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He collapsed while sizing up a putt. That was the last we heard of David Graham, who never made it past the eighth hole of the 2004 Bank of America Championship on June 27th of that year. Started the day in spikes; ended it in a hospital gown. Graham's diseased heart was found to be pumping at only 12% of normal volume. That was the day he retired, with all the subtlety and sentiment of a bullet wound. It was almost enough to make you forget about the friendly fire from the 1996 Presidents Cup team, whose mutiny forced Graham to step down as International captain.
Graham will be the defending champion of sorts when the PGA Championship returns to Oakland Hills this August. He won the major the last time it was contested on that confounding patch of grass outside Detroit, in 1979. And while CBS plans to feature a brief retrospective of the Australian's career, he remains something of a mystery, thanks to his one-two of abrupt, appalling exits from the game.
Graham racked up 35 professional victories, including two majors, eight PGA Tour titles, and five wins on the Champions Tour. His closing 67 at the 1981 U.S. Open at Merion is a benchmark for tournament golf. Graham hit every fairway that day but the first, and basically every green in regulation (his ball twice rolled onto the fringe). Ben Hogan called to tell him he'd crafted "one of the best rounds of golf I've ever seen."
It made sense, one of golf's most exacting course setups being tamed by one of its most exacting players.
"He was very fastidious about his clubs, how they felt, the length, the swingweight," says Bruce Devlin, a fellow competitor who remains a friend. "He and I would change a full set of irons in the motel room in the night. You get those tiny cigarette lighters — about half of one gets one head off, so five or six of them would get the whole set off."
For Graham there was no obstacle that he couldn't overcome with enough pain, effort and creativity. He turned pro at 14 against the wishes of his father, an angry World War II veteran who lived in a separate part of the house from Graham's mother. For the boy's temerity, Graham the elder promised never to speak to his son again, and kept his word until 10 years later, at the 1970 U.S. Open, when he showed up unannounced on the practice range. By then he was more of a stranger than ever, and after a surreal conversation in the clubhouse Graham sent the man back whence he came — wherever that was. His sister wrote many years later to say that their father had died.
Graham gave himself to golf. So relentless did he become in his obsession with the craft that he could be called a precursor to Nick Faldo, or even to self-described "control freak" Tiger Woods.
"David is the only guy I've seen who regripped his clubs every day before he practiced," says his friend Lee Trevino. "He'd come out with a pair of scissors and a roll of tape and lighter fluid, and he'd put the grips on, let them dry for five minutes, and then he'd hit balls. He had all the grass on the practice range dead from lighter fluid.
"He was a perfectionist in the way he dressed, spoke, carried himself and tried to play."
As he sits on the patio overlooking Iron Horse Golf Club in Whitefish, Montana, where he lives with his wife, Maureen, David Graham, 62, is almost unrecognizable from the guy he was in the late 1970s and '80s. He wears khaki shorts and a white T-shirt around his midsection, which is 20 pounds heavier than it was in his prime. His face is fleshier; only the eyes and the last vestiges of an accent give him away.
"I loved to play," says Graham, who now prefers skeet shooting. "I used to love to get up at two o'clock in the morning and go out to my workshop and grab a shaft and a head and a grip and make a putter and let the glue dry overnight and get up the next morning because it was going to be the best putter I ever had, you know?"
His putting saved him in the '79 PGA. Graham led by two strokes but flinched on his tee shot on the 18th hole, finding the right rough. Having done his own yardages all day, he was in desperate need of a number to the green and asked his caddie, who blew his shot at Employee of the Month when he replied, "You haven't asked me one question all the way around. I don't know. Figure it out for yourself."
