00:00First off, congratulations on an incredible career in broadcasting.
00:04You've been somebody I've looked up to for a very, very long time.
00:08So first off, congrats.
00:10Thank you very much, Smiley.
00:11Great to be on with you.
00:13You're doing a fantastic job there.
00:15So it's the young guys like you and Colt, Amanda on the CBS side.
00:23I mean, that's what it's all about now.
00:25You know the players so well, and you're doing a fantastic job.
00:29Yes, and it was such a great send-off watching CBS,
00:33how special it was over the last couple of weeks.
00:36There wasn't a dry eye, it seemed like, in the compound or in that booth.
00:41Certainly not mine.
00:42At the winning championship.
00:43Oh, my God.
00:44It was a beautiful, beautiful send-off.
00:47I was underprepared.
00:50I was really, I had no idea.
00:52Sela Shai is our producer.
00:54He does a great job.
00:55He's turned it around.
00:56It really is amazing.
00:57The pictures we put out and the production quality, it's really special.
01:02And he said, hey, you be ready.
01:05This is going to be a couple of weeks of celebrating you, you know.
01:08So I still had no idea that the tributes would be the way they were.
01:12And as you could tell from my response at the end,
01:15when they kept showing all these old photos.
01:17Oh, that got me in.
01:19I can't imagine how you felt.
01:21She's crying her eyes out, and I'm like, oh, stop.
01:24Anyway.
01:26It was incredible and very, very well-deserved after an incredible career in broadcasting.
01:31But one of the things that have recently come out for you is a biography to Helen Back,
01:38talking about your story in the game of golf, written by Jeff Saunders.
01:41And I want to first kind of get into this because, for the most part,
01:45when we have players on this podcast that have come on, we always detail their history
01:51and where they got started in the game and their journey.
01:55And there's no better read, I imagine, than this book that I'm super excited about reading
02:00because I think there's going to be so many things that I read from your journey
02:03that I'm going to be able to relate to from my own personal journey in the game of golf.
02:07So when did this book come about with Jeff and wanting to get something down on paper
02:14for everybody to read?
02:16For a long while now, I'm 65 at the end of the year.
02:20I've been involved in the game.
02:21I left school at 15 years of age to be a golf pro.
02:25That's all I ever wanted to be.
02:26I wanted to be a club pro, giving lessons, helping people out in the club.
02:30I came from a very small town, a rural area, where the nearest golf course was six or seven miles away.
02:38My dad and the farmers in the area did it all by voluntary labor, built the course.
02:43So that's really where I came from and what I wanted to do.
02:47I just became a good player along the way through my effort and wanting to be as good as I could be.
02:52I think a lot of players, as you said, come from that type of background where it's a singular game, as you know.
03:04It's a lonely game at times.
03:05It's not as lonely as being an Olympic swimmer, for example, but it's a lonely game.
03:10You need to be willing to put the effort in, and you've got to have a passion, as you know, to do that.
03:16So the book starts out with that, and then it ends up where I played well, then it goes through the phase where I didn't play so well, and then the last 20, 30 years doing the TV.
03:29So it's a long-term read about my life in golf, about an era in golf, if you will, not just about me.
03:37It's not like an I, I, I, I, I throughout the book.
03:41And I'd always been asked to do this book because of my rise in golf and then seemingly my sudden demise in the game when I lost my confidence and was injured and couldn't play well anymore or certainly couldn't compete.
03:57So I'd always kind of put it on the back shelf.
04:00I didn't really want to do it.
04:01I'd been – journalists had asked me a lot of times, come on, you should tell your story.
04:05And then I finally met Jeff about three years ago, more than – maybe three or four years ago, and he came to me and he'd written a book on my great friend and mentor, Peter Thompson, and also on Sir Bob Charles, a New Zealander that also won the Open Championship back in 63.
04:22And he said, I'd like to tell your story.
04:24And he convinced me over time.
04:26He wrote a couple of chapters, sent them to me.
04:28Sorry for the long-winded answer.
04:30But basically, he convinced me that this story needed to be told for my family, for my grandchildren.
04:38They want to look back on this and say, wow, that's what grandpa did.
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