One Degree of Separation
And other brushes with greatness
By Bill Fields
The first celebrities I saw in the flesh weighed about 2,000 pounds apiece.
They were the Budweiser Clydesdales, parading down Broad Street in Southern Pines in the 1960s, and they didn’t yield to the left if they didn’t want to. To a 60-pound kid, a one-ton horse seemed as big as a brontosaurus.
My celebrity encounters veered from the equine over the years, but star sightings outside the golf world — on which I’ve reported for four decades — have been few and far between.
Sadly, Meryl Streep never looked forward to commuting on a train to Grand Central Terminal with me as she did as Molly to Robert De Niro’s Frank in Falling in Love. I did get a hello from Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis on a 1988 flight to Boston. Friendly, lots of hair, not a lot of height. In a long check-in line at LaGuardia Airport, Chris Farley, in sunglasses and a hoodie, nodded in my direction when we made eye contact. On a flight to London, Robin Givens, sans Mike Tyson, sat a few rows away.
It wasn’t unusual for folks to see Paul Newman out and about in Connecticut. I walked past him once on a sidewalk in Westport, and his eyes were as blue as you thought they were.
Covering a PGA Tour Champions event at Pebble Beach, I needed a few minutes from Bernhard Langer for an interview after his round, which concluded on the ninth hole a long way from the Lodge. Langer asked me to join him in the shuttle van so we could talk during the short ride back to civilization. Clint Eastwood, who had played in Langer’s group, was in the front passenger seat, and seeing an interloper clamber into the vehicle didn’t make his day.
“You can take the next one,” Eastwood said to me.
“Bernhard told me to come with him,” I replied.
“It’s OK, Clint,” Langer interjected.
Eastwood still seemed peeved when we reached the clubhouse. His demeanor to a stranger was much different from that of another Hollywood A-lister, Jack Lemmon, with whom I had crossed paths at a golf tournament at Pebble Beach years earlier. Lemmon was walking his standard poodle across a parking lot and offered a smile and a friendly hello.
Lemmon was a fixture each winter on the Monterey Peninsula, where he tried in vain to make the amateur cut and play on Sunday in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the old Bing Crosby Pro-Am. I didn’t expect to see Glenn Frey of the Eagles under the big live oak at Augusta National Golf Club on Masters Wednesday in 1997. But Frey loved golf and was there, in a white caddie jumpsuit, to loop for pal Brad Faxon in the Par-3 Contest. I lament having not seen the Eagles in concert during the band’s heyday, but I got to meet Frey and shake his hand that day.
Two iconic figures in sports and entertainment, John Madden and Betty White, passed away within a couple of days of each other near the end of 2021. Tributes focused not only on how much they accomplished during their respective careers but how well they treated people throughout their long lives. I never met either icon — saw Madden dining in a California restaurant once — but the coverage made me think of the time I met one of my childhood baseball heroes, Brooks Robinson.
Back in the late 1980s, I knew the former Baltimore Orioles third baseman was going to be playing in a celebrity golf event in Florida that I was covering. Once on-site, a lot of people were paying attention to the former New York Jets receiver Don Maynard, a Texan who was teeing it up in shorts and spiked cowboy boots. I prioritized finding the baseball Hall of Famer who had worn No. 5 and won 16 Gold Glove Awards.
If Robinson had grown tired of grown men asking him to sign a baseball while hearing about how he inspired them to play the hot corner in Little League, he sure didn’t show it. He was gracious and genuine, and as he signed the brand-new Rawlings baseball I’d brought along, I was 29 going on 12. PS
Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.
