Opinion & Analysis
Champagne Time: On the 50th anniversary of the death of Tony Lema
One afternoon a lifetime ago, in a scraggly bit of park between a suburban New York commuter railroad station and the dire Bronx River, a skinny little young teen was working on his short game. With his trusty 9-iron, the kid hit pitches from target to target: tree, bare spot, piece of litter. And then Masters champion Doug Ford came along, asked the kid what he was aiming at — “That tree there?” — and with the kid’s club stiffed it.
I tell this story to explain, in sentimental part, why I recently tracked down a copy of Ford’s 1963 Wedge Book. (Let me also add that Doug Ford did have local connections, which makes his appearance there in a patch of southern Westchester train-station scrub less golfus ex machina than you might have thought it.) That hard-practicing kid’s once stellar short game has gotten maddeningly erratic, this near-half-century later, and in looking around for guidance I discovered Ford’s little volume, previously unknown to me. It contains advice that is still very helpful — and it also contains, in Julius Boros’s Preface, a sentence that left me nearly as open-mouthed with wonderment as Ford’s no-practice-swing bullseye left my younger self. Boros, himself a three-time major champion, mentions having worked his way up with Ford on the post-war pro circuit “amid some pretty fine company — Jackie Burke, Ted Kroll, Tommy Bolt and Jerry Barber, to name a few.” And then Boros, writing in September 1963, adds this:
“Doug Ford and I both feel that the current crop of young golfers, including Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, and Tony Lema, is the best to come up since that group a decade ago.”
The King, the Black Knight, the Golden Bear — of course the Big Three, all still happily with us, did go on to be “the best” of that golfing generation (and then some). But that there might have been a Big Fourth? What about the last-named member of Boros’s then-young foursome?
Smooth swing
Well, I knew that Tony Lema had a nickname, too — although “Champagne Tony” is definitely under-dressed for keeping company with the Big Three’s era-bestriding monikers. And I also knew that Lema’s nickname accurately reflected his life-of-the-party lifestyle. (As today’s parlance would have it, he owned his choices: “I have never denied myself a drink or a good dinner or a party while I am out on Tour.”) What I had not known, prior to turning from Boros to Wikipedia and beyond, was the extent to which Tony Lema’s tragically-short career had justified lofty expectations, right up to Big Four-dom.
The biographical basics I discovered are as follows. Anthony David Lema was born in Oakland in 1934, five years after Palmer, a year before Player, six before Nicklaus. Raised on the wrong side of the tracks, he learned golf at a local muni, becoming good enough to win the Oakland City championship at 18. He served overseas in the Marine Corps, then came home to work at the San Francisco Golf Club and a Nevada nine-holer. By 1957-58, Lema was out on the pro circuit, with financial backing from Eddie Lowery, otherwise known to golfing history as Francis Ouimet’s 10-year-old caddy at the 1913 U.S. Open.
With, as Peter Alliss described it, “an elegant swing of rare beauty” — so sweet and smooth “you could pour [it] on popcorn,” in another admirer’s words — Lema enjoyed some early pro success. (Video of that swing, with commentary by Hale Irwin, is available on YouTube.)
Lean years followed, but then came the breakthrough. He won three times in the fall of 1962, once in 1963, and in 1964 went on a streak that saw him win the Crosby at Pebble in January, the Thunderbird Classic and the Buick and Cleveland Opens in June, and the Open Championship (by five strokes over Nicklaus in second) at St. Andrews in July. (Lema chronicled his early tour experiences in Golfer’s Gold, which George Plimpton applauded as showing “considerable flair for the written word.”)
A couple more titles followed in 1965, and a final victory in May of 1966. Add a second-place finish at the ’63 Masters; a 9-1-1 record in two Ryder Cup appearances (’63 and ’65 — the best record of any competitor with at least two appearances); 50 percent top-10 finishes from ’63 through ’66; and a win over Palmer, Ken Venturi, and Bobby Nichols at the 1964 World Series of Golf (taking home $50K, which was then the game’s largest purse), and Lema’s career certainly seemed to be tracking toward Hall of Fame status.
Instead, too-soon his time ran out: on July 24, 1966, after his final round in the PGA Championship at Firestone Country Club in Akron, Lema headed with his pregnant wife for Chicago to play the next day in an exhibition in Crete, Illinois. Less than a mile from arrival, the twin-engine charter crashed … on a golf course, just short of the green of a par three.
As veteran N.Y. Times journalist Dave Anderson was to note, Tony Lema’s death “saddened even casual followers of golf because of his appeal.”
And his appeal was considerable
Tall, handsome, and personable, Champagne Tony lived extra-large — with “effervescence,” was Anderson’s memorable choice of adjective, although he could well have simply chosen “extravagance.” Lema boasted that although he finished second in tournament earnings in 1965, he finished “first in spendings.” (He took home just over a hundred thousand in prize money that year.)
With an outgoing style “that let others in on the enjoyment of his victories,” Lema became almost as popular as his good friend, the game’s charismatic King, achieving the type of crossover celebrity not previously enjoyed by professional golfers in the pre-Palmer era. So the nickname Champagne Tony was made to order for such a “colorful and endearing character.” He had been christened with it after his first big win at the Orange County Open in the fall of 1962. An excited Lema, hungering for a validating title at long last, promised the press corps after 54 holes that “if I win this thing, guys, it’ll be champagne all around, not beers, tomorrow.” And next day, sure enough, the playoff victory was Lema’s and the bubbly went to the writers — although, as he later admitted, “all the sportswriters there couldn’t have drunk as much as I did that night.”
(But at least that time he waited: an earlier, unofficial win had come after a playoff for which he’d prepared with three quick post-round highballs, thinking his workday already done. On the other hand, he would later go ahead and tempt fate by serving up the bubbly at the halfway point of his victorious ’64 Open Championship, when he held a two-stroke lead over the field.)
In short, whether taking driver out a 12th-floor hotel window during a late-night party, or exchanging club for baton during a TV appearance at the helm of Lawrence Welk’s “Champagne Music Makers,” Champagne Tony, off the course and away from the game, was always the life of the party.
Memorials
Lema’s friends and fellow pros kept that party going in his honor for many years. Beginning a year or two after his death, and continuing until 1980, the Tony Lema Memorial attracted top names in the worlds of sports and entertainment, as well as many of golf’s greats — 50 celebs, 50 pros, 100 amateurs. The one-day invitational, with gala dinner the night before, was held on Marco Island, Florida, at what was then the Marco Island Country Club, where Lema had been the first, albeit unofficial, club pro. According to local reporter Tom Rife, writing in 2006 in memory of the Memorial, “Not before, and not since has Southwest Florida known anything like it.”
Nor, as it turned out, had that golf-crazy youngster mentioned earlier known anything like the Marco Island course, when he and his father came to tee it up there in the spring of 1969. My scorecards from their two rounds are, I suppose, my most-prized golf mementoes. As the scores themselves attest (125 and 126, 118 and 121), neither I nor my father, whose own recent introduction to the game had opened the door to my taking it up, had ever played such an overwhelmingly challenging course. Indeed, handling the cards, a memory annotates the rounds: so many balls lost in the seemingly-ever-present water we had to suspend play to ride in to get more!
So that, anyway, is why one golfer, on this July 24th, celebrated the half-century anniversary of Tony Lema’s death with thoughts not only about what might have been, in Champagne Tony’s case, but also with reflections on what has been, in the lifetime of that kid who, amazingly now almost 50 years a golfer, is still trying to better his short game.
As the editor-in-chief of this website and an observer of the GolfWRX forums and other online golf equipment discourse for over a decade, I’m pretty well attuned to the grunts and grumbles of a significant portion of the golf equipment purchasing spectrum. And before you accuse me of lording above all in some digital ivory tower, I’d like to offer that I worked at golf courses (public and private) for years prior to picking up my pen, so I’m well-versed in the non-degenerate golf equipment consumers out there. I touched (green)grass (retail)!
Complaints about the ills of and related to the OEMs usually follow some version of: Product cycles are too short for real innovation, tour equipment isn’t the same as retail (which is largely not true, by the way), too much is invested in marketing and not enough in R&D, top staffer X hasn’t even put the new driver in play, so it’s obviously not superior to the previous generation, prices are too high, and on and on.
Without digging into the merits of any of these claims, which I believe are mostly red herrings, I’d like to bring into view of our rangefinder what I believe to be the two primary difficulties golf equipment companies face.
One: As Terry Koehler, back when he was the CEO of Ben Hogan, told me at the time of the Ft Worth irons launch, if you can’t regularly hit the golf ball in a coin-sized area in the middle of the face, there’s not a ton that iron technology can do for you. Now, this is less true now with respect to irons than when he said it, and is less and less true by degrees as the clubs get larger (utilities, fairways, hybrids, drivers), but there remains a great deal of golf equipment truth in that statement. Think about it — which is to say, in TL;DR fashion, get lessons from a qualified instructor who will teach you about the fundamentals of repeatable impact and how the golf swing works, not just offer band-aid fixes. If you can’t repeatably deliver the golf club to the golf ball in something resembling the manner it was designed for, how can you expect to be getting the most out of the club — put another way, the maximum value from your investment?
Similarly, game improvement equipment can only improve your game if you game it. In other words, get fit for the clubs you ought to be playing rather than filling the bag with the ones you wish you could hit or used to be able to hit. Of course, don’t do this if you don’t care about performance and just want to hit a forged blade while playing off an 18 handicap. That’s absolutely fine. There were plenty of members in clubs back in the day playing Hogan Apex or Mizuno MP-32 irons who had no business doing so from a ballstriking standpoint, but they enjoyed their look, feel, and complementary qualities to their Gatsby hats and cashmere sweaters. Do what brings you a measure of joy in this maddening game.
Now, the second issue. This is not a plea for non-conforming equipment; rather, it is a statement of fact. USGA/R&A limits on every facet of golf equipment are detrimental to golf equipment manufacturers. Sure, you know this, but do you think about it as it applies to almost every element of equipment? A 500cc driver would be inherently more forgiving than a 460cc, as one with a COR measurement in excess of 0.83. 50-inch shafts. Box grooves. And on and on.
Would fewer regulations be objectively bad for the game? Would this erode its soul? Fortunately, that’s beside the point of this exercise, which is merely to point out the facts. The fact, in this case, is that equipment restrictions and regulations are the slaughterbench of an abundance of innovation in the golf equipment space. Is this for the best? Well, now I’ve asked the question twice and might as well give a partial response, I guess my answer to that would be, “It depends on what type of golf you’re playing and who you’re playing it with.”
For my part, I don’t mind embarrassing myself with vintage blades and persimmons chasing after the quasi-spiritual elevation of a well-struck shot, but that’s just me. Plenty of folks don’t give a damn if their grooves are conforming. Plenty of folks think the folks in Liberty Corner ought to add a prison to the museum for such offences. And those are just a few of the considerations for the amateur game — which doesn’t get inside the gallery ropes of the pro game…
Different strokes in the game of golf, in my humble opinion.
Anyway, I believe equipment company engineers are genuinely trying to build better equipment year over year. The marketing departments are trying to find ways to make this equipment appeal to the broadest segment of the golf market possible. All of this against (1) the backdrop of — at least for now — firm product cycles. And golfers who, with their ~15 average handicap (men), for the most part, are not striping the golf ball like Tiger in his prime and seem to have less and less time year over year to practice and improve. (2) Regulations that massively restrict what they’re able to do…
That’s the landscape as I see it and the real headwinds for golf equipment companies. No doubt, there’s more I haven’t considered, but I think the previous is a better — and better faith — point of departure when formulating any serious commentary on the golf equipment world than some of the more cynical and conspiratorial takes I hear.
Agree? Disagree? Think I’m worthy of an Adam Hadwin-esque security guard tackle? Let me know in the comments.
@golfoncbs The infamous Adam Hadwin tackle ? #golf #fyp #canada #pgatour #adamhadwin ? Ghibli-style nostalgic waltz – MaSssuguMusic
Episode #16 brings us Cliff McKinney. Cliff is the founder of Old Charlie Golf Club, a new club, and concept, to be built in the Florida panhandle. The model is quite interesting and aims to make great, private golf more affordable. We hope you enjoy the show!
Last week, I came across a reel from BBC Sport on Instagram featuring Scottie Scheffler speaking to the media ahead of The Open at Royal Portrush. In it, he shared that he often wonders what the point is of wanting to win tournaments so badly — especially when he knows, deep down, that it doesn’t lead to a truly fulfilling life.
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“Is it great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have in the game of golf? Yeah, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about it because I’ve literally worked my entire life to be good at this sport,” Scheffler said. “To have that kind of sense of accomplishment, I think, is a pretty cool feeling. To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day, I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I’m not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world, because what’s the point?”
Ironically — or perhaps perfectly — he went on to win the claret jug.
That question — what’s the point of winning? — cuts straight to the heart of the human journey.
As someone who’s spent over two decades in the trenches of professional golf, and in deep study of the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the game, I see Scottie’s inner conflict as a sign of soul evolution in motion.
I came to golf late. I wasn’t a junior standout or college All-American. At 27, I left a steady corporate job to see if I could be on the PGA Tour starting as a 14-handicap, average-length hitter. Over the years, my journey has been defined less by trophies and more by the relentless effort to navigate the deeply inequitable and gated system of professional golf — an effort that ultimately turned inward and helped me evolve as both a golfer and a person.
One perspective that helped me make sense of this inner dissonance around competition and our culture’s tendency to overvalue winning is the idea of soul evolution.
The University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies has done extensive research on reincarnation, and Netflix’s Surviving Death (Episode 6) explores the topic, too. Whether you take it literally or metaphorically, the idea that we’re on a long arc of growth — from beginner to sage elder — offers a profound perspective.
If you accept the premise literally, then terms like “young soul” and “old soul” start to hold meaning. However, even if we set the word “soul” aside, it’s easy to see that different levels of life experience produce different worldviews.
Newer souls — or people in earlier stages of their development — may be curious and kind but still lack discernment or depth. There is a naivety, and they don’t yet question as deeply, tending to see things in black and white, partly because certainty feels safer than confronting the unknown.
As we gain more experience, we begin to experiment. We test limits. We chase extreme external goals — sometimes at the expense of health, relationships, or inner peace — still operating from hunger, ambition, and the fragility of the ego.
It’s a necessary stage, but often a turbulent and unfulfilling one.
David Duval fell off the map after reaching World No. 1. Bubba Watson had his own “Is this it?” moment with his caddie, Ted Scott, after winning the Masters.
In Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, reflecting on his 2011 Super Bowl win, Rodgers said:
“Now I’ve accomplished the only thing that I really, really wanted to do in my life. Now what? I was like, ‘Did I aim at the wrong thing? Did I spend too much time thinking about stuff that ultimately doesn’t give you true happiness?’”
Jim Carrey once said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”
Eventually, though, something shifts.
We begin to see in shades of gray. Winning, dominating, accumulating—these pursuits lose their shine. The rewards feel more fleeting. Living in a constant state of fight-or-flight makes us feel alive, yes, but not happy and joyful.
Compassion begins to replace ambition. Love, presence, and gratitude become more fulfilling than status, profits, or trophies. We crave balance over burnout. Collaboration over competition. Meaning over metrics.
Interestingly, if we zoom out, we can apply this same model to nations and cultures. Countries, like people, have a collective “soul stage” made up of the individuals within them.
Take the United States, for example. I’d place it as a mid-level soul: highly competitive and deeply driven, but still learning emotional maturity. Still uncomfortable with nuance. Still believing that more is always better. Despite its global wins, the U.S. currently ranks just 23rd in happiness (as of 2025). You might liken it to a gifted teenager—bold, eager, and ambitious, but angsty and still figuring out how to live well and in balance. As much as a parent wants to protect their child, sometimes the child has to make their own mistakes to truly grow.
So when Scottie Scheffler wonders what the point of winning is, I don’t see someone losing strength.
I see someone evolving.
He’s beginning to look beyond the leaderboard. Beyond metrics of success that carry a lower vibration. And yet, in a poetic twist, Scheffler did go on to win The Open. But that only reinforces the point: even at the pinnacle, the question remains. And if more of us in the golf and sports world — and in U.S. culture at large — started asking similar questions, we might discover that the more meaningful trophy isn’t about accumulating or beating others at all costs.
It’s about awakening and evolving to something more than winning could ever promise.
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RAT
Jul 28, 2016 at 11:08 am
Impressive ! Where’s the movie?
Korean Slum Lord
Jul 27, 2016 at 10:25 pm
My family in the states live in Hayward, just minutes from Tony Lema’s course. He is well-regarded in Northern California. Everybody’s favorite Portuguese.