A nine-hole match with the devil: two-time major winner Hubert Green takes on cancer with the same resolve he shows on the golf course

Golf Digest, March, 2004 by Dave Kindred

"I speak in a Southern type language. My spell-check on this great IBM has no chance. Sometimes I might put a capital 'S' to emphasize sarcasm. 'R' will stand for Redneck-ese. (S) I will try to include some highly intelligent digs at y'all from time to time."

His wife, Michelle, becomes a lifesaving version of Nurse Ratched. His treatment is "a nine-hole match with the devil." God is spoken of, and often, as Mr. Big, sometimes in capital letters. "The devil has no chance, thanks to y'all and MR. BIG."

During six weeks of radiation, Green wore a white mask molded to his facial features. The idea was to hold his head still so radiation zapped only the targeted area. "If you think it'd be hard to lay still for 15, 20 minutes," he says, "let me tell you, you can lay real still when your life depends on it."

He sometimes carried a prop to his four-hour chemotherapy sessions: "They had these nine chairs, lined up like a barber shop, and everybody in them is dying. It's not a happy place, everybody in pain. But I thought, 'It's where we are in life. Let's lighten up.' "

So chemo nurse Debbie Balmer laughed when she saw Green carry in a stuffed-toy horse, Renegade, representing the mascot of his alma mater, Florida State University.

"It played the Seminole fight song," Balmer said. "Well, we're all Gators here [at the University of Florida Health Science Center]. I went to the gift shop and bought a Gator that played our fight song louder than his. We had a fight-song war going on in chemo."

A minute of laughter, dozens of "puke days" in "Pukeville." Green reported, "Chemo does not favor this redneck. Matter of fact, it is worse than missing a three-footer on 18 at Augusta."

When Green missed that putt 26 years ago, three years after his father's death, he needed it to get into a playoff with Gary Player. At the time, Green was near greatness. The previous summer he had won the U.S. Open. In 1985 he won the PGA Championship. From 1971 to 1985 he won 19 PGA Tour events. Give him that Masters and move him up from third in the 1977 British Open, he'd be with Nicklaus, Hogan, Sarazen, Player and Woods as the only six men with a career Grand Slam.

Anyway, by August, HubertGreen.com reported that its journalist might play the next week. Instead, crisis.

It was Aug. 9. At home, he suddenly felt so bad he asked his wife to take him back to the hospital. Severe dehydration, low white blood-cell count, pain. He couldn't swallow. A feeding tube was inserted.

Then it got worse. "On the 11th," he says, "I came close to cashing in my chips." Disoriented, he vomited a pool of dark reddish fluid. He thought he'd seen such an eerie pool somewhere else.

Three days later, he remembered where.

"My father, I was with him, vomited the same-color stuff," Green says. "And one of the nurses came in and said, 'Ooh.' My mother asked, 'What was that?' The nurse said, 'That's dead man's bile.'

"The next morning, he passed away. Thank God, when I vomited, I was on enough pain medication I couldn't realize what I was seeing. That might have put me over the hill."