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

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

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Last year I was fortunate enough to play in the senior pro-am event at Pebble Beach, the Pure Championship. (One of golf’s best events.) Sunday night, after the Grand Finals, I drove north from the Monterey Peninsula to SFO and took an overnight flight home to Philadelphia. Bernhard Langer was also at San Francisco airport that evening, flying to West Palm Beach on a Redeye JetBlue. There he was, Bernhard Langer, arriving at midnight and wearing a blazer, all his hair in place, a small carrying bag on his shoulder. The old prof.

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 of Langer’s Hall of Fame status is said to have flown home from nearby Monterey Peninsula Airport on NetJett. Not our hero.

I recently asked him if he ever paid to “fly privately.” (What a pretentious sentence.) “I’ve done it a few times, but very rarely,” 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 should say up here that I consider Bernhard Langer to be one of the most amazing people in golf. The fact that he won the Charles Schwab Cup championship last year at the age of 67 is astonishing. This week he is back defending the title at Phoenix Country Club. Except now he is . . . 68! (The Time March is funny that way.) He doesn’t expect to win. He doesn’t expect to finish DFL (and besides, you’ll never hear Langer use a profane word). He doesn’t expect anything other than this: to do his best. That’s his whole thing, his philosophy of life in three words, the secret of his success.

Yes, 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 plays a big role in all of this. In Augusta, during the Champions Dinner on Tuesday night, he usually sits with Larry Mize and Zach Johnson in the Amen Corner of the table.) But doing your best is Langer’s starting and finishing line. Langer doesn’t preach this as an approach to life that works for everyone. His gaze is focused inward. He doesn’t dictate anything to anyone, he doesn’t pontificate about anything. He says this works for him.

Longer doesn’t mean warm and fuzzy. There is no flood of words from him, as is the case with, say, Phil Mickelson or Lee Trevino or Gary Player. Some time ago, by chance, I sat next to Langer at dinner in a hotel restaurant, the tables close together. He was alone, just like me. We nodded as I sat down and that was it. I can take a hint. I left him alone.

I’ve had some interesting and memorable experiences with Langer, here and there and over the years. I once interviewed him in his backyard, in a gated golf community in Boca Raton, South Florida. Suddenly a piercing rainstorm came in in the afternoon. We were maybe 25 feet from the back door. We could have easily ended it. Langer called his wife on a cell phone and said, “Vikki, Michael and I are in the gazebo. Can you please come out with an umbrella.”

I once attended a PGA Tour Bible study meeting with him. He wasn’t there looking for improved so-help-me-God scores. (Some, you could tell.) He was searching, period. Later, and in depth, but still without a flood of words, he told me about his rebirth as a Christian in Hilton Head just days after his victory in the 1985 Masters.

I once wrote a favorable story about him Sports illustrated. When I saw him later, I could tell something wasn’t sitting well with him. “The story was good,” Langer said in his typical and direct manner. “But the word was there Nazi in it. It hurts me to look at that word.” Langer’s father, a remarkably unremarkable man – a mason who could fix anything and make anything grow – came of age in Germany’s darkest hour.

Langer has often said that his second Masters victory, in 1993, meant much more to him than the first, in 1985, because he did it on Easter, as a Christian, and by four shots. He was by far the best player on the field that week. “No one can say I won because someone else messed up,” Langer said. In 1985, Curtis Strange had a three-shot lead on Masters Sunday, but he hit second shots into the water hazards on the back two nine par-5s.

If you missed Strange’s red-hot run through the 1980s, you missed some of the most riveting, intense golf ever played. Langer reached the age of golf in the same era. Curtis and Seve, Woosie, Sandy Lyle, Faldo, Watson, Jerry Pate, Lee Trevino and Hubert Green and Jack Nicklaus were 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 1990s – 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 the Big Six. Mickelson could still make it a septette if he can turn things around here. Langer never wanted more than golf, not in his professional life.

Interesting and memorable, continued:

Langer once said to me, seemingly for nothing, “Are you coming to the Father-Son this year?” (When reading Bernhard quotes, please use his inflection and accent. Makes the reading experience richer.) The Father-Son, also known as the PNC Championship, in Orlando in December. Bernhard knew, and the press and public did not, that Tiger Woods would play in the PNC for the first time, with his son Charlie. I got myself there. That was in 2020, when Charlie was just 11, the youngest ever participant 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. Moments later, as I read Tiger’s lips over the NBC broadcast, Tiger said to Langer, “Bernhard? You’re the best. You’re the best, dude. Awesome.”

“I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something like that,” Langer told me recently after flying from West Palm to Phoenix for this Schwab final. (Commercial, of course. “The flight was two hours late,” Langer said. “You sit there in the airport wondering if you’ll ever reach your destination.”) Bernhard doesn’t play guessing games, on lip-reading quotes or anything else. His trading stock is accurate, confirmed information. Facts. Facts!

In the summer of ’81, my friend Brad Klein caddied for Langer at the World Series of Golf, at Firestone, in Akron, Ohio. (Brad spoke German.) He thoughtfully changed his distance book to a meter reading book, while Langer used the metric system. Brad took a 10 percent discount on each number, so a 200-yard shot became 180 yards. In other words, he multiplied each distance number by 0.90. Langer got him on the right track: use .91, which turned a 200-yard shot into 182 yards. Langer still uses meters. (Also an AOL email address. Works great!) That World Series event was Langer’s first tournament on American 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 much more of his life in Florida than in Germany. He has played and won all over the world. Wiki pegs him for 126 wins worldwide.

I recently sent him (via AOL email) a collection of photos, under the heading Bernhard Through the Years. We looked at them together by telephone.

Here he is, in the late 1970s, with shaggy white-blonde hair and a luxurious mustache to match. “I didn’t lose a bet or anything, I just thought I’d try a mustache,” Langer said, nearly half a century later with a caption.

Here he is in 1985, after winning the Masters, at the awards ceremony, in red pants and a red shirt, with lowly amateur Sam Randolph next to him. Randolph was the U.S. Amateur champion at the time. He had a T18 finish at the ’85 Masters. He turned pro the next year. That ’85 Masters was Randolph’s first of the eleven majors in which he played. It was by far his best result. “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 and the ’91 Ryder Cup, when he missed a six-foot par putt that would have meant Europe retained the Cup. You could see the pain running through his arms, his neck, his face.

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

“I didn’t do that,” Langer said. “Because I knew I had done my best.”

He won the following week on the European Tour in Germany.

The first time I saw Langer up close was in Hilton Head in 1985, the week after his Masters victory. I was there to caddie for George Archer and after his early finish on Sunday afternoon I went out and joined the crowd as I watched Langer try to win in successive weeks. His caddie was an Englishman, Peter Coleman. His distance book used meters. His manner was certainly not irritable. He was in control. He won. Everyone in the golf world admired the way he worked. Forty years later, nothing has changed. The man is 68 and defending his title at the Charles Schwab Championship.