Lessons from Lee Trevino: On the occasion of his 85th birthday, we share tips, wisdom, laughs from a recent Trevino clinic

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PUNTA MITA, Mexico — Lee Trevino is hard at work doing the two things he does best: hitting a golf ball and talking a mile a minute. Some 50+ members at Punta Mita Golf Club, home to two Jack Nicklaus designs, and VIPs of the WCW Mexico Senior Open have gathered around the practice green for Pacific and Bahia golf courses as Trevino treats them to a clinic on the short game and bunker play.

Trevino, who celebrated his 85th birthday on December 1, hasn't been slowing down. Just last month, he did Q&A's and clinics in Chicago, Little Rock, Arkansas, El Paso, Texas, Palm Springs, California, and this one in Mexico, the country where his grandfather, who helped raise him, emigrated from a few years before he was born.

"It's a funny thing because, hell, I make more now than I did when I played," he says with a laugh. "This here, this is my home country. They're buying my breakfast. That's it. I told them, 'Just buy me lunch and breakfast.' "

And so Trevino, one of the game's greatest wedge wizards, still is performing, leaving them laughing with his trademark wit and wisdom and his audience soaked it all up until Trevino closed out the session by saying, "I'm done. We're finished. I'm going to go lay down." Of course, he headed to the back of the range and beat more balls.

Happy birthday, Lee. Don't ever change and thanks for sharing your wit and wisdom with all of us.

Trevino teaches the short game

Trevino wore a Merry Mex striped shirt with the colors of the Mexican flag, navy shorts with a Folds of Honor belt and a black knee brace on his right knee. He told the attendees of the clinic that he was going to focus on the short game. "You know I can hit the ball," he said. "My record tells you, you don't need to see that anyway."

And then Trevino summed up why he wanted to emphasize the short game.

"You can go 400 yards in two rolling the ball and then it takes you three to get down to 20 feet. It kills you," he said, "and it's because you don't know how to hit a chip shot."

"Unless this shot is going to be a bump here," he instructed, "that's the only time the club is square to the target.

"If you have any type of shot around the green and you want to support getting the ball up, then you have to play with an open club, mandatory. What happens to 90 percent of you, and I watch it every day is they play square, and then, for some awful reason in their mind, they think they're going to have to open this club to go up. If they play with the club close, they're right. You do have to. But you know what happens is the trunk of the trees going this way and the limbs are going that way — it won't work. Once in a while it will, but the majority of the time it won't work. So the secret is always remember that when you take a golf club back, it opens. I don't know of anybody that plays golf that the club doesn't open on the way back. All your job is is to hold it. You know how you close it? With the body, with the trunk. You see that? Isn't that amazing. It takes a little practice but you aim at second base and the club is aiming at first base. The club is going to cover and be square when it gets to the ball. How does it do that? It's going to do that with the body. The limbs are going to follow the trunk."

Trevino on his game at 85 and how his wife set him straight that "there's no 'I' in team"

Trevino claims he hits balls every day for 90 minutes to two hours at home in Dallas, typically at Preston Trails, but that he rarely plays 18 holes anymore. He had just come from playing in the member-guess at Big Horn in Palm Springs and had surprised himself with his good form.

"I felt so good that I'm not tired," he joked. "I played 54 holes, and I had 11 birdies. I haven't had 11 birdies in three years."

A woman in the audience asked Trevino why he doesn't like to play anymore and it drew a typically droll response from The Merry Mex.

"Don't have to," he said. "I married a very wealthy woman."

This led Trevino to recounting how he met his wife Claudia at the PGA Tour stop in Hartford when she was a young girl with a lemonade stand.

"I married her and she got all my money," Trevino cracked.

Then he shared how he finally learned how to be a loving parent to his final two children.

"I got a great daughter. I had my boy late in life when I was 53. I feel so bad. I didn't spend much time with my other kids because I was busy. But [Claudia] is Irish-Italian in Connecticut, and she told me. She said, 'OK, we're gonna have a couple of kids, but you gotta understand there's no ‘I’ in team, don't forget it.' "

The greatest wedge player and a Seve tip

Who is the greatest wedge player Trevino's ever seen? "Hubert Green was absolutely magnificent," he said. "Now you talk about guys with shotgun. Hubert Green hardly ever touched the grip he choked up so much when he chipped. But he was deadly."

Trevino also shared a tip when he was short sided and he had to go up and stop it quickly that he learned from the great Seve Ballesteros. "One time I was struggling with the wedge and told my wife, I said, 'This damn wedge is just killing me.' And she said, 'Have you ever done what Seve does?' I said, 'Why are you watching Seve?' She said, 'Watch Seve. He looks like he's riding a horse.'

"Seve didn't like to give you any of his stuff," Trevino said. "I watched him and started practicing what he'd do. The arms are moving, nothing else is moving. Softer than a baby's butt, right there, right? That was the 54-degree, not even the high-lofted club."

Bunker lesson

Trevino hopped into a green side bunker and began to dish out more morsels of his genius. “If the sand doesn't get on the green, you're not going to get there."

"People have it wrong," he continued. "When you have a short bunker shot, you tend to swing easy, and when you have a long bunker shot, you tend to swing hard. Remember, if the club is open and you swing hard, it's not going anywhere, because the sand flies off the club faster. Depth perception is everything with bunker shots, because you're only using one club. The reason it goes farther is because you keep the sand on the club longer. The longer you keep the sand on the club when you hit a bunker shot, the farther it'll go, the quicker it comes off, the shorter. So when we're going short, we swing fast. And the reason we swing fast is because they're not going anywhere. This ball is not going to go anywhere."

More priceless Trevino wisdom as he went off on a tangent about cell phones.

"My advice, especially for the young people, leave your cell phone in the car. These young people today are having a tough time, because this this thing is killing you, this phone is killing you. God damn, you look at that thing all day. You understand, what the hell are you doing? I have the original flip. I don't take phone calls because everybody that calls me, wants something. Hey, can you do me a favor? I say, sure, but how are you going to pay me back?

"They know not to call me because I won't answer. If you leave a message and I know who it is, you damn sure not going to get a call back because everybody that calls me wants something. Hey, can you do me a favor? I said, Oh, hell yeah. I said, 'Now, how am I gonna get paid back?' "

Kill the fly

After Trevino wrapped up the clinic, he stuck around for some media interviews with the local media and responded to questions in Spanish. "My Spanish wasn’t so bad, was it? Oh, it's terrible. You know, I didn't learn to speak Spanish until I moved to El Paso (in 1965)."

Before Trevino called it a day, he did give the audience one tip on the full swing.

"If you want to watch something with these great professionals, they are all swinging left. Nobody holds it down the line anymore. That's old school." Nobody goes down the line. Nobody goes this way. Because why? The trunks moving this way, the limbs going that way? That's why we couldn't hit it anywhere That’s how we were taught. We couldn't get any speed. These guys hit it nine miles now because Mac O’Grady and some of the guys came along and taught you how to go left. And if you want to watch these great players play, even these guys watch them. They all get here and they race like hell to get to the left, and then they pick the ball up while they're doing it. That's what Nicklaus did. Ian Woosnam did it 100 years ago. Here's what it's like. It's like having two flies on this step. Then you got a fly there, and you got a fly here, and I told you to kill this fly. This is what you do. You're killing the fly."

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Lessons from Lee Trevino: On the occasion of his 85th birthday, we share tips, wisdom, laughs from a recent Trevino clinic