His Shot
Guy Yocom, who conducted more than a hundred interviews with the game's biggest names for Golf Digest, gives the answers this time
Guy Yocom has been one of the bright lights in the golf magazine world since the mid-1980s, when he left his native Utah for a staff position at Golf Digest. The publication’s readers benefited for decades from Yocom’s smarts and curiosity, whether the topic was instruction, the rules or the pro tours. For the last two decades, Yocom was most closely associated with Golf Digest’s “My Shot,” feature, where he collaborated with more than 120 golf figures, including some of the game’s titans, in telling their stories in their own words. Many years from now, these interviews will stand as a vivid record who these people were—what made them tick, laugh and cry. The candor of their answers in print is owed in part to the skill of the person who was asking the questions you don’t see. I sat down with Yocom, 64, earlier this month to talk about his life and the craft he practiced so well. It’s “His Shot”, if you will.
To do a good interview, you’ve got to be a good listener. Even though I talk too much, when I listen, I really listen.
I was 27 when I came to Golf Digest. I’d been a sportswriter in Utah for about five years. The Standard-Examiner in Ogden, where I’d gone to college at Weber State, was far more technologically advanced than Golf Digest was when I came to work there. They presented me with a new electric typewriter. We wrote on this cheap, yellow paper. I was an assistant managing editor in my first months at the magazine, and part of my job was driving copy over to Sam Gigliotti’s typesetting company. He was a fellow with big, meaty hands but was pretty nimble on the keyboard.
I grew up in the Rose Park section of Salt Lake City. Tony Finau comes from the same neighborhood. I loved baseball as a kid and was on a Utah state championship team in the Western Boys Baseball Association. Some of the movie “The Sandlot” was filmed on the field where we played 30 years or so earlier. The Rose Park public golf course was two blocks from my house, but it cost 75 cents to play. My allowance was a dollar a week, and I didn’t want to spend it all on golf and a Coke. I’d go over there and get in trouble, looking for golf balls to sell back to the pro shop or the golfers.
I ran with a rough crowd, kind of borderline. I never got in a serious fix, but I was a free-range kid. There were issues in my family. My mom and dad got married three times to each other as they kept trying to make it work. My dad was married five times in all, my mom six times. They were good people; they just couldn’t get along. But my dad never missed a child-support payment.
When I was 18, I got a job at Rose Park as a greenkeeper and got to play for free. A neighbor gave me a set of musty old clubs, including a Ted Kroll signature driver. During and after college, I played a lot at El Monte Golf Course. Some people think Utah is this backwater, but you can go on all the rides there. I learned how to gamble at El Monte. It made you good—you had to get better. In one Calcutta, I bought myself for $50. That was a lot of money for a young reporter at the Standard-Examiner. Playing as a 7 handicap, I shot two-under 68 and won over a thousand dollars.
I don’t think I ever shot 68 again. I was like a career 5-handicap, but it was always fun. I got to play a lot with Phil Mickelson when I was working on stories with him at Golf Digest. I don’t know why, but I was never nervous. I helped Jackie Burke with a book and played some with him. There for a while he was like a second father to me.
Esquire did “What I’ve Learned,” and it was a revelation to me. You saw the answer but not the question. They would cast a really wide net—celebrities but also some surprising people like a guy in Idaho who was the potato king. It was only a page in length, or a two-page spread tops. But I saw possibilities in bringing something like that to golf.
Tommy Bolt did a book years ago, The Hole Truth, but nobody had seen that in a long time. I loved the phrase and that’s what I wanted to call my deal. But my editors just didn’t warm up to it, thinking it was too cryptic. It became “My Shot.” I wanted to do some surprising people, inventors or some character running a muny somewhere. The magazine’s thing was, go get the best people you can get.
Guy Yocom near his home in Connecticut, April 2021. (Photograph by Bill Fields)
Before starting up the My Shots, I’d done a long oral history of the ’75 Masters that was published in 1995. There were a lot of cool moments in that oral history, but one of the best was seeing Johnny Miller’s caddie, Mark Eubanks. Johnny said he used him every year at Augusta, that he was a heck of a caddie. Knew every dip and swell at that place. But he had one shortcoming. When Mark got nervous, he had trouble talking and would start sweating. Miller said it was the darnedest thing—all the sweat came out of his hands. Drip, drip, drip like you had turned on a faucet. If Miller got in contention, he told Mark not to touch his clubs because he got them wet.
I was at the Masters and was trying to find Mark Eubanks. The caddiemaster says he’d be coming by at 11 o’clock the next day for a sandwich. He did, and I told him I’d love to hear from him about the ’75 Masters. He agrees to go with me to the Digest rental house to watch the tape of the tournament. It was a beautiful old house in a ritzy part of town, and he seemed uncomfortable. People still smoked indoors in those days, and he wanted a cigarette. I had a lighter and lit his cigarette. We started watching the video and he says, “I need another light.” He was dripping sweat from his hands, just like Miller said he did, and the perspiration had put out his cigarette. His hands weren’t dripping because his player was in contention at the Masters, but because he was inside this unfamiliar, wealthy environment.
We did the first My Shot in 2002, with Sam Snead, not long before he died. He was 89 when I sat down with him. I always had a bias toward old people. They simply had seen more and done more. What’s the old saying? At a party, talk to the oldest person in the room.
These interviews were an opportunity to get off the beaten track with the subjects, to explore things that might not make a profile. What they dream about, whether they believe in ghosts, if they’ve seen a UFO. I’d go in with roughly 30 questions or jumping-off points.
I wanted to do them in a quiet place. I was demanding about that. I didn’t want to do it when they’d just come off a golf course and were tired or distracted. I told them I’d need two hours, we’ll be really thorough and that you’ll be really glad you did it. The pull of Golf Digest helped. I’d been at the magazine for 15 or 20 years, so a lot of people knew me too.
I never burned people. I just didn't like that, didn’t feel it was right. Trust was a huge part of it. Doug Sanders told me about putting a hit out on himself, ordering his own suicide because of a medical condition he was suffering with. He knew people that for $5,000 would make it look like a murder. Then he had surgery and called the guy back and told him he didn’t want it done after all. When Doug reviewed the interview, he wanted to leave the hit anecdote out, but he finally agreed to it.
These were collaborative. When someone’s telling a story, they might move on to something else and then come back to it 30 minutes later. I would put it together in a sequence that made sense. It’s all authentic, but I would help someone sound more like themselves. Jim Colbert, for instance, when he talked about the tour, would call it the circuit. So I would use that word a few times. It sounded like him. I had a little license, but I didn’t make up anything. It was as if you were ghosting a book for someone.
I promised the subjects that they could see the My Shot before it was published and change whatever they wanted. The first 70 or so people I interviewed, they hardly did anything to them. Maybe change a word here or there.
I always tried to turn in 3,000 words, and they were always really well edited by the magazine’s longtime executive editor, Mike O’Malley. I never wanted another editor, and don’t know if I could have taken another editor. He was the best. Mike would pore over them. I felt that he worked as hard on them as I did.
As the years went by, it became ridiculously harder to get folks. If players would agree, it would be for only an hour, not two. It coincided with the decline of print publications. Folks were omnipresent on the Golf Channel or the internet. They or their agents didn’t see the point. There were people that I wanted to see that I just couldn’t see. I did 12 a year for the first seven years, then didn’t do them for a while. I did more than 120 people in all.
Some people you wouldn’t think be that interesting turned out to be incredibly interesting. Eddie Merrins, for one. He wasn’t a notable tour player, but he’s been at Bel-Air Country Club for so long with so many people who’ve come through there that he’s encountered. Peggy Kirk Bell was great, and so was Kathy Whitworth. Ken Venturi was great. What a storyteller—he knew what I was shooting for. I could ask him about how to win a fistfight, about playing in Japan, about Sinatra. He knew would what be interesting. I interviewed Michelle Wie twice, once when she was 14 and the other time when she was older. She remembered me, and she remembered the first piece. Michelle was fantastic, even better when she was older, because she felt she could tell me anything.
My mom worked a bunch of jobs. One of them was at a community action center, where people would donate books and periodicals. She’d bring home boxes of books and magazines. My mom’s feeling was, read whatever you want. There would be Playboys, comic books, Shakespeare, books on the weather or World War II. She told me she didn’t care what I read; it’s all good. That’s absolutely true. You develop an ear to hear things, regional dialects, slang.
I found out through these conversations with great golfers that they have some things in common. I’d address the enormity of their accomplishments and ask how they were able to accomplish things under suffocating pressure. And the greats would almost be bemused. In a way, it was easy for them because of their approach. Hale Irwin described opportunity as door, saying some people don’t want to see what’s on the other side. They see a barrier, or they see change. Maybe they’re afraid if they achieve something, they’ll have to live up to new expectations. Some people, on the other hand, just shrug and walk right through that door. Irwin said he just went through it and would worry later. Turned out there was nothing to worry about.
There is also a certain meanness, a hardness, within most of the greats. Call it a sporting cruelty. They don’t just want to win. They want to step on your throat. It’s one of their weapons.
There were probably some other forms of stories, profiles for example, where I didn’t live up to my potential. But I got really good at the interviews and put a great deal of effort into them. Doing the My Shots turned out to be right in my wheelhouse, sort of my gift.