Free Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont by Adam Lazarus Page B

fee, double or nothing. I beat him every time.”
    The extra dollars went a long way toward helping to feed his family, so when Lee chose golf over school, Joe and Juanita (neither could read nor write) did not object. Although Lee had mastered the art of ditching the local truant officer, Juanita went before a judge to legalize his absences and received a work permit for her thirteen-year-old son.
    Lee persuaded the superintendent of the golf course (today known as Glen Lakes) to hire him and he earned $1,250 during that first year—a substantial sum for a young kid in 1952. In the daily company of older caddies and club members, most of whom were twice his age, he grew up fast.
    “I went from a country kid to a cool kitty from the city. I was smoking when I was ten, something I picked up from older caddies, just like the foul language. I was a little boy thrown in with men,” he remembered. “Some of them were dangerous people who carried knives and guns. Hardly a day passed that I didn’t watch a knife fight. We were shooting dice and playing cards and there always were arguments. It was an education of hard knocks.”
    Despite earning a livelihood and being surrounded by the golf culture, Trevino did not play his first complete round in a golf tournament until age fifteen, when he qualified for the Dallas Times Herald tournament by shooting a 77 at the Stevens Park municipal course. That first competitive appearance turned out to be short-lived, however, when he lost 2 & 1 in the second round of his age bracket.
    Trevino had entered the event only on the suggestion of a local driving range owner, Hardy Greenwood, who had seen him pounding balls endlessly as a skinny eight-year-old. The driving range was just a few miles from Trevino’s home, and Greenwood gave Lee a job, clubs, shoes, and entered him in the Dallas tournament.
    With extra money in his pocket and dressed like most teenagers of the day-jeans, leather motorcycle jacket, wide-collared shirts, and boots—Trevino drove around the city courting girls and trouble with the law. One night in 1956, he and a friend stole a set of hubcaps from a member of River Hills Country Club, where he now worked (he had quit the driving range after a falling-out with Greenwood). A policeman managed to crack the case—Trevino put sparkling new hubcaps on his beat-up, 1949 Ford—but let the two boys go after they returned the goods to the rightful owner.
    “Confused, unsettled, and almost seventeen,” Trevino turned to the military for guidance (and to avoid an appearance in court). On his birthday, he walked into the local marines recruiting office, passed the enlistment test, and, despite little formal education, was inducted within three weeks. A few days before Christmas 1956, he left Dallas for boot camp in California.
    After a rocky start during basic training—“I got hit in the stomach and slapped in the head so many times I lost count”—Trevino trained hard and was deployed as a machine gunner in the southwest Pacific. He reenlisted after his initial two-year hitch and, shortly afterward—to make up for an error that assigned him to kitchen duty—a captain in Okinawa offered Trevino a place in Special Services based on his golfing talents. Not surprisingly, spots on the team were highly prized and hotly contested—it was a heck of a way to satisfy one’s military obligation. Trevino earned his spot but only after he thumped a superior officer who challenged him to a match.
    “I didn’t do anything but play golf with the colonels. That’s when I really learned to play. I started out as a private, but after beating the colonels a few times, I rose to sergeant.”
    Twenty-year-old Buck Sergeant Lee Trevino returned to Dallas after his discharge in 1960, having realized that golf could rescue him from both a life of poverty and a long-term military career. He patched things up with Hardy Greenwood and returned to work at the driving range. The next spring,