As I drove up to John’s Island last week for lunch with Mark Mulvoy, the now-retired Sports Illustrated editor who is serving as tournament chairman for the 2015 USGA Mid-Amateur Championship, my plan was to interview him about the prestigious golf event he is bringing to our community in October.
And I did – eventually.
First, though, there were the usual preliminaries. We hadn’t met before, despite the fact that he has been spending winters at John’s Island for more than 25 years, and as often happens when two former sports writers get together, we talked shop.
We talked about the business, about all the changes we had witnessed and how the internet had some newspapers and magazines on the ropes.
We talked about our experiences, about the places we had worked and people we knew.
Mostly, we talked about sports, about games and athletes and the stories we had written about them.
Nearly two hours after we sat down at that shaded, poolside table, we were still reminiscing, filling a postcard-perfect Florida afternoon with lively conversation and fond memories.
Finally, we got to the golf tournament – the Mid-Am, as it’s known – which will be played on the John’s Island Club’s North and West courses Oct. 3-8, and the first-ever champions reunion that will be held at John’s Island this weekend.
“It’s the first time a USGA major championship will be played on the Treasure Coast,” Mulvoy said of the tournament, which will bring 264 amateurs, ages 25 and over, with handicaps of 3.4 or lower, to the Vero Beach area.
“The qualifying starts in August and ends Sept. 14, and somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 amateurs all across the country will attempt to play their way into the field of 264,” he added. “We’re talking about some of the finest amateurs in the world. The 264 who will come here will have an average handicap of plus-2, so this is a very high, very competitive level of golf.
“This is a big event.”
Mulvoy estimates the cost of hosting the tournament, which is free to the public, will approach $600,000, require 700 volunteers and the use of facilities at the Red Stick and Quail Valley golf clubs, as well as 40 14-passenger vans for evacuation purposes in case of bad weather.
So to make sure it gets the buzz it deserves, Mulvoy has organized a weekend reunion that will bring together, for the first time, the Mid-Am’s past champions. They will gather for a private dinner Friday night at John’s Island – “just them and their wives,” Mulvoy said – before playing golf Saturday morning at JI West with tournament supporters from John’s Island.
They’ll then be honored during a lavish, Saturday night gala at the John’s Island Beach Club, where celebrated author John Feinstein will be the featured speaker.
Among the dignitaries expected to attend are USGA president Tom O’Toole, USGA executive director Mike Davis and noted course architects Pete Dye and Tom Fazio.
“We were looking for something this time of year, when most of our members were down here and could get involved, to jump-start the event and create some buzz about the tournament,” Mulvoy said. “I play some competitive amateur golf, and I know a lot of these guys. They’ve never done anything like this, and they’re excited about it.
“When I first mentioned it to Jim Holtgrieve, who won the first Mid-Am in 1981 and was the captain of the 2013 Walker Cup team, he said, ‘I’ll walk there.’”
And just like that, in a matter of 15 minutes, Mulvoy had given me the information and quotes necessary to write a story on the Mid-Am and past-champions reunion.
But as I drove away from our lunch meeting, I replayed in my mind our entire conversation … and realized something.
This wasn’t just a golf story.
The previous two hours had the makings of something more – a column in which I could take you beyond the event and introduce you to a remarkably accomplished, self-made man, a renowned and respected magazine editor who found his way to Vero Beach in the mid-1970s, later bought a home here and had a compelling story to tell.
Actually, Mulvoy has dozens of them.
So I called him back, told him what I was thinking and arranged to meet him a few days later for a second interview, this time for breakfast at the Citron Bistro in Indian River Shores.
There, over bacon, eggs and toast, we revisited our previous conversation, I sought more details and he gave me what was, in essence, a highlights reel version of his wonderful life story. Mulvoy, now 73, is a Dorchester, Mass., native and the oldest of four brothers who attended Boston College High School, where his senior-year yearbook entry declared: “determined to become a sports writer.”
He then went on to Boston College, which also produced such sports-writing stars as Bob Ryan, Mike Lupica and Lesley Visser, as well as Mulvoy’s brother, Tom, former managing editor of the Boston Globe.
In fact, Mulvoy began working for the Globe while at BC, serving as the newspaper’s campus correspondent, putting in part-time shifts at night in the sports department and writing during the summers.
“The summer of ‘63, after I had graduated from BC, I did a road trip with the Red Sox, which was pretty nice for a guy just out of college,” Mulvoy said. “I’ll never forget Curt Gowdy coming up to me on the team charter and saying, ‘Hey, Bush, you want to write my show?’
“I was getting $12 a day meal money, and he paid me $25 a day to write this four-minute show. You go on a two-week road trip and you had an extra $300 to spend. That was pretty good in those days.”
His days got better.
On April 1, 1965, Mulvoy joined the staff of Sports illustrated, where he went on to cover baseball, pro football and hockey, as well as some college football and basketball.
“I had my problems with college sports – the hypocrisy of it all,” he said.
Mulvoy said he also spent four years writing golf and working as “sort of a ghost writer for Jack Nicklaus, who was under contract to the magazine.”
It was hockey, however, that took Mulvoy to the 1972 Summit Series, the first-ever showdown between Canada’s NHL All-Stars and the Soviet Union team that dominated international amateur competition.
“The single-greatest event I ever covered,” Mulvoy said of the eight-game series, won by the Canadians (four games to three with one tie) only after they swept the final three games in Moscow.
“I went to Russia three times during that period, which was fascinating.”
He also wrote a book about the series, titled “Faceoff at the Summit,” with Team Canada’s goalie, Ken Dryden, an NHL All-Star with the Montreal Canadiens.
Mulvoy wrote or co-authored several other books, including one on hockey great Bobby Orr (“My Game”), paralyzed New England Patriots receiver Darryl Stingley (“Happy to be Alive”) and golf (“The Passion and the Challenge”).
In 1976, weary of travel after more than 10 years on the road and with a house full of kids at home, Mulvoy became an SI editor. He later went back to writing, but it didn’t last long.
“I remember going up to Boston to write a piece on the Red Sox during the summer of ‘78, and I was in the dugout, trying to talk to Jim Rice,” Mulvoy recalled. “He basically told me to go screw myself five different times. That was enough. I went home and went back to editing.”
He became a senior editor a year later, was promoted to assistant managing editor in 1981 and was named SI’s editor in 1984 – at age 43, the youngest person to hold that lofty position. He retired in 1996, immediately after the Atlanta Olympics.
During his reign, SI twice won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. It marked the only two times SI has won that award.
“I’m proudest of the fact that we made our mark,” Mulvoy said. “I told my people that I wanted us to be the conscience of sports, because nobody else was doing it. Somebody had to take on the steroid abuse. Somebody had to take on the cocaine menace. Somebody had to take on the corruption in the Olympics. Somebody had to take on Pete Rose.
“Somebody had to take on all of the things that were not right about sports,” he added, “and we did that.”
Then he left.
“There were other things I wanted to do,” he said, “such as teach.”
So Mulvoy spent four years commuting from his home in Rye, N.Y., to Connecticut, where he taught classes – “The Business of Sports” and “The Business of Journalism” – at Fairfield University.
He also wanted to play competitive senior amateur golf, and he did.
In 1996, he was the low amateur in the New York Section qualifying for the U.S. Senior Open.
“I didn’t get in, but I did play in the U.S. Senior Amateur in Oregon in ‘99,” Mulvoy said. “I played with a little bit of success in different places.”
Not bad for someone who knew nothing about the game when, as a teenager in 1955, he attended a caddie camp at the Hyannisport Club, where the Kennedy family often played.
“We used to caddie for the Kennedys a lot,” he said. “Rose Kennedy would play nine holes and you’d get a buck and a quarter. But as an inner-city kid from Dorchester, all I knew about golf was what I saw on television.
“My second day on a golf course, we were on the 11th hole, and I said, ‘They moved the flag! They moved the flag! Who moved it?’ … I never knew they moved the flags around the greens. I had no idea. I felt like an idiot. But that was the start of golf for me.”
It was golf that brought him here.
That golf book he co-wrote with longtime San Francisco sports writer Art Spander in the 1970s? Mulvoy did his research for the chapter on course architecture at John’s Island.
“I knew Pete Dye and called him, and he said he was building a course in Vero Beach,” Mulvoy said. “So I went down there and slogged around with him for three or four days, and I thought it was a nice place.
“A couple of years later, I came down with my family for about 10 days in February, rented a place at John’s Island and really enjoyed it,” he added.
“I remember you could drive from JI to downtown Vero Beach in about five minutes back then.”
It wasn’t until 1990, though, that he bought a three-bedroom condo at John’s Island.
Eight years later, he bought a house. And in 2004, he and his wife, Trish, became Florida residents who now live here from mid-October through Memorial Day, returning to their condo near the American Yacht Club in Newburyport, Mass., for the summer.
“When we first came down, the place was still an emerging nation,” Mulvoy said. “Vero Beach was quiet, with no high-rise buildings. You come over the bridge and you could actually see the ocean. You still can.
“This is a great, great community,” he added. “The restaurants, the theater, the charitable groups … There are so many things in this town that exist because of the charitable contributions of the people here. The people take great pride in their community.
“I’ve brought a lot of SI people down here, editors and ad sales people, and a lot of them live here on the island. It’s a special place.”
And, in October, it’s getting a special event that John’s Island folks are hoping will bring national recognition to its West Course.
“About 10 or 12 years ago, people at the club were asking why our West Course wasn’t more widely known as a great golf course, and I told them: ‘You’ve got to show it off to a bigger golf universe’,” Mulvoy said. “Since then, we’ve had a couple of Florida state championships here and a U.S. Open qualifier where nobody tore up the course.
“So I became the point man – because I had the connections – and we looked into getting a USGA event,” he added. “We had the USGA in here seven or eight years ago, looking to get the 2009 Senior Amateur, which went to Lake Nona. But the USGA loved our course and loved Vero Beach, and they told us they’d like to consider us again.”
Then, four years ago, Mulvoy got a call from the USGA which, because of economic problems at another course, was scrambling to find a place to play the 2015 Mid-Am.
“I said, ‘I’ll get back to you in three hours,’ and got the club president, manager and board involved,” he said. “That’s how quickly it happened. Of course, they told me: You got it, you run it.
“That’s how I became the tournament chairman, and it’s a massive undertaking.”
So was running the best sports magazine in America, but Mulvoy was a huge success there, too.
“When I first got to SI, I was there about two weeks when I starting thinking: This is the wrong league,” Mulvoy said. “They had all these brilliant writers – Frank DeFord, Dan Jenkins, John Underwood. My strength wasn’t as a pure writer, but I was a great reporter. I was able to create a rapport with athletes and people in sports, and that served me well.”
He preached that same play-to-your-strengths sermon to the writers he hired, which also served him well.
SI was a must-read magazine for sports fans in the 1960s and ‘70s. Mulvoy made it better.
Then he left.
“I’ve always believed that when you run something and leave, you leave,” he said. “They had a farewell party for me after the ‘96 Olympics and I didn’t enter the building again for seven years.
“I still communicate with people there, but it’s a totally different universe now,” he added. “Did you see that they’ve let go all of their photographers? That’s kind of strange if you’re ‘illustrated.’ But the way the internet is eating up print, newspapers as well as magazines, I don’t know how long magazines like this are going to exist.
“My timing was perfect.”
And now he’s here – playing golf, preparing for a big event and thoroughly enjoying life in Vero Beach.
I look forward to Saturday night and another chance to talk shop. Maybe Feinstein will join us.
