‘I told these two nuns I would give them £5,000 if I won!’ Golfing royalty LEE TREVINO on his costly 1971 Open win, gambling and drinking with a Bond villain, being ‘fried’ by lightning and reveals who he’s backing to conquer Birkdale

There are many things to take away from an hour with Lee Trevino but we should probably start with the nuns. He owed them money.

‘Oh boy,’ he says. ‘They came to collect and I can see it like it was yesterday. I’ll tell you about it.’

And he will, because that’s what Trevino does. Aged 86 and one of the greatest golfers in history, he has fewer equals in the business of spinning a yarn.

This episode dates back to July 1971, so it fell after his time as a hustler in Texas and before he was struck down by lightning.

The setting was the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale in Southport, where the tournament will return in the coming days, and that was a good week for Trevino – he would go on to win his third of six major titles. But the charm is in the detail. So are the nuns, a rough-sleeping Bond villain and other tangents.

‘Man, I was on a string of form at that time,’ Trevino tells me over the phone from his home in Dallas. ‘In the previous two or three weeks, I had won the US Open in a play-off against (Jack) Nicklaus and the Canadian Open straight after. I was flying when I got to Birkdale.

‘But I won’t forget this – as soon as I got to the course, these two nuns hit me up for a donation to a Catholic orphanage. I made them a promise that if I won the Open, I would give them £5,000.

‘Well, that was some week. I was staying in the Prince of Wales Hotel and my room was above the kitchen. And a room above the kitchen gets warm, so sleep wasn’t easy. Lucky for me, I wasn’t playing until 3pm most days, so I had an option – I could go out a little.’

By chance, that meant falling under the influence of the actor Jimmy Dean, a fellow Texan who was in the process of shooting Diamonds Are Forever and had, for reasons unknown, taken to napping on a public bench outside Trevino’s hotel.

‘We would go over to the Kingsway Casino together,’ Trevino adds. ‘That was sort of our routine – I’d go play my golf, we’d head to the casino, and we’d leave again at 4-5 o’clock in the morning. That’s where I got introduced to red wine. That was like grape soda to me but after a shower, I’d be ready to get back to the course.

‘Now, if memory serves me, I started my final round on fire. I think I shot four birdies in five holes, won my first Open, and when I get off the course the nuns are waiting!

‘I told them, “Listen, we’re going to the casino for a drink, you’re coming with us, and then I’ll give you your money”. They went there with me, sat in the booth and when they had the money they went on their way again.

‘I got my cheque for winning the Open (£13,000) but after paying my caddie, flights, accommodation and the nuns, I think I lost money on that trip!’

There never was a bland route to the hole with Trevino. And no one in the field of Thursday’s 154th Open Championship will have a story like his.

Born into poverty and raised by a single mother in a house without electricity, Trevino won 92 titles worldwide, including two of each major except the Masters. He and Augusta National, and those who ran it, just couldn’t get on, so he boycotted their place for a while, because that was his way.

But he won more than most who ever tried the old game. And this from a Tex-Mex lad who was picking cotton at five and enlisted for four years in the marines at 17. Without going into the service, Trevino reckons he would be dead or in prison, because that, too, is how he was.

Today, he is chatting from the 250 square-foot gym of his mansion, with a golf glove on his phone hand and a pitching wedge in the other; the outsider who forced his way in with grit and a twinkling eye.

‘Not many golfers went the way I did,’ he says. ‘Nowadays they get snapped up to college when they’re young. It’s a different cookie now. It’s like comedians – all the great comedians in your country and mine are dead.

‘It’s the same thing with golf. Nobody says anything. Watch them when they go play – they don’t talk much on the fairway. My son told me this: “The world has changed”. But they can play. Boy, they can play.’

Trevino is booming his high-pitched laugh down the line and diverts a thought to Titanic Thompson, who was infamous across the United States as the pre-eminent gambler of his day and capable of playing golf off scratch with either hand. He happened upon Dallas in the early Sixties and spotted an opportunity in Trevino to exercise both his passions – golf and hustling. Turns out Thompson was pushing at an open door.

‘Other than caddying when I was younger, I didn’t play golf until I was 22,’ says Trevino. ‘But I got good at it fast. There’s a lot of people who want to give you their money!’

Before long, Thompson was fronting up the cash for Trevino to take on the unsuspecting, a future Masters champion in Raymond Floyd among them – they played for $1,000 a round. The unknown kid beat him and near enough everyone else. And when he was done beating them with clubs, he started hustling, using a glass Dr Pepper bottle as a golf club on a par-three course.

‘That was the 32oz bottle and I used to tape it up so it wouldn’t break,’ Trevino says. ‘Man, I would throw the ball up and hit with a baseball swing [with the glass bottle] and could send it 100 yards. I could put backspin on it and everything. I made a lot of money for a boy who had earned $1 an hour in construction after leaving the marines.

‘I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything.’

Thompson died in 1974, aged 80, and Trevino has another line to share: ‘The last time I saw him, he was 75 and he had the most gorgeous pair of eyes, blue, and to look at those eyes you’d think he was 30.

‘He could talk you into anything. Man, he would bet you on how many miles it was from a highway sign into town and some guy would read the sign and say, “30”. Titanic would say, “Looks like 25 to me, I’ll bet ya.” But the other fella doesn’t know he moved the sign five miles forward the night before. Town to town he would clean up.

‘By the time he passed, I heard there wasn’t a crutch or wheelchair in that nursing home that he didn’t win from somebody!’

Trevino is loved in golf. Truly. That wasn’t always the case – it is easy enough to imagine how he jarred with the establishment types and his one-liners have often been a mask for earlier traumas. But his achievements were outstanding.

As a self-taught swinger, he played his rookie season on the PGA Tour in 1967 and had trounced Jack Nicklaus by four strokes to win his first US Open by the close of 1968. Remarkable. His six majors, won across a span of 16 years, saw him conquer courses as diverse as Oak Hill and Muirfield, and all with a low ball-flight honed on scrubland tracks in Texas.

‘I just outworked everybody, that’s all I did,’ he says. ‘Ben Hogan was the same – we just outworked everybody else. I would go to a golf tournament, finish my round, and I’d go to the driving range and hit 1,000 balls until dark with a six-pack of beers.’    

Trevino leaves a little pause before adding: ‘Hell, I’m out there sweating and I ain’t going to replace it with water, am I?’

Trevino operated in an era of giants, of course. Men like Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, his idols. Trevino would talk about them all day, if you’d allow it. To the existential question of the greatest, Nicklaus or Tiger Woods, he says: ‘The greatest, the GOAT, is Nicklaus but I think the best player was Tiger. Tiger could do more than Jack. He had more in the arsenal. But one has 18 majors.’

That segues into a different tangent: ‘We got one coming up here who just turned 30. Birkdale favours Scottie Scheffler a lot. Watch him go.

‘I met him when he was young. He came to my club, eight years old, and he was on the putting green. He wanted to putt for a nickel or a dime, and I wouldn’t take him on because he would brag if he beat me and he was pretty good at it.’

A hustler can always recognise another.

For Trevino, he just wants to keep the party running a while longer. He has previously stated his wish to see his ashes scattered on the Old Course at St Andrews, and ditto his fear that he might be ordered to caddie for Palmer in heaven. Hopefully that day is a long way off for a man who famously cheated death when he was hit by lightning at a tournament in Chicago in 1975. It’s difficult to know if it was connected in any way to taking a pair of nuns to a casino.

‘It was the second-best sensation I felt in my life,’ Trevino says, without elaborating on the first. ‘When it hit, for a moment my body was like 92 degrees and it was the warmest feeling I ever had in my entire life. Nothing hurt and I said, “God damn, this is pretty good”, but then I woke up an hour later and, s***, my hair, my toenails, pain everywhere. I was a Kentucky Fried Chicken, man.

‘It ripped up so much of my body, and I had so much metal put in to fix it, that even now I’m scared of those junkyard magnets.’

That story stands as a Trevino classic. Ditto the one with which this long chat ends, tracing to the time in the early Seventies when he was mowing the lawn outside his big new house, shared with his second of three wives.

‘Around the corner comes this blue Cadillac,’ Trevino says. ‘It pulls up and this very, very attractive lady was sitting in that car, and she goes, “Young man, what do they pay you to do this yard?”

‘And I said, “Well, the lady who lives here lets me sleep with her”. She didn’t say a word and just rolled up the window.’

I was still laughing five minutes after hanging up.