The Bernhard Langer Story: Stuff You Never Knew About This German Legend

0 0 GolfCentralDaily July 28, 2014 Edit this post

I don't care what anyone says, Bernhard Langer is good enough to play in this years Ryder Cup aged 56. Yesterday he won the Seniors Ope...

I don't care what anyone says, Bernhard Langer is good enough to play in this years Ryder Cup aged 56. Yesterday he won the Seniors Open by 13 shots at Porthcawl in one of the great displays of links golf for many years. But how much do you really know about Langer and where he came from?

I'm a child of the eighties and at that time Seve Ballesteros, Jack Nicklaus and Nick Faldo were grabbing all the headlines while Langer quietly operated under the radar. I decided recently to find out a bit more about him and was fascinated to read that far from the polished millionaire he is now, Langer grew up in a very poor family in Munich.

Here in his own words are excerpts from his story.

I grew up in a little town in Germany about thirty miles from Munich. My father was a brick layer and my mother was a housewife. I’m the youngest of three children. In those days we were very poor. I never received any pocket money and had to wear hand me downs from my older brother. My dad could not afford a car so we all used bicycles for transportation.
At the age of eight I started caddying to earn some money. There were eight boys from our town that caddied on a regular basis. We were paid five marks, which is about three dollars for eighteen holes. The golf course was five miles away so we rode our bicycles to get there and back. Out of those eight guys, three became golf professionals. We got four old clubs from a member and all the caddys shared them. Those four clubs were a two club, a three iron, a seven iron, and a putter with a bent shaft. Maybe that’s where all my putting problems came from. Not having a wedge or a sand wedge was quite a struggle. On the other hand it forced us to improvised which might have been very helpful in the long run. After four years of caddying I saved up enough money for my first set of golf clubs and boy was I proud of them. They got polished and taken care of as if they were made of gold and diamonds.
At the age of fifteen I finished school and had decided what I wanted to do with my future. I went to an Institute and when asked what I was interested in and what I wanted to do, I replied that I wanted to be a golf professional. The person that interviewed me said that he had never heard of that. He left the room to see if he could find any documents on such a profession. After twenty minutes he came back with a ruffled look on his face and said there was no such thing as a golf professional and he would strongly advise me to do something else. I knew that there were about two hundred golf professionals in Germany and that they all made a living. I was able to convince my parents that this was all I wanted to do and they finally gave in.
One month later in August of 1972 I started my first job as an assistant professional in Munich. Munich was one and a half hours by car away from home which meant that I had to rent a room and live on my own which was quite a change. I commuted by bicycle and had a wonderful time working on the golf course all day and playing a lot of golf. I was always fairly short in size but wanted to hit the ball as far as a grown adult. This made me develop a strong grip so I could hook the ball and make it go further. Even now my grip rate is amongst the strongest in professional golf. I have read comments from players that with a grip like mine you’re not going to make it. Gary Player was my idol because he’s my size, he’s a fitness fanatic which I used to be, he has to travel long distances to get the tournaments as I do, and he has a personal relationship with Christ.
One Sunday morning at my club I had arranged for a game with three people from my club. As usual I came a half hour early to hit some balls and warm up and a weirdest thing happened on the driving range. I was shanking every single ball out of the pocket. I made my way over the first tee with shaking knees knowing how much these guys play for. We ended up playing for what I considered a lot of money. The amount was about my income for three months at the time. With my horrendous warm up I did not feel very confident. The only good thing though was the first hole was a par five and the first two shots were with woods and you can’t shank woods. As is turned out I shot sixty-eight that day and took all three of them to the cleaners.
In 1982 I played a tournament in England and on the seventeenth I hit a nine iron for my second shot and pulled it to the left and it a big oak tree near the green. I heard the ball hit two or three times but did not see it come down. Seconds later hundreds of spectators started laughing and sure enough the ball was lodged up in the tree in a little indentation on a huge branch about fifteen feet above the ground. After debating whether I should take the penalty shot or climb up in the tree and hit it, I decided to climb up the oak tree. Minutes later I hit the ball from up in the tree onto the green and the crowd went absolutely crazy. The TV cameras had everything on tape and hours later the picture of me hitting the ball out of the tree went around the world. Two days later I flew to Akron Ohio to play the World Series golf tournament which was my ever event in the US. I was co leader after three rounds and I heard the people in the crowd saying there’s the guy who was up in the tree.