Lee Trevino
Lee Trevino was born on December 1, 1939, in Dallas, Texas, a city whose working-class landscapes and heat-baked terrain formed the backdrop of his early life. A citizen of the United States, Trevino came of age in a region where golf was largely a sport of privilege, a context that would shape the arc of his professional path in ways that set him apart from many of his contemporaries on the course.
Trevino pursued a career as a professional golfer, competing at the highest levels of the sport over the course of a sustained and accomplished working life. His performances on the course brought him to the attention of the wider sporting world, and he received the Associated Press Athlete of the Year award, a recognition that placed him among the most accomplished American athletes of his era. The award reflected a period in which his play drew consistent national attention and made him a figure of considerable public interest.
His standing within the sport was further confirmed when he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, an honor that acknowledges sustained excellence and contribution to the game over a career's span. The induction marked a formal acknowledgment by the golf community of what his record on the course had demonstrated across many years of competition. Throughout his career, Trevino conducted his professional life in English, competing within American sporting culture and engaging with the public and media in that language.
The Library of Congress catalogs him under the authorized label "Trevino, Lee," a small but telling detail about the durability of his presence in the cultural and historical record of American sport. His career as a professional golfer, rooted in Dallas and carried forward through competitions that earned him both a major individual athletic award and a place in the World Golf Hall of Fame, represents a substantial body of work within the sport he practiced. Trevino remains a figure whose professional record is documented in the permanent institutional memory of American public life.
Quotes by Lee Trevino
Lee Trevino's insights on:
I'm going to win so much money this year, my caddie will make the top twenty money winner's list.
Jack Nicklaus liked to curve the ball by opening or closing the clubface at address. I never felt I was good enough to do it his way. I didn't like changing my swing path, either, which some guys do. There's only one really reliable way to curve the ball: Change your hand position at address.
I love watching Anthony Kim play, but I'm not a fan of the way he grips down a good two inches on his full-swing shots. Choking down lightens the club's swing weight and effectively makes the shaft stiffer. It also makes it difficult to hit the ball high enough for all situations.
When you’re poor, you know nothing about the future, you know nothing about the world, nothing that goes on outside 300 yards around you.
I’m hitting the driver so good I gotta dial the operator for long distance after I hit it.
I’m a golfaholic, no question about that. Counseling wouldn’t help me. They’d have to put me in prison, and then I’d talk the warden into building a hole or two and teach him how to play.
A rough should have high grass. When you go bowling they don’t give you anything for landing in the gutter, do they?
Living in Dallas, I root for the Mavericks and the Stars and the Cowboys, but I’ve always pulled for the Chicago Cubs. I enjoy watching them play.