The Legacy

And on this airy subject, and on almost no other, you cannot get the plus-4 talker to talk. It's easy to see Crosby as Jack Fleck, winning the 1955 U.S. Open over Ben Hogan at Olympic; Chris Patton winning the 1989 U.S. Amateur at Merion; Hilary Lunke winning the 2003 U.S. Open at Pumpkin Ridge. To see Crosby among the winners who came out of the blue. Crosby has a different take. His view is that he played the shots and won the hardware. What more is there to it than that?

For some golf people, though, Crosby's two USGA medals are an enjoyable and enduring sporting mystery. Sandy Tatum, who was Crosby's captain on a World Amateur team, has been puzzling over it for 25 years. How did Crosby play his best in the places most meaningful to him? "It's the darnedest thing," says Tatum, a former USGA president who witnessed both events and lived for decades in San Francisco.

Of a half-dozen people asked recently about Crosby's USGA feats, it was a novelist—and how fitting is that?—who came closest to taking the lid off the subject. J. Michael Veron is a writer of golf fiction, a Louisiana lawyer, a scratch player, a USGA committee member and a friend of Crosby's. Speaking of those two weeks in Crosby's golfing life, Veron says, "I don't know what tune Bing was humming in Nathaniel's ear, but the beat must have been perfect."

For Nathaniel, it's easier to turn those two events into a line, one he delivers well. (Bob Hope would be pleased.) Crosby says, "My father sang White Christmas. My sister shot J.R. I had to do something to make a name for myself." Nathaniel's sister, Mary Crosby, played J.R.'s mistress on the TV series Dallas, about an obnoxious Texas oil family, and is the answer to the ubiquitous 1980 question, "Who Shot J.R.?"

Somebody, upon learning that Nathaniel's father was Bing, once said to Nathaniel, "That's as famous as famous gets." Some of that fame landed in Nathaniel's lap. He's the skinny kid in the V-neck sweater, with the plastered hair and the braces, in some of the Bing Crosby Christmas specials. (He appeared in 11 of them.) Tens of millions of people watched those shows, when TV was dominated by three networks and boredom was a way of life. There was a vast built-in audience for any news about Nathaniel Crosby, and then he went out and won a national golf title. No modern winner of the U.S. Amateur ever got more attention in victory, except maybe Tiger Woods, and then only when he won it for a second time (and then a third).

At the '81 Amateur, Crosby defeated Willie Wood, then one of the best college players in the country, in the semifinal. In the final, as Crosby came roaring back against Brian Lindley, a 24-year-old aerospace engineer, he'd pump his fists after good shots, drawing this hilarious hiss from the English commentator Peter Alliss of ABC: "I don't know if dear old dad would approve of that."

The next year, at the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach—the one Tom Watson won with his chip-in on the 71st hole—Crosby provided his own drama. His big fat seaside 9 came on the 14th hole of the Friday round. He followed that by playing the last four holes in one under to shoot a 73 and make the cut by two. In the fourth round, leaking oil like an old Ford Falcon, Crosby made a double bogey on 15, a bogey on 16, another on 17 and a scrape-it-around par on the last, with Pavin standing beside the 18th green with his arms crossed. "Retrospectively, that round has become way more important to me," Crosby says. "Back then I thought there would be a lot of that."

He graduated from Miami and gave the pro game his best shot. Crosby had a good head for golf and fuel in his tank. He worked hard. But innate golfing talent, at the level needed to grind it out week after week and make a mark as a touring pro, was another matter. The week at Olympic was from somewhere else. The Pebble week was too.

Crosby believes in courses for horses, which is why, like everyone else, his picks for this week are Phil and Tiger, who have owned Torrey Pines since they were teenagers. Both can play high long-iron shots that, to borrow a phrase Bing liked and Nathaniel still uses, "land like a butterfly with sore feet." The high long-iron was one of the secrets to Nicklaus's four wins in the national championship, and Nathaniel and his dad often spent Father's Day watching the final round of the U.S. Open on TV, rooting for Big Jack. When Nicklaus held his first Memorial tournament in 1976, Bing showed up to help launch it.

Bing Crosby is one of the patron saints of the USGA. He and Hope won the Bob Jones Award, the USGA's highest honor, in 1970, and the USGA museum has had exhibits honoring Crosby for, among other things, inventing the celebrity pro-am and making so many aces. (He made one on the famous over-the-cove 16th at Cypress Point with, Nathaniel noted recently, a 48-inch driver. His swing was dripping syrup.) Crosby organized the first celebrity pro-am in 1937, at the Rancho Santa Fe golf course, near San Diego. (Today, there's a course in Rancho Santa Fe, designed by Fred Couples and Brian Curley, called Crosby National.) David Fay, the USGA executive director, believes that Dwight Eisenhower and Arnold Palmer actually continued the movement that Crosby and Hope began: spreading the gospel of golf to America's burgeoning middle class through their shows, interviews, movies, publicity stills and tournaments. Sooner or later, Crosby's enthusiasm for golf showed up in everything he did.