TREVINO, Lee Buck

(b. 1 December 1939 in Dallas, Texas), Mexican-American golfer with an unorthodox style who became one of the best and most popular players on the Professional Golfers' Association (PGA) tour.

Trevino was born to Joseph Trevino and Juanita Barrett Trevino, a housecleaner. Trevino and his two sisters were raised by his mother and his grandfather, a gravedigger, in a four-room shack with dirt floors adjacent to the Glen Lakes Country Club in Dallas. Forced by economic circumstances to quit school at age fourteen, when he was in the eighth grade, Trevino got a job at a Dallas driving range in 1954. He hit range balls in his spare time and developed a short game at the nine-hole pitch-and-putt that he helped the owner, Hardy Greenwood, construct. Several years earlier, he had begun to play golf at Glen Lakes, where he worked retrieving balls, polishing clubs, and caddying.

By 1956, when he enlisted for a four-year tour of duty in the U.S. Marine Corps, Trevino estimated he was a four-handicap golfer. Stationed in Okinawa, Japan, he made the division golf team and with a lot of time to practice, began to build a strong game. His main problem was an unpredictable hook. But everything about Trevino's career was unpredictable, and he grew to cherish that aspect of his life. In many ways, it was the secret to his success.

In 1960, when Trevino mustered out of the service as a first sergeant, he had no particular ambitions; he just enjoyed hitting golf balls. He returned to his old job as a handyman at Greenwood's Dallas driving range/pitch-and-putt. Self-taught, and self-confident, Trevino realized that what he lacked in golfing finesse he made up for in bravado, and that many golfers who were more polished choked when playing for big stakes (an insight he carried into his professional career). Trevino supplemented his income by playing all comers, first conventionally, and later right-handed with left-handed clubs. When he had depleted the local supply of betting competitors, he switched to playing with a heavily taped twenty-six-ounce Dr. Pepper soda bottle, with which he had practiced diligently. In three years he never lost a bet playing with his bottle.

Trevino had a bad grip, an awkward swing, and strong, magnificent hands that a golfing friend once said worked like a computer. "He is not only one of the finest strikers of the ball in modern times but one of the best shotmakers in history," the golf historian Herbert Warren Wind wrote. Having learned to control a golf ball with both sides of an iron, and then with a taped soda bottle, and having hit tens of thousands of practice balls with regulation clubs, perhaps it is no surprise that Trevino even moved the golfing champion Ben Hogan to declare that he manipulated his club better than any other golfer.

On 24 August 1964 Trevino married Claudia Ann Fenley; they had four children. The next two years, Trevino entered and won the Texas State Open, prompting his wife to enter him in the 1966 U.S. Open at the Olympic Club in San Francisco. Staked by friends, he finished fifty-fourth, but was not too discouraged to enter the 1967 U.S. Open at Baltusrol Golf Course in New Jersey. Trevino had turned professional in 1960, but had never joined the Professional Golfers' Association, having had no idea he was good enough to compete. But at Baltusrol he won fifth place and $6,000, which gave him a pass into succeeding PGA events and, more importantly, the confidence that he could play successfully on the highest level. By the end of the season he had won another $20,000. Nevertheless, no one was more astonished than Trevino when he was named the 1967 PGA Rookie of the Year. "I never dreamed I could play with those guys on tour," Trevino recounted years later. "The longer I played, the easier it got. But I never dreamed I was going to be as good as I turned out to be."

Neither Trevino nor golfing fans had long to wait to discover just how good he was. In the first five months of the 1968 season he won more than $50,000. And then he won the U.S. Open at Oak Hill in Rochester, New York, with such convincing authority that he was catapulted to the front ranks of upcoming stars. He not only beat Jack Nicklaus down the stretch, but tied Nicklaus's earlier record score of 275, setting a U.S. Open record of his own by being the first to play all four rounds in the 60s: 69, 68, 69, 69.

In 1971 the five-foot, seven-inch, 190-pound Trevino became a superstar. In just twenty-three days he won a lifetime's worth of tournaments: his second U.S. Open, the Canadian Open, and the British Open. He was recognized as the PGA Player of the Year and became the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year. He also was named the Hickok Professional Athlete of the Year and the Associated Press Athlete of the Year, joining only a handful of golfers so honored (Byron Nelson, Hogan, Arnold Palmer, Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods). During his career with the regular PGA tour Trevino won twenty-seven events, including six majors: two U.S. Opens (1968, 1971); two PGA championships (1974, 1984); and two British Opens (1971, 1972).

In 1975, playing in the Western Open at the Butler National Golf Club outside Chicago, Trevino and two other golfers, Jerry Heard and Bobby Nichols, were struck by lightning. Trevino was seriously hurt and remained in intensive care for several days. Within a year, he had developed a serious back problem he believed was caused by the lightning bolt, and underwent major surgery. The operation was a success, and Trevino won nine more PGA tour events while continuing on and off the course to entertain his fans, his colleagues, and the press. In 1980 Trevino won the Vardon Trophy for the fifth time. Trevino was inducted into the PGA/World Golf Hall of Fame in 1981. Two years later Trevino and Fenley were divorced. On 20 December 1983 he married Claudia Bove; they had two children together.

In addition to his autobiography, Trevino has written two golf how-to books, I Can Help Your Game (1971), with Oscar Fraley; and Groove Your Golf Swing My Way (1976), with Dick Aultman.

If Trevino had not succeeded at golf, his friends insisted he would have been a credible standup comedian. After winning the 1968 U.S. Open, he declared he would buy the Alamo and give it back to Mexico. But after a visit he recanted, explaining that it lacked indoor plumbing. "The older we get," he observed when he joined the PGA Senior Tour in 1989, "the better we played." Consistently irreverent to the golfing elite (to the extent that he stopped playing in the Masters tournament for a time over disagreements on how Augusta National was run), he said publicly on more than one occasion, "When I turn sixty, I'm going to get a blue sport coat, a can of dandruff, and run the USGA [the ruling body of amateur golf]." But as of 2001 Trevino remained an active player on the Senior Tour. He was named the Player of the Year in 1990, 1992, and 1994; and has won more tournaments as a senior than during his days on the regular PGA tour. And he still uses the unique style that Dick Aultman and Ken Bowden described in the Masters of Golf (1989), as "five wrongs [that] add up to an immaculate right."

Trevino's autobiography is They Call Me Super Mex (1983), written with Sam Blair. For additional information, see biographies in Len Elliott and Barbara Kelly, Who's Who in Golf (1976). See also Herbert Warren Wind, "The Sporting Scene: Mr. Trevino and Mr. Nicklaus," New Yorker (14 July 1980). Additional material on Trevino's career is on the official website of the PGA Tour at http://www.pgatour.com.

Martin Sherwin