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Trevino's desire to buy a big hunk of life for me and my kids" is a drive born of deprivation. He does not know who his father was and has never tried to find out. "Rich people like to talk about their backgrounds, their ancestors and where they come from," he explains. "We were too poor to care. We were too busy existing." He was raised in the rural outskirts of Dallas by his mother Juanita and his maternal grandfather Joe Trevino, an immigrant gravedigger. Their four-room frame house —located "about two miles over in the country"—had neither electricity nor running water. Lee had to improvise his boyhood games. Basketball was played with a tennis ball. A taped beer can served as a football.
The golf balls, though, were for real. The Trevino house stood in a hayfield next to the seventh fairway of the Glen Lakes Country Club. In between was a fence, and little Lee was soon turning a tidy profit on that happy coincidence —collecting balls that sailed over the fence and selling them back to club members. Expanding his business, he welded two rake handles together, fashioned a chicken-wire scoop on one end, and went fishing for more strays in the water hazards. "I cleared maybe $10 a day," he recalls. When he was six, he found a discarded wooden-shafted No. 5 iron, sawed it down to size and began hitting horse apples. Bored with make-believe, he eventually "made me a two-hole course in the pasture, and when they cut the hay in summer I had me the plushest course you ever saw."
Trevino quit school after the seventh grade to work for the Glen Lakes greenkeeper. He caddied on the side, played a few holes at dusk, but took no serious interest in the game. That did not develop until after he joined the Marines at 17 and was shipped to Japan as a machine gunner. He picked up a tattoo, caroused around the bars, and got into fights with sailors. "I loved the Marines," he says. "I never knew anybody when I was a kid, and there I was around a bunch of guys my own age. Hell, I volunteered for everything —night patrols, you name it. It was like camping out to me." Things got even better when he spied a bulletin-board notice announcing tryouts for the 3rd Marine Division golf team. "Shucks," he told himself, "I know a little about that game." Qualifying for the team with a round of 66, he learned a lot more over the next two years playing in tournaments in Japan, Formosa and the Philippines.
Wallets Waiting
When Lee returned home in 1961, he was ready for a little action. He found it at Dallas' Tenison municipal golf course, where there were plenty of wallets waiting to be tapped. His challenge was hard to resist: he would play with only one club, give an opponent his handicap, and winner take all. Trevino claims that he and his trusty No. 3 iron never lost. When things were slow, he would take on all comers on an obstacle course that began on the first tee and then angled across a railroad crossing, down a gravel road and through a tunnel before ending back on the course. Business was so good (he was averaging $200 a week hustling) that he took an apartment across the street from the course so he could get an earlier start.