Earlier this year, while researching a story about the 1971 Walker Cup match at St Andrews, I e-mailed Ben Wright, the well-known British golf journalist who had covered the event, as indeed I had, to see if our memories of it chimed. In particular, I wanted to check whether he had said if GB&I won, the team could throw him into the Swilcan Burn. Also, whether he drove a sports car and whether he had been at the same public school in Essex as Neil Allen, a famous boxing and athletics writer on The Times.
In a short space of time, I received a cheery e-mail from Wright, reprinted here in part.
“Flat Rock is a lovely little village in the Blue Ridge mountains, and I live at 3,500 feet above sea level. I am super fit for an 88-year-old! Our county was devastated by COVID, but my wife and I have been vaccinated. Neil Allen and I shared a study at Felsted School and were close friends. I stupidly wrote in the FT (Financial Times) that if the home team won the 1971 match they could throw me in the Swilcan Burn, and when they came looking for me I fled to my hotel room! I don’t remember much about the match, I regret to say, only that the Brits and Irish were heroic. Michael Bonallack told me later that I was their inspiration!
“Sorry to be so unhelpful, but my memory is not what it once was! Every good wish to you from Ben.”
Wright was one of a line of British journalists or golfers to transition successfully from the printed word in Britain to commentating about golf on American television.
He subsequently confirmed he had indeed owned and driven sports cars, always white in colour and always convertibles. Sports cars and a man with a double-barrelled name such as Bentley-Wright were a racy combination. I later discovered he had been married five times. Some might say that was pretty racy, too.
Ben died last week of complications following surgery to help him recover from a fall in which he had broken two vertebrae. He was the second distinguished television commentator from Europe to die within a short space of time after Göran Zachrisson, a suave Swede whose English was better than many Englishmen’s, passed away after nearly 50 years as one of his country’s most revered sports commentators. Both loved golf, were good story tellers and good dinner table companions.
“I talked to him (Wright) recently and he was as usual funny, quick with a phrase and eloquent,” tweeted Peter Kostis, the swing coach and former TV golf analyst. “Rest in peace Bentley.” Danielle Tucker, who hosts a golf show on Hawaii radio, said: “Ben was one of the most affable people I’ve had the pleasure to talk with on my golf show.”
Wright was one of a line of British journalists or golfers to transition successfully from the printed word in Britain to commentating about golf on American television. Henry Longhurst was the first, as incomparable a broadcaster as he was a writer, while Peter Alliss was perhaps the most revered. Not long after Longhurst came Wright, whose work continued in the Financial Times well after he had moved to the U.S. and started to work for CBS Sports, commentating, most notably perhaps, on the 15th hole at the Masters. The calm and thoughtful insights of Peter Oosterhuis, the ex-Ryder Cup player, made him welcome on U.S. TV and Renton Laidlaw’s Scottish burr, and the hint of merriment in his voice, guaranteed him success. Why? “Our great golf commentators from your side of the pond tend to be pretty relaxed overall,” Judy Rankin, herself a distinguished American voice on televised golf, wrote in an e-mail. “They make golf such a pleasant listen/the accent doesn’t hurt! Maybe generally less technical.”
Like Longhurst and Alliss, Wright had an enviable way with words. “He was able to produce the required phrase seemingly without needing time to compose his thoughts,” Laidlaw said of his one-time colleague on television in Britain. “In that, he was as close to Peter Alliss as you could get.”
In Golf Digest, John Feinstein recounted a gem of Wright’s while commentating on what appeared to be slow play by three players at a U.S. tournament. “With little else to do while the players dawdled, CBS producer Frank Chirkinian cut to a group of ducks hanging out around a pond that fronted the green,” Feinstein wrote. “Without missing a beat, Ben Wright, sitting in the tower above, said: ‘When this round began those were eggs.’ ”
“Ben was fearless. ... He knew he had the ability to do the job. He did not lack confidence. He was a half-full sort of fellow, very genial, someone who was never down."
Renton Laidlaw
Wright’s career at CBS ended in the mid-1990s after he had made some unwise remarks about lesbians and golf, and women’s anatomy being unsuitable when making a golf swing to a local female journalist in Wilmington, Delaware. Wright subsequently denied saying these words and CBS backed him strongly. When it later emerged the journalist had accurately reported Wright’s comments, CBS suspended Wright in January 1996. A storied broadcasting career on U.S. television ended.
“Ben was fearless,” Laidlaw said. “There was nothing too reserved about him. He knew he had the ability to do the job. He did not lack confidence. He was a half-full sort of fellow, very genial, someone who was never down. He had a terrific personality. People liked him.”
In her e-mail, Rankin said: “I thought the things he said that got him in trouble should not have ended his career. Way too harsh! He certainly was entertaining on TV.”
Not long after our exchange of e-mails back in May, another one arrived from Wright. “I simply have to tell you how I became Ben,” he wrote. “My given name was John Bentley-Wright. When I came out of the Army I took a job promised to me when I edited the school magazine … I became a cub reporter on the Daily Dispatch in Manchester, and the night news editor hated me as a public school toff. He was an obese scum from Bradford named Maurice Wigglesworth. He gave me every dirty little job until one night he sent me out on the moors in a snowstorm to report on a horrendous crash between a truck load of sugar and a coach load of teenaged mill workers. I penned my epic and signed it with my given name. Wigglesworth looked me up and down and asked me if I thought the ‘columns of this newspaper run horizontally to accommodate your f---ing name.’ ”
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