Around the block with Joe Dey Jr.

I thought it was my imagination, but the brick and clapboard houses on either side of us seemed to recede into the night, replaced by ranks of luminescent spectators. A phantom golfer, woozy with heat exhaustion, walked beside a dapper Dey, whose clipboard had become a shooting stick. But just as quickly, the first phantom vanished and another appeared, a man in a white cap keeping up with the unchanged Dey's purposeful stride.

"People thought Ben Hogan was absolutely cold and silent," Dey said, "but I refereed his last two rounds at Oakland Hills in '51, and we chatted most of the way around. I remember on the front nine in the afternoon, when he was really beginning to roll, he hit a three-wood off the tee and had only a pitch left to the green. People were flocking all around him, and he said to me, 'You know, golf spectators put up with a lot to watch us play. They park their cars a mile away and come out here and get pushed around by the marshals and police.'

And I said, 'Yes, they do, but did you ever consider that they greatly admire the skill you have?'

Ben looked at me and then at the club in his hands, and he said, 'You know, I guess it does take some skill to hit a little ball with this thing.'"

Dey turned to me as the phantom of Hogan dissolved into a thousand points of flickering light. "That's good conversation," he said, "and right in the middle of winning the U.S. Open."

At the second corner Dey's ghost turned left, leading me up the middle of another tree-lined street.

"Is it true what I've read?" I asked. "That you carried a Bible in one pocket of your jacket and the Rules of Golf in another?"

He pulled a tiny Bible out of his right inside pocket and raised it like an auction paddle. Shifting his shooting stick to the other hand, he fished a dog-eared booklet out of the opposite pocket and waved it.

"I almost became a minister," he said, putting the books away. "I taught Sunday school, and when the R&A made me only the second American captain of their club, I preached from a pulpit in St. Andrews, which was a great honor. It's only and finally in God that our hope really lies."

"But you were a stickler for the rules."

"Well, of course."

My comment seemed to annoy him.

"The integrity of golf is paramount," he declaimed. "If you don't have that, it's no game at all."

"It's just that you had a reputation for ..."

"I was in a position" — he emphasized the word — "in which I had to make unpopular decisions. I didn't always enjoy it."

He raised his stick and pointed up the street, where another luminescent drama was being played out under a tree. A stocky woman in '50s golf garb was sobbing, surrounded by well-wishers and press photographers. I guessed that the disconsolate woman was the Hawaiian pro Jackie Pung, who was disqualified from the 1957 U.S. Women's Open for attesting to the wrong score on a hole, even though her final-round total was accurate. The ruling cost Pung a one-shot victory over Betsy Rawls.