Even as he approaches his 62nd birthday, Raymond Floyd remains a study in contradictions. His proud, patrician bearing is carried on a delicate, almost feminine gait. The years have softened his aquiline features, but those pale blue eyes still size people up with the calculating air of a riverboat gambler. And although he has grown into the role of sober elder statesman, he has no regrets about his early years in the pro ranks, when he was a hell-raising Lothario and part-owner of a topless band. "I enjoyed playing and I enjoyed playing," he says.
Illustration by Josie Jammet
As he walks off the 9th green at Valencia Country Club near Los Angeles after the pro-am at the Champions Tour's SBC Classic, Floyd ruefully shakes his head. "Today I played more like Ray Charles than Ray Floyd," he says. Truth is, he doesn't much care. Four decades after he was offered a contract to pitch for the Cleveland Indians, Raymond Floyd knows he has lost his fastball.
This month he will make his final U.S. Open appearance, at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, where the Floyd legend was etched in stone 18 years ago. On that chaotic Sunday afternoon in 1986, nine golfers were tied atop the leaderboard, the biggest logjam in Open history. One by one they faltered, but Floyd went about his task with the clinical detachment of a pathologist. He snatched the lead with a twisting birdie putt at the 13th hole and never relinquished it, shooting 66 to become, at 43, the oldest Open champion. Golfers everywhere instantly began imitating his swashbuckling swagger, the trigger-finger gesture as a putt disappeared and "The Stare," that unflinching gaze under which his rivals had wilted when it mattered most.
Today Floyd is a member at Shinnecock. He owns a house five minutes from the course in the village of Southampton. A nostalgic farewell on home turf could prompt an aging gunslinger to wonder if there's one last bullet in a chamber that has fired only blanks for years. But Floyd has no time for such misty-eyed notions. Being competitive means making the cut, nothing more. "I'm 61. I can't compete against those guys," he says. "My career is behind me."
This admission of finality-and frailty-is not something you expect from Raymond Floyd. He has been the game's most enduring competitor, a man who held off Fred Couples to win at Doral just shy of his 50th birthday, joining Sam Snead as one of only two players to win in each of four decades. He finished second at The Masters twice after turning 47 and took a break from the Senior Tour to dust Jose Maria Olazabal in a crucial Ryder Cup match.
Perhaps such an acknowledgment comes more easily when your best days aren't that distant in the rear-view mirror. Or maybe you're thankful you had a chance to prove yourself at all. Because, as Lee Trevino says, there was a time when you'd wake for the final round still wearing your golf spikes and clothes from the day before, with ice still melting in your glass.
Raymond Floyd joined the tour in the twilight of the Rat Pack era, when pro athletes lived free of indictments and often spent their evenings clutching a Scotch and what was then called a broad. Today, a player like him might run afoul of the Tour's propriety police and earn comparisons to John Daly, who has set the standard for bad behavior. Still, despite a decade's worth of conduct that today might be seen as less than professionally correct, the bad-boy tag never stuck to Floyd. But then, maybe the difference between his early career and Daly's troubles is the difference between embracing life and battling it.
By his early teens, Floyd was hustling army officers on the course at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where Raymond was born in 1942 and where his father, L.B., was a master sergeant and the Fort's golf pro. Raymond's only sibling, Marlene, played on the LPGA Tour. Their mother, Edith, was a club champion. When Raymond stopped asking for his allowance, L.B. discovered that his son had a profitable sideline: weekend money matches in a town 50 miles away. When he couldn't spot his opponents any more strokes, the brash youngster would play left-handed.
He was also a promising pitcher and at 17 was offered a $25,000 contract by the Cleveland Indians organization. (By comparison, the following year Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth's home run record and earned $42,500.) He agonized before lingering knee problems pointed him toward golf. He dropped out of the University of North Carolina after one semester and turned pro in 1963.
His first three starts were missed cut, missed cut, win. His victory at the St. Petersburg Open Invitational came when he was 20 years old, earning him $3,500 and Rookie of the Year honors. After that grand debut, Floyd pretty much took the rest of the decade off. "Once he went out on tour and met Doug Sanders and Al Besselink and those crazy guys, he just went wild," says his sister, Marlene. "Sometimes he wouldn't go to bed; he would just show up for his tee time the next morning."
He had arrived on tour a year after Jack Nicklaus, but while Nicklaus-who at 23 was already married with two children-went out and won major titles, Floyd just went out. "I was enjoying the lifestyle," he says, settling into a chair in a quiet locker room at the SBC Classic. "I was in awe when I left Fayetteville, North Carolina. I was loving the celebrity of the game and loving the people I met."
He moved to Chicago in the mid-1960s and partied so often with Cubs players including Ron Santo and Billy Williams that he had an honorary locker at Wrigley Field. "I'd go to the park every morning, take batting practice with them and shag balls in the outfield."
By necessity, he was a terrific player when hung over. One day a bleary Floyd was making his way to the tee when a reporter asked what color his eyes were. "Red," he said. When asked at the time if chasing women was his problem he said no, the problem was catching them. "I like women and partying and I'm not ashamed of it," he boasted. "It doesn't affect my golf. It's not like I turn into a pumpkin at midnight."
Forty years earlier, Walter Hagen had created the persona of the louche golfer, a man-about-town who could arrive on the tee in evening attire, champagne glass in hand. It was a life Hagen never actually lived; it was a psych job. But Floyd embodied everything Hagen pretended to be. He was a regular at the Condor Club in San Francisco, where every night Carol Doda would descend from the ceiling, topless and dancing on a piano. One of the first American women to have her breasts enlarged, Doda was immortalized as the "put-together girl" by Tom Wolfe in The Pump House Gang.
Floyd "was a party animal," says Doda, who now runs a lingerie boutique on Union Street. "He'd hang out with the guys-that's mostly what they did. I never went home with them to find out what else they did." The rat pack of tour pros-Floyd, Miller Barber, Bob Rosburg-would often step outside the club around 4 a.m. and hit golf balls down the Broadway strip. Around that time, Floyd was part-owner of a local bar called Coke's and invested in The Ladybirds, a topless band.
Throughout the 1960s, his playing reputation owed less to his accomplishments than to his stout appetite for high-stakes money matches. In 1966, Floyd was challenged by backers of a young club pro at the Horizon Hills course in El Paso, Texas. "I'll play anyone I've never heard of," he said. The club pro was Lee Trevino.
As Trevino unpacked the visitor's bag, Floyd asked, "Do you have any idea who I'm playing today?
"You're playing me, Mr. Floyd," Trevino replied.
One of Floyd's backers invited him to check out the course. "I ain't going out to look at the course," he said. "I'm playing the goddamned locker-room attendant."
When Trevino won the first match, Floyd wanted to press for another nine holes. "I said, 'Mr. Floyd, I'd like to go with you but I gotta put the carts on the charger,' " Trevino says. "He said, 'Aw s---, I'm playing the cartman too.' " According to reports, by the third day, Floyd was in the hole for around $3,000-equivalent to almost $18,000 today-but eagled the last hole to break even. "I've got easier games on tour," he said when the putt dropped. "Adios."
Michael Holahan, Augusta Chronicle
Floyd at the 2003 Masters. In 1976 he lapped the field at Augusta National, winning by eight shots.
"I don't regret it at all," Floyd says of his freewheeling lifestyle. "Who's to say that if I led life differently I might not have burned out? Honestly, I'd like to go back at 21 and dedicate myself. But would I have fulfilled my life? Would I have become the person I am today?"
One tournament in Floyd's 41-year career marks a crossroads. It's not the 1976 Masters, where he lapped the field to win by eight shots. Nor that epic Open at Shinnecock a decade later. In fact, it is the Greater Jacksonville Open in March 1974, a tournament from which the feckless, underachieving playboy withdrew.
His bachelor life had ended three months earlier when he married an elegant, 30-year-old brunette named Maria Fraietta, who owned a fashion school in Miami and whom he had met through mutual friends. Their first child, Raymond Jr., was born nine months and two weeks after the wedding. "People who knew me marveled when I got married. They couldn't believe I was the same person," he says. "I don't want to sound like a prude or a stiff collar, but I took the vows and that meant something." The new Mrs. Floyd proved to be as strong willed about her husband's career as he was cavalier.
After an opening-round 76 at Jacksonville's Deerwood Country Club, Floyd was midway through an equally indifferent second round when a buddy approached. "You can't make the cut," Bob Rosburg said. "Withdraw and we'll go to Miami and be at the races this afternoon."
"Sounds good to me," Floyd replied. He walked in, but never made it to the track. Maria refused to leave. "I came here for four days and I'm staying for four days," she said. As the couple idled in the hotel, Maria told her husband to make a decision. "If you don't like what you're doing, stop. You're still a young man. There are a lot of professions you could undertake."
"That was like hitting me upside the head. A light bulb went on," Floyd says almost exactly 30 years later. "Before that I didn't work hard. My talent had carried me."
He changed his nocturnal habits and began working with Jack Grout, who had coached Nicklaus. The results suggested what Floyd might have achieved during his first decade on Tour had he spent less time with his rat pack and more with the range rats. He won the Kemper Open in 1975, ending a six-year drought that extended back to the '69 PGA, and became a consistent, formidable force on Tour. Of his 22 career wins, 17 came after he married, including three of his four major championships.
"He turned up in a condition to play," says Ben Wright, the longtime CBS announcer. "Maria rescued his career. He was not too far from being washed up."
The curtain had fallen on the party-hearty first act of Floyd's career. He welcomed Act II as a condemned man greets an 11th-hour phone call from the governor.
Having exhumed the player, Maria set about burying the playboy. At a televised mixed-foursomes event in Ireland in 1977, Wright introduced Floyd on camera. "Representing the United States, Ray Floyd, who is no stranger to mixed foursomes..." A voice shouted 'Cut!' Mystified, the host turned to see a woman emerge from the gallery. "She came over and said, 'Ben, I'm Maria Floyd and those days are long gone. We're trying to put that image behind us so I'd really appreciate it if you could adjust your intro accordingly,' " Wright remembers. "I said, 'Certainly Maria.' And we became the best of friends."
Not everyone has found Mrs. Floyd so cordial. A few years ago, Bruce Fleisher told reporters a story about playing with Floyd in 1992. According to Fleisher, when Floyd double-bogeyed a hole, Maria complained, "You're throwing our money away," and Floyd replied, "Honey, I didn't mean to make double-bogey." Fleisher thought it was an amusing tale, but Maria didn't and later confronted him about it. "Sometimes honesty hurts," Fleisher said later.
"She's a very dominating woman, no question about that," Wright says. "Maria muted Ray's wildness, so people who met him after her might think he was on the bland side. But she was absolutely foursquare behind her husband."
"Raymond's in the same place as me," Trevino says, laughing. "I'm not scared of anyone except my wife. I think Raymond would probably endorse that."
"I'd say that's fairly accurate," Floyd admits.
Conventional wisdom on golfers is often an exercise in hagiography, the peddling of a parable that is only partly true: Thus did Hogan fade gracefully from the scene and Nicklaus never miss a putt that mattered. The conventional wisdom on Floyd is that he was a fearless front-runner. "Ray's got the guts of a burglar," Tom Watson says of Floyd, who earned his rep with wire-to-wire victories at the 1976 Masters and the 1982 PGA at Southern Hills Country Club, when he opened with 63 and cruised to a three-shot win.
"Raymond was like Seabiscuit," says Trevino. "Once he got his nose out front, he was very difficult to catch."
In truth, his record with the lead is undistinguished. Between 1976 and 1992 he led entering the final round 19 times but won only eight. One of those disappointments had come a week before the 1986 Open at a tournament in Westchester, New York, where he collapsed on Sunday with a 77. He was still seething on the three-hour drive to Shinnecock when Maria questioned him about what happened. "I just blew an engine," he said. "No oil left."
"What's going to happen if you're leading next week?" she persisted. "What are you going to do different?"
"I'll handle it," he snapped.
"No, you can't just say you'll handle it."
Floyd later admitted that he wanted to throw his wife out the car. Instead he listened. He knew he had played like a rookie, so desperate for a win that his brain froze. It was a mistake few thought he would have a chance to repeat at the Open, where he hadn't cracked the top 10 in 15 years.
Even if Floyd's record with the lead didn't always support his reputation, the manner of his win at Shinnecock-keeping his head while all about him were losing theirs-turned the exaggeration into gospel. Leaders were rising and falling faster than the scoreboard could track them, but Floyd was in something like a trance. Maria met him as he walked off the 10th green but he looked right through her, unblinking. "I've seen him win without that look," she said later, "but I've never seen him lose with it."
When he waved home a decisive birdie at the 16th, a man everyone thought washed-up 20 years earlier had his first Open. He finished two clear of Lanny Wadkins and Chip Beck, whose teacher at the time was L.B. Floyd.
Only after he won the Open did the public perception of Floyd finally catch up with the reality. The hard-drinking wastrel morphed into a wily veteran with a showman's flair. The image was far removed from his days at Wrigley Field and his nights at the Condor Club. And even as his skills have deteriorated over the years, he still exhibits a taste for the memorable gesture. Two years ago, Tom Lehman partnered with Floyd at the UBS Warburg Cup. "He's got a 30-footer for birdie," Lehman recalls. "His son Robert is caddying for him and says, 'It's fast by the hole.' Raymond says, 'It doesn't matter. This is going in.' It starts off real slow and it's about a third of the way there when he points down with his right index finger, turns and starts walking off the green. When it goes in, he doesn't even turn around, just keeps walking to the next tee. That's a stud, right there."
No one today swings like Floyd, in any sense. His action-an ungainly swipe reminiscent of a butcher slinging a meat hook in a slaughterhouse-has never seemed more quirky, his old lifestyle never more extraordinary, and his feisty, fiery character never more missed.
"I can't say there's a young player I watch on TV that has any character or emotions at all," he says. "They do everything by the book. This"-he jabs the air for emphasis-"is the perfect golfer. This is the way the perfect golfer thinks. This is the perfect swing. But that eliminates character and personality."
As his champions tour colleagues pound balls on the range, Floyd is done for the day. It's 2 p.m. The kid who left Fort Bragg over 40 years ago has come full circle; ready to embrace life off the course. He's just a little wiser this time around.
In 2002, Floyd was diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He was sedentary for eight weeks and almost a year later would still feel fatigued on the course. "I'm a hundred percent, but what if it had been too late?" he asks. "That was the wake-up call. A lot of people don't get that." Floyd decided to call time out on his Hall of Fame career.
"The two slaps upside my head were when Maria said I could change my career and the cancer. I never did things, because I was so engrossed in my profession," he says. "I didn't take trips to Europe, I didn't go ice-fishing in Canada, I didn't go bird shooting in Mexico. Now I want to enjoy life while I'm healthy."
His main hazards these days are those of fatherhood. His son Robert, a golf pro, was good enough to win the Office Depot Father/Son Challenge with his dad twice but has made only one cut in 17 starts on the Tour. (Ray Jr. won the event three times with his dad.) "He just hasn't played well," Floyd says. "Same with Nicklaus's sons or Player's sons. It's always, 'Oh, I knew your dad. He did this.' That has to get old. He's in real estate now, he's easing out of golf." In that respect, Robert is still emulating his father.
Last year, Floyd's 24-year-old daughter, Christina, appeared in the HBO documentary Born Rich, a fly-on-the-wall look at privileged kids. In it she suggested that blacks would not be welcome at the exclusive Bathing Corp. of Southampton, where her parents are members. Driving by another club in her Mercedes, she saw an black man playing tennis. "He's probably a pro," she said breezily. Her parents were deeply embarrassed. "We had a chat with her about it. It was a learning process for her," Floyd says. "We all learn coming up."
The old lion will arrive at his Southampton den before the summer crowds. He will spend a few days each week at Shinnecock, where he spent last summer playing fairways already narrowed to penal USGA width. He figures six-under-par will win the Open if conditions are benign, over par if the wind blows. His pick? The gambler in him won't look beyond the predictable favorites. "The winner will be a past major champion because the quality of the course is that good, or it will be a player who everybody already thinks is going win a major."
Floyd no longer maintains a set schedule for playing the Champions Tour, where his appearances have diminished since the cancer scare. So too has his game-he hasn't won in four years.
"Raymond and I know we can't win again," says Trevino, reflecting on earlier times. "You know something great about the old days? When you got up in the morning, that wasn't the best you were going to feel. Now when you get up and every bone in your body hurts, it's gonna hurt all day."
Whichever the road he took in life-playboy or player-Floyd was never at less than full throttle. Today, the competitive fire that gave us "The Stare" seems all but extinguished. Yet the contradictions that have characterized Floyd's career remain. He insists he can still win on the Champions Tour but admits he has stopped working for it. He enjoys designing courses, but only wants one job a year. He doesn't want to become an elder statesman, a ceremonial figure, but can't resist a last ovation at the Open. And for all his talk about leaving the golf grind behind and ambling into the sunset with Maria, there is still an animated flicker when he discusses Shinnecock. It's just enough to make you think there might be a little fire left in the belly.
He shakes his head.
"Golf is not my number-one objective. That stopped five or six years ago, and now I enjoy life much better," he says, rising from his chair. His still-robust physique offers no hint of the years when he was once one of golf's hardest-living characters. "I had a very good time, but I don't miss it."
