Butch Harmon's Best Man: Meet One of Golf's Deep and Original Thinkers
Butch Harmon’s best man, in every sense of the phrase, is a slender, successful retired cotton merchant named Sam Reeves. Reeves has homes near two of his clubs, Cypress Point in Northern California and Seminole in South Florida, but nobody would ever call him an out-of-touch golf snob. He’s one of golf’s deep and original thinkers. Here, in an adapted excerpt from Michael Bamberger’s new book, "The Ball in the Air," Reeves shows us why golf is such a great incubator for friendship. With the PGA Championship coming up, he goes deep on his friendships with two remarkable and wildly different golf pros.
Most men, as they enter middle age and trundle on from there, are not good and making new friends. But Sam Reeves is not most men.
Reeves is 88, in good shape in every way, and in his 60s he developed two new friends. As it happens, both men were golf pros, the late Jim Langley of the stop-time Cypress Point Club near Pebble Beach, and the very-much-alive Butch Harmon of Las Vegas and various driving ranges and TV towers around the world. Sam drew those two into his web as he fell into theirs.
In personality, these two gents could not be more different. Jim Langley was gentle, trusting, reserved. Butch Harmon is profane, circumspect—and comically direct. But in the most important ways Langley and Harmon are one in the same. Each is a true golf pro, and each an example of the varied ways a person can leave a footprint on the world of golf and shape the lives of its inhabitants, Sam Reeves among them.
“The greatest gift a man can give is to be a friend,” Reeves told me the other day. We’ve talked often and deeply over the past half-decade or more. We met when Reeves was 82 and had recently become the oldest amateur to make the cut in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, walking all four rounds. Sam still speaks with a casual drawl, a legacy of his childhood in tiny Thomaston, Ga., then a church-and-ag town at the intersection of nowhere and nothing. “By that I mean a true friend. Not a pal or a buddy. Butch is, like Jim was, a true friend. I have the deepest respect for golf professionals, whether they play or teach–or whatever. I’m drawn to them. I’m always trying to learn and engage.”
On the basis, Reeves has been drawn to the life and times of Old Tom Morris. To Melvin Hemphill of Columbia, S.C., a golf instructor who was like a second father to Reeves. (Hemphill’s granddaughter is the golf commentator Kelly Tilghman.) And to Butch Harmon and Jim Langley. New friends who, over time, became old friends in the third act of Sam’s life.
Sam sees his life—and often other lives—in stages. For his own, looking at life as a play, he can identify three distinct acts. There’s a first part, beginning with his birth in Thomaston in the summer of ‘34 and extending to (roughly) age 30. In those three decades he attended public, segregated schools in Thomaston, college at the University of North Carolina and served in the integrated U.S. Army. At the end of this first act, Reeves and his young, growing family headed from Memphis to Fresno, Calif., as Sam, with partners, sought to turn a regional cotton business into an international one. Reeves’s name for this first act is Preparation. He started it as Sammy. He finished it as Sam.
Reeves calls his second stage, 30 to 60 (give or take) Implementation. In the Implementation years, Reeves put to use what he learned in Preparation. In this 30-year period, Sam’s pre-occupations were varied and entwined. He was a husband and a father, an entrepreneur, a traveler, a seeker. Also a serious golfer—except for the decade when he stopped playing cold turkey.
And now Sam Reeves is in his third act, what he calls his Validation years. Sixty on out.
When he was 60, Reeves retired from his intense career as a cotton merchant. (When China opened its doors to American businesses in the early 1970s, Reeves and a partner, Billy Dunavant of Dunavant Enterprises, roared through them.) In his Validation years, Reeves has found himself taking stock of life’s fundamental truths and identifying the things that leave him feeling proud and enriched and good. His friendships with Jim Langley and Butch Harmon would be at the top of that list.
When they were in their 20s, both men sought to make a living playing tournament golf. Harmon, now 79, won the 1971 B.C. Open, then a satellite PGA Tour event. Jim Langley, who played the Tour with limited success in the 1960s, shares the course record at Cypress Point, 63, with Ben Hogan and others. He has the one-handed course record, too. Langley shot a lefthanded 81 some years after a heinous car accident robbed him of his use of his right arm and hand. It’s an astounding accomplishment. Even the shortest par-4 holes were like long par-5s for him.
As for Sam, the highlight of his golf career was qualifying for the 1972 U.S. Amateur at age 38, when he was married with four children (all daughters) and working beyond fulltime. To qualify for a national amateur, to be in the same tournament as a Ben Crenshaw, with all that going on? That’s astounding too. Even now, at 88, if Reeves doesn’t break his age, it means he’s had a bad putting round. He hits it on the face.
For Sam, golf, and his golf relationships, are like jet fuel. His energy and drive are inspiring. I thought he might have a damn heart attack one morning as we stood at the range at Cypress Point. I was watching Sam making these alarmingly aggressive warm-up swings with a headless driver. His face was red and he was breathing hard, almost hyperventilating. But he was fine. Just Sam, doing his thing.
He has a playful manner. You’d be hard-pressed to find a serious person with a better sense of fun. There’s a looseness about Sam, in how he walks, how he talks, how he thinks. Sam’s instinct, when possible, is to say yes. In response to many questions, he’ll say, “Suuurrrre.” It’s a long, two-syllable word in Sam’s Thomaston drawl.
That same day at Cypress Point, some hours after the heavy breathing of that warmup session on the range, Sam and I were having lunch on an outside patio. Condoleezza Rice was one table over. Sam said hello and Ms. Rice said, “Sam, can I visit with you? There’s something I’d like to ask you.” So charming and Southern. You could see they had a nice rapport, each with the other. After lunch, cookies to go for dessert, Sam said to me, “I don’t know what she wants, but whatever it is, the answer is yes.” Golf got Condi Rice and Sam Reeves together.
Sam has logged hundreds of rounds with Butch. He spent many hours talking to Jim Langley in Jim’s tiny, cluttered office in the back of his tiny, cluttered shop. In the years they knew one another, Reeves, a serial lesson-taker (part of his quest), took only one golf lesson from Langley. He swore off Langley as a teacher when he realized that he would not accept any payment from Sam.
Sam and Jim, a devout Catholic, would sometimes compare notes about their conceptions of God and justice and fate. As for Sam and Butch, they can go deep on subjects like weight distribution at top of the backswing at the drop of a visor. But they can also go deep on the challenges and joys of being a business owner, a father, a husband, a son. Sam and Betsy Reeves have been married since 1958. Butch and Christy Harmon have been married since 2001. Sam was the best man at their wedding.
Butch’s father, Claude Harmon, winner of the 1948 Masters and a friend of Ben Hogan’s, was the longtime pro at both Winged Foot and Seminole. (Yes, at the same time.) When Reeves made his first visit to Seminole, with his close friend Billy Armfield as seniors at the UNC in late December 1955, Claude was the head pro there and Hogan, at the height of his powers, was on the practice tee. Sammy and Billy sneaked peaks at the Wee Ice Mon and ran to the first tee. Hogan, famously exacting, had no need for an entourage. But he has a small number of true friends, but Claude Harmon among them. Hogan was once visiting the Harmons for a dinner. Claude was grilling steaks. Claude said, “Ben, how do you want your steak?” Hogan said, “I’ll cook it myself.” He wasn’t worried about hurting Claude’s feelings. Their friendship could handle the truth.
Many years after that first visit to Seminole in 1955, Reeves became a member of the club. Now he’s a wintertime fixture there, but not the club’s Oldest Member (nodding to Wodehouse) or anything like that. He’s in the mix, giving the needle and taking it, too, playing in club events, bringing in friends and family members for games. He and Butch have taken on more than a few comers there over the years. They both know the club’s lore, including the consecutive rounds in 1947 when Butch’s father went 78-60.
Claude and his wife, Alice, had two daughters and four sons. All the boys became golf professionals. Butch—Claude Jr. on his birth certificate—is the oldest of the four. He taught Greg Norman when he was the No. 1 player in the world and later Tiger Woods, when he was the No. 1 player in the world. But those successes came after decades of trial. It was not easy, being the namesake son of Claude Harmon.
Butch’s youngest brother, Billy Harmon, is a prominent teaching pro in the Palm Springs desert and caddied on the PGA Tour for Jay Haas for years. (One of Butch’s breakthroughs, as he taught the game’s best players, was to make the caddie a central part of the team, to be Butch’s eyes and ears and sometimes mouth in the heat of tournament play.) A third brother, the late Dick Harmon, was a longtime club pro in Houston and taught Lucas Glover, among other major winners. For 42 years, Craig Harmon, the second oldest of the four sons, was the head pro at Oak Hill in Rochester, where the PGA Championship is being played this year. Craig still teaches. The Harmon Brothers. Their father’s heavy-wool Augusta National club coat is on display at the club.
Yes, professional golf, is a trade that can be handed down, one generation to the next. Witness Old Tom Morris and his son, Young Tom. Davis Love Jr. and Davis Love III and Davis Love IV, aka Dru. The Harmons go three generations, too. Butch’s son Claude Harmon III is a prominent swing coach with an on-again, off-again teaching relationship with Brooks Koepka. Right now, it’s on.
Jim Langley and his wife, Lou, had four sons. The youngest of them went into government work and business but the other three followed their father into golf. A club pro, a course superintendent and a caddie. (Jim had, and Butch and Sam have, strong attachments to caddies.) Brett Langley, the oldest of the four sons, became the head pro at Pebble Beach. One of the biggest jobs in golf. But his life was derailed, and finally ended, by the curse of addiction.
Jim Langley had a clear-eyed view of life, its joys and its sorrows. You could say the same for Sam and Butch. Honest exchanges—honesty, period—was at the core of their friendships.
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Butch Harmon and Sam Reeves
Butch will tell what anyone will tell you, that you can’t buy a gift for Sam Reeves, which is why he insisted on caddying for Sam when Sam turned 70 and played with Adam Scott in the Dunhill Links Championship in Scotland, an annual pro-am on the European tour. This was in September 2004. The weather was nasty and cold, windy and rainy.
“Damn, Butch, we been out here for four days and you ain’t taken a piss yet,” Sam said to Butch midway through the final round. They were on the Old Course.
“What?”
“You haven’t urinated, brother.”
“I’ve got on four layers of clothing—how in hell am I gonna take a leak?” Butch said.
“Okay, then,” Sam said.
They marched down the fairway through the wind, Sam’s slender bag on Butch’s back. They were playing in.
“Where did that come from, anyway?” Butch asked.
Like, who would notice such a thing?
“Just observing ya,” Sam said.
Sam sees Butch. Sam saw Jim Langley. Sam observes. It’s one of his qualities. It’s one of the things that makes him good at friendship.
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Jim Langley grew up in Salinas, Calif., 20 miles from Cypress Point and Pebble Beach. He was a member of the 1958–’59 Cal (the University of California, Berkeley) team that won the NCAA basketball title, defeating West Virginia and Jerry West 71–70 in the final.
After Cal, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps. After the Marine Corps, he tried to play tournament golf for some years. When he ran out of money he got work loading and unloading California produce on California freight trains.
Then, in 1971, he heard Cypress Point was looking for a head pro. He knew golf but not club golf. The club’s patrician president said, “I’m going to take a chance on you, Langley.” A red-letter day.
In the timeline of Langley’s life, one dark date jumps out: Nov. 12, 1987. It was a Thursday and it started pleasantly. Langley and a Cypress member were driving north to the San Francisco Golf Club to play in a tournament there. They were on a notorious stretch of Highway 101 known as Blood Alley, south of San Jose, in a new Ford. The member, Bill Borland, then the club president, was driving. Borland did not know that the fuel gauge was defective. The car ran out of gas. Langley was 50 and powerful. He was pushing the car off an exit ramp when he was struck by another vehicle. Langley went rolling down a ravine. It took Borland and the other driver 10 minutes to find him—Jim was 40 feet away and unable to speak. Borland held Langley’s head as they waited for an ambulance. Langley was drifting in and out of consciousness. Langley had broken both legs, punctured a lung, dislocated both shoulders and suffered extensive nerve damage. He had 12 surgeries and lost the use of his right arm and hand.
After the accident, Jim Langley would walk the course every morning and stop near the 15th tee, a par-3 on the Pacific. Once there, he would say a prayer and throw a ball into the water, almost as a sacrifice. Then one day he ended that practice. He didn’t want to add more plastic to the ocean.
In the vicinity of his usual resting stop, he saw an old rusting water pipe sticking straight out of the ground. The pipe had no cap and Langley placed a golf ball on its top. The ball fit right on it, as if sitting on a tee. After that, Langley stopped there, at that rusty pipe. It was like an altar for him. He’d stand there silently and he would say a prayer for the club’s caddies, his son among them.
In Jim Langley’s era, and in Claude Harmon’s era before that, many head pros at elite American clubs avoided contact with the caddies, another nasty example of country-club classism. Langley was the opposite. There were caddies at Cypress looking to reclaim a former life, or find a new one, and Langley helped where he could. The caddies at Cypress were allowed to play the course on many afternoons and that ball on the water pipe was a symbol—it was there if they needed it, and Jim was there if they needed him. He gave to the caddies, quietly, broadly and regularly. He always knew, going back to his days loading freight trains, that he could have been one himself. It would be impossible to say how much Jim Langley gave away but it was likely in the millions. He gave away more than he saved. But he needed to share.
Sam Reeves and Jim Langley.
Jim Langley’s values matched and Sam’s values and enhanced them. In Sam’s rounds with Jim, Jim played bogey golf with his right hand in his pocket. When they went out for dinner, Jim often ordered fish—easier to cut with one hand. They got to know each other gradually, over time. Sam visited with Jim almost every time he came to Cypress and those visits numbered in the hundreds. Real friendship, Sam will tell you, takes time.
In September 1987, Pope John Paul II, the skiing pope, came to the Carmel Mission Basilica, Jim’s home church in Carmel-by-the-Sea. Sam and Betsy Reeves were there. So were Jim and Lou Langley.
As John Paul II made his way down the basilica’s main aisle toward the pulpit, he was surrounded by security people, the cardinal of Majorca, various deputies, a photographer, mission officials. The church was packed to its fire-code allowance. The pope kissed congregants but generally kept moving. The atmosphere was borderline pandemonium.
When the pope was almost at the altar, he made eye contact with a tall, white-haired man on his left. The pope stopped and shook Sam’s hand. Sam did not know why. He had been to the Vatican but had never met a pope. Sam was a church-going Protestant, but he felt a distinct power emanating from the pope. Sam told the pope that he appreciated his global view of the world’s problems, a theme in many of his encyclicals, which Sam had read. The pope, in his Polish-accented English, said something affirming back to Sam. He then turned to the Majorcan cardinal beside him and instructed him to give Sam a small silver crucifix.
Two months after that, Jim was pushing that new Ford with no gas off the road when another vehicle struck him. The accident. The accident that started a new chapter in Jim’s life.
Jim Langley retired from Cypress Point at the end of 2005. He was hired on the basis of one main qualification, his personality, and that was the foundation of a career that lasted almost 35 years, in good times and bad. He was ambivalent about retirement but Lou was eager to see the world while they could. Jim was made an honorary member of the club but seldom used it. Eight years after retiring he died. That was 10 years ago. He was 75.
Throughout golf, Jim Langley had a reputation for being ethical and generous, remarkably steady and reliable. Butch knew all about that. Thousands of golf people did. Jim Langley was a legend, a legendary club pro. His funeral service was at the Carmel Mission and it was packed with caddies, Cypress Point members, club employees, Cal teammates, church friends, loads of other club pros and touring pros. There was a small silver crucifix in his coffin, the one the cardinal gave to Sam at the pope’s behest. Jim’s wife and their four sons and spouses were in the front pew. Five months later, his first-born son, Brett, the club pro, was dead.
When Jim Langley retired from Cypress, Golfweek published a profile of him. The writer of the piece, John Steinbreder, thought so much of what Sam Reeves told him for the story that he wrote out Sam’s words on a heavy personal notecard and secured it, by way of a pushpin with a red bulb, to an antique map above his desk. The way John has it positioned, the notecard is surrounded by ocean. It reads:
Jim has a life of joy, which is remarkable when you think of what he has gone through. Joy, you understand, is different from happiness. Joy is an inward peace, a sense of contentment and acceptance of life and what it gives you. And while pain may be inevitable, suffering is a choice. Jim has pain but he chooses not to suffer. Rather, he gives, and he inspires as a result.
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The four days of each of the men’s professional four majors are like holy days for many of us, including Sam and Butch. But this upcoming major, the PGA Championship, run by the PGA of America, is different from the others. The club pro and the teaching pro is at its foundation, and the those who teach the golf swing and sell its equipment and run golf clubs of every kind are suddenly in the sharpest kind of focus.
But golf has a way of doing that. It sharpens our focus. It raises the stakes of our mistakes, the joy of our successes, the altitude of our dreams. It elevates our friendships. Sam Reeves will tell you that. He has been playing for 75 years and if there’s one thing he will tell you it is that.
Bobby Jones of Atlanta was Sam’s first sporting hero, going back to Sam’s boyhood in Thomaston, Ga. In 1958, Jones, frail with disease, was made an honorary citizen of St. Andrews, where he had some failures and many successes. His 20-minute address to his fellow townspeople included these three sentences:
"There are two very important words in the English language that are very much misused and abused. They are friend and friendship. When I say to a person, 'I am your friend,' I have said about the ultimate.”
Just recently, Sam read those words from Jones’s 1958 address for the first time. Those sentences, as you would expect, brought Jim Langley and Butch Harmon to mind for Sam. Two true and great friends he made through golf.
Sam had a single-word response to Bob Jones’s insights about friendship:
“Amen.”
This piece is adapted from Michael Bamberger’s book, “The Ball in the Air,” published by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The book is available at some libraries, many bookstores and on Amazon.com.
Michael welcomes your comments at mfbamberger@aol.com