Trevino: "We were hoping somebody would invite us into the clubhouse and buy us dinner."
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When did you come to that determination to retire? How did you figure out that you had had enough?
I’ll tell you what brings you to that decision. It’s real easy. It’s when you can’t wait to get to a tournament, and then when you drive in you say ‘What am I doing here?’ And then you can’t wait to get out of there. In other words, I don’t care about competing any more. I came to grasp with everything when I realized I couldn’t compete any more, If you’ve won as many tournaments as I’ve won and competed the many years that I competed, you understand that you’re not gonna go play just to be playing. When you drive into that golf course, you want to have a chance of winning, and if there’s any doubt inside of you that you can’t win, it’s time to hang it up.
When you go back to your heyday, there were players like yourself, Arnold Palmer and others who were characters of the game. One of the biggest criticisms of the PGA Tour today is it doesn’t have the personalities like it did in your prime.
If you’ll look back at the old days, most golfers when we came to the course we had a sport coat on, and we hung it up in the locker. Today, these kids come to the course in shorts and a pair of tennis shoes on, and a T-shirt, and then they dress while they’re there. And then they leave the same way. It’s almost like the rock band Kiss. Once they take the makeup off, nobody recognizes them. It was different back then and we were more personable I think back then, and the reason for it is simply because we didn’t play for a lot of money. We were hoping somebody would invite us into the clubhouse and buy us dinner. That’s why we had the coat there.
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