WHAT I'VE LEARNED GARY PLAYER

With his 90th birthday approaching in November, the nine-time major champion says he has “traveled more miles than any human being” and calls himself “the most well-read athlete in history.” (Another apt assessment might be “most opinionated.”) Here are some lessons the Black Knight has picked up on his nine-decade journey.

- MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Gary Player, photographed at the Bear’s Club in Jupiter, Fla., on December 13, 2024.

What makes a champion? You can’t define it.

But I believe it has a certain amount to do with suffering.

I am grateful for how I suffered as a kid. I suffered like a junkyard dog.

I adored my mother. She died when I was nine years old. My father had to leave school at 15. He was one of six. He needed a job. The only job you could get in South Africa at his age was down a gold mine, 8,000 feet below the ground. He did that for 30 years.

As a boy, I would wake up at 5 a.m. and walk an hour and a half to school and an hour and a half back. I’d come home to an empty house. I was nine, and I had to cook my own food. For two years, I would lie in bed, crying every night. And you know what? It’s the greatest gift I ever had in my life.

I am not a boaster. But I sit here today having won the most tournaments of any man on the planet. It’s a fact. I won more national titles—U.S. Opens, British Opens, Australian Opens and on—than Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods combined. I’ve lasted longer than Sam Snead, the greatest athlete to ever play the game.

I still shoot par at my age. I’m nearly 90.

All this success comes about because of what happened to me as a young person. When you play professional golf, you are suffering. People don’t realize that this game eats you up alive.

But this game—you never master it. Whether you are Tiger, Jack, Ben Hogan, today you shoot 88, the next day you shoot 74. The conditions are the same. You haven’t changed your swing.

“I would like to understand why, when I listen to music or when I think of my parents, I cry and I kiss the ground. But then I get on the golf course and I am a mean, miserable son of a b----.”