Willie (33 page)

Johnny Gimble, on the other hand, talks mostly to his golf ball.

Johnny will tee up the ball and then get down on his knees and stare at it. “All right, ball,” he will say, “now get legs, go, get up there and turn over, and then hit and stop and back up. Whoa! You got it? I'd better not have to tell you again.”

Gimble never seems to be as hard on himself as he is on the ball when the shot doesn't turn out right. His swing, Johnny says, is past worrying about. “Some people say their golf game comes and goes,” he says. “Mine went and stayed.”

I'll always remember one piece of advice Johnny gave me about my golf swing.

“Willie,” he said, “I believe your problem is that you lunge just before you lurch.”

There is a false story that has been widely printed about golf at the
Pedernales. I am supposed to have said, “Par at my golf course is whatever I say it is. Today I made a fourteen on the first hole and it turned out to be a birdie.”

Maybe I did say that someplace, but it was a joke. For one thing, anybody who has played golf with me knows I have never made a 14 on a hole. My golf ball is in my pocket long before my score would add up that high. And we do take the game seriously at the Pedernales. One of the great things about golf is excuses don't count, but foul balls do. It don't matter how you make the par, it goes on the card as a par. And it don't matter if the other guy hit better-looking shots but made a bogey, it still goes on the card as a bogey. In other words, it's not how but how many. You never know what might happen. When you add up the strokes, a 4-foot putt counts the same as a 300-yard drive.

A lot of people who've heard about our golf at the Pedernales think we kick our balls out from behind trees—the famous Pedernales Stroll—and violate all kinds of rules of the game, but this is a large exaggeration.

Maybe the false stories started with what we printed on our Pedernales Country Club scorecard:

• When another is shooting, no player should talk, whistle, hum, clink coins, or pass gas.

• Don't play until group in front is out of way.

• Excessive displays of affection are discouraged. Violators must replace divots and will be penalized five strokes.

• Replace divots, smooth fingerprints in bunkers, brush backtrail with branches, park car under brush, and have the office tell your spouse you're in conference.

• Let faster groups play through.

• On the putting green, don't step on another's line.

• “Freebies” are not recommended for players with short putts.

• No more than twelve in your foursome.

• Gambling is forbidden of course unless you're stuck or you need a legal deduction for charitable or educational expenses.

• All carts are not allowed within 20 feet of traps or aprons surrounding greens.

• No bikinis, mini-skirts, skimpy see-throughs, or sexually exploitative attire allowed. Except on women.

• Please leave course in the condition in which you'd like to be found.

Also the telephone never rings out on the golf course.

I've played golf with Willie for years. During a game in Vegas, I had to leave the group at the ninth hole for an appointment with my psychiatrist. Golf will make you nuts, but so will women. I was romancing a lady and we weren't getting along and she thought this psychiatrist could make me understand her line of thinking. Instead, it made me really hot.

I rushed back to the game as they approached the fourteenth tee. I was steaming. I placed my ball on a peg, glared at it, gritted my teeth and said, “You see this ball? I wish it was her head.”

Then I nailed one of the longest drives I ever hit in my life.

Willie teed up his ball, took a mighty swing, and hit it dead solid perfect, right on the sweet spot, bashed it way down the middle.

He grinned at me and said, “I never liked the bitch, either.”

In 1971 I was working the register at my club, Castle Creek, in Austin, when this fellow walked up and said, “I understand your name is Tim O'Connor.”

I said it was. He said, “I'm Willie Nelson.” I recognized him. He said, “I'd like to play your joint.”

I grabbed a bottle of whiskey and we went to my office and got drunk and became friends. Willie played Castle Creek for seven nights.

Several months later I went on a tour with Willie. My job was chief cook and bottle washer. I drove the Bronco that hauled our gear. It's hard to believe now, but all the band stuff would fit in one Bronco. I took the responsibility for getting a good sound system and buying Bobbie her own piano and hiring somebody to advance the gigs, which amounted mostly to calling ahead to make sure we had more than one microphone waiting.

We had our share of hairy gigs. One night at Gilley's, for example, the audience literally stole our show. There were 3,000 cowboys in Gilley's that night, and they got so rowdy they swarmed all over the stage. They were kicking and punching each other and crashing into us. The most I could do was grab Willie's guitar and run. Willie and I escaped out the back door, into the pouring rain, and jumped into his old red Mercedes. On our way to the Holiday Inn I was cussing and raising hell.

I said, “What the hell do you want me to be? God damn it, I can't do my job. This is ridiculous.”

Just a smartass twenty-seven-year-old kid mouthing off. But Willie stopped the car and we got out in the pelting rain. I was steaming mad, ready to fight. As Willie looked at me his eyes went from a real chestnut brown to very dark black. I was hoping he'd hit me with a beer bottle, anything to set me off, because I was a violent type in those days.

Willie looked at me hard and said, “There's three things I never want you to be.”

I said, “What the hell is that?”

Willie said, “I never want you to be cold, wet, or hungry.”

He turned and walked through the rain into the hotel. Shit, I thought, I'll follow this guy anyplace.

Our third annual July 4th Picnic at College Station, Texas, in 1974. It attracted over 150,000 people through the weekend
.

With Robert Redford on the set of
The Electric Horseman,
my first movie role. I had the best line in the whole movie
.

I got to play the lead in
Barbarosa.
That's Gary Busey with me at gunpoint
.

They made a movie from my album
Red-Headed Stranger
with Katherine Ross and Morgan Fairchild as the two beautiful leading ladies. That's my grandson, Bryan Fowler
.

In 1978 I played at the White House for Mrs. Carter, who brought my daughters Paula and Amy onstage
.

President Carter sang a few bars with me during a Democratic fundraiser in 1980
.

Everywhere I went during our tour of Japan, I was surrounded by reporters and their cameras
.

Prince Charles and Walter Cronkite stopped backstage at a concern in Austin
.