Bernhard Langer’s secret to success can be summed up in 3 little words

About Bamberger Sponsored by Charles Schwab, organizer of the Charles Schwab Championship, it will be held this week at Phoenix Country Club.

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Last year, I had the pleasure of attending the Senior Pro-Am – Pure Championship – at Pebble Beach. (One of the best events in golf.) On Sunday night, after the finals, I drove north from the Monterey Peninsula to San Francisco International Airport and caught an overnight flight back to Philadelphia. That night, Bernhard Lange was also at the San Francisco airport, taking a red-eye JetBlue flight to West Palm Beach. He, Bernhard Lange, arrived at midnight, wearing a blazer, neat hair, and a small handbag slung over his shoulder. Old major.

You have to consider Bernhard Langer to be one of the richest professional golfers of all time, at least in the non-celebrity realm, right up there with Jim Furyk and Jay Haas. (A long career, a marriage, frugal spending habits.) Another golfer with Lange Hall of Fame status might fly home on NetJet, flying out of nearby Monterey Peninsula Airport. Not our hero.

One day I asked him if he had ever paid to fly on a “private jet.” (What a pretentious phrase.) “I’ve had a few, but very few,” Lange said. “Too expensive.”

You can imagine B. Franklin and B. Langer exchanging ideas. Indeed, waste not and want not.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say at the top that I think Bernhard Langer is 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 his title at Phoenix Country Club. Only now he is. . . 68! (That makes the march of time interesting.) He doesn’t expect to win. He doesn’t expect to complete the DFL (btw, you’ll never hear Lange use profanity). He had no expectations of anything except to do this: to do his best. This is all about him, his philosophy of life, three words, the secret of his success.

Yes, that’s it. I know because I asked and he said so. At least, that’s the courage of it. There are some other things. First, good genes and a healthy life. (Faith plays a big role in his life. At Augusta National, he usually sits in the Amen corner of the table with Larry Mize and Zach Johnson at Tuesday night’s Champions Dinner.) But doing your best is Langer’s starting and finishing line. Lange isn’t preaching that this is a lifestyle that works for everyone. His gaze turned inward. He doesn’t give orders to anyone or talk dogmatically about anything. He said it worked for him.

Lange doesn’t do warm and fuzzy things. He didn’t babble with words like Phil Mickelson, Lee Trevino or Gary Player. Not long ago, by coincidence, I found myself sitting next to Lange at a hotel restaurant at a very close table. He was as alone as I was. We nodded as I sat down and that was it. I can take the hint. I left him calmly.

I have had some fun and memorable experiences with Lange over the years. I once interviewed him in his backyard, a gated golf community in Boca Raton, South Florida. Suddenly, it rained heavily in the afternoon. We were about 25 feet from the back door. We could have easily rushed through. Lange called his wife on his cell phone and said, “Vicky, Michael and I are under the gazebo. Please bring an umbrella out.”

I once went to a PGA Tour Bible study with him. He wasn’t there looking to improve his “God help me” score. (As you can tell, some are.) He’s looking, that’s all. Later, days after his 1985 Masters victory, he told me in depth but still without gush about his rebirth as a Christian in Hilton Head.

I once wrote a praise story about him Sports Illustrated. When I saw him later, I could tell he was a little uncomfortable. “It’s a good story,” Lange said in his typical, direct way. “But there is a sentence on it Nazi in it. I feel pain when I see this word. ” Lange’s father was a humble, ordinary man—a bricklayer who could fix anything, plant anything—who grew up in Germany during its darkest hour.

Langer has often said that his second Masters win in 1993 meant more to him than his first in 1985 because he won by four strokes as a Christian on Easter. He was the best player on the field that week by a huge margin. “No one can say I won because someone else screwed up,” Lange said. In 1985, Curtis Strange led Sunday’s Masters by three strokes but hit his second shot in a water hazard on the par-5 back nine.

If you missed Strange’s white-hot run in the 1980s, you missed some of the most compelling and intense golf competitions of all time. Langer came into golf during the same era. Curtis and Self, Woosey, Sandy Lyle, Fedor, Watson, Jerry Pate, Lee Trevino and Hubert Jack Nicklaus were still so good at it that every major was a thrilling ride. Langer had nine top-10 finishes in majors in the 1980s, five more in the 1990s, and six more majors this century. The bed in his home is a humanoid charging station. Sam Snead, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Hale Irving, Tom Watson, Bernhard Langer: In order to become great over time, that’s the Big Six. If Mickelson can turn things around, he can still make the septet. Langer wanted nothing more than golf, and that was true for his career.

Funny and memorable, continued:

Lange said to me at one point, seemingly out of nowhere, “Are you coming to the Father-Son meet this year?” (When reading Bernhard’s quote, insert his intonation and accent. Makes the reading experience richer.) The Father-Son Game, aka the PNC Championship, in Orlando in December. Bernhard knew, but the media and public did not, that Tiger Woods would be playing with his son Charlie at PNC for the first time. I got there myself. That was in 2020, when Charlie was just 11 years old, making him the youngest competitor ever in the event. Last year, Langer and his son Jason beat Tiger and Charlie on the first playoff hole, with Langer making an 18-foot eagle putt. Moments later, when I saw Tiger’s lip reading on the NBC telecast, Tiger said to Lange, “Bernhard? You’re the best. You’re the best, man. That’s awesome.”

“I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something along the lines of,” Lange told me the other day, as he flew from West Palm to Phoenix to watch Schwab’s finale. (Commercial, of course. “The flight was delayed two hours,” Lange said. “You’re sitting in the airport wondering if you’re going to get there.”) Bernhard doesn’t play guessing games, lip-read quotes or anything else. His modus operandi is accurate, verified information. fact. fact!

In the summer of ’81, my good friend Brad Klein caddyed for Langer at the World Series of Golf at Firestone in Akron, Ohio. (Brad speaks German.) He thoughtfully converted his yardage book into a measurement book because Lange uses the metric system. Brad reduced each number by 10%, so the 200-yard shot became 180 meters. In other words, he multiplied each yardage gain by 0.90. Langer made it clear: Using 0.91, he turned a 200-yard shot into 182 meters. Lange still uses meters. (And an AOL email address. Works great!) That World Series was Langer’s first game on American soil. He finished T6. This is the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Langer has played in 327 PGA Tour events and 375 PGA Tour Championship events. Now, he spends far more time in Florida than in Germany. He has competed and won all over the world. Wikipedia puts his global win tally at 126.

The other day I sent him (via AOL email) a series of photos titled “The Bernhard Years.” We watched them together over the phone.

Here he is in the late 1970s, with thick platinum hair and a matching extravagant mustache. “I didn’t lose the bet or anything, I just wanted to try growing a beard,” Lange said, providing the caption nearly half a century later.

Here he is at the trophy presentation after winning the Masters in 1985, wearing red pants and a red shirt, with low amateur Sam Randolph sitting next to him. Randolph was the U.S. Amateur champion at the time. He tied for 18th at the ’85 Masters. He turned pro the next year. The ’85 Masters was Randolph’s first of 11 majors. This is his best result to date. “We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” Lange 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 meant Europe retained the trophy. You could see pain in his arms, neck, face.

“Did you worry that night, even for a moment, that you might never forget that miss?” I asked Lange the other day.

“I didn’t,” Lange said. “Because I know I did my best.”

He won the European Tour event in Germany next week.

The first time I met Langer up close was at Hilton Head in 1985, a week after he won the Masters. I was caddying for George Archer there and after he finished early Sunday afternoon I went out to join the crowd watching Langer try to win for weeks on end. His caddy was an Englishman named Peter Coleman. His yardage book uses meters. His attitude was decidedly unexcited. He has everything under control. He won. Everyone in the golf world admires the way he works. Forty years have passed and nothing has changed. The 68-year-old is defending his title at the Charles Schwab Championship.