If you think Rives McBee was happy a year ago at the Showdown Classic, when he finished in a tie for 21st place and collected the first $3,925 of his Senior Tour career, you should have seen him yesterday when his only problem was trying to wedge one of those billboard-sized checks into the trunk of his rental car.
The check was for $52,500 and it was made out to Rives McBee.Win and the world wins with you, and they give you a huge check, and they spell your name right.
It was hard even for McBee to believe that only a year had passed since last summer at the Jeremy Ranch, when he picked up that $3,925 check to launch a Senior Tour career that has been as lucrative as it has been improbable.
"Yes, I have shocked myself," he said yesterday only moments after finishing his encore year at the Jeremy Ranch with a winning 54-hole record-setting score of 202 that had Lee Trevino himself, who finished second, muttering as he ran to the airport.
McBee is precisely the kind of person the marquee names on the Senior Tour have nightmares about - namely, a pro who had a short and undistinguished career on the regular PGA Tour and who then stocked shelves with sweaters and worked behind a counter for 20 years before deciding he'd like to have another crack at making his living playing golf.
That's the crazy notion McBee got into his head two years ago, as he approached the age of 50 and eligibility for the Senior Tour.
He knew he wasn't Jack Nicklaus or Lee Trevino or Gary Player, or any of those other guys who dominated the PGA Tour when he gave it a go in the '60s. He knew that meant he would have to go through the Senior Tour qualifying process of teeing it up Monday mornings along with 125 other guys - and hoping his score would be one of the four low ones that would move on to the tournament proper.
The first thing he did before he hit the tournament trail was go to the bank and withdraw "a sizeable portion of our life savings."
In his first five Monday efforts - this was last summer - he repeatedly failed to make the final four.
Then came the 1989 Showdown Classic.
He had tuned up for that Monday qualifier inauspiciously enough - by playing in the Salt Lake City Parks Open at Mountain Dell and Bonneville Golf Courses. He shot 76-75 playing alongside Utah's local pros and didn't win a dime.
Undaunted, he fired a Monday-qualifying one-under-par 71 at Jeremy Ranch . . . and a Senior star was launched.
Not only did he go on to win that $3,925 check, and not only did he go on to qualify the next two Mondays in the next two Senior Tour events, but when the tour hit Lexington, Ky., a month later, for the RJR Bank One Classic, McBee hit the jackpot. First he won the Monday qualifier. Then he won the tournament.
By winning, he exempted himself from Monday qualifying for a year, which was reason enough for the halejulahs he was saying all the way to the mega-dollar RJR Championship a few weeks later, where he finished second to Gary Player but still won $145,000.
To make a short and sweet story shorter, Rives McBee has been a fixture on the Senior Tour ever since. Almost literally. He has not taken his membership for granted. After the Showdown in '89, he played in all but one tournament the rest of that season, and after 27 Senior Tour stops in 1990, he's played in 25 of them - more than any other player. He's not just a horse, he's an iron horse.
Yesterday's triumph gave him two wins in a little over 12 months, and upped his Senior Tour career winnings to $510,000 - or about $42,500 a month.
"I am a happy man," he said, admitting that last summer, before coming here for Showdown I, he almost bagged the whole Senior Tour idea and returned to Texas to start yet another new career - as a high school teacher.
"I was thinking I could be a golf coach and a basketball coach. I like basketball," he said. "I have a degree in P.E."
The thought of becoming the next Bobby Knight had surfaced after a Monday disappointment in Cleveland - where he shot two-under-par and still didn't qualify for that week's tournament.
But lo and behold, two weeks later he found himself in Utah - and the profit margin was about to make a trend that is yet to be reversed.
He has turned into the second coming of Rives McBee. A living, check-cashing example that if at first you don't succeed on the PGA Tour you can not only try, try again, but you can also make up a lot of ground in a hurry.