Senior amateur champion Vinny Giles
JUNO BEACH, Fla - The term "lifelong amateur" is disappearing from the golf lexicon, given that everybody with any game turns pro these days. But Vinny Giles is one of the few great amateurs to have refrained from turning pro. Giles, 68, chatted for a good 90 minutes this week in a coffee shop here. He knows everybody in the game.
Giles, a Virginian who spends his winters here and who belongs to the famed Seminole Golf Club, won the 1972 U.S. Amateur, the 1975 British Amateur, the 2009 U.S. Senior Amateur, seven Virginia State Amateurs and three of his home state's Opens. He played on four U.S. Walker Cup teams and captained the 1993 side. Giles played nine Masters and made the cut in three. He made the cut in both U.S. Opens that he played.
Educated as a lawyer, Giles later started a player management company. His clients included Tom Kite, Davis Love III and Lanny Wadkins. He's wrapped up that company although he continues to represent Wadkins and his brother Bobby, also a tour pro. He's a close observer of the game - amateur and pro.
When it comes to the PGA Tour, Giles wishes PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem had taken "more of a stance" on a couple of matters. He said that there simply hasn't been enough consideration to sponsors, for one thing.
"The Tour should insist that every player has to enter every tournament at least once every four or five years," Giles said. "Why can't the Tour say that as of 2012 that's the rule?"
Good question. You'd think the PGA Tour would provide every sponsor an increased likelihood of getting the best players. That's yet to happen for rank-and-file events. The RBC Canadian Open is a prime example.
Then there are the purses. Finchem has never wanted to decrease purses, which is understandable given that this would normally be a retrograde move. But the last few years have not been normal economic times. There's a new normal now, yet purses haven't gone down in recognition of this.
"In 2009 after what we went through, I think the Tour should have said to every tournament that it's okay to cut the purse by 20 percent," Giles said. "That would have been the greatest statement. What's the difference between $4.8 million and $6 million?"
That's all on the pro side. But in speaking with Giles, it become clear that the amateur side of the game remains No. 1 with him. He played on some world amateur teams, and met and played against many top Canadians, including Gary Cowan and the late Nick Weslock. He said of Canadian courses that, "There are so many good ones up there, but people [outside Canada]don't know that."
Meanwhile, Giles's favourite brand of golf is played in the U.K. He supports conditions that demand players use their imaginations, which means he prefers that golf be played on the ground and not only in the air. Augusta National itself is most demanding when conditions invite and even compel such golf, which isn't surprising because co-founder Bobby Jones conceived of the course as an inland links - fast and firm and so what if it's not wall-to-wall green?
Those days are pretty much over because of television and the intense maintenance that goes into the course for the Masters, which starts April 7. But at least the greens sometimes get a touch of brown in them, and force players to work the ball in off slopes. And they always require creative putting.
"I played many practice rounds with Ben Crenshaw when he was an amateur," Giles recalled. "He was like a surgeon on those greens. He could feel the ball to the hole."
Crenshaw went on to win the Masters twice, while Giles went on to win just about everything in amateur golf. Golf is a richer game because he stayed amateur. It's not possible to write a legitimate history of world golf without writing about him.
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Gary Who? notches first PGA victory
Getting a handle on the long ball
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and, most recently, he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 11 books, including The Natural Golf Swing, with George Knudson (1988); Links: An Insider's Tour Through the World of Golf (1990); The Swing, with Nick Price (1997); The Fundamentals of Hogan, with David Leadbetter (2000); A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands (2001); Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); and his latest, This Round's on Me (2009). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein