My Dinner (and Breakfast) With Jean

All week you've been hearing echoes of the collapse. For a change, let me relate what it was like to spend time with the guy, if only for a day. I tell this story not merely because it seems timely, but also because Van de Velde was probably the coolest pro golfer I've ever had the pleasure of hanging around with in ten years of writing golf.

In October 2000-- this was fifteen months after Carnoustie, toward the end of Jean's first of two full years playing the US PGA Tour, two months after he almost won the Reno-Tahoe Open using his wife's clubs (!)-- I was assigned by the fledgling monthly Maximum Golf (remember that one?) to do a Q&A with Jean. I went out to Las Vegas to do it, absolutely cold-- no prior contact at an earlier event, no agent mediation, nothing. I found him at Summerlin or the Canyons on Tuesday, pitched him, and his attitude was this: bon, I have nothing better to do, here's my cell phone number, I'm staying at the Paris casino-hotel (couldn't pass that one up!, he said), why don't we have breakfast tomorrow?

He had a late morning pro-am time that Wednesday morning, so we met at about 8 a.m. in one of the hotel's little restaurants. He arrived with one of the best cases of bed-head I'd ever seen, and we sat down to eat. As usual, we chit-chatted a bit, getting to know each other, the unusual thing being his curiosity about the journo sitting across from him; we also talked a good bit about Vegas, since this was his first visit, and he was dazzled. (In a kind of family-from-Topeka sense, as opposed to an L.A.-let's head-over-to-the-Crazy-Horse sense.)

My clearest memory of that morning is how he ordered breakfast. After we shooed the waitress a couple of times, asking for a few more minutes, Jean finally ordered the Belgian waffle. I couldn't resist. "Jean," I said, "I was sure you'd ask for the French toast."

"Well, you know, the Belgian waffle isn't really Belgian," he said, with his best facetious smile. "It's French too. Didn't you know? The French, we invented everything!"

Between the chatting and the eating we did get a little work done. Part of the morning portion of interview went like this:

Me: So were you treated as a national hero after Carnoustie, despite not winning? Were you, like, given the Legion of Honor medal or anything?

Him: No. But, you know, bullfighting is popular in the south of France, and during the autumn holidays, I went to a bullfight in Mont de Marsan [his hometown, near Biarritz and the Atlantic Coast]. The maestro….

Me: The matador?

Him: Yes, the matador. Sometimes the matador will dedicate the bull to someone in the crowd. So during one bullfight, the matador was close to killing the bull, and he stopped to address the crowd. There were 3,000 people there. He came to me and he spoke to me, and he said, this bull was mine.

Me: And then he gored it.

Him: Right. [Rolling his eyes.] It was a wonderful moment.

Me: You’ve been sponsored for the last couple of years by EuroDisney, whose Paris theme park is detested by a good percentage of the French population. Are you ever accused of being an agent of Yankee cultural imperialism?

Him: No, not at all! [Laughing.] People my age and the younger generation love Minnie and Mickey! Maybe some of the older people object. We’re very proud people, but we’re not against everything American. Look at all the French people who spend four hours eating meals at McDonalds!

Me: Have you ever had a four-hour meal at McDonalds?

Him: [Again, smiling] Well, I said some French people do it.

We didn't get anywhere near finishing the interview that morning-- I didn't yet have a word from him about Carnoustie-- so I suggested we have dinner. His response: Why not? He expressed a small curiosity about Vegas's celebrity-chef restaurants, so I made us a reservation at Emeril's for that evening, and met him after the pro-am to tell him we were all set for, like, 8 p.m.

"Well, there is one problem," he said. "When I travel, I like to take my own wine, but some restaurants, they don't like that."

"I'll call to make sure it's okay," I told him, "and if it's not, we'll go someplace else." What I thought to myself, of course, was, okay, this guy is a little bizarre. I mean, Americans aren't that backward. There's bound to be some pretty fair wine at Emeril's. "I'll call you in an hour to let you know what happened."

So I call the restaurant, and ask for the sommelier. He doesn't like it, but he agrees, saying he'll require a corkage fee, which of course is exactly what any good restaurant in another city would do, except that in Las Vegas the last thing they expect is for a tourist to be that picky about wine.

I get to Emeril's first, and the sommelier happens to pass by while I'm waiting at the front of the restaurant. I take the opportunity to introduce myself. I get the expected frown. I stand around for a few minutes, and Jean comes waltzing up (no bed-head this time) with a bottle of wine under his arm. We're seated, and here comes the sommelier, waiting to hear about how this jerk's wine is better than anything in their cellar. Surprise: it is. It's a rare bottle of Latour that makes the sommelier's eyes open as wide as a pair of coffee mugs. Turns out people back home, in addition to dedicating bulls to Jean, have been handing him priceless bottles of wine pretty much non-stop ever since Carnoustie.

Sometimes diners will offer a steward a little of the wine they've ordered if it's something particularly good. This one's so good that the sommelier just straight out asks, "Would you mind if I had a taste of that?"

So the check comes, and, even without the wine, the bill is astronomical. I insist on paying (it's not my money, after all, but the magazine's). Jean ain't having it. He says, "I think I can afford it. I have had a pretty good year the last couple of years." You would think Tour pros do this all the time after dinner interviews, but they don't. It rarely ever happens.

Now, we've eaten and drunk so much that we've gotten virtually nothing done for the article. I mention this, and he says, "Well, I have an afternoon tea time tomorrow, so why don't we just go back to my room and talk?" Bon. So we get back to his room, and have the following exchange:

Me: Okay, time to talk about Carnoustie. Let’s start with your second shot on the eighteenth hole, the two-iron approach that bounced backward off the grandstand, across the Barry Burn, and then into the deepest fescue on the course. Bad judgement, or bad luck?

Him: Some people said I was stupid to hit that shot. But some say, “That’s the most unlucky break I’ve ever seen in my life.” It’s probably somewhere in between. I could have hit a better shot. But at the same time, you think, the ball hits the grandstand, comes back forty yards, hits off the stone near the hazard, and into an impossible lie. You think, what else could happen? Where is the lightning? Where is the fire-breathing dragon?

Me: On American television, the ABC commentator, Curtis Strange, crucified you. But during the Ryder Cup telecast, Johnny Miller said, “Van de Velde should go down as the only player ever to have a grandstand cost him a major championship.”

Him: He’s right. [Smiling.] No doubt about it. You can question the choice I made to play that shot, but if that grandstand isn’t there, that ball doesn’t land more than ten yards from the green.

Most people who watched closely remember it just that way. (Indeed, in his news conference today, Tiger remarked, "He got a good break off the tee, and a bad break off the second shot, and it just escalated from there.")

I told Jean that the American television broadcast-- or maybe it was one of the magazines-- had a picture of the stanchion off which the ball had ricocheted, and it was marked where his ball had hit it, kind of like when you can see a ballmark on a clay or composite tennis court. Jean nodded.

"I don't know if it's on tape or in a magazine," I said. "But I'll try to find it for you. If it's on tape, maybe I can have a still print made from it."

"I'd like that," he said. "Maybe I could have it framed." The look on his face-- the pursed lips, half smiling and half frowning-- was perfect. It reflected both his sense of humor about the episode, and the chagrin he had so determinedly tried to hide for over a year.

That was pretty much our last exchange of that evening. When I got home from Vegas, I dug out the tape I'd made of the final round at Carnoustie, and the image wasn't there. I flipped through all the magazines, and it wasn't in any of them, either. I began to suspect that NBC, during that year's Ryder Cup, might have showed the image (using BBC footage), but I didn't have the Ryder Cup on tape.

Even though I never found it, I still think about that image, and that look on his face at the end of that evening, every time I think of Van de Velde. I really wish I had found it. I still feel like I let him down.

Comments

[Dan]

The Golf Channel ran a show last week about Van de Velde's final hole at the Open and there was a shot of the image of the ball on the grandstand bracket - it was part of a clip from the ABC TV coverage.

[Ronald Montesano]

Shipnuck sent me over here via link, and the trip was worth the article. Nicely done.

[roxanne paquette]

I was watching the British Open on tv and saw that Jean Van de Velde is suffering from mononucleosis. I contracted the same virus after the birth of my son and it remained for 2 years. I would love to share with him my symtoms and recover. If there is anyway you can have him get in contact with him I would greatly appreciate it. It was so severe I had to stop working for 6 months as an Assistant District Attorney in New york

thank you

Roxanne paquettte roxpaq@msn.com