Calvin Peete’s path from the beanfields of Pahokee, Fla., to the lush greens of the PGA Tour was uniquely his.
Who ever heard of such a tale in a country club locker room? That of an eighth-grade dropout, working the fields to support himself and his family, hustling later to sell clothes and jewelry to migrant workers out of his car trunk, who didn’t touch a golf club until he was 23? And, then, his first instinct was to choke it like a baseball bat.
Who needed golf, Peete used to wonder? After all those years working in the hot sun, not him, he thought.
Then, in 1966, while in New York, a group of friends took Peete to a public course. Either play with us or wait for us, they told him. “I couldn’t get a ride home,” he said during one Boys Life interview, “so I went along with the fool idea.”
That fool idea led to 12 victories on the PGA tour and made him one of the most recognizable figures on the tour throughout the 1980s.
Peete, the most unlikely of golf legends, died Wednesday morning in an Atlanta hospice. He was 71.
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