When Andy Bean first arrived on the US Tour, standing 6’ 4” and weighing over 200lbs,

no-one was inclined to argue with him, especially when he revealed that before making it as a golf pro he had wrestled alligators for a living.

 

Only later did it emerge that, in advance of these wrestling matches, Bean would let the ‘gator soak in a bath of cheap, strong gin for an hour.

 

He was one of many hailed as the successor to Jack Nicklaus, partly because he could hit the ball immense distances, partly because he won four times in his first two years on the US PGA Tour (and11 times in his first nine years, when he finished every season inside the top-35 money-winners), and partly because anyone with a lick of talent was hailed as the new Jack Nicklaus by an American media desperate to see the baton handed on to one of their own. Sadly, in Bean’s case in particular, the prediction of immortality proved a little premature.

 

Some thought this was because he wasn’t very bright – American writer Dan Jenkins once described his head as being ‘a box of rocks’. The impression wasn’t alleviated, in 1986, when an event called The Invitational was launched on the US Tour, using a modified form of Stableford scoring, a system not in common use in the USA at the time.

 

After one round Bean exclaimed: ‘I don’t understand it. I don’t know what to think about it. It isn’t stroke play and it isn’t match play. It’s not golf. It’s just... playing games.’

Three years earlier, in the Open Championship, Bean tapped in a putt with the grip end of his putter, not realising it was illegal. It cost him a two-stroke penalty, he ended the championship two strokes back of the winner, Tom Watson, and said: ‘Yes, I am dumb.’

The charge of being a wedge short of a full set is given added credence when we consider that one of his favourite musicians is Garth Brooks, and his favourite TV programme is Miami Vice. But then the big man throws us a curve ball by citing Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey as his two favourite books – perhaps he’s thinking of a different Homer.

In reality, this big, amiable bear of a man, who played in the Ryder Cups of 1979 and ’87 (with a record of played 6, won 4, lost 2) is neither particularly smart nor dumb, he’s just an ordinary Joe who has an extraordinary ability to hit a golf ball, as he demonstrates now on the Champions Tour.