The secret to Bernhard Langer’s success boils down to 3 little words

Bamberger Briefly is sponsored by Charles Schwab, host of the Charles Schwab Championship Cup, being played this week at the Phoenix Country Club.

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Last year, I had the good fortune to play in the senior pro-am event at Pebble Beach, the Pure Championship. (One of the best events in golf.) Sunday night, after the grand finale, I drove north from the Monterey Peninsula to SFO and took an overnight flight home to Philadelphia. Bernhard Langer was in the San Francisco airport that night, too, flying a redeye JetBlue to West Palm Beach. There he was, Bernhard Langer, midnight coming and blazer on, every hair in place, one wee carry bag on his shoulder. The old pro. 

You have to think that Bernhard Langer is one of the richest professional golfers of all-time, at least in the non-celebrity division, right up there with Jim Furyk and Jay Haas. (Long careers, one marriage, modest spending habits.) Another golfer with Langer’s Hall-of-Fame stature might have NetJetted his way home, flying out of the nearby Monterey Peninsula airport. Not our hero.

I asked him the other day if he ever paid to “fly private.” (Such a pretentious phrase.) “I have a few times but very seldom,” Langer said. “It’s too expensive.”

You can imagine B. Franklin and B. Langer comparing notes. Waste not, want not, indeed.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say, here at the top, that I consider Bernhard Langer one of the most amazing people in golf. The fact that he won last year’s Charles Schwab Cup Championship, at age 67, is astounding. This week, he’s at it again, defending the title at the Phoenix Country Club. Except now he’s . . . 68! (March of time is funny that way.) He’s not expecting to win. He’s not expecting to finish DFL (and, by the way, you will never hear Langer use a profane word). He has no expectation, for anything, except to do this: try his best. That’s his whole thing, his life philosophy in three words, the secret to his success.

Yep, that’s it. I know because I asked and that’s what he said. At least, that’s the guts of it. There are some other things. Good genes and healthy living, for starters. (The role of faith in his life rides herd over all of this. At Augusta, at the Tuesday-night Champions Dinner, he typically sits with Larry Mize and Zach Johnson in the Amen Corner of the table.) But try-your-best is Langer’s starting line and finishing line. Langer is not preaching this as an approach to life that works for all. His gaze is inward. He’s not dictating anything to anybody, he’s not pontificating about anything. He’s saying that’s what works for him.

Langer doesn’t do warm-and-fuzzy. There’s no torrent of words from him, as there is with, say, Phil Mickelson or Lee Trevino or Gary Player. A while back, by maître d’ coincidence, I found myself seated next to Langer at dinner at a hotel restaurant, the tables close together. He was alone, as was I. We exchanged nods as I sat down and that was it. I can take a hint. I left him in peace.

I have had some interesting and memorable experiences with Langer, here and there and over the years. Once I was interviewing him in his backyard, in a gated golf community in Boca Raton, in South Florida. Suddenly, a drenching afternoon rain shower moved in. We were maybe 25 feet from the back door. We could have easily made a dash for it. Langer called his wife on a cellphone and said, “Vikki, Michael and I are under the gazebo. Could you please come out with an umbrella.”

I once attended a PGA Tour Bible Study meeting with him. He wasn’t there searching for improved so-help-me-God scores. (Some, you could tell, were.) He was searching, period. Later, and in depth but still with no torrent of words, he told me about his rebirth, as a Christian, in Hilton Head, several days after his win in the 1985 Masters.

I once wrote a laudatory story about him for Sports Illustrated. When I saw him later, I could tell something about it did not sit right with him. “The story was good,” Langer said, in his typical and direct way. “But it had the word Nazi in it. It is painful for me to look at that word.” Langer’s father, a remarkable unremarkable man — a bricklayer who could fix anything and grow anything — came of age in Germany’s darkest hour.

Langer has often said that his second Masters win, in 1993, meant far more to him than the first, in 1985, because he did it on Easter, as a Christian, and by four shots. He was the best player in the field that week, by a lot. “Nobody could say I won because somebody else screwed up,” Langer said. In 1985, Curtis Strange had a three-shot lead on Masters Sunday but hit second shots in the water hazards on the two back-nine par-5s. 

If you missed Strange’s white-hot run through the 1980s, you missed some of the most compelling, intense golf ever played. Langer came of golf age in the same era. Curtis and Seve, Woosie, Sandy Lyle, Faldo, Watson, Jerry Pate, Lee Trevino and Hubert Jack Nicklaus still very much at it, every major was a thrill ride. Langer had nine top-10 finishes in majors in the 1980s, five more in the ‘90s — and six more in this century. His bed at home is a humanoid charging station. Sam Snead, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Hale Irwin, Tom Watson, Bernhard Langer: For greatness over time, there’s your Big Six. Mickelson could still make it a septette, if he can turn things around here. Langer never wanted anything more than golf, not in his professional life.

Interesting and memorable, cont’d:

Langer, seemingly apropos of nothing, once said to me, “Are you coming to the Father-Son this year?” (When reading Bernhard quotes, please insert his inflection and accent. Makes the reading experience richer.) The Father-Son, aka the PNC Championship, in Orlando in December. Bernhard knew, and the press and public did not, that Tiger Woods would be playing in the PNC for the first time, with his son Charlie. I got myself there. That was in 2020 when Charlie was only 11, the youngest contestant ever in that event. Last year, Langer and his son, Jason, defeated Tiger and Charlie in the first hole of a playoff when Langer made an 18-foot eagle putt. A moment later, as I read Tiger’s lips via the NBC telecast, Tiger said to Langer, “Bernhard? You’re the best. You’re the best, dude. Awesome.” 

“I cannot remember exactly what he said but it was something like that,” Langer told me the other day, after flying from West Palm to Phoenix for this Schwab finale. (Commercial, of course. “The flight was two hours late,” Langer said. “You are sitting there in the airport wondering if you are ever going to get to your destination.”) Bernhard does not play guessing games, on lip-read quotes or anything else. His stock-in-trade is precise, confirmed information. Facts. Facts!

In the summer of ’81, my buddy Brad Klein caddied for Langer at the World Series of Golf, at Firestone, in Akron, Ohio. (Brad spoke German.) He thoughtfully converted his yardage book into a meterage book, as Langer used the metric system. Brad took 10 percent off each number, so a 200-yard shot became 180 meters. In other words, he was multiplying each yardage number by .90. Langer got him straight: Use .91, which turned a 200-yard shot into 182 meters. Langer is still using meters. (Also, an AOL email address. Works just fine!) That World Series event was Langer’s first tournament on U.S. soil. He finished T6. It was the start of a beautiful relationship. Langer has played in 327 PGA Tour events and 375 PGA Tour Champions events. He has now spent far more of his life in Florida than he has in Germany. He has played and won around the world. Wiki has him down for 126 wins globally.

I sent him the other day (via AOL email) a collection of photos, under the heading Bernhard Through the Years. By phone, we looked at them together.

Here he is in the late 1970s, with bushy white-blond hair and luxurious matching mustache. “I didn’t lose a bet or anything, I just thought I’d try a mustache,” Langer said, providing a caption almost a half-century later.

Here he is in 1985 after winning the Masters, at the trophy presentation ceremony, in red pants and a red shirt, the low amateur, Sam Randolph, seated beside him. Randolph was then the U.S. Amateur champion. He had a T18 finish at the ’85 Masters. The next year he turned pro. That ’85 Masters was Randolph’s first of the 11 majors in which he played. It was by far his best finish. “We don’t know what tomorrow will bring,” Langer said. “Golf is more fickle than life.”

Here he is at the ’93 Masters, the 2024 Schwab Cup Championship, the ’91 Ryder Cup, when he missed a six-foot par putt that would have meant that Europe had retained the Cup. You could see the pain running through his arms, his neck, his face.

“Did you ever, even for a moment, worry that night that you might never get over that miss?” I asked Langer the other day.

“I didn’t,” Langer said. “Because I knew I had tried my best.”

He won the next week on the European Tour, in Germany.

The first time I saw Langer up close was at Hilton Head in 1985, the week after his Masters win. I was caddying for George Archer there and after his early Sunday-afternoon finish I went out and joined the crowd watching Langer try to win in consecutive weeks. His caddie was an Englishman, Peter Coleman. His yardage book used meters. His manner was decidedly unexcitable. He was in control. He won. Everybody in golf admired how he went about his business. Forty years later, nothing has changed. The man is 68 and defending his title at the Charles Schwab Championship.