Feeling special melancholy over media passings of Andrews, Rosaforte

This spring’s past Champions Dinner will be less one of the old-timers with the passing of 1968 winner Bob Goalby on January 19 at age 92. Some would take umbrage at using “winner” for Goalby, but the man who put on the green jacket because of a scorekeeping error by Roberto De Vicenzo didn’t ask to be in such a horrible position. He and Roberto should have been tied at the end of regulation, with a playoff to decide the outcome, but when De Vicenzo had signed for a wrong, higher score, Goalby was the winner by default.

Should Goalby have declined the first-place honor and refused to accept? There was nothing nefarious about the decision by officials, it’s what was dictated by the Rules of Golf. You can’t expect competitors to play by the rules but disregard them when one seems overly harsh. Goalby handled the troubling victory as well as anyone could have, at the time and for the decades later when he was asked about it and many interviewers thought he should have walked around for life apologizing for what happened. De Vicenzo himself always handled the cruel twist better than those who held it against Goalby. Like myself, Goalby was an Illinoisan, from good Midwest stock. He was from the Belleville area and that’s where he died. It’s located in southern Illinois a short ride east of St. Louis. His relatives include the Haas boys, Jay, Jerry and Bill among them, plus three sons of his own.

Goalby won 11 times on tour and three times on the senior circuit. He was an instrumental part of the senior tour in its infancy, and post tour life did TV work for NBC. Born six months before Arnold Palmer, he was a loyal soldier of the old guard, appreciative of where the tour had come from and supportive of the veterans, including Arnie. Peter McCleery, like myself now of Golf Digest’s old guard, always chuckled over course rover Goalby’s blatant shilling for his pal Arnie during a Skins Game. Palmer’s new line of Axiom clubs had been released, and after Palmer hit a particularly good shot, Goalby said enthusiastically on air, “Hey, Arnie, I’ve gotta get me a set of those Axioms.” Arnie was doubtless beaming from ear to ear.

Along with feeling kinship with this fellow golfer from Illinois, Bob Goalby, two recent media passings are particularly hard to accept of two people I worked with. Peter Andrews passed away on December 21 at age 90 and Tim Rosaforte January 11, age 66.

When Peter worked on the editorial staff at Golf Digest in Trumbull, Connecticut,I had the office next to him. He was one of the most well-read and well-versed writers I ever worked with. His knowledge on many subjects ran deep, which I appreciated because I, too, like to know a lot about a lot. He had a liking for Christmas-time traditions, like the spiked egg-nog recipe he shared. Like me, he thought the Alastair Sim Scrooge version was the best ever done, and he and his family sat down to watch it every Christmas, also like me, crying at the end.

Peter was limited after he suffered a stroke in the summer of 1994 just as he was about to travel to the Hamptons on Long Island to do research for the 1995 U.S. Open. That he lived so long afterward was testament to his determination and the devotion of his wife, Marge. I will think of him from better times when he would regale everyone with stories, including his time as an editor at Playboy. I will never forget the image of him in our offices; each office was roughly 8 or 10 feet by 8 or 10 feet, with desk credenza units way too big for the space. I still picture him in the office, eating entire containers of hard candy during meetings, or in his office, chewing his pencil as he read galleys. He destroyed his chair backing and arm rests by rubbing them against the wooden desk. It was all because of his office being, as he called it, a “pestilential hell hole.”

I did not spend as much time around Tim. He primarily worked for sister publication Golf World, but would ask for research help from me after I was put in charge of our Resource Center and Library. I always felt Tim had the life I could have seen being my career since I had started as a sports reporter and golf writer and being out in the field that way was what I loved the most. I always thought the Tim Rosaforte viewers got to see on TV was what we got as coworkers. He was a gatherer and seemed always occupied with trying to gather as much information as he could so he could just as quickly disseminate it. The awards that came in toward the end of his career attested to how well he did it, most notably as an honorary member of the PGA of America.