From The Memorial Tournament Magazine

By Gary Van Sickle

Air raid sirens wail. Lights flick off, candles are extinguished. A blackout begins. The faint hum of airplane engines grows louder. Ack-ack guns start their ominous pop-pop-popping. Giant searchlights swing through the night sky like slow-moving clock pendulums.

It’s 1940, 18-year-old Wendy Lugg has come from Wales to get a nursing degree in London. She didn’t expect that to mean putting her own life at risk but this is The Blitz during The Second World War. Waves of German bombers attack London as Adolf Hitler tries to destroy Great Britain’s morale and, if possible, erase it from the map.

So Wendy hurries down the steps from the hospital where she works and lives into the perceived safety of the Underground, London’s subway. Some nights, she makes three or four such dashes. But this is war, there is nothing to do but work and try to survive.

Wendy tells these stories years later to her son, Nick Price.

“She said it was brutal,” Nick said of The Blitz. “That had to be a harrowing thing for a young woman.”

(The German buzz-bombs, which come a few years later, are worse. “She said you could hear them pulsing, but if you could hear them that meant they were going to go past you,” Nick said. “She said if the pulsing stopped, you were in trouble. Psychologically, it must have been terrifying.” Note to Shed: this graf Optional, you could delete. Nick’s mom wasn’t there for the buzzbombs but heard about them from friends in letters and told nick the stories later, so maybe it’s not a fit here)

Wendy eventually gets her commission as an officer in the British nursing corps and is sent to British India. There, she meets a British artillery officer named Raymond Price. They marry in December of 1945 in a church in Belgaum, in northern India.

Their adventure together has begun with a splash. The Blitz. The war. India.

**

The road I’m driving on makes quite an entrance from Hobe Sound onto Jupiter Island, a long finger of secluded tropical beauty along Florida’s southeast coast.

I cross a drawbridge over the Indian River and drive beneath a scenic canopy of trees on the other side. A right turn at Hobe Sound Beach sends me north toward the home where Nick Price has lived for more than two decades.

When I reach Stately Price Manor (my description, not his), the security gate opens and—wow! Nick Price’s driveway gives Augusta National’s famed Magnolia Lane a run for its money.

Seriously, he’s got his own Magnolia Lane-like canopy of ficus and banyan trees. One giant, multi-trunked banyan tree towers over his house. Price comes out as I park in the driveway beneath the banyan, which is quite the conversation starter.

Yes, Price says, he considered putting a treehouse up there for his three children (Greg, Robin and Kim). Then he learned that Florida law, due to the threat of hurricanes, required even a treehouse be built to code. That made it cost-prohibitive—five figures--and worse, took all the fun out of it.

We head inside his lovely, open, sprawling home to check out his trophy collection. It’s sprawling, too. The man is in the World Golf Hall of Fame and made winning look stunningly easy for half a dozen years in the 1990s while piling up two PGA Championships, an Open Championship and a pair of Canadian Opens among his 48 victories worldwide. He is a worthy choice as the Honoree of this year’s Memorial Tournament Presented by Bic Pens and Hamm’s Beer (real sponsor names to come).

Several glass cases are built into the outside wall of his office and they’re filled with memories from events big and small, from the Associated Engineering Open to three Zimbabwe Opens to major championships.

Between trophy statuettes of Byron Nelson (Byron Nelson Classic), Arnold Palmer (PGA Tour Player of the Year) and Payne Stewart (Payne Stewart Award), I notice the claret jug for the 1994 Open Championship. On the shelf just above it is the case that holds the accompanying gold medal.

“That one,” Nick says, “is very special.” His far-away look tells me his memories of that Open are as fresh and warm as bread just out of the oven.

I gawk some more before we slide into his office, which is lined with photographs (some of aircraft, another of his passions), paintings and books. Price is hooked on the journals of the early African explorers, men whose adventurers can’t be duplicated in a world where Google Earth sees everything.

“I’m not a hunter but I enjoy the stories,” Price says. “These guys had a sense of adventure and bravery and they went into areas where no white person had been before. If something happened to them, you wouldn’t even find their bones. Their adventures were amazing.”

Nick Prize grew up in Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe), a country later racked by strife, taught himself golf on rudimentary courses often built and maintained by local farmers, and carved a path that led him to become a golfer of global importance.

His adventures were no less amazing.

**

Raymond and Wendy Price barely have time to catch their collective breaths after the war ends. In 1946, she gives birth to their first son, Kit, in Karachi. The same year, violence erupts in what is then known as British India. It’s a civil war along religious lines between the Hindus and the Muslims.

An agreement is reached, partitioning India into two states--the Union of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. This means the end of British Raj, or Crown Rule. Karachi becomes part of the new Pakistani (Muslim) state. The Prices and the other British are no longer welcome.

The Prices get passage on a military evacuation train but it’s a long and dangerous trip, rife with threats of violence. Each time their train is stopped, Raymond and Wendy hide their infant son, Kit, under the seat in their cabin and brace for an attack. Luckily, none comes.

The train moves on. They escape. They reach Bombay (now Mumbai) and safety… temporarily.

**

There were few outdoor sports the Price boys—Kit, Tim and Nicholas--didn’t play growing up in Salisbury, Rhodesia. Nick ran cross country (delete: and steeplechase) and played cricket, soccer and rugby, among others.

Then, Tim Price did something that proved to be important. He and two friends chipped in to buy a bag of used golf clubs. It wasn’t a set, just three dozen assorted clubs in a canvas bag that had a piece of rope for a strap.

“I was the caddie when we started,” Nick says. “I remember how that rope cut into my shoulder. (add sentence: So after awhile, I started dragging the bag down the fairway.”)

Nick played as a lefty at first but switched to crosshanded since there was just one lefthanded club. His brothers were impressed with how quickly Nick got a feel for this curious new game. Nick began playing golf as often as he could at Warren Hills, a local club where juniors could play on weekday mornings (ADD:) during the school holidays. He quickly improved. Nick, about to turn 13, sank a four-foot putt in fading evening light to shoot 71 and break par for the first time. “It was an electrifying moment,” Price says.

It was the start of something big. By 1974, Nick had become an accomplished junior player in his small corner of the world. A friend urged him to try the Junior World golf tournament in San Diego. It was a stretch for the family budget but Wendy agreed to let Nick go and she tagged along.

The flights were long, the scenery was stunning. “Mom was amazed at the size of America,” Nick says. “I looked at a map before we left and figured that Rhodesia was about the size of Montana.”

American juniors were curious about his homeland. “They’d ask, You’re from Africa, why aren’t you black?” Price says. “Or they’d ask, Do you ride an elephant to school? I’d say, No, I usually ride my bike.”

Nick played four rounds at Torrey Pines that week and won, beating future tour players such as Gary Hallberg and Hal Sutton. “I was 17, I didn’t know how good I was,” Nick says.

Coming home—after a pilgrimage to Disneyland--was a challenge. Winning the Junior World came with a trophy so big, Nick had to carry it on the plane. “That was a real pain,” Nick recalls. “We put it on the floor between our seats. People were asking about it.”

He had gone to America and beaten the world’s best players his age.

“It changed my life for a little bit,” Nick says.

But he was about to turn 18, which meant he owed his country 12 months of military service. And that was about to become dangerous.

**

Raymond Price gets new orders in late 1947. He gets posted to Sudan, a British colony on Egypt’s southern border, adjacent to the Red Sea.

(Note: Move this entire graf to the next section on the Price family): Raymond hears stories about fuel rationing and food shortages and widespread misery back home in England. His country is still in shambles as it rebuilds from war.

Delete: So he chooses Sudan. (he didn’t choose—he was posted)

The Prices gather their belongings, board a ship and say their final farewell to India.

While on board from Bombay, civil war breaks out in Sudan. British diplomats there make hasty exits.

The ship with the Prices aboard changes plans and doesn’t put into port in Sudan. Instead, it continues south along the eastern coast of Africa.

The Prices are suddenly on another odyssey.

**

It was quiet on the bus, even somber. It was March, 1976, and Nick Price was among 98 young men conscripted for 12 months into the Rhodesian Air Force. The bus was taking them to the air base at New Sarum for 14 weeks of training.

The regimen included rising every morning at 4:30 or earlier to prepare for inspection and physical training. “It was a sudden transition from the life of a schoolboy to the iron regimen of the military,” Price says.

Meanwhile, violence has broken out in Rhodesia, the start of a civil war and a long, dark time in the country. The rise of black nationalism is a challenge to the government’s white minority rule. Rhodesia has 300,000-plus whites and 4 million blacks. The black nationalists are from rival factions that oppose each other and the government, creating a war with three sides.

A further complication is that guerilla fighters hide out in training camps in neighboring Mozambique. They attack in Rhodesia, then go back across the border.

Six weeks of training passed when Price’s drill instructor made an announcement. “Well done, ladies,” Price recalls him saying. “I have good news--you just got another six months slapped on to your service time.”

There were groans and a few wails. Due to a huge manpower shortage, the government suddenly needed troops. “Guys who had calendars and were crossing off the days as we went just tore ‘em up,” Price says. “It was not a good day for our morale.”

Price was slotted into communications. His first posting after training ended was as a radio operator at Fort Victoria.

(delete the following scorpion anecdote—it happened during the raid in which fanner was killed, not here. It would just get in the way of that story… He was up late his first night there, getting his radio up and running. When he crawled into his sleeping bag, he was stung in the back by a scorpion and spent the rest of the night writhing in agony.)

After two weeks, he was repositioned to Rutenga, a makeshift airfield on the eastern border near Mozambique. Several vehicles behind Price in the convoy were. Ambushed. “Two guys were killed and that first night I was sleeping under the stars,” Price says. “It was like, Welcome to the war. It wasn’t a very good start.”

Price and his radios were usually on the move, relocating as needed. Once, Price went with the police reserve air wing to look for a patrol that had lost communication. “We flew over this area at 800 to 1,000 feet, I saw the moonlight glint over the lake, it was beautiful,” he says. “I saw a couple of flashes, I didn’t think much about it but when we get back, I saw two holes in the tail of our aircraft. ”

After one raid on training camps

)inside Mozambique, Price heard from a pilot that a wounded casualty was being evacuated. The helicopter landed 70 yards from Price’s position. (delete: so he rushed out to help) Medics treated the bleeding soldier but he needed urgent care and was to be flown to a hospital 60 kilometers away.

“I said, Give me his name and details and I’ll send them ahead,” Price says. “They said, ‘Rifleman G Fanner.’ I thought, ‘It can’t be Graham!’ But it was. Graham Fanner lived seven houses away from me.”

Price’s friend didn’t survive the second helicopter trip. “I think about him to this day,” Price says. “Graham was so smart, he was going to become a doctor. It’s all so damned unfair. You see death around you and it’s so random.”

By the time guerillas shot two passenger planes out of the air, the first one in September of 1978, Price was out of the war. His tour of duty ended in October, 1977. The first thing he did after returning home from the air force was to turn pro as a golfer.

Well, not the first thing. First, there were beers.

**

The ship carrying Raymond, Wendy and Kit Price puts into port for ten days in Durban, South Africa. It looks like a beautiful place.

No new orders are immediately forthcoming from the army in the wake of the Sudan crisis so Raymond Price surveys the city. By chance, he runs into an old army buddy who has taken up residence in Durban. “This is a really nice place,” the army pal tells Raymond. “Durban is very British.”

Raymond hears stories about fuel rationing and food shortages back home in England. His country is still in shambles as it rebuilds from war. So he decides to retire from the military, take his pension and stay in Durban. He lands a position with a company that manufactures clothes. After a time, he starts his own clothing manufacturing company.

The future seems uncertain but Raymond and Wendy aren’t afraid to start over, strangers in a new land.

**

New golf professional Nick Price chased his dream in 1978 with what amounted to a wing and a prayer. He had $250 in cash plus his clothes, his golf clubs and a 1964 Peugot with 180,000 miles.

He won some modest checks at first by after a run of poor play the next year, Price was down to his last $200 when he arrived at the British Airways Open on the Channel Islands.

“I knew this was my last one,” Price recalls. He finished fifth and scored 800 British pounds. Then he placed ninth in Belgium; 53rd in the Open Championship at St. Andrews (won by Jack Nicklaus); and was second in The Netherlands a week later, worth 3,750 pounds. “It was like I won a lottery, it was so huge,” Price says. “I was starting to feel like maybe I can make a living out of this game.”

Price finished 51st on the tour’s Order of Merit (money list) and earned exempt status. So he had officially arrived, even if living out a suitcase for 22 straight weeks at one point wasn’t necessarily glamorous.

“I got on the Tube stations (London subway) two or three times with golf clubs and my luggage,” Price says. “I wonder if any of today’s pros have done that?”

Price progressed nicely up the European money list the next few years and even won the 1981 Swiss Open but by that year’s end, he was slumping and felt terrible about his game. Back home that winter, he saw how improved fellow countryman (not South African as I had written) Denis Watson’s swing was. Watson said he’d started working with David Leadbetter, also a Zimbabwean (not South African) then based in the U.S.

Price knew Leadbetter, they first played junior golf together when Price was 11, and he promptly phoned to make arrangements to work together in Florida in early 1982. That was Price’s first time seeing his swing on video in slow motion. “I nearly threw up,” Price says.

His problem was a steep backswing followed by a shallow forward swing. A lot of work ensued but Price got more consistent with Leadbetter’s help. “Seeing was believing,” Price says.

The changes paid off. Four months later, Price led the Open Championship at Royal Troon with six holes to go. .

“I knew exactly where I stood,” Price says. “I had just stiffed a 5-iron at 12 for three birdies in a row. I was three shots ahead and I’ll never forget it, I told my caddie on the 13th tee, ‘That’s it, Kev (Kevin Woodward), we’ve got this thing!’ Famous last words. Never again did I say those words to anyone.”

A bogey followed at 13. At 15, Price hooked his tee shot into the left rough. He hit a 4-iron well but his ball nicked a small, diagonally-running ridge just in front of him and sent his shot careening against the wall of a greenside bunker. He had to play out sideways and made a double bogey.

Meanwhile, Tom Watson posted his score and was tied with Price. “I didn’t fancy my chances in a playoff with Tom Watson,” Price says by way of explaining why he played a chip too aggressively at the 17th hole and made a costly bogey. He parred the 18th to share second place with Peter Oosterhuis. Price was crushed but as he made the long drive back to London the next day, was buoyed by one thought: “I realized (add) at age 25 I could win a major.”

The following summer, Price made it into the elite field of the World Series of Golf in Akron, Ohio. Firestone Country Club’s South course and its small greens and narrow fairways appealed to Price, a straight driver and precise iron player. He never faltered, won by four strokes and got a handshake on the 18th green from Nicklaus, who played in an earlier group but waited around to congratulate him. The victory came with a ten-year tour exemption, which set up his career.

“That week was an emotional wringer for me,” Price says. “I probably got only 12 hours of sleep all week. That evening I won, I had a few beers in the locker room with the guys who worked in the locker room and wondered, How in the hell did Jack ever do this 70 times?”

The rest of the mid-1980s weren’t bad. Price won the 1985 Lancome Trophy, lost the ’86 Western Open to Tom Kite in a playoff, had two top-ten PGA Championship finishes and shot 63, the lowest Masters Tournament round, in 1986.

It was another heartbreaking loss in the Open Championship that ironically was the key that opened the door to success.

At Royal Lytham & St. Annes in ’88, Price went head-to-head with Seve Ballesteros, the Spanish superstar whose short game was magical. Ballesteros made a superb pitch on the final hole to clinch the victory, a pitch that nearly went in.

“I played beautifully, I may have hit more fairways and greens than him and I still came in second,” Price says. “When Seve beat me there, I realized then that my short game was not strong enough. Seve drilled that point home the way he beat me. He taught me a fantastic lesson.”

Price was 31, and his determined, new-found focus on improving his chipping and putting turned him into the man to beat in the first half of the 1990s.

He won the 1991 Byron Nelson Classic and Canadian Open. He earned his first major championship at the ’92 PGA with a ball-striking clinic at Bellerive in St. Louis. He had already finished sixth and fourth at the Masters and U.S. Open that year, respectively.

“I drove it so beautifully that week and never put a foot wrong,” Price says of the ’92 PGA. “I was ready. That was a launching pad for me.”

He won four more times in 1993, including The Players Championship—“The best I ever played tee-to-green in any event,” he recalls.

He won the PGA Tour’s money list title and was Player of the Year. In 1994, he won six more times, including big events like the Honda Classic and Western and Canadian Opens. And he won back-to-back majors, the Open Championship at Turnberry and the PGA Championship at Southern Hills.

At the Open, Price was three shots behind Sweden’s Jesper Parnevik early on the back nine at Turnberry and was not hitting it well.

Price birdied the 12th hole, then saved par at 13 with a deft flop shot from behind the green and another par at 14 when he played a bump-and-run chip beneath television cables that marshals held up for him. There was his short-game focus paying off when it mattered.

A superb wedge shot and a clutch 12-foot putt got him a crucial birdie at 16, then Price pumped a 4-iron onto the green at the par-5 17th. Then he rolled a 35-foot eagle putt that dived into the hole and he made a memorable, emotional leap into the air, the photo opp of his life.

“It was almost like it all happened in slow-motion,” he says. “I was so happy to make that putt.”

Parnevik faltered coming in and Price had his Open after two near-misses. In his winner’s press conference, he half-joked that he’d had one hand on the Claret Jug, then the other and now, finally, he had both hands on it.

“I was on top of the world,” Price recalls. “You dream of that but you never really know if it’s going to happen. They gave me that jug and I saw my name on it, and then all the other names. It was an amazing feeling.”

Less than a month later, Price blitzed the PGA Championship field at Southern Hills by six shots. The New York Times compared him to Secretariat at Belmont. Runnerup Corey Pavin said, “I felt like I won the B Flight. Nick made it impossible to have any hope out there.”

Fellow player Mark Calcavecchia, after losing to Price at the Canadian Open, said, “I’m gonna find out Nick’s schedule for next year because I’m gonna play all the other ones.”

Between 1991 and 1999, Price won 38 times around the world. It was as fine a run as any player in the modern era not named Tiger.

**

(delete this graf): Clouds form over South Africa. A 1950 law prohibiting mixed marriages is just the start of stronger apartheid rules coming from the government. By 1959, there demonstrations, strikes, boycotts and some violence. Police kill 69 black demonstrators in the 1961 Sharpeville Massacre.

In 1962, Raymond Price moves his family north to Rhodesia, effectively a self-governed British colony. It’s a prospering, younger country that seems full of opportunity without racial tension that is rising in South Africa.

Raymond sells his car, a Plymouth with big fins, and the family travels by train. Fritz, the family’s pet dachshund, spends much of the two-day train trip beneath the seat.

The Prices resettle in Salisbury, the Rhodesian government’s seat. Although gas is a luxury, as are automobiles, Raymond uses the proceeds from selling his clothing company to buy an older Jaguar that seems “as big as a bus” to young Nick, and .

to start a ladies clothing manufacturing company.

The Prices enjoy their new homeland. “We drove a lot, my dad was good at exploring the country,” Nick says. “He loved the bush and had a sense of adventure, obviously.”

Raymond’s passion is fishing so the trips are usually to rivers, dams and lakes and the Prices often stay in cheap rental cottages in national parks.

After five years in Salisbury, a lifetime of heavy smoking catches up to Raymond in 1967. He dies after a long battle with lung cancer. He is 55. Nick is only 10.

Kit, 21, takes over the family business and (add) assumes the role of fatherly figure in Nick’s life. The Prices downsize their only car. Wendy takes a job at the factory. She leaves for work at 6:45 each morning and comes home at 5:45 every evening. Nick is basically on his own and when Tim moves out a year later, Nick is the only male residing in the household.

Raymond’s passing draws the family closer but there’s a undeniable hole.

“My life changed,” Nick says. “It was never the same after that.”

**

At Stately Price Manor, Price is the only male residing in this household now. The three kids are in their 20s, chasing their own dreams and mostly out of the house. Nick says he and Sue, his wife since 1988, are thinking about putting the place on the market. This home may be the most majestic of all his trophies with its river views and outdoor pool and gurgling waterfall.

He walks me through his workshop, where we laugh at how small the persimmon heads were on the drivers he once used. They’re the size of today’s hybrids.

There are nearly as many fishing rods in his workshop as golf clubs. I declare that as a sign of a life well-lived.

It has been a long, eventful journey out of Zimbabwe for Nick. Both of his older brothers have passed away. Wendy moved back to England in the late 1970s and lived there happily until she died in 2012.

Nick turned 63 at the start of 2020. He loves playing with Greg in the annual PNC Father-Son Challenge but otherwise only dabbles in recreational golf. (Delete stat about Nick playing 5 Sr events—that was incorrect. He played 0.) At this point, he’d rather fish.

Still, he has traveled the world, explored new countries and had unforgettable adventures.

Just like his father, just like his mother.

Gary Van Sickle

The real Nick Price story