Shinnecock Hills and its six Opens are a bridge in the history of the game – and mine

SOUTHAMPTON, NY — Welcome to the Open! That, ours The Open, our American national championship, or this Shinnecock Hills golf course, built by the men of Shinnecock, seems to have flown in from Scotland. The South Fork of Long Island is a big sand pit, really. American linksland, if there was such a thing.

You’ll hear more in the coming days about course changes, maintenance and more. Forgive me: I’ve been to this Shinnecock course regularly over the years, as a caddy, reporter and guest player, and I can say that the course doesn’t change at all. To me, it’s a swaying, pale field of wind-blown bumpiness. Shinnecock Hills is beautiful, in a painful, timeless and challenging way. Like golf: beautiful, in a bad way, timeless and challenging. A stationary ball, golf on it, courage and doubt swirling in the north. It is true for them and it is true for us. The second hand of the clock is ticking. If you walk well, the waggle can feel like it’s taking-ev– er? OK?

Golf makes time in weird and wonderful ways. Michael Murphy invites you to “Golf in the Kingdom” with this: “The game was invented a billion years ago — don’t you remember?” Golf loves wind, too, and this holy week on deck looks as windy as you’d hope, with the course flying from a distance. Here (again) is John Updike, in honor of the old linksland wanderings: “This was happiness, in this wilderness between the tracks and the sea, and freedom, of the wild and spiritual kind.” One player will leave this 126th US Open, and the sixth played here, very happy. He will have his name on the medal forever.

On Father’s Day 1986, Raymond Floyd won the second Open played here at Shinnecock Hills. An hour or so after Floyd’s victory, I found myself sitting in the press booth one row behind Joe Gergen, a sports columnist. Newsday. Gergen was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with small flowers and was writing on a typewriter. He kept quiet and laughed at something with a scribe on his right elbow. I was 26 years old. I happily carry the photo to this day.

I just re-read the story Gergen posted that night. (Thank you, Newspapers.com.) His first words from Floyd: “Normally, I express my happiness through tears.” Gergen’s entire column, in fact, revolves around Floyd’s eyes. You get a little bit and take it out – and I started to take that. Golf and writing were already important aspects of my life, but more cement was poured that night. A few weeks earlier, Gergen had written a kind column about my first book, an account of my brief stint as a touring caddy. A 40th anniversary edition of that book has just been published. The march of time.

I can hardly believe it, the blink of it all. I can see the morning of my childhood almost in real time. Maybe it’s the same for you. There are papers on the dirt road of our house in Patchogue, about 30 miles west of here. My neighboring town, Bellport, had a municipal course where I played all the weekday afternoon golf I wanted, in high school and college. (We played quickly to finish.)

My brother and I, as kids, read Dave Anderson and Red Smith in the sports section New York TimesRussell Baker on his Op-Ed page, William Safire’s “Languages” column, a host of others, Cap’n Crunch watching everything through the letterbox. I had an 8th grade gym teacher who taught an intro-to-golf class, plastic balls aimed at basketball hoops. That class changed my life. My first US Open (so to speak) was in ’74, at Winged Foot, mostly with newspaper coverage, and broadcasting. Watson, Trevino, Palmer. Hale Irwin won. Watson won the British Open one year later. I was surprised.

Luck has an eternal shelf life, right?

A bookish junior golfer in Western Pennsylvania read my wee caddy memoir, my first book, when I was 12 years old – and as I turned thirty it became my editor. (Good luck.) This new edition is his, along with Brad Faxon, who wrote its introduction.

At the ’86 Open at Shinnecock, Faxon, then a tour pro and now (we all know him) a veteran broadcaster, was one of the first, ready to play when someone came out. I played him in practice rounds on Tuesday and Wednesday. When no one backed out, he flew to Chattanooga to play a very small event there. He won. I traded my caddy badge for a press pass and saw Joe Gergen play Sunday night. A few months later, I was hired as a high school sports writer The Philadelphia Inquirer. The editor said, “I like the way he goes around the country selling cheap things, doing that money-making thing.” (Cheap flights on People Express — my daily commute to the big city.) I suddenly had colleagues who really knew Joe Gergen and Dave Anderson, among my other deadline heroes.

Hero worship is no longer a thing. Maybe we expected too much. Tiger Woods was always good at working on his golf weaknesses. Apply as you wish. Some parts are other parts. How much does Paul McCartney’s unbridled joy in music, his own and others’, inspire that? When he was 24 and 44 and 64, you could see that joy on his shy face, and you can still, 84 knock on his door. (You don’t work for music, McCartney said; you play it.)

Roger Angell, the late baseball writer and author, was at the peak of his powers in his 90s. Inspiration. Gary Player used to say, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” All over the world at that. Yep, lots of XY here. Excuse me while I shout and shout, cell phone glowing in hand, with these four: Susan Orlean, Kate McKinnon, Bonnie Raitt, Meryl Streep. (Writer, comedian, singer, Meryl Streep.) The words alone make you want to turn up the volume, do a little dance, raise your game. Isn’t that right?

The first US Open at Shinnecock Hills was held in 1896. I was there for the next four, in 1986, 1995, 2004 and 2018. And I have a press pass – press confirmation – for this one. luck-eh. After 40 years, Joe Gergen’s example continues to inspire me. This is the life of typing.

As we finished a round of nine holes earlier this year (on the soft remains of the US Open course), one of my regular playing partners said he hadn’t read my first book.

“Please don’t,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“It’s bad.”

“Then why are they bringing it out again?”

“Well, it has a certain charm.”

In 1985, when I was trying to become a professional golfer, the Pebble Beach pro-am was still named after Bing Crosby. By ’86, Bing was out and AT&T was in. I feel like I caught the PGA Tour in its last year as a mom-and-pop operation. I had a caddy-yard mentor named Killer, who won the 1979 Open with Hale Irwin at Inverness. When my pro missed the cut at the US Open at Oakland Hills in ’85, we spent the weekend parking on the front lawn of our hosts. At the BC Open in Endicott, NY, I stayed in a cabin for $5 a night. I was a recovering English student trying to make it as a vagabond caddy. The stakes may sound low but they were high then. They were high for me.

I didn’t know what I was doing, not as a caddy, not as a writer. But I loved you, everything. The golf, the scene, the waning excitement, an attempt to capture it all in typed words. Forty years later, nothing has changed, except now I know what everyone of a certain age ends up saying. George Bernard Shaw said that youth is wasted on the young. Pithy and true. This is not pithy but it is painfully, incredibly true: It goes by so fast. This week will go by so fast. Everything is moving very fast. Dance while you can.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com