy. There were people taking human growth hormone, but again they weren’t doing anything wrong because there was no policy. Now we have a policy and every golfer knows that whatever he was doing, he can’t do it anymore. So every golfer who will be tested will be clean”.

He again refers to the Sports Illustrated story, which investigated the drugs industry ahead of the Olympics. “They are talking about splicing genes, totally undetectable. You watch rugby. Are those players normal human beings? Are they? What about the women running in the Olympics? Are they normal looking people? This is a tragedy. We are going to lose. It’s a very sad day”.

RIGHT, THEN. THAT’S DRUGS COVERED. NEXT UP: HOW THE equipment is ruining golf. Light blue touch paper, make sure the tape is running, and stand well back.

“The distances these guys are hitting the ball are making the courses obsolete. Look at the Masters. It’s frightening what they did to that golf course.Why is money being needlessly spent? From Timbuktu to Wentworth, they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Every golf club I go to, they are making them longer.Why? All they have to do is change the mould and shorten the ball. Think of that money if it was channelled in the right direction. Fewer people are playing the game because it’s time-consuming and expensive, the cost of oil and food is hitting golf. To raise the money, these courses are levying their members, and they don’t want to pay because it takes even longer to play. Maintenance costs are going sky-high. It’s all very well to sit in a committee and say lengthen the course. Well, I’ve built 250 courses and I know the costs are escalating.

“People are not aware of it. Take the money and put it in to junior golf. The R&A do a fantastic job but they have to stop the equipment manufacturers. Tiger Woods at the 18th hole in the US Open is a perfect example. The commentators missed the significance of it completely. He got backspin out of thick rough, for God’s sake!

“At Doral, Tiger hit a driver 375 in the air! 400 yards is going to be common very soon. Wait till we get a Michael Jordan out on tour. A new generation of athletes are coming through. I said this on the BBC and Peter Alliss scoffed at me. It’s the same as when I talked about drugs.”

Player says that advancements in technology by the manufacturers should be limited. They on the other hand want to maintain the link between what we see on the TV and what we buy in the shops.

“Let the technology advance for the handicap players,” says Player, rebutting the notion that we are playing with the same equipment as they do on tour. “It is different. You do not use the same equipment as the pros. Anyone who says, ‘I want to use the same equipment as Tiger Woods’ is dreaming.

You cannot do it. You wouldn’t hit it 150 yards, it would be way off line, the shafts have a different kick point, the lofts are different, the ball have a certain projection. You think you are playing the same but you are not. Take the three leading golf balls in the market today. Not one is better than the other. They are all equally good. The one which markets itself the best sells the most. If you cut the ball back 40 yards, for the pros it’s still the same, it’s still all down to marketing. But no, they will continue until we are playing 8,000 and 9,000 yard golf courses.”

THE CONVERSATION TURNS TO THE Olympics and golf’s place in it. Oddly, Player seems unprepared for this. “What do you think?” he asks me, to give himself some thinking time. I mumble something about it spreading the game, and he takes the idea and runs with it. Sort of.

“Yes. It would be nice. Instead of the money angle, it would be good to see the players compete just for the glory. The public are getting sick of seeing golfers get a fortune and at the last minute not turning up. In Sun City, one guy agreed to play and eight days before the tournament he pulled out. The promoters are putting in 65 million rand in to the tournament and the guy turns around and says he’s tired. Man, that makes me so mad. I had a speech committed to do in Boston a month ago and to play in two tournaments.

My brother-in-law died and I pulled out of the tournaments. But I got on a flight from South Africa did the speech and flew back the next day. How many young guys would do that today?”

After this diversion, he links back to the Olympics. “It would help golf. Imagine having golf at the Olympics in China. Or Russia. It would help golf manufacturers and course memberships.”

Outside the clubhouse, the golfers are being taken in buggies out to play the East Course. Each group is starting on a different hole in a shotgun start. Player will meet up with each group as they pass through the 17th hole. The occasion is to promote the work of his own charitable foundation.

The mission statement of the Player Foundation is to help educate underprivileged children and provide support for impoverished communities around the world. Its work has touched many thousands of children since its inception 25 years ago. I suggest to him that we in the west can’t really appreciate the levels of poverty that exist in Africa.

“There is no comparison,” he says quietly. “We live in a false world. The majority of the kids in the world live in poverty. I went to a school in Cape Town, a settlement. No running water. When I asked them what they were going to be, they said ‘I’m going to be president, or I’m going to be a doctor, a lawyer.’ These kids have nothing. But their positive attitude was amazing.

When I left they clung to me like leeches. I got in the car and cried my eyes out, like a baby. It gives me such a kick to see those kids. Because I was poor and I remember what it was like. Back then I said that when I’m going to be a world champion I will do something for poor people. That’s what I’m doing.We took $1.7milllion in one day in China for Aids children. In South Africa we’ve donated $10million to a fund that will be there in perpetuity.”

After 50 years, nine major championships, millions of air miles, enormous wealth and a great many controversial sound bites, it is these sort of numbers upon which Gary Player hopes his legacy might rest.