The darkness and inspiring light of a lost Hilton Head golf legend
One of Hilton Head Island’s greatest golf stories is not really a golf story.
It focuses on Bert Yancey, who tied for second in the first Heritage golf tournament played 54 years ago in Sea Pines. He got his $9,250 check, but locals were glad he and an Alabaman named Richard Crawford bowed to the king on that Sunday afternoon that Arnold Palmer’s win put Hilton Head on the map.
As the RBC Heritage Presented by Boeing brings the PGA Tour to town this week to wrestle over a staggering $20 million purse, Bert Yancey is a lost legend of the Lowcountry.
It was always a struggle with Bert.
“It was not until the 1967 Masters that most people knew there was a Bert Yancey,” Mark Mulvoy wrote in Sports Illustrated in the spring of 1969 before Yancey was one of the few to figure out the diabolical new course at Harbour Town.
“The pros on tour knew him, though, and knew that he had a meticulous golf game. His swing was silky smooth. His long irons were played with precision. His short game was played with finesse, and his putting was right up with the best. ‘I’d rather have Yancey’s stroke than a license to steal,’ Jackie Burke says.”
Yancey was a tall and robust man with a head full of wavy hair beneath a visor as he seemed to glide across the fairways, winning seven times in 13 years on the tour. The highlight was a one-stroke victory over Jack Nicklaus in the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am, but twice he finished third at both the Masters and the U.S. Open. With the hands of a surgeon, he once guided his golden Spalding Cash-In putter to a PGA Tour record of 102 putts for 72 holes.
But there was a big problem.
Yancey battled demons much worse than the slick greens of Augusta that he was so obsessed to master that he crafted a Play-Doh model of each green to literally get the feel of them.
The demon we know as mental illness bombed into Yancey’s life in his senior year the U.S. Military Academy. He was an honor student and captain of the golf team.
“I was loving the whole thing,” he told columnist Dave Kindred for The Washington Post in 1978, “when — boom! — in less than two weeks I was in a padded cell.”
He had started staying awake for days at a time, his mind racing like a meteor over our humdrum world. He told Kindred he was taken to an Army psychiatric hospital after he put a plebe or two against a wall and demanded something like, “What is truth, mister?”
He was in that hospital for nine months. That was 1960. They called it a “nervous breakdown” and sent him home to the panhandle of Florida.
He turned to golf and made the tour. But the demons went with him, and because his name was now associated with the greatest names in golf, he found himself the subject of stunning headlines.
In 1974, he felt God was telling him to preach against racism so he climbed a ladder in a LaGuardia Airport terminal and he began his sermon, ordering Black people to one side and white people to the other. He felt he had all the money of Howard Hughes to cure cancer, something that could be aided by interpreting the steam from a lightbulb when he spit on it. In Japan, he ran into The Temptations band late one manic night and, when he assumed the pose of a martial artist, he was clocked from behind with a real karate move.
Yancey’s last stab at the Heritage’s tartan jacket was in 1976. He always scored well here, but this time, paired with Jack Nicklaus and Lanny Wadkins, he shot 90-80.
He left the tour that year, a broken and sad figure.
In 1977, after his wife divorced him, he washed up on Hilton Head again, this time to live.
It wasn’t always pretty, but it was here that Bert Yancey’s story soared beyond mere chips and putts.
LITHIUM
The silver lining of the infamous LaGuardia Airport incident was that Dr. Jane Parker of Payne Whitney Hospital diagnosed his case as manic-depressive illness and put him on lithium.
Lithium had a horrible side-effect for a golfer. It gave him hand tremors, a good excuse not to take it.
But if taken properly, it could even out his manic highs and the can’t-get-out-of-bed lows. He could function as he did most of his life, as the quiet but friendly Bert that his island pastor called “winsome.”
Still, Walter W. Thrailkill took a big chance when he hired Yancey to be a golf instructor at Shipyard on Hilton Head. So did Sea Pines when it later brought him to Harbour Town for the Bert Yancey Classical School of Golf.
Bill Palmer, who was Yancey’s 27-year-old boss at Shipyard, and Cary Corbitt, who worked with at Sea Pines, say he was an excellent teacher with great people-skills.
But even that almost imploded as soon as it began.
Yancey, dressed as Robin Hood, was arrested early on a Halloween morning near his villa in Shipyard. He was accused of peeping tom, resisting arrest and damaging county property (kicking in the patrol car). He was sent to the state mental hospital in Columbia.
Palmer, perhaps best known locally for being a founder of the Hilton Head National course, said they considered firing Yancey at Shipyard.
“My boss, Harry Ranier, said he’s with us,” Palmer says today. “We just said, ‘Hey, you’ve got a problem. We’ve all got problems. Yours just got publicized, unfortunately.”
Charges were dropped, but the problem remained whether Yancey would be as consistent in taking his medicine as he was with his golf swing.
BIPOLAR VOICE FOR THE OUTCAST
Island friends could tell when Yancey was about to launch into a manic phase of what is today called bipolar disorder. They were called to rescue him in what they estimate would be eight or nine episodes per year.
It happened once at the Catholic church. Once he was pulling a little red wagon behind his car down U.S. 278. Sometimes they took him to the mental hospital in Columbia. But he was never kicked to the curb, which happens to countless Americans with mental illness.
Until he returned to Florida in the mid- to late-1980s, Yancey remained a public and respected figure here.
He had a radio spot on golf tips, and offered quick tips alongside a cartoon that ran in The Island Packet. He hosted touring pros and local pros in radio shows during the Heritage.
He sang annually in the community performance of Handel’s “Messiah.” He was a faithful member at First Presbyterian Church, where a longtime member recalls his meticulous dress in clothes of vivid colors.
His pastor, the Rev. John M. Miller, included Yancey in his 2017 book, “The Communion of Saints: A Pastor’s Pot-Pourri of Parishioners.”
He tells about Yancey studying for two years to become a teacher in the international Bethel Bible Series. Some of his thoughtful observations about biblical passages seemed to come out of the left rough, Miller wrote, “but everyone in the group knew about Bert and knew about his illness, and so it was okay. When he became a teacher, he performed very well with his own class, and his class members respected and loved him.”
The fact that Yancey talked openly and often about his bipolar disorder when few others did became his story.
Dave Kindred wrote a follow-up column on Yancey in 1981 titled “Yancey’s Message: ‘If I Can Do It, You Can.’” He told Kindred his answer to those who asked why he would venture back onto the pro tour.
“Because I’m a golfer. Because I’m normal. Because a lot of people need to know you can have mental illness and still be a normal person doing your job. I have a responsibility now. Do you know how many kids in this country have manic-depressive illness? By being visible with my teaching and by playing four or five events on tour, I’m saying to those kids — and everyone with manic-depressive illness — ‘I’ve got it, too, but I’m shaking it as long as I stay on my medicine.’”
Yancey preached it until he fell dead of a heart attack in 1994 at Park City, Utah, while warming up for a Senior PGA Tour tournament. He was 56.
A plaque affixed to a granite slab at the Park Meadows Golf Club says: “Bert Yancey was a tenacious champion with unusual courage, determination, wit and wisdom. As a true professional, he exemplified persistence through hardship … His quest for excellence remained remarkably intense and focused as he executed his final shot from this area.”
David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.
