A nine-hole match with the devil: two-time major winner Hubert Green takes on cancer with the same resolve he shows on the golf course
It was one of those bright winter days in Florida when the sun is betrayed by a chilling wind off the Gulf of Mexico. The breeze came past that pine tree, came against Green’s face.
Because he’s diabetic, his hands and feet quickly get cold. He was uncomfortable. He wore shimmering blue slacks, a blue sweater over a blue long-sleeved shirt, and the wide-brimmed leather hat that is his trademark.
He’d driven his golf cart onto the back practice tee at Hombre Golf Club, his home course in Panama City Beach. In a red plastic crate, he’d brought along a couple hundred Callaway reds, each ball marked with an inked circle and inside the circle the initials “HG.”
He hit five, six balls with a 9-iron. Earlier, he’d said he felt weak. Instead of the club hitting the ball, it was like the ball hit the club. A 9-iron might go 110 yards, a measure of strength so dispiriting that he said, “Right now I couldn’t play on the LPGA Tour.” On the practice tee, he moved to a 5-iron. A little draw, pretty enough. Nine, 10 swings. The balls fell 10, 15 yards short of that left pine tree.
He turned and said to the only other player on the range, “Whatcha hitting?” “Five-iron,” said Allen Doyle, another Champions Tour star, and Green rolled him a ball, asking him to hit it at that last pine tree, the one 144, 145 yards away. Doyle’s 5-iron flew over the pine.
Someone remarked on the wind coming at the players.
These next words Green said through tight lips: “Freakin’ hurricane. I can hit a 5-iron 145 yards.”
What we know to be true is not always what we want to know. Hubert Green knows it to be true that so soon after his cancer he cannot be the Hubert Green who was one of the great players of his generation.
He knows it. Says it out loud. Still, he wants it. He’s a hard case, little different at age 57 than 27, ornery, funny, proud. Green’s longtime friend and contemporary, Billy Kratzert, says, “Hubert just expects so much of himself, and he goes at everything head-on. Only problem is, he wants it yesterday. He’s the king of wanting it yesterday.”
Now, on the range, he wants it to be yesterday. He wants to be able to scream a 5-iron 185 yards into the freakin’ teeth of a hurricane.
But it’s not happening. “Got nothing from here,” he said, bringing the 5-iron halfway down, “to here,” moving it to impact. He hit maybe 25 balls, then packed up his stuff. “Not very impressive, eh?”
Four months earlier, Hubert Green was all but dead. Any dead man in August who draws 5-irons into a December breeze is impressive.
It began at his dentist’s. At a regular cleaning in April, Dr. Stephen Myers saw a swollen, abnormal area on the back left of Green’s tongue. On May 26, doctors told Green he had cancer.
He remembers nothing else of what the doctors said, nothing that made sense. He heard words, words all around him, pieces of ice on the air, floating, brittle. At the back of his neck, there by the hairline, fear arrived.
Doctors said the cancer was at Stage 4, the killing stage. It was on the back of his tongue and a tonsil. They talked about treatments. None of the information made it through the fear shaping itself to the man with the cancer. He knew cancer.
Green’s father was 75 when he died in 1975 of cancer that began on his stomach. The son remembered Dr. Albert Huey Green’s customs of each April at the Masters.
“He’d walk down 1, down the right side on 2, and stop by a tree on that hill to watch us play out and hit tee shots on the third,” Green said. He sat at home. Sunlight danced on the gulf waters. Tears filled his eyes. “After he passed away, I found myself turning on 2 and looking back. He wasn’t there.”
Treatment for Green’s cancer wouldn’t start until July 2. So he did what he has always done. Played golf. “What else am I going to do, feel sorry for myself, ‘Oh, woe is me’? I’d have gone crazy sitting at home.”
A Billy Kratzert story: “The week after he found out he had cancer, Hubert’s playing a skins game before the Senior PGA with me, Fuzzy Zoeller and John Calabria. Hubert, of course, is in every fairway. And on the first four holes I’m in rough you can’t get out of. Well, he is all over me. So I say, ‘Hubert, why’re you riding me so hard?’
“He says, ‘Man, I’m dying of cancer, this might be the last time I ever get to give you a bunch of [grief].’ I say, ‘Here I am, feeling a little compassion for you, and you’re still that Doberman you always were.’ It was wonderful.”
Green shot 77, 75, missed that cut. Two weeks later: 66, 67, 71 for his best finish of the season, a fourth in the Farmers Charity Classic. Then, 30th in the U.S. Senior Open where, on June 29, he played his last round of 2003.