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, which is played this week at the Phoenix Country Club.

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Last year, I was lucky enough to play in the senior pro-am event at Pebble beachPure championship. (One of the best events in golf.) Sunday night, after the grand final, I headed north from the Monterey Peninsula to SFO and caught an overnight flight home to Philadelphia. Bernhard Langer was at the San Francisco airport that night, too, flying a JetBlue red-eye to West Palm Beach. There he was, Bernhard Langer, midnight was coming in blazer, every hair in place, a small bag over his shoulder. 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, a marriage, modest spending habits.) Another golfer of Langer’s Hall-of-Fame stature might have hit the NetJet route home, flying out of the nearby Monterey Peninsula airport. Not our hero.

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

You can imagine B. Franklin and B. Langer comparing notes. Don’t waste, you don’t want, really.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say, up front, that I consider Bernhard Langer 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’s at it again, defending his title at Phoenix Country Club. Except now he is. . . 68! (The March of Time is funny that way.) He doesn’t expect to win. He doesn’t expect to finish DFL (and, by the way, you’ll never hear Langer use a profane word). He has no expectation of anything except to do this: to try his best. This is his whole work, his philosophy of life in three words, the secret of his success.

Yes, that’s it. I know because I asked him and he said so. At least, that’s her guts. There are a few other things. Good genes and a healthy life, for starters. (The role of faith in his life trumps all of that. At Augusta, at the Tuesday night Champions Dinner, he usually sits with Larry Mize and Zach Johnson in the Amen corner of the table.) But try your best is Langer’s starting and finishing line. Langer isn’t preaching this as an approach to life that works for everyone. His view is from within. He is not dictating anything to anyone, he is not pontificating about anything. He says this is what works for him.

Langer doesn’t do warm-and-fuzzy. There’s no flow of words from him like there is with, say, Phil Mickelson or Lee Trevino or Gary Player. Some time ago, by chance, I found myself sitting next to Langer at dinner in a hotel restaurant, tables close together. He was alone, just like me. We exchanged nods as I sat down and that was it. I can make a suggestion. I left him alone.

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

I once attended a PGA Tour Bible Study with him. He wasn’t there looking for so-help-me-God improved results. (Some, you might say, were.) He was looking, period. Later, and in depth, but still without a stream of words, he told me about his rebirth, as a Christian, at Hilton Head, a few days after his 1985 Masters victory.

I once wrote a story praising him Sports Illustrated. When I saw him later, I could tell something was wrong. “The story was good,” Langer said, in his typical blunt manner. “But she meant it Nazi in it. It is painful for me to see that word.” Langer’s father, an extraordinary man—a mason who could fix anything and grow anything—grew up in Germany’s darkest hour.

Langer has often said that his second Masters victory, in 1993, meant much more to him than his first, in 1985, because he did it on Easter, as a Christian, and by four strokes. He was the best player on the field that week, by far. “No one can say I won because someone else messed it up,” Langer said. In 1985, Curtis Strange had a three-shot lead at the Masters on Sunday but hit his second in water hazards on the back two par-5 par-9s.

If you missed Strange’s white run during the 1980s, you missed some of the most compelling and intense golf ever played. Langer came into the golf era in the same era. Curtis and Seve, Woosie, Sandy Lyle, Faldo, Watson, Jerry Pate, Lee Trevino and Hubert Jack Nicklaus still very much in it, every big thing was an exciting ride. Langer had nine top-10 finishes in majors in the 1980s, five more in the ’90s — and six more 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 is the Big Six. Mickelson can still make it a septette if he can turn things around here. Langer never loved anything more than golf, not even in his professional life.

Interesting and memorable, continued:

Langer, seemingly unreceptive, once said to me, “Will you come to the Father-Son this year?” (When reading Bernhard’s quotes, please include his inflection and emphasis. It makes the reading experience richer.) The Father-Son, aka PNC Championshipin Orlando in December. Bernhard knew, and the press and public did not, that Tiger Woods would be playing at PNC for the first time, with his son Charlie. I got myself there. This was in 2020 when Charlie was just 11 years old, the youngest ever competitor in that event. Last year, Langer and his son, Jason, beat Tiger and Charlie on the first hole of a playoff when Langer made an 18-foot eagle putt. A moment later, as I read Tiger’s lips over the NBC telecast, Tiger said to Langer, “Bernhard? You’re the best. You’re the best, dude. Great.”

“I don’t 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’re sitting there in the airport wondering if you’ll ever get to your destination.”) Bernhard doesn’t play guessing games, lip-reading quotes or anything else. Its market stock is accurate and confirmed information. Facts. Facts!

In the summer of ’81, my friend Brad Klein caddied for Langer at the World Series of Golf, in Firestonein Akron, Ohio. (Brad spoke German.) He cleverly converted his measuring book into a measuring book, since Langer used the metric system. Brad subtracted 10 percent from each number, so a 200-yard shot became 180 yards. In other words, he was multiplying each yardage number by .90. Langer got it right: Use the .91, which turned a 200-yard shot into 182 yards. Langer is still using the gauge. (Also, an AOL email address. Works great!) That World Series event was Langer’s first tour on American soil. He finished T6. It was the beginning 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 around the world. Wiki has him down to 126 wins globally.

I sent him the other day (via AOL email) a collection of photographs, under the title Bernhard Through the Years. We saw them together on the phone.

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

Here he is in 1985, after winning the Masters, at the trophy ceremony, in red pants and a red shirt, the lowly amateur, Sam Randolph, sitting next to him. Randolph was then the US 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 11 majors in which he played. This was 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, the ’91 Ryder Cup, when he missed a six-foot par putt that would have meant Europe had 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 absence?” I asked Langer the other day.

“I didn’t,” 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 at Hilton Head in 1985, a week after his Masters victory. I was caddying for George Archer there and after his finish early Sunday afternoon I went out and joined the crowd watching Langer try to win back-to-back weeks. His caddy was an Englishman, Peter Coleman. His yard book used meters. His manner was decidedly unflappable. He was in control. He won. Everyone in golf admired how he went about his business. Forty years later, nothing has changed. The man is 68 years old and defends his title at the Charles Schwab Championship.