In 30-plus years of doing interviews, one of the most memorable for me was 15 years ago, when I sat down for lunch with Bruce Summerhays and we talked about how much money he was making.
This wasn't as gauche as it first sounds.
Discussing someone's salary might normally be considerate impolite, but in the case of a man who plays golf for a living, money is how he keeps score.
At the time, Summerhays was a rookie on what was then called the Senior Tour and is now known as the Champions Tour.
What he was attempting to do was not unlike threading a needle in a thunderstorm.
The Senior/Champions Tour is made up mostly of men who have played professional golf all their lives and when they turn 50 they leave the regular PGA Tour — and all that youth — behind to compete among themselves in a sort of a very long, extended legends reunion tour. It's golf's version of the Rolling Stones.
Every year they let a handful of Walter Mittys — men who didn't play the regular tour — onto the Champions Tour as qualifiers, and almost none of them stick.
But it was near the end of his first year and Summerhays was sticking.
Bruce probably doesn't remember it exactly this way, but to me it was like talking to a kid who'd been set loose in a chocolate factory. Or found the map to Treasure Island.
He had made nearly $700,000 that year and the season still wasn't over.
I remember we got out a napkin and added up all the money Bruce had made as a club professional and golf coach in his entire life to that point: 49 years of earnings.
It wasn't as much as he'd made in the past nine months.
Better yet, he was making it playing golf! His true love. It was like getting paid to eat.
He'd spent his life to that point — his prime years as an athlete — content being a family man. After one fleeting run at the PGA Tour when he was just out of college, he'd put that quest aside in favor of raising eight kids with his wife, Carolyn, and fitting in local Utah golf tournaments whenever possible.
Now, suddenly, every weekend his eight kids, almost all grown up, were taking turns caddying for him at Champions Tour stops across the country, and Carolyn was happily keeping the books.
His $700,000-plus winnings that first year, in 1995, passed Sam Snead on golf's career money winning list. A couple of years later he passed Billy Casper, then Arnold Palmer, then Gary Player. All those guys he'd grown up idolizing, he flew by them like they were standing still (which by point of fact they now were).
By the time the cash register stopped ringing, he'd made $9,056,559 — one spot behind Jack Nicklaus' career total of $9,108,352, good for No. 62 on the all-time money list for golfers over 50.
There's a part of Bruce Summerhays that still can't believe he did it — even though he's the one who did it.
In February, he turned 66 and three weeks ago he teed it up for his final Champions Tour event for at least the next three years. He won $3,726 for placing 52nd in the Principal Charity Classic in Des Moines — his 452nd tournament on the old guys' tour.
He could keep playing, but another clarion call is luring him away. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints asked him to serve as a mission president in Florida — a three-year assignment that starts this Thursday.
He's trading in his golf shirt for a tie, his rescue club for a rescue book, his regular shifts every Sunday for, well, regular shifts every Sunday.
Before he reported to his mission, I called and asked Bruce if we could do another interview, 15 years later.
We met at the house on the hill he bought in Farmington, where furniture was piled in the driveway awaiting the moving van.
Bruce, sun-tanned and lean — looking none the worse for spending all that time outside exercising in the sun — wore the same smile he was wearing in 1995.
"If I'd dreamed it," he said, reflecting on what the last 15 years brought and the future it's made possible, "it wouldn't have turned out this good. I'm telling you, I wouldn't have dared make it this great."
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.