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With his bull-like physique and a handshake that could bend steel, Sergio Gómez won most of his battles. He lost his last one May 27 when he died of cancer in San Sebastián, Spain, a little more than one month past his 75th birthday. With that, golf lost a good man. “All men die, but not all men live,” José María Olazábal once said. It was true of Gómez, his lifelong friend, a man of principle, who knew how to enjoy himself, who was genial and good company to the end. “He was the sort of man you wanted on your side in a bar late at night,” Ken Schofield, a former executive director of the European Tour, said.
For years Gómez travelled the world as the manager, friend, confidant, adviser, companion, sometime caddie of Olazábal and to see the two of them together, whether on a golf course or off it, was to see one man devoted to the other. They were Basques from San Sebastián, where the airport may be so uncertain of its place geographically that its runway begins in France and ends in Spain. But rarely were two people so comfortable in their own skins, dignified, proud Spaniards, humble in origin and noble in character and demeanour.
“Because you so loved José María and Sergio Gómez was such a unique personality you would forgive Sergio anything,” Guy Kinnings, formerly of IMG and now deputy chief executive of the European Tour, said. “He was quite a character. It is very rare for people to work with just one player. As far as I know I don’t think he worked with any others and he never showed any interest in working with any others. He did a good job for José María. Because he was so not a shark and so not trying to sell, you found yourself almost selling to him. You’d go, ‘What do you think would be a reasonable figure?’ and he wouldn’t know and so you’d find yourself saying ‘I’ve got to be fair here,’ and you were almost negotiating with yourself. Sergio was sitting there thinking I’ll leave him to it and he’ll talk himself up. He was always so nice. It was unique.
“I have never been to his office but I am told that it was not like IBM or Apple head office. I believe it was a scene of not even controlled chaos. A lot of unpaid cheques and invoices, some that we had sent him to send to us so that we could pay him. I’d have loved to have seen it. There was this guy managing one of the greatest talents we have ever seen. It was terribly appealing.”
It was no surprise to learn that when Gómez played rugby his position was tight head prop, the cornerstone of a scrum. Of his voice you could say it growled and of his grip, suffice to say that you never forgot it. And his character was as strong as his grip. “He was of a different era,” George O’Grady, another former chief executive of the European Tour, said. “He was emotional, convivial and unique. When you made a deal with him you shook hands and then each had a whisky. His word was his bond.”
Sergio Gómez's lifelong association with José María Olazábal was striking for its length and steadfastness. How many other managers carried their player’s golf bag, as Gómez did for Olazábal so often, once at the Masters?
I first met him more than 30 years ago when I flew to Spain to interview Olazábal, then the hotshot young golfer, a successor to Seve Ballesteros. Gómez met me at the airport, took me to the golf club, oversaw my interview and after we had eaten dinner together we shook hands and said our goodbyes at the airport. From that moment on, he became someone whose company I sought because I knew I would learn from him. I would learn all about José María, the only player he managed, about the European Tour, about the PGA Tour in the US, about Seve. He had an air of wisdom about him. “He was a knowing fellow and had a knowing feeling about him,” Schofield remembered. “You learned a lot from him. He was a significant force in world golf.” Isabel Trillo Amores, the respected Spanish golf writer for whom English is a second language, said: “He made great the motto: You will never go to bed without knowing something else.”
His lifelong association with Olazábal was striking for its length and steadfastness. How many other managers carried their player’s golf bag, as Gómez did so often, once at the Masters? They were singular men and with Maite, Sergio’s first wife, they formed an unbreakable trio. Maite was almost a second mother to Olazábal. “When Maite feels she has to tell him she does not like his attitude or the way he is facing a problem, she tells him,” Sergio Gómez told me in 1999. “José María is a very, very good hearer. He attends to things that are said to him.”
In that same interview, Gómez explained to me the closeness between he and Olazábal in the following way. “We lived together during the Masters in 1985 and he and I found that my vocation was babysitter, nurse, driver, caddie, manager. I was holding a meeting in our hotel when José María said, ‘Sergio, remember at 11:15 we are leaving.’ I could tell him to take the car and I would get another courtesy car but to him that is not thinkable. At 11:15 I am the driver so I have to finish my meeting. That is the spirit of our relationship.”
Journalists liked Sergio because he talked freely, not worrying that we would write something that might let him down. The phrase “off the record” did not come from his mouth very often. He put his trust in us, which was flattering, and that trust was repaid because we didn’t write things he would rather we hadn’t. It would have been a breach of confidence and while we might have done that to some, we wouldn’t have dreamed of doing it to Sergio. Imagine his wrath had we done so.
“I have a personal memory of him with Darren (Clarke), Lee (Westwood) and their caddies Billy Foster and John Graham in a bar in Japan,” Chubby Chandler recalled. “It was very small, barely enough room for the six of us. We watched the film Pulp Fiction in there, which was bizarre. Then we got on the karaoke. We were all singing and he was trying to sing along with us but he didn’t know the words until he found the Spanish song La Cucaracha. He sang with all the passion of a Spaniard, lots of ‘rrr's’ in it, in his tenor voice. I remember we were crying laughing watching him singing with such pride and such gusto.”
Gómez had been battling cancer for several years and by last month it had so eaten away at this once mighty man that he was reduced to a husk. He and Olazábal had begun their world odyssey together, travelling in a Seat 600 car. Now they ended it together, with death close by. They talked, ate lunch and sometimes when Gómez was strong enough they went for walks. “He died peacefully and quietly,” Olazábal said of his lifelong friend.
Top: Sergio Gómez and José María Olazábal
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