What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer Read Free Book Online

played for Yale, he had a wife and a baby son, and the war had taught him, as it had most of his classmates, that life was a serious and finite business. There wasn’t much margin spending years of it as a banjo-hitting first baseman, trying to make the major leagues.
    But his teammates wouldn’t have bet against him. He had that kind of presence on a ball field: serious, capable, a student of the game and a hundred-percent competitor. He had to be, coming from his family, where competition, games of all sort, were practiced with a gravity and fervor that some families reserved to religion.
    Pres Bush, his dad, had been a Yale first baseman, at six-foot-four, a towering slugger who’d hit the ball a mile—would have had twice as many homers if he could have run faster. Not only was Pres elected captain of the ball team, he’d occasionally succumb to entreaty from the golf team. ( Pres, we’ve got to have you, we’ve got Penn today! ) So he’d play against another school’s best golfer in the morning, then suit up in Yale flannels for a one-thirty ball game. It was from big Pres that Poppy, and all the Bush kids, took their attitude toward the game itself: the seriousness of playing well, the appreciation of form. Prescott Bush demanded much of himself, and he did not play a game to hack around. He was still a scratch golfer into his fifties, and never would accept the demands of a Wall Street partnership, or later, his duties as a U.S. Senator, as excuse for shoddy play. There was one way to insure that you’d never be invited to play golf with Pres again, and that was to talk while he was putting.
    Still, Pres mostly played against the golf course and his own human tendency to error. The competitive fire, the will to win, Poppy got from his mother’s family, the Walkers. It was always sink or swim with the Walkers. The old man, the grandfather, G.H. Walker, was as hard a handful of business iron as the Midwest ever produced. It was he who transplanted the family from St. Louis to a mansion in New York, so he could play in capitalism’s big leagues with the Vanderbilts and Harrimans. That was the same league he played as a sportsman. For a while, he kept a stable of racing horses in partnership with Averell Harriman. When his friend (and rival) in St. Louis, Dwight Davis, created the Davis Cup championship for tennis amateurs in Britain and the U.S., Gampy Walker created the Walker Cup for the amateurs of golf. In his later years, he headed the New York State Racing Commission and served as president of the United States Golf Association.
    But those were the public connections to sport. It was in private that he practiced and passed on the religion of games, chiefly in Kennebunkport, Maine, where, at the turn of the century, he bought seventeen acres of rocky coastline as the Walker clan’s summer preserve. For the Walkers, the long days in Maine were a whirlwind of contests. There were boat races from the harbor to Walker’s Point. (And not in the genteel, silent canoes or sailboats that other families kept; Pops Walker favored powerboats, big ones.) There were pickup ball games, in the family, at the Point itself, or bigger games on the town field for the summer league that Gampy Walker created, staffed with town boys and college players brought to Maine for the summer, so his own sons could have summer baseball experience. There were daily and twice-daily golf matches, and tennis matches, pitting parents and children, cousins and uncles, Walkers and friends, against one another in an ever-shifting, always ranked, round-robin to determine the best. In some ways, golf was the fiercest: it was his game. By the time his sons came of age and honed their skills enough to beat him, they’d also learned a dozen little ruses (“Oh, sorry, Father ... Bill’s counting on me for a foursome”) to dodge the dread despair and rage , somewhere on the back nine, when the old man found himself four down, with only three to