I like the old, weird America stories.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/calvin-peete-rip/Before Tiger Woods, five African-Americans had won on the PGA golf tour, and each one would make an entertaining and inspirational biopic. For example, Calvin Peete, a grade school dropout, came out of the Old, Weird America before the 10,000 Hour Rule to win a dozen tournaments after he turned 35, even though he never tried golf until around his 23rd birthday and was never a strong man. Bruce Weber writes in the New York Times:
Calvin Peete, whose life traced one of sport’s most triumphant arcs — a school dropout with a crooked left arm who did not pick up a golf club until his 20s, did not join the pro tour until his 30s, and still became one of the leading players of his era and the most successful black professional golfer before Tiger Woods — has died. He was 71.
… A self-taught player who never hit especially long, Peete was one of golf’s most accurate drivers and fairway players. He won his first Professional Golfers Association tour event, the Greater Milwaukee Open, in 1979, and from 1982 through 1986 was among the tour’s most prolific champions, winning 11 tournaments, including four in 1982.
In 1984, he averaged 70.56 shots per round, winning the Vardon Trophy, given annually to the professional golfer with the lowest per-round score. …
His story is Dickensian in its down-and-out beginnings and American in its particular obstacles and eventual rewards. He was born in Detroit on July 18, 1943. According to numerous sources, his parents had nine children, and after they divorced, his father, Dennis, had 10 more.
Calvin lived with his father, a vegetable picker in Pahokee, Fla., in the south-central part of the state, and after he dropped out of school in the eighth grade to help feed the family, he, too, worked in the corn and bean fields. He was unable to do heavy work, however; at age 12, he had fallen out of a tree and broken his left elbow, leaving him unable to straighten the arm.
It was perhaps a serendipitous accident. It is a golfing dictum that for right-handed golfers, the left arm remains straight during a swing, but Peete, who never had a golf lesson before he turned pro, developed his own method, compensating for his handicap and developing a stroke uncanny in its accuracy, or, as his onetime caddy Dolphus Hill said in 1986, “He goes flag on you.”
Peete was regularly among the tour leaders in driving accuracy and greens hit in regulation. …
It was in Rochester, in the summer of 1966, that he tried golf for the first time. He was 23. Friends invited him to a fish fry, he recalled in a 1986 interview with Boys’ Life magazine, but they took him to a golf course instead.
“I couldn’t get a ride home,” he said, “so I went along with the fool idea.”
Quickly bitten by the bug, and with his selling done at night, he began spending days on the golf course, teaching himself by reading books. He took advice on his grip from the man who sold him his golf gloves, practiced on a baseball field, made films of his stroke and studied them. It took him nine years and three trips to the PGA qualifying school before he earned the right to join the tour, at 32, in 1975.
...Peete was a very short, very straight driver who tried to avoid getting in the rough or trees where he’d have to improvise a shot out of trouble. He preferred to have the ball sitting up in the middle of the fairway. Peete’s game was rather robotic, but now that I think of it, his strategy makes a lot of sense if you recall he didn’t have all those adolescent years to practice crazy shots out of trouble and develop as much natural feel for all the different shots you’d have to hit if you wander into the rough and trees.
It made Peete a rather fascinating figure during his prime in the first half of the 1980s because he had emerged from virtually an underclass background to become the most overachieving exponent of the cautious Calvinist style on the pro tour.
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