The Two Lives of George Boutell

It was the summer of 1964. I was playing the Resorters Golf Tournament in Alexandria, MN. There he was, George Boutell, the number one amateur player in the country. He was funny and friendly to this 16 year old kid, enamored with such a high profile golfer. It was the start of a life long friendship ending at the celebration of George’s life October 1st, 2018. 

Born in Minneapolis, he and his family moved to Phoenix in 1956 at the suggestion of doctors, as a result of his older brother’s illness. At the time it was believed the clearer air of the desert would help him recover.  

George was introduced to golf at Interlachen Country Club in Minneapolis where his family were members. He maintained a life long love of Interlachen. He was only twelve when the family left for Phoenix.

Living near the Phoenix Country Club, his game flourished. At age 14 George became the youngest person to ever qualify for the National Amateur. He was focused and meticulous. He was smart, graduating at the top of his class of 650 at Phoenix Central High School. 

George made friends easily with everybody laughing with him. We all loved George. Much of his humor was stupid but funny. Throughout life he would fart around others, laughing, much as a young teenager would do. He loved bathroom humor.   

George immersed himself in golf and school work.  Accomplishments in these areas are not achieved without immense focus and commitment. He told his mother there was no time for girls.  

In 1964 he was named the number one amateur player in the country. He won the prestigious Trans Mississippi Amateur Tournament in 1965. He was a two time All American as he made his way through Arizona State. 

He was a contradiction. On the one hand he was a meticulous student and a focused golfer. However, his public life was filled with silly, self deprecating comments about his body and a sloppiness in how he lived. 

For many years he never cleaned his town house. A patio area, which served as the main entrance, was a joke to all. Weeds grew in the sandy patio. Two folding chairs, much like one would take to a kids ball game, sat outside. No one ever sat in them.

His humor was not appealing to women. With no serious side to his public personality, women were not attracted. 

Laughing at himself, a common greeting from George was, “How am I looking?” It was a reference to his pear shaped figure. His cackling laugh would elicit laughs from all. But it was a defensive laugh. He was very self conscious about his body. It was all an act to protect his secret. 

Everybody was his friend. Everyone liked George. How could you not like a guy that made you laugh saying silly, stupid stuff. In conversation he was a steady stream of questions to those in his presence, never revealing anything about himself. He was funny and interested in you.

George graduated from ASU in four years, with a degree in accounting. Many summers he would come to Minneapolis to see friends at Interlachen and take lessons from Les Bolstad, golf coach at the University of Minnesota. I would figure out a way to see him.

In 1968 he went out on the PGA Tour. It was the in days before tour caddies. Interested in being around great golfers, I called George and asked him if I could come out on tour and caddie for him. It was January of 1969. I had a month long break from Colorado College at the new year. He agreed.

Nothing could have been more fun or thrilling: driving up and down the west coast, caddying at the LA Open, The Bing Crosby (now the AT&T), at Pebble Beach and the Phoenix Open. It never struck me as unusual that we didn’t talk about girls. 

In 1973 I wanted to get out of Minnesota’s winters. I called George and arranged to rent a room from him. I lived with him for a year. 

George played the tour with marginal success. In May of 1973 he called me after the New Orleans Open saying he was done with the PGA Tour. He was done with golf. After devoting his life to the game he was ready to move away from playing. 

From the time he quit the tour he played only a few rounds the rest of his life. He used playing and practicing as a cover for his secret. Earlier in life if he played or practiced he could stay away from social situations. Maybe he lacked the desire to get to the next level in the game because he didn’t love to play. He didn’t practice for long periods as most great players did. Deep down he played to cover his sexuality.

“Golf was a perfect cover for being gay,” he told a friend, Wendy, later in his life. 

He became a very good bridge player. Many days when he was playing the tour he would practice for a couple of hours at the Phoenix Country Club and then go inside the club and play bridge for money for hours. 

Bridge is a game requiring intuition, skill and focus. Successful bridge players are not sloppy, silly, acting out in a haphazard way. It fit his private personality, cerebral, focused, not the act he showed the public.  

During the late ‘60s and early ‘70s he had several self destructive habits. While the ‘no smoking’ campaign had not caught on yet, it was never considered good for your health to smoke. George was a two pack a day smoker. Walking past his bedroom when I rented a room from him, I could see the lit end of a cigarette glowing in the dark. George was having his last cigarette or two before going to sleep. 

Another of his habits was setting an alarm to wake up at 4:00 AM. He would then smoke two cigarettes, eat a package of Oreo cookies, drink a Coke, and go back to bed. He called it ‘snack time’.

He drank to excess. “I was on tour and living with George in the early ‘70s,” Bill Brask told me. “We would go to the Pink Pony restaurant in Scottsdale every night we were in town. George would have two or three martinis, a steak and a baked potato, then two Black Russians. There were some harrowing car rides home. At home he would stick his fingers down his throat and vomit.”

I have since learned this is common among gays triggered by the stress of being in the closet. There is a 60% higher incidence of an eating disorder among people who are gay than the general population.

Following playing the tour he was an assistant pro at Papago Golf Course, a public course in Scottsdale. Working for his head professional friend, Arch Watkins, George could not have been a better employee, meticulous on the job, always on time.   

In the three years George was at Papago his self destructive habits continued. Abusive eating, concentrating on doughnuts, alcohol and smoking, kept his sexual frustration hidden from his friends. He would laugh, the guys would laugh. However, he was tortured. 

Working behind the counter at Papago was always an interim job as he kept his eye open for a different opportunity. Finally a job he wanted open up in 1976.  He became the head coach of the Men’s Golf Team at Arizona State University.   

This was the first time his love of young people became evident. By all accounts he was a great coach. Dedicated to his players, I once asked him why he worked so hard. He responded, “Because every decision I make has an effect on a young person.” 

“He had a great eye for talent,” Barry Conser, on the team from 1979-1984, told me. “He would take a player on a trip after a poor qualifying, believing he had more talent than others. Many times he was right.” 

Words of praise poured in following news of his death.

“George always gave me hope! He didn't give me a spot on the team but I felt he believed in me. What more could a student athlete ask. In 1983 I became George's and ASU's first NCAA golf champion. What an honor considering the great names that came before me. Coach remained a mentor well into my professional career on the PGA Tour because as he became a  fantastic Tour Rules Official,” said 1983 NCAA champion Jim Carter.

"George had such a positive impact on my life and so many others. He believed in me and gave me the opportunity to achieve things in my life that seemed unreachable,” said Jeff Knudson, another of George’s players.

“He would do anything to help his team,” Conser told me. “Once he stood with me for four hours, helping me when my game was suffering.”

He had contradictions in his coaching days also. On one hand he was caring, concerned for every player on the team. However, out with friends he would make humorous complaints about “The little munchkins. Do you think they can find me here? Can I hide from them?” he said to a friend. It was a ruse, another act. He cared for the kids deeply. 

After a decade he left ASU in 1986 to take his dream job as a PGA Tour official. It was a job that perfectly fit his personality. A call from a player needing a ruling requires complete confidence in the correct answer. If an official makes a mistake the whole golf world will know about it. The ruling can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars to a player. With his ability to understand players, his knowledge of the rules and ability to focus, George would get it right. 

I once asked him what he did with a week away from the tour. “I read the Decisions Book cover to cover every week I am off tour.” The USGA Decisions Book is a complicated book, describing through example, how each of the rules of golf are to be interpreted. It is long, it is technical, requiring great concentration to understand. I cannot imagine how many times he read the book in 25 years on tour. Top PGA Tour player, Nick Price, told me in 1994, “George was respected by the players.”

George worked as many weeks as any official. The days are long on tour for officials. Up early to make certain everything is set at the course, then not leaving until after dark in preparation for the next day’s play. I rode around TPC Scottsdale as he set hole locations for the day’s play. Even though the hole locations had been set earlier in the week, he spent 10 minutes or more on each green making perfectly certain of the exact location. George loved being a tour official.  

George was a creature of habit. He worked the same tournaments every year, staying in the same hotel, eating in the same restaurants in each town. Everything was repeated. He did not handle change well. 

For the 65 years he was in golf he was trapped. Trapped by his sexuality. What could he do? Come out? In the ’60s a person who was openly gay would have been ostracized. Had George been a known as a person who was gay, he would have been an embarrassment to his family, his school, his sport. He stayed in the closet to save the pain to those that cared for and loved him. 

He would never have been hired at ASU to coach a men’s golf team had he come out. In fact, he may have been reassigned had it become known. George had have believed the PGA Tour would not have hired him in 1986 to be a tour official as a person who was gay.

George played the tour from 1968-1973. It was not until 2018 that a PGA Tour player came out. Fifty years after George went on tour, a player has come out. His secret had to stay locked up.

Everything in his golf life was built around staying in the closet.

Not that it was just ASU or the PGA Tour that may have been homophobic in the ’60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Would I have called George and asked if I could travel and caddie for him, had I known he was a person who was gay? Would I have lived with him in the early ‘70s? 

After 25 years as a tour official, he retired in 2010. George’s golf life was over. He had moved to the theatre. In the early 2000s he started spending time in New York as a theatre goer. Then, after leaving the tour, he lived in NYC for six months a year, renting an apartment. 

“What do you do in New York?” I asked him. 

“Just go to plays.”

He quit smoking and drinking when he moved from golf to the theatre. His self destructive habits ended when he was free of his tortured life, even his diet improved.

I called him before my wife and I went to New York to see a few Broadway shows. “We have tickets to see South Pacific,” I said.

“Oh, that’s great!” he said. “I’ve seen it 52 times.” 

He saw ‘Billy Elliott’ and ‘The Laramie Project’ well over 100 times. The stories are of young men who were gay and not accepted by society. His theatre friends said he related to Billy Elliott and the murdered University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in The Laramie Project. 

Within the theatre community he no longer hid being a person who was gay, but he never told any of his golf friends. 

After a few years he went back to spending full time in Scottsdale. There is speculation New York was physically too demanding with all the walking.

Before he left NYC he called a friend from Phoenix who was a Broadway performer. He presented her with a box of “Playbill” theatre programs. There were over 600 programs from every show he saw, probably in chronological order. 

George was a hoarder. Later he invited his women friends into his home to attempt to clean out the house. “It was a walk back through his life,” said Wendy.

He did make one more trip to New York City. “Annie is closing,” he told me. “I’ve seen every actress that ever played Annie, except this one. I think I better go see her.” 

George was able to be himself in the theatre community. Nobody cared what he looked like or who he was attracted to. While he would see all the touring shows that came to Phoenix, he loved the various youth theaters. He particularly enjoyed musicals. If a show had a seven or ten day run, he would go to every performance, always arriving an hour early.  He would go to a play every day, sometimes two in a day. He was intense.

In the theatre community he developed at least three close relationships with women, Wendy, Linda and Kelli. I asked his close friend, PGA Tour official Mark Russell, if he ever interacted much with women when he was in golf. 

“No,” Mark said.

It was a 180 degree shift in relationships. 

“In the theatre community he was able to be his authentic self,” said Wendy, one of the first people he came out to. 

At intermission of a performance of ‘Music Man’, George stood with Wendy and her husband.  It became obvious from the conversations that their son, who had the lead in the play, was a person who was gay.

“Your son is gay?” George asked.

“Yes.”

“And you still love him?”

“Of course,” said Wendy.

“I’m gay,” George said. 

“He went through a catharsis in looking at himself and not seeing a failure,” said Wendy. “He had a self loathing for many years.” 

George developed a close relationship with Linda. When first meeting her, George questioned whether he should give her his phone number. Calling a mutual acquaintance, he asked “Can she be trusted?” He was afraid she would embarrass him, knowing he was gay.

The friendship grew and, in a conversation with Linda, George said, “I have something to tell you. I’m gay.” He looked at her waiting for a reaction. “Does that change anything?” 

“It took a long time to gain his trust,” Linda told me. “His friendship was the greatest friendship in my life.”  She started to tear up. “He could see I had a broken heart and he wanted to mend it. He opened my heart.” She paused. “He spent his life helping people find their authentic self. He had a way of seeing the hurt in people.” 

“He was afraid he would lose the family that he loved so much,” Wendy said. “He wanted to be with me because I could tell others that he was person who was gay without scaring them. I think he thought of me as his mother who, even though he was gay, still loved him.

George was afraid to come out because, “They wouldn’t understand,” he told Linda. 

“The people who love you the most will love you more for who you are,” she responded.

He craved touch. Frequently when he would talk to the women he would lay his hand on their arm or hand. “We would go to plays and sit cheek to cheek,” Linda said. 

“I went to lunch with his brother Bill, after George passed,” Wendy said. “We went to the same Olive Garden I always went to with George. The hostess recognized me and asked about George. When we told her he had passed away she sadly said, “Who is going to hold my hand when I walk you back to the booth?” 

He loved the young people in the plays and they loved him. To each young actor he spoke with he would say, “I saw you up there. You were great. You’ll be good. Stay with it.” 

“He cared about all the kids,” Wendy said. George did for others what no one could do for him, know and accept him for his authentic self. 

I sat at George’s celebration of life at Camelback Country Club on October 1st, 2018 surrounded by 200 of George’s friends. The theatre group told heart warming stories of a loving, caring person. 

The golf group, many of whom sat stunned, told tales of silly, funny things George had done and said. I called mutual friend, Mike Morley to tell him about the event. “That answers a lot of questions,” he said.

Everybody loved George in both of his lives. George Boutell was a tortured soul who finally found his true self at the end of his life. He is the most unique person I have known in A Life In Golf.