When Tiger Woods was a new pro, in the late 1990s, Sports Illustrated Golf Plus was making so much money we were taken to Daufuskie Island, S.C., to spend some of it on an "off-site" (golf junket).
By the end, with Woods competitively irrelevant, I was working for the PGA Tour amid the turmoil of a new rival league. Somewhere in the middle, for me, was a career that recalled “Almost Famous,” the Cameron Crowe film about a cub reporter for Rolling Stone who keeps inadvertently finding himself in the middle of the rock scene.
The Gunn High School kid (before Tour winner Martin Trainer got there) who hit plastic golf balls over the family swimming pool in Palo Alto, imagining himself on the iconic par-3 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass, didn’t plan this. The teen who trundled off to Cal (long before Max Homa and Collin Morikawa) couldn’t have guessed what was to come. He couldn't have known that he would be seeing a lot of one of the guys he met there, a smooth-swinging Golden Bear named John Wood, the future caddie, NBC Golf reporter and U.S. Ryder Cup Team manager.
But that’s how it all played out.
“What’s your favorite sport?” asked Sports Illustrated Chief of Reporters Jane "Bambi" Wulf during my very short interview in New York.
“Golf,” I said.
So, yeah, I was lucky, and maybe some of it was good NorCal mojo.
Once, after the Masters, I flew from Atlanta to Salt Lake City, in coach, seated next to the Bay Area rocker Huey Lewis. He had a middle seat, and made it clear he did not want to talk. He watched a lot of news.
Another time, I played Napa’s Silverado Resort with Andy Miller, the best golfer of Johnny’s four sons. Andy shot something like 67 without tying his shoes. Silverado, too, was the site of one of the last PGA Tour events I covered, won by Patton Kizzire in a week when his new performance coach had him hugging a tree and recording a rap song with his caddie. A story like that drops in your lap? Luck.
Oh, and Stanford product Maverick McNealy won the RSM Classic with little brother Scout on the bag last November, a long-awaited victory that brought tears all around and was almost too good to put into words.
Like McNealy, I'd honed my game at Stanford, where I picked the range and drove the tractor. And I, too, played some junior golf. Back then, the NorCal section’s leading juniors were guys like Mike Foster, Will Tipton and Todd Fischer. They were, to me, untouchable.
It was at Stanford that I began my career studying talents who seemed almost supernatural. Arizona State’s Billy Mayfair chipped in for eagle at the par-5 opener and quipped that he was just trying to keep up with his playing partners, who’d hit the green in two. Arizona’s Robert Gamez oozed stardom. Woods, much younger, would easily surpass them.
I was gone by the time he arrived on The Farm, having begun my own career in the game. I would talk books with Rory McIlroy, waterski with Rory Sabbatini, play golf with Greg Norman. At the 2004 Open Championship at Troon, I gave winner Todd Hamilton a ride to the victory party, but the restaurant was closed, the staff inside eating their dinners. A few waiters and waitresses eyed us through the glass.
“Todd,” I said. “Take the Claret Jug out of the case.”
He did, and the staffers’ eyes went wide as they threw their heads back and laughed. We were in. Thus began an unlikely victory party for us both, one a journeyman, the other a writer friend of his caddie’s.
There was an element of absurdity to my job. At Maximum Golf, we posed Melania Trump in a bathtub full of golf balls, replicating a photo of LPGA bombshell Jan Stephenson. Around that time, at an Omega event with a real grass putting green at Grand Central Station, I won a putting contest and shook hands with brand ambassador Ernie Els as the cameras flashed. “It’s like you won a tournament, man,” Els said, handing me (gulp) a watch I should have returned.
Maximum Golf, bless its daffy soul, lasted all of 12 issues, and soon I was back under the Time Inc umbrella at Golf Magazine. That's where I was when I lucked into a story I never wrote about but still tell socially.
In 2015, Bill Clinton came to the old Bob Hope tournament in Palm Desert, which benefited the Clinton Foundation. I’d just seen him at the SI Sportsman of the Year banquet at Chelsea Piers, where he had spoken eloquently about the importance of teamwork. In Palm Desert, he piled out of a town car and I introduced myself, saying I’d liked his speech.
“What’d you say your name is?” he asked as we shook hands. I told him. We walked that way for a few paces, him not letting go, until a Secret Service agent tapped me on the shoulder. Clinton released my hand, and we went our separate ways. I had heard about his uncanny memory, and he did not disappoint, for some six hours later, as he walked beside Patrick Reed to bestow an award to a serviceman on the 18th green, Clinton caught sight of me. “Cameron,” he said.
The Open returned to Troon last July, by which time I was writing for the PGA Tour itself. That famous 17th hole at the Stadium Course, which I'd imagined as I lobbed balls over our swimming pool in Palo Alto, was now a five-minute walk, max, out the back of the office. Full circle.
In Troon, Todd missed the cut, I caught a cold, and our Italian place was gone. Xander Schauffele won, and I filed my story and went out with friends to an Indian restaurant. Looking around, I realized it had replaced the Italian spot where I brought Hamilton in 2004. Full circle again.
The golf gods seemed to be up to something, and in February, I got an email from the Masters. This was going to be my 20th year covering it; as a thank you, I would get to bring someone. I called my guy Mike and felt a lump in my throat as I began to explain the situation.
My parents never played; Mike, who grew up in Greenwich, Conn., was my entry point to golf. I was lucky he’d moved to NorCal when we were 13 or so after his parents split, and lucky he’d stuck with me even as I struggled to get the ball airborne on the endless par-5 opening hole at Palo Alto Muni. We also played the nine-hole short course at the VA, now paved over. Mike would win club championships, which I could have predicted, but I couldn't even imagine myself as an adult.
Mike was iffy on the Masters, but our call, he said, meant everything. As it turned out I wouldn’t be at Augusta, either, after a layoff. I told myself that it was time, that I was exhausted. The Tour and LIV were now leaning on President Trump, God help them, in their negotiations.
My last day, March 14, was my birthday. It was a gift, all of it, and you’d better believe that kid driving the tractor at Stanford would have taken it.
In my first Masters, in 1998, I was assigned to help the great SI writer Steve Rushin. After it was over, I happened upon Stuart Appleby’s wife Renay, who would die in a traffic accident later that year. She told me that Mark O’Meara’s two children had been too little to see over the crowd when his putt dropped on 18, so she spun around and screamed over the accompanying roar, “You won! You won! You won!”
I crashed the party. I had a blast. I won. I won. I won.