What Bob Goalby did and saw

The 1968 Masters champion's distinctive golf life.

When my grandmother, who was born in 1892, died four decades ago, I thought about how much she had seen and gone through during her lifetime. Then as my mother, “Ma-Ma’s” youngest child, got older, it seemed clear that Mom, who passed away three years ago at 95, had her beat when it came to living through so much given the computer and digital age. This realization might have occurred on the Christmas Day she was 90, when we got her an iPad, and I was trying to find an open convenience store where I could buy a stylus so that tablet boot camp could commence.

Bob Goalby—like Arnold Palmer, Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—was born in 1929, only half a dozen years after my mother. With the news that the 1968 Masters champion died this week at age 92, the long arc of his distinctive golf life is worth considering. His generation saw so much change in the game that it is hard to imagine another witnessing as much evolution.

Goalby is an under appreciated key figure in two chapters of professional golf. In the late-1960s, he led a cadre of players instrumental in advocating a split from the PGA of America, a development that set the stage for the modern PGA Tour. A decade or so later, Goalby was among a small group of golfers who advocated for the formation of the Senior PGA Tour, now called PGA Tour Champions, which began with two events in 1980. Goalby picked up a pair of victories as a senior to go with 11 PGA Tour titles. While helping to build up the 50-and-over circuit in its formative years, Goalby also worked as announcer on NBC’s golf broadcasts.

The senior tour helped pros of Goalby’s age and older add to the modest paydays of their primes. In Goalby’s rookie season on tour, 1958, he won a tournament, had a bunch of top-25 finishes and earned all of $11,052 for his efforts. When Goalby’s great-nephew, Bill Haas, won the 2011 FedEx Cup, he collected $10 million.

Goalby was always generous with his time talking about the old days, whether on the phone, when he was playing senior golf or at Augusta National, where he enjoyed returning each spring. Goalby enjoyed a special kinship to those who came before him in part through his close friendship with Sam Snead, who was still playing the tour when Goalby got there. Through his nephew Jay Haas, a nine-time PGA Tour winner to whom he was an influential mentor, Goalby had a close link to the professional game years after he had stopped competing. Between Jay (798), Bob (543) and Jay’s son Bill (431), they have teed it up in nearly 1,800 PGA Tour events.

The event most closely tied to Goalby, of course, is the ’68 Masters. In death he couldn’t escape the circumstances of his lone major title—” … who won the Masters after scorecard flub,” was one headline I saw today—but he had nothing to do with Roberto De Vicenzo’s final-round scorecard error that left the Argentine star one stroke behind Goalby. Tommy Aaron wrote down a 4 for De Vicenzo on the 17th hole instead of 3 he made. De Vicenzo didn’t catch the mistake before signing his card with the higher number. The Rules of Golf didn’t permit any wiggle room, but that didn’t stop the hate mail, plenty of it, from arriving at his mailbox outside St. Louis. That green jacket weighed more than everybody else’s, and not because it was sewn from heavier fabric.

All Goalby did that Sunday in Georgia was shoot a closing 66, thanks to a back-nine flourish: birdies on the 13th and 14th holes followed by an eagle-3 at No. 15. “After a fine drive down the fairway, he settled on a 3-iron,” Herbert Warren Wind wrote in The New Yorker of Goalby’s second shot on the par 5. “He played an almost perfect shot. On the flag all the way, the ball carried the pond with plenty to spare, pitched softly on the front part of the green, and finished eight feet from the hole.”

A long iron, a long time ago.