What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer Read Free Book Online Page A

play. Even when younger, tennis-playing Walkers would hit the River Club, Court One (pretty much the only court they’d play on), everyone knew it: no other members were so energetic, noisy, clannish, and competitive. No other matches had the same air of seriousness, of importance, do-or-die. And when there was a championship, or like cataclysm, there would be G.H. Walker himself, attending in his very clean white-and-brown saddle shoes, tweed jacket and necktie, stiff white collar, white flannel trousers, and straw boater.
    One summer, when son Louis and daughter Dorothy were a mixed-doubles team playing for the River Club’s junior cup, G.H. Walker appeared at Court One, but Lou was nowhere to be seen. He claimed later he didn’t know the match was on. It turned out he was at the bathing beach, fooling around and drinking with friends. So the old man had Lou summoned. And he showed up loaded, snookered , in front of the whole club! He tossed a ball for a serve and whiffed. He was staggering on the court. The old man departed, leaving word: he would see Louis, after the match ... in his room. When Lou got back to the Point, much sobered (by match end, he hadn’t played so badly), the old man didn’t wait for explanation. He announced to Lou: “You’re not going to college. You’re too stupid to go to college. You’re going to work.” That same evening, Lou was packed, and on his way to a year in the coal mines in Bradford, Pennsylvania.
    In time, all the Walker kids got the religion. They certainly had the talent. Herbie—George Herbert, Jr.—got it all, right down to the attitude. He was as hard in business and sport as his father, he loved a winner , and he became the second patriarch of the Point. But Johnny Walker was certainly the best ball player: one year at Yale, he hit a glorious .600! And no one played a better golf game than Jimmy: it was he who was in line to fill the shoes once worn by the old man as president of the USGA. Even Lou might have had some sporting glory if he hadn’t screwed around so much. When he was a senior, a pitcher at Yale, he got a spring-training tryout with the New York Giants. But when the great Mel Ott came to the plate, Lou’s first pitch plunked the slugger in the neck. Ott said: “Get that college jerk outta here!” And that was the end of Lou’s tryout.
    But pound for pound, perhaps the best was Dottie, the younger of two daughters, the pearl in this pan of gravel. Not only was she bright and beautiful (they were all so attractive), but she seemed to have in her small form the distillate of the Walker ethic: she played to win. When Betty Trotter, a girlfriend at Kennebunkport, challenged Dottie to a swim from the River Club pier, all the Walker boys knew that Dottie wouldn’t stop until Betty did. But when Betty quit, after twelve hundred yards in choppy open sea, Dottie just kept swimming, more than a mile, straight to Walker’s Point. No one had to make allowances for Dottie in competition. When she married Prescott Bush, and had her own kids to raise, she served as the one-woman ranking committee: it was she who made the matches, pitting Bushes against Bushes, Bushes against Walkers, and Bushes against friends, in the constant contest to be the best.
    And it wasn’t just summers, not just in Maine: in their year-round home in Greenwich, Connecticut, the Bush kids played games constantly. If there wasn’t a ball game at the Greenwich Country Day School, or a tennis match at the Field Club, they’d gather their friends for football at the Bush house, where there was room, and a ready welcome from Dottie. The house on Grove Lane was a magnet for kids: if it rained, all the friends might still show up, to play indoor football in the long upstairs hall, or Ping-Pong on the table in the front hall (Dottie finally tired of taking it down—that table was the first thing visitors saw), or some game that Poppy made up, on the spot. Poppy never liked to be alone. And he