Scattered Shots: King of Soap and Swing

by Victor Williams

Nearly a month had gone by since he stood on the 18th green at Edgewood Tahoe and hoisted the American Century Celebrity Golf Championship Trophy after 17 years of near-misses and final round meltdowns, but Jack Wagner still felt like a little kid.

He’d finally outlasted perennial athlete sticks like Dan Quinn and Billy Joe Tolliver by dropping a 12-foot putt on the final hole for birdie, which his caddie, 15-year-old son Peter, read to perfection. So with a wide-armed smile to the heavens, Wagner lifted a lot of frustration and self-doubt off his shoulders — and cashed a hundred grand as well.

“It’ll go right into Peter’s college, fund, I suppose” he said. It was official: Wagner belonged out there with the guys who had been money-making athletes all their lives and were now the best celeb golfers in the world. He knew he had the game — he’s been club champion at Bel-Air Country Club twice during his 20 years as a member — but in the back of his actor’s mind, he never really believed he had the right stuff.

Now he does, though he’s not about to give up his regular role on the daytime drama The Bold and the Beautiful for a run at, say, the Champions Tour. “What I make on the show would put me in the Top 25 on the money list,” he says. “I don’t want to lose my PGA acting card right now. Why would I do that? Freddie [Couples, who’s 48] and several of the others are all my age, and I don’t see them getting worse or my game getting that much better.”

Still, he’s damn good, and a good father to boot, teaching his kids the game (sort of) after a stellar career on such shows as General Hospital and Melrose Place. A jacked-up Wagner spoke to FG recently after dropping his kids off at school.

Are you still on a high? You had your son next to you on the bag at Tahoe this year and at the press conference after you won. You were pretty amped up.

Yeah. It’s a bizarre thing. I went into the hospital about six days later with a severe, acute case of diverticulitis for about four days. They scoped me for colon cancer. So it was really weird. You go from this high into this real reality slap in the face. It puts everything into perspective. But the real high is basically going back out to Bel-Air with my sons and playing and hitting balls because I went about 2½ weeks without touching a club because of the illness. And you know that’s really when it comes again, when people congratulate you and talk about it because you get to sort of relive it a little bit.

You can’t go into it too much, but you get asked a lot of questions and it’s a really nice feeling when they had it on every television screen around Bel-Air and the staff was watching. And it’s nice to have almost a home-crowd situation where they feel you were representing them.

Did you have to buy some drinks?

I had my kids with me so I was able to duck out of that deal.

Besides your kids, do you have regular playing buddies that you hook up with and are they going to ask you for more strokes?

Years ago I used to have a great group, [former Lakers star] Jerry West and a really great gambling group who threw balls every day at a certain time. But that’s all kind of gone away given my work schedule on the Bold and the Beautiful and the kids getting a little older. That time for yourself goes away as a parent for some reason. Plus, I enjoy ... to be quite honest, I enjoy playing with my kids. I love it. I make them the priority.

Have you gotten them lessons through Bel-Air, and is there a pro you’ve worked with and kind of passed along to your kids?

You know one guy has helped them a little bit. He’s a new pro there. Eddie Merrins sort of stepped down about five years ago. A guy named Dave Podus has come in from Minnesota. He’s worked with my boys more. Because I’m not a big lessons guy. I kind of have my own swing and kind of manage it and I’m learning to understand a little more. Bad habits are hard to break, and it really does take just simple things to break them and that’s what I’m kind of finding by watching my kids. What they do wrong, I realize I do the same things.

Do you see elements of your attitude toward the game and your mental game also in your kids?

Just being a father and trying to teach your kid anything is probably the hardest thing to do. They don’t really want to hear it from their mom or dad — especially their dad — when it comes to sports, and you really have to back away from it as much as it kind of hurts and as much as you feel you really can help them. It’s better to get them to a golf professional. I don’t claim to be a teacher at all. But I can certainly see when somebody is doing something blatantly wrong — their grip’s not right or whatever — especially a beginner. You can’t really teach old dogs new tricks, but you certainly can take younger players and fix that. But it just doesn’t seem to work with your own kids. I’ve had talks with John Cook and Tommy Armour III, and it’s the same thing. They’re PGA touring pros and they’re like, “The last thing my kid wants is to hear from me … what I think about his swing.” So I try to back off and let him find his own way and he eventually comes to me, because if he’s hitting it bad, he’ll go, “What am I doing?”

Tell me about your roots in golf. Was it passed down along to you?

My dad played a little nine-hole course in the sticks in Missouri, and I just picked it up from caddying. I just grabbed it with a baseball grip and whacked it around the house, then around nine holes. I wasn’t a country club kid and I certainly wasn’t a lessons kid, and I didn’t have any organized golf game in high school or college or anything like that. I liked it and worked hard at it once I got old enough to hit it out of my shadow.

When you started getting roles on daytime television ... when did you become a member at Bel-Air?

In 1985. I got out of drama school in ’82 and had odd jobs around the city. I was a tour guide at Universal, and when I got cast on General Hospital, a producer found out I liked golf. They were members out at Bel-Air, and they invited me out to play. I got back into golf and was sponsored to join the club. I’ve gained a couple club championships and winning the AT&T with John Cook in 1991 got me an invitation to the celebrity tour at Lake Tahoe.

Daytime TV is pretty hectic. Where do you find time to practice?

On General Hospital and then Melrose Place in the 1990s, I was pretty much a major player and I could manage my golf time: I knew when to dip in, dip out, ask out of work. You know, manage my schedule so I could fit my golf in. Being in my 40s now and starting on a new show, I really had to kind of re-create myself in terms of CBS, whom I never had worked for. I’m new to the show here. Most of the cast had been here for 17 to 18 years when I joined. I dedicated myself to really becoming a player on this show, which meant making it a complete priority, so I pretty much didn’t play golf for two years. Since then, I’ve got my foot in the door there. I’ve got a great relationship with the people at CBS. Once that happened, once I felt comfortable, I started playing golf again.

What’s your routine as far as practicing and playing?

I manage my day to get out in the late afternoons, when I can put a good hour in. Yesterday I hit balls for a half hour with Peter, who caddies for me. We played nine holes. We had a little match. I give him a stroke on every hole but 3-pars. I’m even par after six holes and I’m 4-down. I say, “I don’t like this arrangement anymore.” So we’re adjusting the strokes — he can have 1 shot a side. He was 2-over yesterday with a double bogey from the blue tees. So he really gets it up to kick my ass, and I don’t like it anymore. I’ll have to cut him out of my group and just play alone now.

You know it’s bad when you’ve got people making side bets about your son …

Don’t think I haven’t considered that option.

Bel-Air has history. What’s special about that place to you?

It’s carved out of the most expensive real estate in the world — Bel-Air. You don’t find many houses under $4 to $5 million. It’s right next to UCLA. It’s got a lot of history for celebrities dating back to Howard Hughes and Dean Martin and the list goes on. George C. Scott. Not that they were all great golfers. You can still go out there and see Dennis Quaid, Pete Sampras. Al Michaels is there every day. He’s just a total over-the-top golf nut. He’s a junkie — forget about it.

You don’t even think about it when you’re out there, but I imagine for people who come to visit or are a guest, it’s probably a little overwhelming. They see these guys tee it up or out on the putting green. I used to play a ton with Sean Connery out there on the course in the ’80s and ’90s, but Sean has kind of relocated over to Europe. That was a little bit overwhelming for me, to play with Double-O. And by the second day, it’s [in a thick Scot accent], “That was in the water and you’ve got to putt that one out!” And I’m like, “Hey, screw you, Double-O, that’s in the leather, we pick it up."

Back to the Celebrity event: What made the difference this year? You’ve been close in past years. Did you feel like deep down maybe you didn’t deserve to beat these athletes or was it like bad luck?

This year was a great example for me how this is a mental game. It was totally a different mentality. I never believed I could win. I’m against guys who’ve been in their particular sport for the past 15 years. These guys are geared for this, you know? I never really believed I could win, and I proved that quite a few times by choking down the stretch.

This year, I didn’t really approach it that way at all. I really went for that old-fashioned “one shot at a time” and letting go of the bad things that have happened and looking at what we’re going to do now. I didn’t even think about the leaderboard until I was on the 18th. I knew we were all right there. On the 15th tee, I knew I had the lead by one, which means nothing. There are some reachable 5-pars and anything can happen. That’s what the beauty of that course and that format is. That’s what they want. Everybody kind of chipped up around on 16, which is a reasonable par 5, and nobody birdied. At 17, we all hit great shots, and we each had about 12 feet — every one of us could have made it, but we didn’t. At 18, everybody could have birdied and did. It came down to that.

How does golf equate with acting? Is it the same kind of compartmentalization when you take a role and you’re acting?

That’s an interesting question because some of the best scenework I’ve ever done theatrically, live theatre, or television or movies of the week, I don’t really remember what happened. I was really in the moment and absorbed in it and was well-rehearsed on it. Some of the times I feel that I’ve been at my weakest is when I haven’t been as well-prepared or my thoughts were running somewhere other than where I was in the middle of the scene. And golf is the same way. I think people can attest to when they played their best, they can’t really remember what they were thinking. I think Michael Jordan has said that. They call it “the zone” or whatever. A lot of great athletes will tell you their best performances come when they have no idea what they were thinking about. That’s the way I was that day. I didn’t feel like it was over. It felt like we had another nine holes. FG