ORLANDO – When Lee Trevino started prepping to compete in this year’s PNC Championship, the World Golf Hall of Fame member and six-time major champion topped several balls on the range. Was arguably the best ball-striker in the game lifting his head? Say it ain’t so.
“I never, ever remember doing this in my life,” Trevino said.
His son, Daniel, 31, who is his partner in the two-person scramble format team event that begins on Saturday at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club, suggested he go see renowned instructor Randy Smith, who teaches world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler. But Trevino made a vow many years ago that he wouldn’t take a lesson from anybody that he could beat. Trevino dialed up Smith and when he answered he said, “Have you got 15 minutes to look at me? I think you can beat me now.”
The lesson helped. Trevino recounted on the Subpar podcast that five weeks ago he made a birdie and nine pars and shot 82 in a fundraiser at Dallas National.
“What are you complaining about?” Daniel said. “You broke your age.”
Trevino, 84, calls the PNC Championship his major and he talks about it all year. He’s played in every edition dating to the inaugural event in 1995 when 10 major winners gathered with their sons. He’s assumed the role of the field’s elder statesman, which has evolved to feature 20 major champions (including women such as Annika Sorenstam) and their relatives competing for the Willie Park Trophy. There’s a wait list just to get in the field.
“It’s like people trying to qualify for Augusta,” Trevino said.
PNC: Saturday tee times | Photos
It’s interesting that he should mention the Masters, the only one of the four majors that he never won. He’s failed to win the PNC Championship, too, but the family gathering reflects the growing importance that familial bonds have come to mean to him.
Trevino never knew his father and that absence surely affected Trevino’s outlook on life. He grew up in a household where he rarely heard an encouraging word and re-enacted his youth with his children. “I gave them the roof over their heads, but I didn’t give them the love,” he said. “I was a screamer. I’d have a few beers and get crazy with the kids.”
Rick Trevino, his oldest, recalled in a first-person magazine article that his father would fly in to visit him once or twice a year in Green City, Missouri, where Rick lived with Trevino’s first wife, Linda, and they would speak by phone once every month or two, but otherwise they didn’t have much of a relationship. In later years, Rick would serve as his father’s caddie at the Legends of Golf when it was held at Big Cedar Lodge in Branson, Missouri, not far from where he lived. Lesley, Tony and Troy — his children from his second marriage — became accustomed to a house in which their father was rarely present. It was nothing for him to be gone for eight consecutive weeks. In a Sports Illustrated article, Trevino was once asked if his son Tony had come to resent his absent father. “I think so,” Trevino said, “and I don’t blame him.
“My wives raised four kids that I did not know. I had no clue who they were. I didn’t go to a high school basketball game or a recital. I went to graduation, and that’s it,” he said. “Before I knew it, they were grown up and gone.”
Trevino credits Jack Nicklaus for demonstrating a better way. He recounted teaming with Nicklaus at the 1971 World Cup in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. When they finished a practice round, Trevino suggested that they hit the range. Nicklaus had other ideas. His oldest child, Jackie, had a high school football game. Trevino joined Nicklaus at the stadium. “Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever done that,” Trevino said
Only later in life did Trevino figure out how to emulate Nicklaus.
“Golf was his living, but he didn’t make it his life,” Trevino told Golf Digest’s Dave Shedlodski of Nicklaus. “I put golf first, and he taught me that was a mistake. I’m a better father now than I ever was. That’s Jack’s impact on me. It says a lot that it has nothing to do with golf.”
Trevino’s youngest children, Olivia and Daniel, were the beneficiaries of their father’s epiphany. The third time was the charm. His family with Claudia Bove, his third wife, became his priority, and nothing stood in the way of time spent with Olivia, born in 1989, and Daniel, who came along four years later. “I’ve been given a mulligan,” Trevino once said. “I was a father before, but not a dad.”
In the early years of the team event, Trevino alternated playing with Tony in odd years and Rick in even years. But once Daniel made his debut in 2006, there’s been no rotation. Parental pride swells inside of Trevino whenever he talks about playing golf with Daniel. “You can’t separate us,” Trevino said. “He’s gonna reap from all the neglect I did my other kids.”
While Nicklaus and fellow contemporaries Raymond Floyd and Hale Irwin have all stopped competing in the father-son, Trevino shows no signs of calling it a day, even if his knees may ache, and according to tournament founder Alastair Johnston, he has a lifetime exemption into the limited field.
“He supported me in this event from the beginning and I told him, ‘You can come back for as long as you want,’ and I’ve kept my word,” Johnston said.
And so Team Trevino rolls on. Two years ago, they held the lead with four holes to go only to finish T-3.
“As soon as we get on the plane and go back we start reminiscing about where we made the mistakes and what we need to work on for next year,” Trevino said. “We talk about it all year.”
