The world's greatest golfer is on the range launching Tour Accuracys into the distance like Scud missiles. Behind him, David Feherty leans in close to his CBS colleague Gary McCord. "You know," he confides, "Tiger hangs on my every word." McCord is unconvinced, so Feherty strolls over and whispers a swing tip in Tiger's ear. Woods nods doubtfully, then proceeds to hit a shank that would shame Happy Gilmore.
"Can't you just leave me alone?'' Tiger explodes. "Security!!"
"You're nothing without me! I made you! I crocheted you a new headcover!" the Irishman screams as two stone-faced goons drag him away. "Hey, watch the hair!"
As Tiger doubles over in laughter, Feherty snaps off the monitor in the CBS trailer where he is showing me tapes of the skits he filmed for late-night highlight shows last season. In other clips he wears a football uniform that showcases his burgeoning belly, surfs in a pair of painted-on Speedos and parades around in a Scarlett O'Hara-style gown. Not exactly Jack Whitaker, I remark. "This isn't a show for tight sphincters," he says with a grin. "We're like the guys sitting around the grill room. It's not life and death, so we try not to take it so seriously. We have a lot of fun, on and off the air.
CBS announcer David Feherty.
For more than five years Feherty has delivered a much-needed splash of color to CBS's golf telecasts. Feherty's sly, quick-witted commentary is delivered with a jocular jab to the ribs rather than a Johnny Miller uppercut. But while Miller's credentials as an NBC analyst were earned on the strength of two majors, Feherty's broadcast fame followed two comparatively workmanlike decades on the European PGA Tour, which was akin to playing in the minor leagues, but without the audience.
According to Feherty, he was downing vodka and Gatorade ("I was on a health kick") at the Hilton Inn West in Cincinnati in 1996 when he was approached by Rick Gentile and Lance Barrow, CBS's golf producers. "They cornered me at the bar—this was just after Ben Wright had been fired," he remembers. "They were looking for someone who could go down on the ground, who knew players on both sides of the Atlantic and who could get information back. They had noticed that my game sucked and made me an offer."
Actually, unlike most golfers who retire to the broadcast booth—think Miller, Curtis Strange or Ian Baker-Finch—Feherty's game had not entirely gone south when he opted to pull on a headset. He logged several high finishes in 1996, including a runner-up at the South African PGA Championship. "I was having a halfway decent year," he admits. "But I was faced with an opportunity that doesn't come along but once a decade or so. If I was going to do it, which I wanted to do, then I'd better do it right then. I wasn't done playing but when they showed me how much I could make, I gave them my clubs." He hasn't played a competitive round since.
Feherty is telling the story of the Yellow Brick Road that brought him to CBS over breakfast at the Marriott Northwest in Dublin, Ohio. It's the first day of the Memorial Tournament and all the talk is about Casey Martin, who has just won his case against the PGA Tour in the Supreme Court. "I can't get comfortable with it either way," Feherty says. "My head says one thing but my heart says another. I don't think that anyone in his or her right mind could say that walking isn't a part of this game. Try playing Kiawah Island in a 30-mile-an-hour wind in the Ryder Cup and tell me you're not exhausted. Or 18 holes in Memphis in June when the tops of your thighs are like two strips of bacon."
Thus spake the head. What does the heart say? "Let him play," he sighs. "You know, jeez, he hasn't got a leg to stand on."
The issue of disabilities has become a little closer to Feherty's heart since his 9-year-old son, Rory, was diagnosed with juvenile arthritis. "I've got to warm up his knee in the morning to straighten it for him. He's in tears every morning, can't get out of bed. I have to carry him up the stairs. It's hard. He's my hero." The family is considering treatment options, he says with a resigned shrug. "He's never going to be a sprinter."
An hour later, Feherty is in the CBS compound hidden in a grove of trees near the 18th fairway at Muirfield Village Golf Club. The network talent has assembled in Barrow's cramped office to plan today's broadcast, which will air on USA Network. Lanny Wadkins, Peter Kostis and Charlie Rymer are here, as is USA's Bill Macatee. It's a frat-house atmosphere, with arguments over how best to handle the Martin decision and the merits of vanilla chips.
"Lance hired me," Feherty says with a nod toward Barrow, a Harvey Weinstein-lookalike who is eyeing me warily across his desk. Like most of the CBS team, Barrow has been suspicious of writers since Ben Wright's ill-considered remarks about lesbians got him tossed from the network in 1996. I ask Barrow what he saw in Feherty.
"He's still asking himself that!" Wadkins snorts.
"He was good," the producer says simply. "We used to pick a golfer and do a 'New Breed' segment on them. We did one on David and during it he said, 'I won't be playing competitive golf when I'm 40.' We knew he would be great on television."
"I was 36 when I did that 'New Breed,'" Feherty adds. "A year later I was with CBS. I came here about 10 minutes after Tiger turned pro in Milwaukee."
Now 43, Feherty took up the game when he was 10, tagging along with his father to a course near their home in Bangor, a middle-class coastal town 15 miles east of Belfast in Northern Ireland. The middle of three children—he has two sisters—he quit school at 17 and turned professional.
After several years as assistant pro at Mid-Herts, a club north of London, he returned to Northern Ireland to work at Hollywood Golf Club. "It was built on a hill so you had to put one shoe on your foot and the other on your knee to have an even lie," he says with a laugh.
A stint at Royal Belfast was followed by one at Balmoral Golf Club, where the head pro was local legend Fred Daly, the 1947 British Open champion. It was the late '70s and sectarian violence was a daily feature of life in Belfast. "Guys who would shoot at each other all night would come and play golf," he says. "And they wouldn't pay green fees! Honestly," Feherty insists, an Irish storyteller warming to the tale. "They would sneak in. There was a Catholic hole in the fence and a Protestant hole in the fence." His one attempt at diplomacy with the paramilitaries fell flat. "Why can't we all get along? I mean, you play here together," he pleaded. "Aye, but that's golf," the terrorist replied. "That's different."
Soon after, Balmoral was targeted in a random bomb attack—the only thing left standing was a clubhouse shrine to Daly's Open win—and Feherty left Northern Ireland for good. "You had to get out of there if you were going to advance in professional sport," he explains. He typically returns to visit his parents once a year.
A 17-year career saw Feherty win five times on the European PGA Tour and three times during his annual winter pilgrimages on the South African Tour. His breakthrough season was 1986, when he captured the Italian and Scottish Opens. Nine years ago he landed in Dallas to play the PGA Tour full-time. He missed the cut in exactly half of the events he entered, his best finish a playoff loss to Kenny Perry at the 1994 New England Classic.
"I came here to play and ended up on TV, which is what I really wanted to do anyway," he says. "I hadn't really thought about doing it on this side of the pond but, once I got here, I realized I could." He found that being Irish didn't hurt. "You know what being Irish is like in America, they think you're a genius for some reason. It's the exact opposite of everyone else's general conception."
After divorcing his first wife—whom he is reluctant to discuss—Feherty was set up on a blind date in 1996 with Anita Schneider, an interior designer from Jackson, Miss. "The first date was in a Dallas restaurant and I was so drunk it lasted about 30 minutes," he remembers with a smile. "But she gave me a second chance." The second date was at The Ballpark in Arlington and apparently went much smoother: They married a few months later.
The couple has custody of Feherty's two sons from his first marriage—Rory and 13-year-old Shey—and Anita's teenage boys, Fred and Karl. They also have a daughter together, 3-year-old Erin. He confesses that his travel schedule can make family life tough. "It's never easy but it's always been my life, since I was 17 years old. In this job I'm home a lot more and can plan when I'll be home."
For all the wry smoothness he now displays on camera, Feherty's debut was less than auspicious, says CBS colleague Peter Kostis. It came at the Johnnie Walker tournament in Jamaica in December 1996. "David was trying to be a straight golf announcer and he was awful," recalls Kostis. "We went out and had a few beers and I said, 'David, you have to be yourself'."
For two days Feherty played the sober cravat until he was assigned to follow Bernhard Langer, one of the tour's notable tortoises. "Langer's group was two holes behind so I asked David why," Kostis says. Feherty mumbled something about the wind making it tough to pull a club. "That's the same for everyone," the veteran announcer prodded, "but these are the only guys who are two holes back."
"Well, you know Bernhard," Feherty finally said. "He could take an hour-and-a-half to watch '60 Minutes.'"
In the final round of the tournament, Loren Roberts' tee shot to a par-3 landed short in the water but bounced onto the green. The rookie announcer was dispatched to investigate and discovered that the ball had struck a coconut lying just beneath the surface. He appeared on-screen with the offending object (bearing a ball imprint) in his hand. "I'm here holding Loren Roberts' bruised nut," he announced to muffled yelps from his colleagues. A star was born.
Since most of Feherty's time is spent trailing the leaders, relationships with tour players matter. His closest friends among the pros are Stuart Appleby, Steve Pate and Mark O'Meara. He says no one has ever gotten upset at his comments. "For the most part the players have been great and I don't often criticize their game. My job is to report what I see and try to make people more human. To give a guy a hard time because he doesn't win …'' He trails off momentarily. "I remember what it's like to be a player. It's tough."
The first round of The Memorial is underway and Feherty is stationed in the 16th-hole tower (he will walk the fairways for CBS on the weekend). As Curtis Strange passes below, he and Feherty trade fist pumps, and Strange invites the gallery to applaud his friend. Another group includes Mark Calcavecchia, prompting Feherty to recall the 1989 British Open at Troon. On the 12th hole that Sunday, Feherty had watched in disbelief as Calc slam-dunked a miracle wedge for birdie to take the lead. "He had played 11 with a couple of fast hooks and drained it for a four. On 12 he hit a tee shot into the bushes but it came out," Feherty recalls. "He kind of clanked it. I thought, 'This guy is so lucky' but after that he played the six best holes of golf I might have seen." A string of bogeys left Feherty in a tie for sixth, four strokes out of a three-way playoff that Calcavecchia would go on to win.
He made another run at the Claret Jug five years later at Turnberry, but again came up just short. "I bogeyed 17 trying to play a cute bunker shot. If I had birdied there I might have been able to birdie 18 and tie." Instead he finished tied for fourth, five shots behind Nick Price.
It is Feherty's freewheeling humor that makes him a valuable on-air commodity, says Macatee. "David is a natural, a guy you want to be around. He is both intelligent and incredibly goofy," he says. "But when you strip away his humor there is an incisive intelligence. A lot of guys are thrown by the technical things, but his personality cuts through everything. He is the guy you would want to play 18 holes with."
Not that he wants to play 18 with you or anyone else. Though he is a member at Royal Oaks in Dallas, where Justin Leonard also plays, on the rare occasions Feherty tees it up, it's usually with Wadkins at Preston Trail, the former home of the Byron Nelson Classic.
Last year Feherty played a skins game against McCord and Kostis, under duress. According to Barry Terjeson, who manages both Feherty and McCord, Feherty is more concerned with finishing a book of fiction than he is with playing. "It's pretty well known that I hate to play golf," Feherty admits, though he does boast of shooting 77 in a recent outing at Winged Foot. He complains of having to bully McCord into a $10 Nassau instead of his customary $5: "McCord is so tight he wakes up in the middle of the night to see if he's lost any sleep."
As Feherty, Wadkins and I make our way to the food tent, Feherty asks, "Did you know that Lanny and I played against each other in the Ryder Cup in '91? We played the last hole like it was dark." The Irishman, making his only appearance in the event, partnered with current European captain Sam Torrance while Wadkins played with O'Meara. Feherty faced a 10-footer on the 18th to halve the match. "I read it left edge and Sam read it right edge," he says. "I accidentally hit it straight and it went in."
"Nobody won—that's why we can talk about it," Wadkins says.
Two stars of that long-ago "War by the Shore" relive the moment while standing in line behind cameramen and assistants. As he spoons salad onto a paper plate, Feherty concedes that he is about the happiest guy in golf and says he can't imagine himself anywhere else. "I'm fascinated by the business—TV people are insane, so I fit in seamlessly. I wouldn't still be playing, that's for sure," he says firmly, casting a glance around the tent. Behind him the late-starters are straggling up 18. "Golf for me was a means to an end. This is it. The end."
