Yesterday’s Nine - The Willie Way

by Turk Pipkin

"You gotta understand," Willie Nelson tells me as we start our fourth nine of the day, "Golf isn't just a game. It's an addiction."

His blue eyes shining like wrinkled sapphires, Willie then makes one of his patented loopy swings, launching a near-perfect drive.

"I press you for a million pesos!" he says with a grin. "Double on birdies!"

I guess my Willie story really starts back in 1980 – a time when I was recently single and spending wasted days and wasted nights in crummy bars that never seemed to close. Somehow I always managed to make it home, but the truth is you can only live like that for so long.

One night, seeing that I hadn’t slept in about a week, songwriter Steve Fromholz invited me to come out the next morning and play a little golf with Willie and the gang at Pedernales (for you non-Texans, that's pronounced purd-n-Alice, though I defy anyone to explain why). Though I’d grown up in West Texas with golf in my blood, I hadn’t played a lick in eight years and this seemed like an embarrassing way to find out whether I could still hit it.

But golf with Willie seemed too good to turn down so I dug out my old Wilson X-31’s and made my way to the course. Already gathered on the first tee were Fromholz, novelist and sportswriter Bud Shrake and Willie Nelson hisownself who, like the others, had already hit his opening shot. Pretty damn nervous about my extended lay-off, I inquired as to the location of the driving range.

All three of them pointed to the first fairway.

“That is the driving range,” said Fromholz.

With a golf ball-sized lump in my throat, I closed my eyes and miraculously whacked one about 250 yards.

“Nine years, my ass,” said Willie, and we were off.

Having rediscovered the game for a lifetime, I soon wised up, traded the night life for the right wife, and began to do what I’d always wanted to do, which was to write. The writing, by the way, really took off when I published a novel called "Fast Greens" that was set at Pedernales Golf Club. So there you have it: Pedernales and Willie Nelson changed my life.

Here’s how the Willie game usually goes down.

First I get a call letting me know I should forget about getting any work done because the man in town and the game is afoot. By the time I get to the course, Willie is usually on his second or third loop around the hilly nine-hole track, but there’s no problem finding him. I just head out to the hole where between five and fifteen golfers in an equal number of carts are scattering balls in all directions, usually claiming whichever ball they find as their own, and making outrageous bets which will never be paid.

For the rest of the day, it's hit fast, drive fast, move it off the rocks and roots which litter the course, and don’t try to tell a joke if you have to think to remember the punch line. In other words, golf the Willie way.

"I first saw Pedernales playing in a celebrity tournament in the mid-seventies,” Willie told me recently on his custom tour bus as he made mental preparations for the game ahead. The air on the bus, by the way, is almost guaranteed to make you forget a lifetime of swing thoughts. I've long-thought there ought to be a sign on the door reading, “Ye who enter here, abandon all hope of breaking 90... on the front nine."

“A year or two later another guy and I bought the club,” continued Willie. “Then I let him have it, but later I bought it back. Then I lost it to the IRS ,so Darrell Royal and Jim Bob Moffett bought it back for me. The Feds said my guys didn’t pay enough for it, so the IRS took it back and sold it to an Iranian fellow. We didn’t get along so I convinced a theater owner in Branson, Missouri to buy it for me and I did six months of shows to pay him back. So I guess I’ve paid for this course a few times."

Why, you wonder, would a guy notorious for his money troubles pay for a golf course several times over? Well the obvious answer is that he wouldn’t be complete without it. Pedernales is his home.

“I was in Tokyo once,” Willie reminisced, “Couldn’t get anything I wanted to eat, drink or smoke, and I couldn’t find a place to play golf. So I got to thinking about Larry Trader back at Pedernales, sitting out there on the front porch of the pro shop and playing every day, and I thought, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?' ”

Larry Trader is the course's pro and guardian angel. Since the day they first saw the course, he and Willie have taken on all comers in marathon matches for big-time bragging rights.

"Our finest day was when Willie and I scrambled against Treviño," Trader tells me proudly as the course's pet peacock fans its tail nearby. "Lee shot a six-under 30 on his own ball and we had to shoot 29 to beat him."

"The secret of golf," says Willie. "Is all in picking your partner."

Another of Willie's long time golf partners is former University of Texas football Coach Darrell Royal who once knocked Willie nearly unconscious by throwing him a two iron and beaning him in the head.

"Am I bleeding out the ears?" asked Willie after he'd picked himself up off the ground. Royal shook his head. "Then I guess I'm not hurt," concluded Willie.

"What you have to understand about Willie," says Royal, "Is that he doesn't care about score; he just wants to play golf. And nothing's going to keep him from it. In the dead of winter, he used to play Pedernales in his Mercedes because it had the best heater."

And play Willie does, hitting it from dawn till dark-thirty, then heading to his clubhouse/recording studio where nights often alternate between playing music, pool, poker, dominoes or chess. What all of these activities have in common, in case you didn't notice, is the word play.

A proud practical joker, one of Willie’s rituals has been to take a guest in his cart to the third hole and drive at full speed towards a large, low-hanging oak limb that by all appearances will soon rip the top off the cart. Of course, having done this a hundred times, Willie knows the limb is exactly one eighth of an inch taller than the cart.

When legendary golf journalist Bob Drum was in town filming one of “Drummer’s Moments” for CBS sports, Willie had a chance to immortalize his little stunt.

“Holyshitdogcrap!” screamed Drum as the cart raced at the limb, an invective string that caused the rest of our group to pretty much fall out of our own carts laughing. Red-faced and flustered, Drum still had Willie go back and do it again for the cameras.

“That limb has always been one of Willie’s favorite escapes from the real world,” says Trader. “Putting people through that little thrill just to make them loosen their grip on all the things they’re so sure of.”

Unfortunately, Trader had a new guy trimming trees last year who wasn’t in on the joke. Whacked Willie's favorite limb off with a chain saw.

“Damn near broke Willie’s heart,” laments Trader.

Willie first became known as a golfer when he was quoted as having said, "Par at my course is whatever I say it is. Today I made a fourteen on the first hole and it turned out to be a birdie."

Despite the snappy sound of this, Willie no longer remembers saying it, and anyone who's played with him knows he'd pick up his ball long before making a fourteen.

When the Legends of Golf was still held in Austin, Treviño showed up every Spring. He’d take six or eight of us out onto the course for a playing lesson, talking a mile a minute in his backswing, saying, “Here’s how I like to hit it." Then pow, he'd bust it what seemed like a mile.

“I’ve been working on my long game,” Lee told us the year he turned 50. “So I can make a buck or two on the senior tour.” He then proceeded to tee up a ball and knock it on the green of the downhill par four, a distance of 345 yards.

“Lee could do that,” says Willie. “Because the golf swing is a part of him, like walking and talking. That’s the way a guitar is to me. And that’s the basis of our friendship.”

“Willie Nelson plays guitar like it’s an extension of his body and soul," says Kris Kristofferson. "Totally responsive to the power of his imagination.”

And when he puts the guitar down and picks up the golf club, more often than you’d think, the same thing seems to happen.

"Every now and then," Willie wrote in his autobiography, "All this action comes together just right and you hit a golf shot that is so beautiful that you wouldn't trade it for an orgasm."

One of the best things about golf at Willie-World is you never know who'll show up. I got a kick out of rock-n-roller Neil Young who waited glumly for a video session until jumping at an invitation to play a few holes with Willie while the cameras got set. Strangest of all was an afternoon spent teeing it up with Willie and the Sherriff of McClennan County, who'd just bailed his old picking buddy Willie out of jail after he was busted by an over-eager deputy for having been asleep by the side of his road with a roach visible in his ashtray.

Actor Dennis Hopper was in Austin making a B-movie sequel to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. His career at an all-time low-point, Hopper had recently cleaned up his act, quitting alcohol and drugs, and he was on the verge of a comeback with the impending releases of "Hoosiers" and "Blue Velvet." In the meantime, he was bored.

“How do you spend all your time,” he asked old pal Bud Shrake who had also recently given up his chemical habits.

“Golf,” answered Shrake who, when he’s not playing is likely to be watching, reading, or dreaming about the vagaries of the golf swing.

“So I took Hopper to a golf shop,” recalls Shrake. “He laid down a credit card for a full set and we went out to Pedernales and started hitting it.”

Whether it was the place, the friends or simply the game, Hopper was hooked. For the next six or eight weeks, when the game was on – which was every day of course – Hopper was there. And when Larry and Linda Trader were married at sunset on the seventh tee, Hopper cried like a baby. Pedernales will do that to you

"People want to know everything about the golfswing," says Willie. “But Trader always told me to 'just hit the ball.' Its not anything special. Little kids usually hit it great the first swing. Lots of people do. But when they start getting instruction, they go all to hell. Kristofferson and I are going to do a golf instruction video. He has the worst swing in the world and I’m the worst teacher, so it’s basically gonna be about cowboy-zen golf. It’s the only thing we know."

Cowboy-zen golf. That's Willie to a tee.

Not too long ago I went to Pedernales on a Monday when the course was closed and the carts locked up. I suggested to Willie that, despite the daunting hills, we should walk for a change. Taking five clubs each we teed off from number seven, pausing a moment to take in the distant views of the beautiful Texas Hill Country.

I should have known I'd never slow him down. As we headed down the fairway, Willie started jogging toward his ball, an activicty which he continued for the full nine holes. We must have made quite a picture, 64-year old musical legend dashing from shot to shot and 44-year old golf writer trying his best to keep up.

“You know what I like about golf," Willie asked me as I gasped for breath. "You can play it a long time. The way I see it, it’ll keep you from weaving baskets."