Because I could not stop
for Death -He kindly stopped for me
- Emily Dickinson
The friends of Bert Yancey will take some pleasure and solace in knowing that the last thing he did in this life was swing a golf club. And the last ball he hit was perfect, a wedge shot "right down the flag," one witness noted.
Yancey loved golf. That much was clear after he overcame years of severe depression to rejoin the pro tour. He so loved the game that he once made papier-mache models of the holes at Augusta, so he could better familiarize himself with the layout of the Masters course.
Yancey was playing golf again Friday morning at Park Meadows Golf Club in Park City. He was hitting on the driving range, about a half-hour before he was to tee off in the Franklin Quest Championship, when he experienced a tightness in his chest for the second time this week. He took aspirin and said he felt better.
His longtime friend and some-time caddy, Jon Fister, a Salt Lake pro, was worried. He reported the symptoms to nearby paramedics. They told him to bring Yancey in for a checkup. After examining him, the paramedics told Yancey he had classic symptoms of angina and advised him to remain in the ambulance and relax.
Yancey couldn't be bothered. He could not stop for . . . this. "Golf is my livelihood," he is supposed to have told them, and he returned to the driving range. He hit 10 more shots. After the last one, he turned to Fister. "Take me back," he said. Once in the ambulance he sent Fister on one last errand: "Hurry, run tell the officials that I'm withdrawing so they can get an alternate to replace me."
By the time Fister returned the doors to the ambulance were closed and paramedics were giving Yancey CPR. He was taken by amubulance to a Park City hospital at 10:10 a.m. where a helicopter arrived to take him to Salt Lake City. It proved unnecessary. Yancey was dead of cardiac arrest. He was 56.
"He died with his cleats on," said Fister. "The last ball he hit was perfect."
There was a lot of that sentiment going around Park Meadows on Friday. For while Yancey's death "cast a pall over the day," as everyone was saying, there was some small consolation in the fact that Yancey, of all people, was playing golf when Death stopped for him.
"If you're going to go, this is the best way to do it," said fellow pro Dave Stockton.
When Tom Weiskopf, another pro and close friend, heard that Yancey had refused to remain in the ambulance, he said, "There you go. That's him. That's him."
Yancey had to work harder than most to play golf, but not because he wasn't naturally gifted for it. Fister calls him "the finest striker of the ball I've ever seen." He also was a superb putter who once played nearly 500 consecutive holes without three-putting.
But golf takes more than a swing, and there is where Yancey struggled. At the U.S. Military Academy he suffered what was termed a "nervous breakdown," and was hospitalized nine months. His treatment included a padded cell and shock treatment. His illness went into remission for 13 years, during which time he was a solid and sometimes spectacular golfer. He won seven PGA tournaments from 1966 to '72 and finished third twice in the Masters and once in the U.S. Open.
But in 1974 things began to go awry. His behavior turned bizarre. He pushed over a Christmas tree in the Tokyo Hilton and announced that he had come to rid the Orient of communism. He climbed a scaffold in a New York Airport and announced he would cure cancer. He flashed a pack of cigarettes at TV cameras during a golf tournament as a sign to Howard Hughes that he was ready to use his money to cure cancer.
After the Christmas tree incident, he was delivered in a straight jacket from jail to a Manhattan hospital, where his illness was finally diagnosed. He was manic depressive, the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain. He was placed on lithium medication but problems continued. Doctors searched for the right dosage. Yancey's golf scores soared. The lithium made his hands tremble, which didn't help his game any. He quit golf in 1976 at the age of 38 and started a golfing school.
Eleven years later, his illness under control, he returned to the tour. He never won a tournament on the Senior Tour, but he did collect $223,000 in earnings the last two years.
"He never gave up," said Stockton. "He wasn't going to take no for an answer . . . I don't know anyone who had as many things to overcome as he did."
Ever since his return, Yancey has given dozens of lectures annually trying to educate the country about manic depression. But in the end, the depression didn't get him.
Last weekend he moved into the Fisters' home, as he does every year before the Franklin tournament. On Tuesday night he experienced tightness in his chest, but aspirin seemed to help. He told the Fisters about the problem the next morning - "I almost asked you to take me to the hospital," he told them - but refused their many entreaties to see a doctor.
And so on Friday he died. "Maybe it was fitting he died on a golf course," said Weiskopf. It was small comfort to Weiskopf and others who knew Yancey as a gentleman, a friend and a pro. But it was something.