Moe & Me by Lorne Rubenstein

Author:Lorne Rubenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781770902060
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The golf course was the only place I felt comfortable. Away from the course I wasn’t in my world. But on the course I was in Moe Norman’s world.

— Moe, 1983

ENCOUNTERS

LOOKING BACK, I REALIZE I thought the best way to try to know Moe would be to spend as much time as I could with him and not only at tournaments. Sure, following him while he competed was important. But I also wanted to see how he moved through his life. How did he spend his time? This was the old “fly on the wall” idea. I remembered an approach to studying a person that came right out of my introductory psychology classes. It was called “naturalistic observation.” Get out there with the person. Watch him. Travel with him. I wanted to hang around, one of my favorite ways of spending time. I took the opportunity to do that with Moe whenever it came up. It didn’t hurt that I was writing professionally by the time I decided to observe Moe again; I felt that much more compelled to try to see what he was all about so I could write about him. The questions I had about him when I first met him remained, as did my fascination with him.

I started my golf column in the Globe and Mail in 1980, the same year that a Toronto-based company began Score Magazine, now ScoreGolf. The Globe and Mail was Canada’s national paper, and Score Magazine was Canada’s national golf magazine. I’d read the Globe and Mail since I was a kid and golf magazines from the time I started to play golf. I still have many copies of the original Golf Digest, when it really was digest size. I have copies of the first few issues of Sports Illustrated and the issues in which Ben Hogan, with the consummate help of writer Herbert Warren Wind, published a series of instructional articles. They turned into Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. It’s the best-selling golf book of all time. Somebody once said that golf translates oddly well into words. Golf, to me, was about so much. Every player had a story. I’d been trying to grasp Moe’s story since I met Moe when I was a teenager. I was thirty-two in 1980 when I started writing for the Globe and Mail and editing Score Magazine and was still trying to understand him. But, more than anything, I just liked to watch him and be around him. That’s what I started to do whenever I could.

CALGARY, 1983

Does anybody really know where a career begins? We look at turning points, roads taken and roads not taken, places where key events happened. Moe figures one place more than any other set him on his way, the Calgary Golf and Country Club. “Golf-wise, Calgary is like a home,” Moe told me when we cruised around the city. “The Calgary Country Club made me known as an amateur, and Willow Park [another Calgary course] made me known as a pro.

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