Mickey Wright was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a pen pal.
That was one of the first things I told my wife when I learned of Mickey’s death on Monday at the age of 85. We were in the midst of a two-day-long drive from Texas to Florida, and it gave me time to scroll through my e-mail exchange with Mickey over the years as my wife manned the wheel and reflect on what felt like a special relationship we shared.
I never met Mickey in person, but our relationship began in 2012 when I was assigned to write a feature on her for The New York Times. An exhibit honoring her career was about to open at the USGA Museum in Far Hills, New Jersey. Wright was famously removed from the game and so a 45-minute phone interview was a huge score. I’ll never forget it because it was an interview unlike any other. She had done more research about me than I had done about her. Before I could get my first question out of my mouth she hijacked the conversation and began congratulating me for some small feat that I had accomplished more than a decade ago as a golfer. I was so thrown off. She had internet stalked me better than some of the girls I had dated.
It took a while before I could get the interview back on track, but when I did she regaled me with stories, such as the joy she felt when she pured a 2-iron.
“I used to say the second-greatest feeling in the world was a high 2-iron to a well-trapped green.”
Which begged the question: What was the greatest feeling?
“Winning,” Wright responded.
She told me that she’d never been the type to save stuff. But once she started looking, she found all sorts of memorabilia. The 1963 Associated Press Athlete of the Year trophy had been tucked in a closet for so long that she hadn’t seen it in 25 years.
“I filled my living room,” she said.
The 1,754-word story ran in the Sunday Sports section on May 20. On June 4, she sent me an email – I have no idea how she acquired my address – and wrote, “you will be proud to know your article is hanging in our Publix store at the seafood counter. They were really tickled with your article.”
A few days later, a package arrived in the mail addressed to me. It was an autographed copy of “Play Golf the Wright Way,” accompanied by a card with Claude Monet’s painting of The Japanese Footbridge with a hand-written note, which included advice on how to read the book: “Just look at the pictures and read the captions. That’s all I wrote. Best, Mickey.”
It was a kind gesture and I jotted her a thank you note, of course, but I expected this to be the last I heard from the great Mickey Wright. I was wrong. A few weeks later, she sent me a missive with a subject titled: 2012 vs 1961-64. Her friend Rhonda Glenn of the USGA had put a bug in her ear and so Mickey was awake at 5 that morning, and sorted through old LPGA media guides and logged on to LPGA.com and had done the math to calculate what she would have earned in current dollars. The 44 tournaments she had won in that four-year time span would have amounted to $11,255,000 in 2012. Her actual winnings were $104,946, or an average of $26,236.50 per year.
“That’s more than just inflation,” she said when I called her on the phone. “As my good friend Louise Suggs once said, that could make you throw up.”
I smelled fodder for another story and Sports Illustrated took the bait with one caveat. They wanted it to be a first-person account. Somehow, I convinced Mickey to participate, which resulted in the only story I’ve ever had published in the prized magazine of my youth, albeit without my byline. (To my great dismay, I failed miserably anytime I suggested to Mickey we should do a book together.)
Rest assured, the SI piece wasn’t a former star complaining about how much money she would have made. As Mickey so elegantly put it, she wouldn’t have changed a thing. She logged some 60,000 miles a year trekking from tournament to tournament by car. She conducted 128 golf clinics per year for Wilson Sporting Goods.
“These weren’t paid outings, mind you,” she explained. “These were to attract a gate. I’m not much of a public speaker, but we all did our part. I guess everybody plays in the time they should play. I feel I did.”
And there was this: “When I finally stepped away for good, I had done everything I had set out to do in golf. There is really nothing that can give me what golf gave me. I can never replace it. I am grateful just to have had it.”
I sent a copy of the story for the Publix seafood counter so they could have fresh copy to go with the daily catch. She emailed me one of my favorite compliments: “Beautifully done!! Thought I could hear my voice.”
If so, it must have been for this line: “I shot 62 twice, once at Hunting Creek CC in Louisville, KY, which was one tough booger.”
She became a loyal reader of mine and would send me notes from time to time telling me whether she agreed with my take or liked a story and usually with some specific detail: “Loved your sentence about the word cheater lingering like a bad cologne,” she once wrote.
But the best correspondences came out of the blue for no reason at all. She sent me this one in January 2013 (that is worth a click) with wishes for a Happy New Year, and all these years later it still brings a smile to my face.
Before I knew it, she added me to her daily e-mail joke list, and they really ran the gamut.
Golfer: “I think I’m going to drown myself in the lake.”
Caddie: “Think you can keep your head down that long?”
“Going to send you one more,” she wrote. “Won’t make it a habit, promise.”
But I loved every bit of it. In fact, I was saddened when she kept her word and I eventually got dropped from the list. In April 2017, I ended a note to her with a postscript: “Please add me back to your jokes list. I miss them.”
She sent me five jokes that day, including one titled “Sunday Morning Sex,” which was a bit risqué. Oh, Mickey!
She couldn’t have been happier for me when I got married, using five exclamation points after “congratulations” and ending her email with a smiling face emoji. It was the only time she ever used one with me.
In the proceeding years, she shared all sorts of interesting snippets of her life in and out of the game. She recounted playing Pebble Beach once from the men’s tees and shooting 74.
“That was about as good as I could possibly have done,” she said. She once had a snowball fight with Louise Suggs and Betsy Rawls at Augusta National and had a picture to prove it. She teased me endlessly when I would pepper her with questions about her playing career.
“Thought you knew all this about me,” she wrote.
I had seen a tweet from the World Golf Hall of Fame noting her birthday on Feb. 14, and thought of reaching out to her that day, but life got in the way. It had been a while since our last back and forth, which centered on the amateur status of another of her pen pals, Lucy Li, who penned this beautiful tweet after Mickey’s passing.
— Lucy Li (@lucyli_golf) February 18, 2020
It turns out Lucy and I were part of a wider club who traded emails, letters and the occasional phone call with Mickey. Colleague Beth Ann Nichols has printed out all her many emails from Wright and longtime chroniclers of the game Ron Sirak and Michael Bamberger also cited having a long-distance relationship with her too. What a cool thing to have shared this bond with Mickey. It was always on her terms and at arms-length, but it is something I will always treasure and already miss.
Has anyone heard a good joke today?
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