Lorne Rubenstein, Garry Gale, Frank Nutson and Frank Mahovlich
Stouffville, Ont. - Earlier this week I played the Granite Golf Club with Frank Mahovlich and a couple of his buddies. That was a treat. The Big M, now a Senator but always one of the hockey greats to me, told stories all the way around. He was off to Ottawa the next day, where he spends two nights and three days a week. But for Monday, it was golf and stories.
One of the best stories he told was of the time he and his brother Peter, also a former NHL player, of course, were playing the Shady Oaks club in Ft. Worth, Tex. They stopped after nine on a hot day to grab a drink, and went into the dining room. Mahovlich noticed a fellow at the bar who looked familiar.
"Is that who I think it is?" he asked his brother. Indeed it was, Ben Hogan himself. Shady Oaks was Hogan's club, and he stopped by there every day to hit balls and have lunch.
"I asked a member to introduce us," Frank told me. "He did. Hogan asked which of us were good golfers? I told him Peter is the better golfer."
Hogan asked Peter to pretend he were hitting a wedge. He swung his arms as if he were doing that. "Now a 5-iron," Hogan said. Peter followed with a 5-iron swing. "Now a driver." Peter swung as if he were hitting a driver.
"Mmm, hmm," Hogan said. "You're a good golfer. Swing the same with every club, just like you did there."
I played the Burlington Invitational tournament at the Burlington Golf and Country Club with Peter a million years ago. We were in the same group for the entire 36-hole tournament, and Peter could play well, for sure. His handicap was five or so. Frank also once held a low handicap. He told his best was a seven.
The Big M is 73, and his swing is solid. There's a lot of upper-body in it, which isn't surprising for a hockey player. He has power and he also shows control when he moves his legs through the ball. Meanwhile, he loves golf.
There was the time, he told me, when the Toronto Maple Leafs coach Billy Reay was getting his team ready for training camp. Reay told the players to bring their golf clubs to Sudbury, Ont., the site of the camp. "Hockey players all play golf," he told the guys.
Frank was playing in those days at the Uplands club in Thornhill. He left for training camp, and when he got there he realized he'd brought his clubs but forgotten his skates. The Leafs' chief scout Bob Davidson went to Frank's parents' home in Leaside, and picked up his skates.
As we played, I remembered watching Mahovlich when he played with the St. Michaels Majors, the Leafs' minor-league club in the Ontario Junior A league. I used to love going down to Maple Leaf Gardens for Sunday doubleheaders. There was nothing like a game with the Majors and the Montreal Junior Canadiens.
In 1961, when the Big M was with the Leafs, my dad took me to the last game of the year. Mahovlich had 47 goals, and needed a hat trick to reach the magic number of 50, then a very big deal. The game didn't mean anything in the standings, and his teammates were feeding him the puck the first two periods. No luck, though.
Mahovlich then got a goal early in the third, if memory serves. We were sitting in the mezzanine behind the goal that the Leafs were attacking. Two more and the Big M would hit 50. But it didn't happen.
That was almost exactly 50 years ago. In 1968, the Big M was at the St. George's Golf and Country Club in Toronto when George Knudson got a hole-in-one on the sixth hole in the second round of the Canadian Open. He remembered that the ball ran four feet past the hole, checked, and spun back in.
The stories kept coming during our round. Frank's pals Garry Gale and Frank Nutson were enjoying every moment, as was I. The usual amount of good-natured ribbing and banter took place, start to finish. Gray, a member of the Toronto Golf Club, recently joined the Medalist Golf Club in Hobe Sound, Fla. A newsletter came in the mail recently, where new members were welcomed.
"I was on the same line with Tiger," Garry said. Maybe he'll get a game someday with new member Tiger Woods. You never know.
On the ninth hole at Granite, Mahovlich had a 20-foot putt. He rolled it two feet by. "I'm trying to putt like [Steve]Stricker," he said.
Stricker had won the Memorial Tournament the day before. Nutson came back with, "Putt like Frank Mahovlich, and you'll be all right," he told his friend.
We talked about paralysis by analysis, which afflicts golfers who get all caught up in the mechanics of the swing. The Big M remembered what his teammate Eddie Shack, with whom he remains friends.
"Slide, skate, shoot the puck. That's all Eddie said you should do," Senator Frank Mahovlich recalled. And then he smacked a drive long and straight. One of hockey's all-time greats, and a classy gentleman then and now, played on. As the Stanley Cup final between Boston and Vancouver moves to the fifth game with the series tied, I'll remember a special golf game with a special hockey player.
Correction: I wrote that Frank Mahovlich played his junior hockey for the Toronto Marlboros. He played for the St. Michael's Majors. I should have remembered that, because he told me how much he learned from Father David Bauer, the St. Mike's coach.
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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