Lee Trevino taught me 10 lessons in 38 minutes. Here they are

On a cloudless morning in early winter, the legendary Lee Trevino pulled up in a golf cart to the back end of the driving range and barked out a declaration.

“I’m not giving away any secrets!”

For a moment it wasn’t clear what he meant. Was Trevino calling off our shoot? A producer and I, enticed by time with a dream guest, had flown last-minute to Punta Mita, a golf course (and ridiculously scenic resort-slash-community) in southwest Mexico, to conduct a range session with one of golf’s all-time greats. A morning view of the Pacific lapping at the rocky shoreline was worth the trip, but we hoped to capture more than just a sunrise and a sunburn, so Trevino’s warning set off some alarms. Golfers can be finicky creatures, after all — and Trevino has earned the right to call his shots.

But Lee’s son Daniel, who’d arrived with him, rolled his eyes.

“I think he’s messing with you,” he said.

We breathed a sigh of relief. The elder Trevino was, in fact, messing with us, injecting a little chaos into an otherwise serene scene. Twinkle in his eye, Trevino grabbed a wedge from his bag, rolled over a ball from the pile and launched into our latest and greatest episode of “Warming Up.” And while there were a few things Trevino actually didn’t want to share — he saves certain secrets for his clinics, he explained — he wasn’t exactly holding back. What followed was 38 minutes of golfing gold, delivered by a six-time major champ and first-ballot Hall of Fame talker.

I’d encourage you to watch the whole thing; that’s sort of the point of the series, neither Trevino’s ball-striking nor his commentary come through via text, and you can find the YouTube link below.

But read on, too, for 10 things I learned from Lee.

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1. He’s still got it.

Trevino is keenly aware of his age — “most people are in the ground when they’re 85,” he says — but he doesn’t let that stop him. Every morning he wakes up and makes his way to the range, where he’ll hit balls for two hours. He’s not prepping for a tournament. He has no competitive goal in mind, he says. But he knows his practice sessions are important nonetheless.

“Golf still means everything to me simply because this is what I did for a living. This has been my whole life,” he says. He laments losing swing speed. But does he ever wake up worried that his game will have abandoned him?

“Oh no, no, no,” he says. “The good Lord gave me a talent. And he has not taken it away from me yet.”

2. Every shot needs a purpose.

Does Trevino like to work the ball? Hooks, fades, highs, lows? Does he ever. To hear him tell it, that’s the entire point.

“I don’t care what shot it is, it has to have a purpose,” he says. “And you’ve got to work the ball to the right, you’ve got to work the ball to the left.”

There’s a philosophy here — one that involves some math.

“The reason for [working the ball] is simply because of the percentages. If you’re working the ball from left to right, you aim 20 feet left. And it doesn’t work right, you’re 20 feet from the hole. If you work it 20 feet, you’re right next to the hole. If you work it 30 feet, you’re 10 feet from the hole. If you work at 40 ft, you’re 20 ft from the hole.

“Now, if you try to hit it straight and you hit it 40 feet to the right, you’re 40 feet from the hole.”

This, of course, assumes that while attempting to hit a fade you will not suddenly hit a snap-hook some 100 feet left instead. (That would leave you 120 feet away!) But Trevino may not have missed by that much since the 1950s.

3. The “hardest shot in golf” isn’t what you’d expect.

The hardest shot in golf — other than perhaps a 60-yard bunker shot, Trevino concedes — is often overlooked. Nobody thinks much about it at all until the moment they’re messing it up: the punch-out from trouble.

“It’s when you get in the trees on the right and you can’t go down towards the flag,” Trevino says. “And you’ve gotta go across to the fairway to lay up.”

The dilemma, he explains, is carrying it far enough to get through the rough and into the fairway but not so far that it skitters into the rough — or trees, or worse — on the other side. It’s critically important to escape from trouble, but nobody works on this specific shot when they practice.

“So this is something that you have to practice. You can’t just go out on the driving range and hit golf balls. You have to have a purpose. You’ve got to change your grip. You’ve got to change ball position. You’ve got to change how far you are from the ball.”

4. There’s one junior golfer he admired: Scottie Scheffler.

Trevino and World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler have more in common than elite ball-striking and happy feet. They’ve also been members of the same Dallas-area club, Royal Oaks, since Scheffler was about eight years old. (Trevino has been a member since 1970.)

“He comes out and joins and he’d come out there and he’d be putting on the green; he’d want to putt for nickels,” Trevino remembers. “I wouldn’t putt him because I couldn’t beat him.

“And he always had long pants as a little junior. He never wore shorts. [We’d ask], ‘Why aren’t you wearing shorts?’ ‘Because I’m gonna be a pro someday. And pros don’t wear shorts.’”

Even at a young age, Trevino says he’d never seen anything quite like Scheffler.

“I’ve played with [Jack] Nicklaus my whole life. Nobody ever hit a ball like this guy.”

5. He’ll never change a person’s swing.

“I never change a person’s golf swing because he has an instructor,” Trevino says. “But not 10 percent of the people that play golf, including the pros, know the mechanics. Know why the ball did something.

“See, the golf ball will tell you what you did,” Trevino says, then tops a ball on purpose. “People will say, ‘Oh, Jesus. I moved, I…’ No you didn’t. You were fine. You had the ball too far forward [in your stance].

The golf club, Trevino explains, is like a pendulum in the golf swing. Find the bottom of the swing. Make sure the ball is there when you do. Changing the swing itself is a much tougher battle and not one you necessarily need to take on.

“You own [your swing]. You’re not going to change it. It’s like trying to teach a guy to walk differently. It’s like trying to teach someone to talk differently. You can’t do it. But you’re not changing a person’s swing — you can change his hands and you can change the position and it makes all the difference.”

6. There’s one pro on Tour who swings it a little bit like Lee.

Trevino is such a beloved presence in the golf world that it’s easy to forget how he got here.

“The question has always been who instructed me, who taught me how to play,” he remembers. “I learned how to play in a pasture, in a field by myself. I didn’t start playing professionally until I was 27, almost 28. I was in the Marine Corps for four years. When I got out of the Marines I went to work on a construction crew building a golf course, didn’t even play golf. I started playing when I was 22 years old. By the time I was 25 I’d won the U.S. Open.”

Five more majors (plus nearly 100 worldwide wins) would follow.

“But I learned how to play blocking the ball. The only guy that plays like that right now on tour is [Daniel] Berger. He leads with the back of his left hand. That’s what I do. The back of the left hand doesn’t rotate. The trunk hits [the ball]. The trunk moves the limbs.”

Tiger Woods has described the sound of Trevino’s strike as different than other golfers. Trevino says that’s because he compresses the ball so well. There’s no flip of the hands involved. There’s no timing involved. He blocks it, swinging down on the ball with the back of his left hand. It worked then and it works now.

7. In the wind, Trevino could hit it as far as anybody.

Perhaps my favorite line of the session came when Trevino transported himself to a windy British Isles weekend some decades ago.

“When I went and played the Open Championship, when I got up in the morning and looked out the hotel window and saw the flags going whoosh, I said [here he grins wide], ‘Bring me a cup of coffee, we’re fixing to go get somebody.’”

He followed that with another one-of-a-kind one-liner — “I don’t like to hit the 3 because the bugs end up having to wear their helmets” — but explained a little bit of the genius that helped him to two Open titles.

“I could make it tumble. I could take the driver and make it tumble.”

8. Even as an all-time great, he got the putting yips.

I mention that Trevino could tee it up in the Open this year, based on the ball-striking clinic he’s putting on display. He agreed. One thing would hold him back, though.

“If I could putt,” he says. “I got the yips so bad that I have to wear four pair of underwear when I play. And then I change about every six holes and I finally finish with one clean pair.”

9. Open your clubface when you chip.

It’s tough to transcribe this tip — you’ll have to watch it — but Trevino insists that you don’t chip with a square club face but instead start with your club facing towards first base.

“The body brings it to the ball,” he says. “The trunk will close it.”

Lee shows off another way to think about this (don’t kill a fly — you might do that with an overhead smash — but catch the fly instead) but you’re better off just watching this one. You’ll get convinced.

10. It went fast.

Want to know how it feels to accrue decades of legendary accomplishments, decades of golf knowledge, decades of meaningful golfing life? One line Trevino shared was from a cherished round, the last of Arnold Palmer’s competitive career. The two were sitting in the locker room post-round and Trevino could see his longtime peer was feeling the weight of the moment.

“He’s getting tears coming down his cheek, and now he’s got me emotional,” Trevino says. “I didn’t know how to get him started because his lip was quivering and he couldn’t say anything. 

“And I looked at him and I said, ‘It went fast, didn’t it?’”

The decade since that round has gone fast too, Trevino says, even though it’s been another memorable decade in a memorable golfing life. There’s some deeper lesson there, one that’s tougher to confine to a simple list.

You can watch Warming Up with Lee Trevino here or in the player below.

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