The US Open champ should be creaky at age 90, but he’s not.
Two things keep Jack Fleck younger than his years.
The first of these occurred very recently. In June, the US Open champion of 1955 returned to the Olympic Club in San Francisco, the site of his big win and the host of the US Open for 2012. Fleck had been the darkest of dark horses fifty-seven years ago when he tied the great Ben Hogan, who he then defeated in a playoff. Sometimes the world embraces an upstart winner; this time, it did not. Perhaps the parallel is to Leon Spinks taking down Muhammad Ali in 1978. No toothpaste commercials materialized for Spinks. Or for Fleck: when he defeated the People’s Champ, he endured more derision than praise. He was dismissed as a fluke. Then he was widely ignored.
Until last month: fans, the media, and the USGA made a fuss over the 1955 champ at Olympic Club. There’s a new book about Fleck’s moment in the sun called The Longest Shot. At last his world has turned, correctly this time. Circles have closed with a pleasing finality.
We ate lunch at the table by the door in the Men’s Grille at Hardscrabble Country Club in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where Fleck enjoys his emeritus status and the members in turn enjoy the wise old pro. We’d first met in twenty years ago, when I was researching a book called The Eternal Summer, which concerned the dramatic goings on in golf in 1960. One of the sub-plots involved Fleck, who made a determined and nearly successful effort to win another US Open against, among others—and hello again—Ben Hogan. Two US Open wins would bury that ugly word “fluke” forever.
“Loose-limbed,” and “gangly”—the old sportswriters adjectives still applied, if not the compound noun, “the driving range pro from Davenport, Iowa.” I’d watched the 70-year-old Fleck play nine holes on the Senior Tour before we talked, and noticed that the limberness and fluidity of his golf swing were far greater than my own. He still moved like an athlete.
And the nonagenarian still has a big swing, not an old man’s constricted swipe. According to himself: “I see Bob Goalby [the ’68 Masters champion] at one of our tournaments not long ago and he says ‘you son of a gun, you’re hitting it as far as you used to.’”
Which leads us to the other thing that has kept Fleck buoyant despite it all.
“I practiced Hatha yoga,” he says. “You do these positions, they’re called asanas”—Fleck’s pronunciation makes the Sanskrit word rhyme with bananas—“and you breathe. Careful breathing tones you down on the golf course. The tension doesn’t build.
“The Loner, they called me. I’d play two, even three practice rounds a day. The other guys wouldn’t do that. No red meats, no smoke. Maybe one glass of red wine now and then.”
The view from the Grille Room is of the practice green and the first tee, and of scores of men in shorts preparing to tee up in 100-degree heat in the Hardscrabble Member-Guest. Fleck looks out the glass with something like serenity on his face.
What about meditation?
“Well, you’re alone in a room, you talk out loud to yourself,” Fleck said. “You say whatever you wanna do or whatever you wanna be. You’re talking to the Lord.”
Fleck has regrets, of course—he wishes he could have putted better which would have meant that he’d have won more—but none of that worries him now. Our interview over, we shake hands, and he walks smoothly, steadily out the door.
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