As Seen on CBS Sports Network: The Charlie Rymer Golf Show Season 1, Episode 13 with Gary Player & NFL Great Jerry Rice

Announcer:

The Charlie Rymer Golf Show, starring Charlie Rymer.

Charlie Rymer:

Hey, okay, let’s pick up the tempo!

Charlie Rymer here, and welcome to my new show where we do things my way. As a former golf pro and a media personality, I know golf, but this isn’t going to be your grandfather’s golf show. I’m bringing you conversations with celebs and golf greats, getting off the course and out on the water, and even getting into some good eats.

This is the Charlie Rymer Golf Show. Keep it in the fairway, folks!

Charlie Rymer:

Now we’re on to a golf course that’s really special, Myrtle Beach’s very own Blackmoor. It’s one of the most enjoyable rounds of golf in South Carolina, just as intended by the golf course architect, my friend and legend, Gary Player. And I’m joining him to gain insight into the golf course design.

Gary Player:

… time ago, huh?

Charlie Rymer:

It’s got to give you great pleasure to come to a golf course that’s been around 30 years and will be here obviously a lot longer. But to see people enjoying your creation, that’s got to feel really amazing.

Gary Player:

You know what’s amazing, Charlie, is you come here, it’s like living on your own ranch. It has been such a pleasure being associated with Blackmoor, such nice people. The way they look after people when they come, that’s important. A good golf course is nice, but you’ve got to look after your customers, and they do that here. And this is a very playable golf course. We tried to make this not too tough, not too undulating greens, and that’s very important, because the average guy doesn’t play very well and you want him to come out and have a good day.

Charlie Rymer:

And they have to have a golf course that accommodates that.

Gary Player:

Exactly. You’re not going to get a big championship on your golf course. And the average guy, you’ve got to think of the average man and woman that are playing the game, to give them enjoyment. They want to come out here and have fun and play as well as they possibly can. Hold it. Hold it a second. Hang on there. Tell me something. How are you? Good to see you. Nice to see you.

Speaker 4:

Mr. Player.

Charlie Rymer:

You guys had no idea you were going to run into Gary Player out here today, did you?

Speaker 4:

No, no.

Gary Player:

I want to make you, I want to…

Charlie Rymer:

Y’all have a great day.

Speaker 4:

Thank you.

Charlie Rymer:

This industry, the golf course industry, moving forward, and obviously things now are a lot different than 1990 when you built this golf course, but great environmental stewardship has to be a huge part of the golf course industry moving forward. What are your thoughts on that?

Gary Player:

I think you’ve got to be careful of over-fertilization. I’m a farmer, and if you keep putting that fertilizer into the soil all the time, instead of, like on my farm, I put a lot of horse manure into the soil. Two years later, I put some chicken manure in there, a lot of leaves. You’ve got to keep the soil vibrant. You can’t just keep putting fertilizer in it all the time. Good soil is good growth, is good drainage. Drainage is important.

Gary Player:

And the other thing is, you’ve got to make sure you don’t waste water, and you’ve got to make sure that you get the speed of play. Look at this, you see this green here now? Look, you can run the ball up here, Charlie. See that? Got a bunker on the left. One’s enough. You don’t have to have… You know what some of these guys do today? They got water on the right, bunker on the left, double trouble. I try to never build a green with double trouble. If you’ve got a bunker on the left, no bunker on the right, no water on the right. Give a guy a chance to bail out and recover. You want people, I keep putting emphasis, people to enjoy the game. If you plan building an Augusta or something like that, that’s different. You want the guys to play well. Look at that green, flat as a pancake. They can make some putts. Makes them feel good.

Charlie Rymer:

I get the sense that the best compliment a golfer could give you after playing one of your golf courses is, “Man, did I have fun.”

Gary Player:

“And I played well.” In fact, wherever I go, somebody comes up to me and says, “You know, I was at Myrtle Beach. I played a lot of golf courses. I enjoyed yours the most, enjoyed yours the most, because the greens weren’t too undulating, there were no bunkers in front of the greens. I could play well, and I felt good. I don’t want to go there and be tortured. I have enough of that at home.”

Charlie Rymer:

Of all the golf courses you’ve played on all the continents of this globe, is there one or two that maybe influenced what you tried to do or have done in your design career?

Gary Player:

I think, first starting off my tour as a pro in Europe helped a lot, because I played a lot of links golf courses. You never saw many bunkers in front of the green. I think that was one of the big influences. And proper bunkering, I think bunkering really makes a golf course. It gives a golf course great character. I do like for weekend golf, is wider fairways too.

Charlie Rymer:

Doesn’t need to be an Easter egg hunt when you head out to play golf.

Gary Player:

I’ll never forget that in all my life.

Charlie Rymer:

So Gary, this is the eighth hole, par four, and I love that you give the players an option here. There’s a long way, that total distance going around the corner might be 380 yards. But you give them this opportunity through this chute for the longer players to drive the green. I just love that you give players options.

Gary Player:

Now, this hole here, I love this, because that is extremely narrow. The average guy, 80 percent of them slice, so we made it a dogleg right. And it’s wide, so they can go up that fairway. It’s very wide. Or you can go this way and you’ve got to hit it dead straight. It’s a lot shorter this way. A lot of young guys could drive the green here, but if they hit it offline, they’re in the boondocks. I love this risk-reward hole. It’s really nice.

Charlie Rymer:

It’s just not a lot of fun to play a golf course where the architect has said, “There’s one shot that you must play here.” I like to be able to go through my options.

Gary Player:

This is a pleasure. I’ll tell you, it’s a thrill coming back here. Look at that, how nice that is. Look at that.

Charlie Rymer:

That’s a good hole.

Gary Player:

You can run it up. That is perfect, man.

Charlie Rymer:

Yeah, and it works with maintenance and maintenance budgets, so many different things that people don’t think about. If you’re doing a project for someone, it’s okay, what are we trying to accomplish here? What’s the maintenance budget going to be? How does all of that work? And I think sometimes if you get a golf course that someone wanted to be a championship golf course, but it’s not, then you struggle with maintenance, because it takes so much money to maintain the golf course, and you can’t do that.

Gary Player:

Now you’re talking, Charlie. And Charlie, let’s hypothetically just say a golf course maintenance is a million bucks. I can go in there now with the ideas that I have, and I can drop that by $200,000. They’re wasting money. That $200,000 can make a vast difference to a golf course’s budget.

Charlie Rymer:

That’s why reinvestment in golf courses and going back and looking at them and spending a little bit of money can really pay off financially over the next 10 or 15 years. One of the things I wanted to bring up with you, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, we’re “The Golf Capital of the World.” We’ve essentially got 90 golf courses in a 70-mile stretch running north to south, and people from all over the world come here to play golf. Do you see a way that as a golf course community, and that’s how we look at each other… Sure, golf courses compete, but at the end of the day, we want people coming and enjoying. It means a lot to the economy, the golf courses.

Gary Player:

Exactly. Exactly.

Charlie Rymer:

Do you see ways that we can collaborate with each other to make the overall business better on our end and also for our customers that come here?

Gary Player:

Just before we say anything, that drive we just took now, through those trees. I mean, one thing about the golf course, yeah, one thing I can feel here when I come here, it takes the stress out of my body. But anyway, what as far as the community is concerned? Here we are in this wonderful area, the golf course community of the world. You should all be working with each other as much as possible, inter-community, inter-golf courses, competitions. It’s many things, dinners, lunch, and bring kids in with autism, bring young girls to the club, bring old ladies. Look after the old people. Have a special day for the vets. I’m really loving this, what I’m seeing, bunker right at the green, see?

Charlie Rymer:

Gentlemen, if you have any complaints or compliments, here’s the designer, Gary Player, World Golf Hall of Fame member.

Gary Player:

How are you?

Charlie Rymer:

And let me tell you, he takes compliments better than complaints.

Gary Player:

Good to meet you guys. Good to see you guys. How are you? Look at those arms. You look like Tarzan. How are you? Nice to see you. Now give me your putter there. Look at the strength. Now watch my eye. I’m going to see it hit that nail. Did you see my eye? You guys… Okay, guys, have a nice day.

Speaker 5:

Thank you.

Speaker 6:

Great facilities.

Gary Player:

All right.

Charlie Rymer:

Thank you, gentlemen. Y’all have a great day. Mr. Player, a true pleasure to spend time with you.

Gary Player:

Thank you.

Charlie Rymer:

I think it’s lunch time. Let’s go have lunch, and I know you’re going to have me eat a salad.

Gary Player:

I’ll tell you, this man can eat. He’s a world champion when it comes to eating.

Charlie Rymer:

All right, let’s go, you old fart. We’re taking a quick break from the Charlie Rymer Golf Show, and while you’re away, I’m going to be designing Myrtle Beach’s newest golf hole. Yeah, we’re looking a little right center here. Yes. Woo, woo, woo hoo hoo hoo. Yes.

Charlie Rymer:

Welcome to the Charlie Rymer Podcast, where we talk golf, life, or whatever I want to talk about, because hey, it’s my show. And I’m going to tell you what I like more than anything: GOATs. And I’ve got a GOAT with us today. The man is a three-time Super Bowl champion. He’s a Pro Football Hall of Fame member, College Football Hall of Fame member. He got all the NFL records, all of them. And if you look at who’s in second, they’re not even close. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jerry Rice. Jerry, thank you so much for joining us on the show. How’s it going today?

Jerry Rice:

Everything is going well, man, but I’m still hungry. After winning three Super Bowls and all of that, I just can’t get enough. I want more, Charlie. I just want more, man.

Charlie Rymer:

I know. I can see it in your eyes. I’m hungry too, but I think we’re hungry for different things. I want to start with the most important question. How’s your golf game right now?

Jerry Rice:

Oh my God, it is wow. It’s like speaking a different language. In golf, you can’t blame anyone else. In football, I could do that, a dropped pass or something like that, a ball thrown high by Joe Montana or Steve Young, I could put the blame on them. But in golf, you can’t do that, and so I would say it comes and goes.

Charlie Rymer:

Yeah, it kicks you in the gut, and you’re like, I’m finished. And then all of a sudden you have three holes and you’re like, man, I’ve fallen in love with this all over again. You are the highest scoring non-kicker in NFL history. I want to ask you about six of those points. You see, I’m a heartbroken Atlanta Falcons fan, very heartbroken.

Jerry Rice:

Those dirty birds.

Charlie Rymer:

You threw one touchdown pass in your career. That was in 1995 against the Atlanta Falcons. How much fun was that?

Jerry Rice:

I took that reverse pass, and it was not really a good handoff. The ball was bouncing all up around my head, and I knew I had to get the ball downfield to J.J. Stokes. I threw the perfect spiral, and it’s like everything slowed down. The guys, they couldn’t believe it. They were like, “Jerry, my God, you had a split second.” And I said, “Well, I just closed my eyes and I threw it up.” And it was right on the money.

Charlie Rymer:

Were the guys needling you? I mean, does that happen? You’re breaking down film, looking at last week’s game, getting ready. I’m sure the sarcasm, the fun, the camaraderie, that’s one of the things that I really miss and think I would love had I had a chance to play a team sport. Just being in the locker room with the guys or breaking everything down after the game, that’s got to be something you miss, I would think.

Jerry Rice:

Yeah, that camaraderie, going up against 60,000 or 80,000 hostile fans and being such a close-knit team where you can go in there and just take that crowd out. Once we took the crowd out of the game, now we could just focus on the team and just execute, because the worst thing is, when you got the crowd in the game, you hear all that noise and stuff like that. They make it hard for the opposing team to be able to execute. So we really worked hard on that. But man, we had guys that just had one heartbeat, and we played for each other.

Charlie Rymer:

You’ve had a chance to play a few events on the Korn Ferry Tour, which has been wonderful for the events, because it brought a lot of attention to the events, brought a lot of people out that wouldn’t have come out otherwise. But when you played in those events, what did you learn about your golf game?

Jerry Rice:

I think what I learned is that I shouldn’t be out there.

Charlie Rymer:

It’s harder than it looks, isn’t it?

Jerry Rice:

Those guys are so good. It’s amazing how they work their way around the golf course. You know, as amateurs, we just want to play fast. We want to grab a club and we’re ready to swing. Those guys are on a whole different level, and I wanted to experience that. I had my chance of doing that, and I was like, you know what, Jerry, I don’t think you belong inside the ropes. You need to stay on the outside of the ropes and just watch. But yeah, it was a great experience for me.

Charlie Rymer:

When you talk about those guys, the golf professional has changed a lot. Basically, when I came along, someone like me would work his way to the PGA Tour. I didn’t have an option to be an athlete really in anything else. Now you’re getting guys like you who are great athletes who are choosing to be golfers early on, and it’s changing the game. Is that something that you’ve really picked up on and noticed?

Jerry Rice:

Yeah. You know, I think the thing is, it’s just guys in other sports, they get addicted to this game. You want to do your best, and that competitive nature comes out. Different athletes, they want to venture out then and they want new challenges. I have found that you look at golf and you look at all the professional players, like DeChambeau, Hideki, winning The Masters and stuff like that. Tiger Woods, I’m hoping that he can come back and play the game again. But talking to Tiger, probably talking to Bryson or something like that, they probably would want to play football.

Charlie Rymer:

Yeah, they would.

Jerry Rice:

Or maybe play basketball. So we all want to do different sports, but it’s that appreciation for the game, man. And I think it’s going to challenge you. It’s going to try to bring out the best in you.

Charlie Rymer:

Well, there’s no doubt about that. Well, folks, if you want to see more of our amazing interview with Jerry Rice, check out next week’s Charlie Rymer Golf Show on CBS Sports for our entire interview with Jerry Rice. You can find that at PlayGolfMyrtleBeach.com.

Charlie Rymer:

Now I’m headed to the course, but I forgot my clubs. I guess I’ll just have to make friends, and I think I know how to do that. Time now for Ambush Trivia. I’m at the spectacular Caledonia Golf & Fish Club, and there are some unsuspecting golfers out on the course right now that are about to have a chance to win a little…

Charlie Rymer:

All right, all right, all right. Y’all ready to play a little bit of trivia?

Eltoria:

Yes, sir.

Richard:

Yeah, man, what you got there?

Charlie Rymer:

I’ll tell you what I got. I got a little prize.

Richard:

Money?

Charlie Rymer:

I got some trivia questions. I’m Charlie.

Eltoria:

Eltoria. Nice to meet you.

Charlie Rymer:

Eltoria, you go by E, right?

Eltoria:

I go by E, that’s correct.

Richard:

Richard.

Charlie Rymer:

Richard. These guys work hard right here at Caledonia. They’re a big part of the reason that everybody feels so comfortable when they come out here. I’ve never come over here when you guys weren’t smiling like that and taken good care of us. So let’s play a little bit of trivia. We got some fun facts. You ready for that?

Eltoria:

I’m ready.

Richard:

Let’s go for it.

Charlie Rymer:

Okay. You got to get four of the five right if you’re going to get the card. Okay? All right, question number one. At what age did Tiger Woods get his first hole in one? This is multiple choice. Was he eight, 15, or 22?

Richard:

Eight.

Charlie Rymer:

You sure about that?

Richard:

What are you saying?

Eltoria:

I’ll go with eight too. He’s a stud.

Charlie Rymer:

Are y’all real sure about that?

Richard:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Charlie Rymer:

All right, you got it.

Richard:

That’s [crosstalk 00:18:39].

Charlie Rymer:

One for one. One for one. One for one.

Richard:

Bring it on. Bring it on. Ready for this.

Charlie Rymer:

Okay, okay. The longest recorded drive in professional golf history? Was it 425 yards, 515 yards, or 600 yards? 415…

Richard:

515.

Charlie Rymer:

Well, you got the answer right. Mike Austin, he did it in 1974 out in Las Vegas.

Richard:

That’s what I’m talking about.

Charlie Rymer:

515 yards.

Richard:

We’re on a roll, right?

Charlie Rymer:

Okay. Yeah, you two for two. Okay. How many miles would you walk when you play all 18 holes without a cart? Is it four miles, six miles, or eight miles?

Eltoria:

Usually it’s 7,000 yards. I don’t know how many yards…

Charlie Rymer:

Come on, guys, I got to get lunch.

Eltoria:

Six.

Richard:

Six miles.

Charlie Rymer:

Y’all are killing it.

Richard:

What I’m talking about.

Charlie Rymer:

You’re three for three. Okay, all of Myrtle Beach, from Georgetown all the way up into North Carolina, how many golf courses are here?

Eltoria:

I’m going to go, I think it’s 74.

Richard:

I’ll say 78.

Charlie Rymer:

Y’all want to think about that for a minute? I mean, this is the golf capital of the world. 74, 78 seems like a small number to me.

Richard:

There are more than that.

Eltoria:

I should know this one.

Charlie Rymer:

You’re about to know it.

Eltoria:

It was like over a hundred or something.

Richard:

Well, yeah, because the two golf courses that [inaudible 00:20:19].

Eltoria:

110?

Richard:

Yeah.

Charlie Rymer:

You know what, I’m going to give that to you. We’re right around a hundred. Give or take, right around a hundred, in a little over 70 miles. That’s a lot of golf. Yeah, a lot of golf. Guys, thanks for playing.

Eltoria:

You’re welcome. Thank you.

Richard:

Thank you, sir.

Charlie Rymer:

All right. And thanks for what you guys do every day. You’re on the front lines of our game.

Richard:

Thank you so much.

Charlie Rymer:

People come in here, they see y’all, they get off to a good start and they got a smile on their face. And always here at Caledonia, they got a smile on their face when they finish. There’s a gift card. When y’all get thirsty, you could probably change that in a little something to drink, if you know what I mean.

Richard:

[inaudible 00:20:53].

Charlie Rymer:

All right. Appreciate it, guys.

Richard:

Thank you.

Charlie Rymer:

Thanks a lot. All right. The golf etiquette concept has two principles: be respectful of other golfers, leave the golf course as good or better than you found it, even when no one is watching, especially if no one is watching. If we all follow these principles in life, think what the world would look like today. That’s it for the Charlie Rymer Golf Show. Keep it in the fairway, folks.

Charlie Rymer:

Hey, so if you guys have got any complaints, I got Mr. Gary Player here. He designed it.

Gary Player:

Well, if you three putt, that’s not my fault.

Charlie Rymer:

He takes compliments better than complaints.