He was baseball’s commissioner. But golf was never far from his inquisitive mind

A few summers ago, on a weekday afternoon, I was playing the sporty course in Kennebunkport, as a singleton. The front nine on this tight little course was wide open and I zipped through the first seven holes. On the eighth tee, a yellow golf ball came bouncing along in my direction and settled in the rough beside the tee. A half-minute later, a grinning tanned golfer, in a golf cart that was practically airborne, came down a gentle hill, making a beeline for this yellow ball. George W. Bush was at the helm, playing golf with his shirttails out.

We nodded hello and I figured I’d seize the moment or regret it forever.

“Mr. President, we have a mutual friend, Fay Vincent.”

Public figures like former presidents must hear that sort of thing whenever they leave the house, people playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in the name of connection.

“Fay!” President Bush said cheerfully. Bush had an uncle named Bucky Bush, and Bucky and Fay were close friends from high school. They worked as wildcatters one hot summer in Odessa, Texas, and stayed that summer with George W.’s parents. George was a Little Leaguer around then.

Years later, Fay Vincent was the baseball commissioner and George W. Bush was the principal owner of the Texas Rangers. Vincent’s reign as commissioner was rocky. It began with the 1989 World Series, interrupted by an earthquake, and ended in 1992 after a vote of no confidence by the owners. The vote was 18-9 against Vincent. Bush was one of the nine in support of him.

“Fay once told me that when he was commissioner, the number one problem he faced was alcoholism among the owners,” I said to President Bush on that sunny afternoon at the Cape Arundel golf course. It’s a private course with tee times for the public. (What a concept!)

President Bush, famously abstemious himself, grinned and nodded and said, “He had that right.” We talked for a solid minute, maybe two, and he told me to send Fay his best.

Fay Vincent was a close friend of mine. He died on Feb. 1, at age 86, from complications related to bladder cancer. He had a stunning capacity to see solutions to complex problems by understanding power dynamics and seeing solutions in novel ways. The soft touch was not his stock-in-trade.

He was not a golfer but had a lifelong interest in the game, going back to his boyhood in Connecticut and caddying at the Country Club of Waterbury. Fay was a huge, strapping teenager with an enormous head (he would not object). One of his regulars at Waterbury was Donald Hall, who owned a large dairy operation. Fay later developed a long, warm correspondence with Hall’s namesake son, the writer Donald Hall. Fay was particularly devoted to two of Hall’s books, Fathers Playing Catch with Sons and On Writing Well.

What Fay liked best about caddying was hearing grown men talk about their business affairs, seeing their golfing foibles — and getting paid. Like a lot of former loopers, Fay took those lessons to his grave. The main one was this: shut up and listen. Also, treat people with a common decency and you’ll get it back. It’s not that complicated.

For years, Fay served on the Time-Warner board. I was a writer for Sports Illustrated, a Time-Warner property. I was visiting with Fay when Jeff Bewkes, the Time-Warner chairman, called.

“Jeff, may I call you back? I’m here with one of your colleagues.”

I found that sentence hilarious.

“Fay, I really would have preferred for you to take that call,” I said. You know, long-term, it might have been useful for my 401(k). I complimented him on his good manners. Fay had no idea what I was talking about.

Fay’s second wife and widow, Christina Vincent, is a golf obsessive, so whenever Fay and I got together, in person or by phone, there was often some golf chat at the start or at the finish with Chrissie. She’d want to talk about Bubba Watson’s pink-shafted driver or Augusta National’s decision to admit women or Se Ri Pak’s backswing. Chrissie and Fay watched a lot of golf together at their winter home in Vero Beach, Fla., and their home in New Canaan, Conn. My friend Mike Donald, the former PGA Tour player, and I once went to visit the Vincents in Vero Beach, and Mike gave Chrissie a putting lesson on the carpeted den floor. Fay encouraged his wife to write down some of Mike’s tips. “It worked for a while, and then it didn’t,” Chrissie said the other day.

The details of Mike’s lesson that day have slipped away, but Mike could not stand a putter path where the head goes outside. Maybe Fay remembered. His mind was a bank loaded with deposits. Also, he always had index cards near him and a collection of sharpened pencils and good pens, and he would write down notes, moments from conversations, phone numbers, things he wanted to do. He fell out of a dorm-room window as a strapping, football-playing freshman at Williams College and after it he struggled to walk for the rest of his life. The accident changed the course of his life and gave him the opportunity, he said, “to develop a life of the mind.” Mind

Chrissie’s son from a previous marriage, Ned Watkins, is the president of the San Francisco TGL team and for the last two or so years of his life Fay would ask regularly about the league and its prospects. As an ardent sports fan, he was a traditionalist, so indoor night golf on a simulator would not be, at all, in his wheelhouse. He was rooting for Ned’s success, knowing all the while his rooting interest would have no impact on the league’s success. He was a hyper-realist.

Fay was fascinated by the UConn women’s basketball team, because the Huskies have such fundamentally sound basketball for decades. He never missed a game. He was almost as captivated by Tiger Woods, and, like millions of others, when Tiger was playing Fay was watching. Fay used to say that rooting for the New York Yankees in the Yogi Berra era was “like rooting for General Motors.” In other words, the Yankees had it all, starting with money and the talent and star power money can buy. When I would tell Fay that rooting for Tiger Woods was like rooting for General Motors, Fay would say, “I can’t stop watching him.” Fay knew Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio and other legends. He was mesmerized by the difficult thing done well. His favorite baseball player was Slick Surrat, a sure-handed Negro league outfielder in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In all matters, Fay returned to fundamentals. He was the antithesis of get-rich-quick. He got rich slowly: boarding school at Hotchkiss, on a scholarship; Williams College, on a scholarship; Yale Law School. Positions at a white-shoe Washington, D.C., law firm and later at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He became the president and later the chairman of Columbia Pictures. When Coca-Cola bought Columbia, he became the vice chairman of Coca-Cola. When his friend Bart Giamatti became commissioner of baseball, Giamatti knew he needed a lieutenant who could handle baseball’s business affairs. He asked Vincent to become baseball’s first deputy commissioner. As a lawyer and experienced investigator, he oversaw the investigation into the allegations that Pete Rose had bet on his team, the Cincinnati Reds. Giamatti died from a heart attack at age 51 in 1989, eight days after kicking Rose out of baseball for gambling. Vincent was Giamatti’s successor.

Vincent wondered on a regular basis if the PGA Tour was prepared for a gambling scandal. It was in his nature to always be anticipating potential problems. He knew the human capacity to cheat was vast and believed in vigilance in all matters.

As commissioner, Fay was aware of allegations of steroid use but knew that without cooperation of the players’ union effective testing would be impossible to implement. He felt the PGA Tour had an obligation to try to sell the players on the idea that a deep, thorough drug-testing program, with public announcements of failed tests, would serve the game well.

Fay took a traditional role in the job of the commissioner: to serve the needs of three constituencies — the players, the owners and the fans. He got in trouble with the owners for trying to make the case that the players, collectively, had more power than the owners. The 1994-‘95 baseball strike was directly tied, in Fay’s view, to the owners being unwilling to see that fundamental truth.

He followed with keen interest LIV Golf’s rise. He believed the long-term health of the PGA Tour depended on giving its players an ownership stake in its broadcast rights and the rights to sell and market themselves without from the PGA Tour. He took a hardline view on players who left the Tour to go to LIV, that they had permanently forfeited their right to play on the Tour. He didn’t see a path by which the Tour and LIV Golf would reach some kind of joint operating agreement, that their interests were not compatible. He felt the business side of men’s professional golf was not keeping its eye on the fundamentals. To compare MLB to the PGA Tour, the ballplayers are the golfers, the owners are the tournament sponsors and the fans are the fans. Fay worried that the PGA Tour, in its desperation to keep more players from going to LIV, was offering payday packages to the players that would be unsupportable, in the long run. In all matters, he always had his eye on the long run.

Wrapping up a beautiful piece Fay wrote for the Wall Street Journal five years ago, Fay wrote these words:

In a culture that so values bright teeth, glowing skin, trim bodies and flowing hairstyles, we elderly try to find ways to stay relevant. In fact, we can offer only the wisdom of experience. If I spend a few hours with the young, maybe I can share some lessons I learned at bitter cost. Maybe I can talk of my mistakes and awkward stumbles. Maybe I can assure the young that wisdom is the daughter of failure yet the mother of success. I remember the acrid tastes of failures, but I quickly forgot the whiff of a success.

As I try to live while confronting an incurable illness, I remember how much I enjoyed the youthful process of learning. Thus I now read and learn from every book possible. I remember one of Blaise Pascal’s “Pensées,” in my own translation: “Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature. A puff of gas, a drop of water is sufficient to kill him. But the difference between him and what kills him is that he knows he is dying.”

It is my brain that still defines me. When I am thinking, I am living. I must fuel the brain by reading. It is that alone that separates me from the cancer that attacks my bone marrow and spills out too many white blood cells. Of course I will fail as I try not to “go gentle into that good night.” Perhaps it’s that failure that will again remind me I am alive.

Fay once went to the Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass and was impressed by the accommodations the PGA Tour made for fans with mobility issues, as he did. He appreciated little things done well. You build on these little things, you build and build and build, and you see where it takes you.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com