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My Two Careers and What's Coming Next
My Pro Golf Career I graduated from the University of Houston in 1963 with a BBA degree, which is business administration. Then I served six months active duty in the Army and a total of seven years reserve duty in both the Army and the Air Force. As soon as active duty was over, I competed fulltime on the PGA TOUR for nearly eighteen years, from 1964 through 1982. Until I was thirty years old, I never had any desire or education to become an author. But when I turned thirty years of age, I studied a particular aspect of the Second Coming of Christ, changed my belief on the subject, and wrote a thirty-page paper on what I had learned. Of course, I was competing fulltime on the PGA TOUR, involved with my family, and therefore studying in my spare time, mostly during the offseason. Nonetheless, I started wondering if I could ever write a book on Bible prophecy and get it published. So, in the mid-1970s I started a hobby to that end. What began as an avocation developed years later into a second career. After I ended my career on the regular Tour, at the end of 1982, I devoted more time to studying and writing. My first two books were published in 1987 and my third one in 1990. But in late 1991, I turned fifty years of age and thus became eligible for the Senior Tour (now the Champions Tour). So, I went back to a "real job." I resumed my pro golf career by competing on that Tour fulltime for the next ten years. After a few years on the Senior Tour, I started incurring orthopedic problems, most of them caused by golf. From 1997 through 2003, I underwent four arthroscopic surgeries: both knees, left shoulder, and right hip. The knee surgeries turned out great. With the last two surgeries, I incurred further complications. This limited my competing on the Champions Tour to about seven tournaments per year from 2001 to 2005. In 2001, despite only one win on that Tour, but many seconds, I still had a reasonably good position on the All Time Money List, which affects elgibility, and it was the thirty-fifth position. Players are exempt in the top seventy. Thus, I remained exempt for the next few years even though I competed seldom, and when I did I played with some pain. Every pro golfer knows that it's difficult to compete at a satisfying level when you play with pain. So, I finally threw in the towel and officially retired from the Champions Tour in 2005 even though I was still an exempt player. My knees and shoulder were fine, but my hip was somewhat painful swinging the club, and it eventually was making it difficult for me to play golf day-to-day. I could have tried a hip replacement, which has a pretty high rate of success. But since my arthroscopic hip surgery, I've had very little or no pain with normal activities, including walking. It was the twisting of the torso in the golf swing that caused me enough hip pain to decide to retire. I may still have a hip replacement in the future. But so far, I've decided against it. Nowadays, I play leisure golf very occassionally. I guess if I want to play more golf in the future, I'll try a hip replacement. Since my hip doesn't affect my dancing, I haven't decided to do it. As far as physical activities go, dancing has taken the place of golf. I never would have believed it. I never danced at all in my life until I turned fifty. But I still work out in the gym. I've lifted weights almost all my life since college. Except for Frank Stranahan, who was a serious weight lifter, Gary Player and I used to be the only guys on the Tour who believed in weight lifting for improving golf, and we did it regularly. Everybody thought we were nuts, including our fellow competitors. Ha!. We had the last laugh. Look at 'em now. Check out Tiger Wood's routine. My Book Writing Career When people learn that I am an author, they usually think I must write about golf. I've never been interested in writing about golf. But I am very interested in writing about Jesus, theology, and world affairs. People used to ask me, "How can you be a pro golfer and write books on theology? And what are your credentials for doing it?" I usually answered that it is not that uncommon for people to have more than one career in their life, though, in my case, they are indeed quite different. I have been a diligent student of the Bible and theology all of my adult life, since my late teens, thus even longer than I've been a pro golfer. As for formal education, I only have a business degree from the University of Houston and one year of Greek at seminary. (In 2005, I started learning Hebrew.) I was, however, awarded an honorary Ph.D. in 2001 by North Park University in Chicago. Friends tell me that I am "self taught." I am indeed highly motivated to study and write lucidly. Partly due to my co-founding and leading the PGA TOUR Bible Study on the regular TOUR, I have had the privilege of knowing many Christian leaders, seminary professors, and other Bible teachers throughout much of my life. This experience aided me in my studies and in becoming an author. In my reading of many books on theology and biblical commentaries, I came to the opinion that many of these writers exceled at knowledge but not at communication for common readers. I decided to try to become an author who would help bridge that gap. (Nowadays, however, authors have the aid of good editors more than they used to.) I have been a member of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) since 1999. It is the world's largest association of Bible scholars, having over 10,000 members from mostly the U.S. and the UK. Each year I attend SBL's Annual Meeting, a five-day affair that most of its members attend. There, I meet with Bible scholars and religious publishers to network, fraternize, discuss theology and writing projects, and attend some of its hundreds of forums involving scholars delivering papers and having panel discussions. This helps me stay abreast of what is going on in the theological, academic sphere. I also am the donor of the "Kermit Zarley Lecture Series" at North Park University in Chicago. This annual, two-day affair began in 2000 and is held in the fall season. This lectures series is conducted free of charge, mostly for the benefit of the university students. Yet the lectures presently are open to the public. I am not the lecturer, as one might expect from the title of the lectures. Rather, each year the lectures feature a different, single, keynote speaker who is a distinguished Bible scholar and usually a professor. The series has been blessed with many outstanding lecturers, some of them also being well-published authors. Past keynote lecturers, in chronological order of their participation beginning in the year 2000, have been Dr. James D.G. Dunn (Durham University, England), Dr. Amy-Jill Levine (Vanderbilt University Divinity School), Dr. Hugh Williamson (Oxford University, England), Dr. Dale C. Allision (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary), Dr. Lincoln D. Hurst (University of California at Davis), Dr. Donald A Hagner (Fuller Theological Seminary), Phyllis Tickle (Publisher's Weekly), and Dr. Randall Balmer (Columbia University). North Park University's gregarious New Testament professor, accomplished golfer, and my close friend--Dr. Scot McKnight--a well published author himself, is the director of the Kermit Zarley Lecture Series. In fact, it was his idea. Writing Screenplays I'm also into writing screenplays. When I saw Mel Gibson's film, "The Passion of the Christ," the day it was released, I laid aside what I was writing and wrote a screenplay on Jesus' resurrection. It was the last scene that did it for me, in which only a few seconds are devoted to Jesus' resurrection. I thought that was a message, it being that if this film was successful, they would produce a sequel, it being on Jesus' resurrection. I also thought about how Gibson and his screenwriter, Benedict Fitzgerald, had to first compile a composite of the New Testament gospels and then write a screenplay based on that. Because of my work in the four gospels with my first two books, I knew it would be much more difficult to write a script on Jesus' resurrection. Why? The gospels are pretty straightforward about the last hours of Jesus' life; but each gospel writer presents quite a different story about Jesus' resurrection. Most New Testament scholars believe that a comparison of these gospel accounts reveals many discrepancies between them. I disagree; but I do believe that it is difficult to harmonize this data. I had already attempted to do that with my first two books. So, I thought about how I had already accomplished some difficult work that would be required before such a script could be written. I also thought about how important it would be to filmgoers for such a script to be very biblical. The success of The Passion was attributed to a very signficant degree to the overwhelming acceptance of Evangelicals, which movement I have been a part of all of my adult life. The Evangelical movement had grown so much in the past fifty years, and Evangelicals attempt to be very biblical. They could make or break any film about Jesus. I was intensely interested in doing this project. It's because I believe that the sole basis of Christianity is the resurrection of Jesus. WITHOUT JESUS' RESURRECTION, THERE NEVER WOULD HAVE BEEN ANY CHRISTIANITY. Don't get me wrong; Jesus' death was immensely important. He provided salvation by dying on the cross for our sins, with crucifixion being such a painful death. Yet the Romans crucified many thousands of people every year. But Jesus is the only person who has ever risen from the dead with an immortal, incorruptible body. Hollywood has produced about 100 movies about Jesus, but not one about his resurrection. This dearth and the fact that Jesus' resurrection is the foundation of Christianity suggests how difficult it would be to make such a film that could be acceptable to moviegoers. Of course, the major reason is that most people accept that Jesus lived, was a great moral teacher, and was crucified; but most people don't believe that he literally rose from the dead. And we know that if most people don't believe that, even more in Hollywood don't either. I knew that, despite what my script idea was, my chances of writing a script and getting it made into a major motion picture were between extremely slim and zip. Something like one percent or less of movie scripts written in the U.S. per year get made into a Hollywood movie. But that wasn't going to deter me. Neither did the first time I attended a monthly meeting of the Arizona Screenwriters' Association. I sat next to a rather onery cuss who had been very successful in Hollywood as a sound engineer and owned about a hundred theaters. He didn't know me from Adam and asked what I was doing there. That was a really good question. I wasn't so sure I had a good answer. I told him I was trying to write my first script to be made into a Hollywood movie. He said most emphatically, "You've got about as much chance of getting a Hollywood film made as a snowball in hell!" I laughed and didn't disagree. I didn't know at the time that Hollywood wants young screenwriters too, not old ones, because they want to invest in someone's future. That didn't matter either. Am I crazy? Don't answer that. I was determined that I was going to learn how to write screenplays and write one. It wasn't any different than one Sunday many years earlier, when I was driving out of our church parking lot. I turned to my wife Marilyn and said, "I'm going to write a book." She didn't have any idea of what had been going on in my head about this. She replied quickly in her frank manner, "What! You can't write." I laughed and said, "Yeah, but I'm going to learn from you." Marilyn and I had met as students at the University of Houston. She was a straight A student, working parttime for the school as a proof reader, and on her way to getting a degree in English literature. She had some writing ability and later became a highschool English teacher; but she didn't have my determination. I bought Final Draft, the most popular screenwriting software, and learned how to use it. I also read about twelve books on screenwriting and took a four-month course on it. I spent one-and-a-half years fulltime on this project, half of it on the script and half on further research. So, I produced the script and a fifty-page (single spaced) research paper which was in addition to the forty pages I already had written on Jesus' resurrection and post-resurrection appearances in my book, The Gospels Interwoven. This script begins with Jesus' body being removed from the cross and being entombed. It includes Jesus' resurrection on the third day and ends forty days later with his heavenly acension. The script is mostly about ten post-resurrection appearances of the risen Jesus to his disciples and the convincing proofs that he provided them. Now came the hard part: trying to interest Hollywood in my script. That place is about as hard to break into as Fort Knox! Nevertheless, as soon as I finished my screenplay, I met Benedict Fitzgerald. What a gracious fellow. We corresponded several times after that. I was hoping to interest him and Icon Productions in my script. Icon, owned by Gibson and his partner, Steve Mc Eveety, produced The Passion film. But Benedict informed me that Gibson was so upset with the criticism from certain quarters regarding The Passion film, that he decided he would not do a sequel to it despite its phenomenol success. Benedict read my script. He responded in an email, "I have the screenplay and find that it may need a professional's helping hand here and there, for the sake of dramatic compression and visual rather than expository reasons. Overall, however, this is an amazing job for someone who has not worked on scripts before." Benedict eventually suggested I produce it. I was shocked. I dabbled in the idea briefly. Jim Caviesel had played the role of Jesus in The Passion. Because of its success, I thought a film on Jesus' resurrection would have by far the best chance of success if Caviesel played the role of Jesus in it. Of course, that would be costly, since Caviesel's fee had skyrocketed to say the least. Still, I wrote a one-page, killer query letter to Caviesel's agent, Ed Limato, the #1 agent in the Hollywood movie business. He called me on the phone as soon as he received the letter. He said I had to make an offer for his client. In other words, don't contact us unless you're going to produce the film and are financially prepared to pay his client's high fee. "What," I said, I was only trying to get them interested in my script. The cordial conversation was short. Sony soon announced that its Gemstone film production company had just launched into producing a film on Jesus' resurrection. I knew it was going to happen; it was just a matter of time. Somebody was going to come along and try to follow up on the amazing success of The Passion. So, I put this project on the shelf and turned back to my books. But, I don't think I'm finished writing screenplays. Since then, I have written a treatment based on my next book, Warrior from Heaven. It is this book idea, which I got thirty-five years ago, that first caused me to think of trying to make a Hollywood movie someday. This unique book is about the Second Coming of Christ. In this book, I have attempted to arrange all unfulfilled biblical prophecies in chronological order and write about them in a reader-friendly, journalistic style in the present tense. Thus, this book should be easily adaptable to film. It would be a biblical epic of very dramatic proportions. That's all for now, folks. Occasionally, I will update you on what's going on with my writing career. As for golf, the birdies are getting to be far and few between. |
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