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Authors: Adam Lazarus

Tags: #Palmer; Arnold;, #Golfers, #Golf, #Golf - General, #Pennsylvania, #Sports & Recreation, #Sports, #United States, #Oakmont (Allegheny County), #Golf courses, #1929-, #History

Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (24 page)

BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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“My dad worked on those tracks,” Tom proudly said to all in earshot. “He was from Beaver Falls and that was one of his first jobs.” And, added a local reporter, “Every time Tom Weiskopf saw the railroad tracks he thought of why he had to win the U.S. Open.”
As Weiskopf set out to win the U.S. Open—an achievement that Nicklaus told the press Weiskopf needed to validate his decade-long career—his dad was with him every step of the way.
“He sacrificed his vacation and bonus money to keep me on the tour. He was Tom Weiskopf’s number one fan. He walked the course with me; he read the papers for news about me when he couldn’t see me play. He told me, ‘You can be the best golfer in the world.’ I feel I let him down a little. I felt I never proved my capabilities in front of him.”
Thomas Daniel Weiskopf (the Tom Weiskopf who rose to golf stardom) began his prodigal golf odyssey in modest, middle-class circumstances, first in central and then in northeast Ohio. Thomas Mannix had grown up in the blue-collar steel town of Beaver Falls, and his father (i.e., Tom’s grandfather—also named Thomas) had done well enough as a mill superintendent at Union Drawn Steel to move his family to the “Heights,” less than a five-minute walk from the town’s only golf club. Thomas Mannix learned to play golf there and, at age eighteen, enrolled in nearby Geneva College, where he was instrumental in founding the small school’s golf team.
Thomas Mannix taught intramural golf at Geneva, and as a competitor he never lost a match in two years of intercollegiate play (all within western Pennsylvania). Upon graduation with an economics degree in 1936, he joined his parents in Massillon, Ohio (Union Drawn’s corporate headquarters), to begin work with the Newburgh and South Shore Railway.
It was there he met Eva Shorb—appropriately, on a golf course. Shorb was the sixth of seven daughters of Elmer Shorb, an electrician and one of America’s many recent converts to golf. Although he chose not to teach his daughters the sport, at age fourteen the independently minded Eva picked up the game on her own and proved to be a natural. She received instruction from notable local pros such as Al Espinosa and Wilson Crane, and at Massillon’s Washington High School she became the first girl in Ohio to earn a (male) varsity letter for her play on the golf team. She dominated the local amateur scene, taking the Stark County and Akron District women’s championships, and soon showcased her skill as a “powerful hitter” on a national stage. In the Women’s Western Golf Association Championship in Cleveland, a seventeen-year-old Shorb narrowly missed breaking the course record when she missed a short putt on the final hole.
The next summer, as a freshman geology major and first woman member of the men’s varsity team at the College of Wooster in Ohio, she again drew national headlines. With a demeanor described by a New York Times reporter as “imperturbable,” Shorb valiantly battled nineteen-year-old Patty Berg—the 1935 runner-up, and one of the world’s finest female golfers—in the first round of the U.S. Women’s Amateur at Canoe Brook Country Club in New Jersey. Though she eventually lost one-down to Berg, her unshakable confidence won high praise in the national golf press.
When one reporter asked Shorb if she was nervous while walking down the final fairway in a tie with Berg, she replied, “Why, no; why should I be nervous?” She and Berg were actually close friends from previous golf competitions, and even Berg’s father was a fan of young Eva. Having arrived a virtual unknown, Eva left Canoe Brook a minor celebrity: a spirited dark horse who nearly toppled one of the game’s emerging giants.
“Now Miss Shorb is calm and composed and charmingly natural,” wrote an admiring observer. “She had the gallery behind her solidly, but it never bothered her. She played her own golf game from start to finish.”
As her college game progressed, Shorb continued to attract the attention of national reporters, but not entirely for her play on the golf course. After a year at Wooster, she was dismissed from the varsity golf team (in a major setback to women in sports, female athletes were increasingly confined to intramural clubs and “play days” on college campuses in the 1930s). Newspapers from coast to coast chastised her banishment and ran photos of Shorb under the banner, “Poor Little Eva.”
Eventually, a partial compromise was reached: Shorb was allowed to compete, unofficially, against another precocious woman golfer, Janet Shock, from nearby Denison College. And although Shorb continued to succeed on the national stage (in 1938, she again lost a close match to Berg in the semifinals of the Women’s Amateur), she wanted to compete more frequently than she was allowed to do at Wooster. She therefore transferred to Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio, and was allowed to play on the men’s varsity team. Reporters referred to her as “another feminine star who has wavered on the brink of greatness several times.”
At some point during college, Eva met Thomas Mannix on a golf course in Massillon, and the two quickly became a golfing couple. Thomas, the district amateur champion of nearby Canton, and Eva competed regularly (sometimes as a duo) at summer tournaments in central Ohio, once scoring the low gross of 74 in a mixed-foursomes event at the Scioto Country Club. Whether Eva left college to be with Thomas is unclear, but she quit Mount Union during the spring 1940 semester to return to Massillon, and within a year the couple was married at St. Mary’s (Catholic) Church.
Though still regarded as one of the “top-flight clouters” when he competed in 1941’s Ohio State Amateur championship, Thomas now faced several new responsibilities—on the job, as his widowed mother’s caretaker, and as a young parent (Tom, the professional golfer, was born in November 1942; two more children soon followed). These left little time for golf during the war years. Shortly after Thomas’s mother’s death in 1947, his employer transferred him to Cleveland, and while he continued to hold several midlevel administrative posts, career setbacks—plus the expense of Catholic schooling and a growing dependence on alcohol—further eroded his high-level golf.
Eva’s game also took a backseat to parenthood, but her natural swing and fierce competitiveness led her to the final round of the Cleveland Women’s Golf Association Championship. She lost on the final hole. While the family did not have enough money to join a private club, with excellent public golf facilities available in the Cleveland area, Thomas Mannix and Eva Weiskopf regularly hit the links. Their eldest son, however, didn’t care much for golf. In fact, Tom—skinny and still only five-nine at graduation, despite a huge high school growth spurt—never excelled on the athletic fields.
“In high school, I competed in football, basketball, baseball, wrestling, and track and wasn’t any good at any of them,” Weiskopf candidly admitted at the height of his professional career.
Even golf, his birthright, did not come naturally. Tom’s parents would take him out to local courses and try to persuade him to play, but he refused to do so. “When they played they took me out on the course with them when I was a boy eight to ten,” Weiskopf recalled shortly after he turned pro. “I never liked the game then.” Instead, he hung around the clubhouse with other kids whose parents forced them to remain there.
“He was a very impetuous boy,” Eva later remembered. “He could never sit still. In fact, there were times when I wished I didn’t have him.”
It was not until father and son attended the 1957 U.S. Open at Inverness Country Club in Toledo that golf grabbed fourteen-year-old Tom Weiskopf’s imagination. At his father’s urging, he watched close-up and was transfixed by the smoothest, most perfect golf swing since Bobby Jones’s.
“After we walked through the gate, he took me straight to the practice range and pointed out Sam Snead. The sound of Sam’s iron shots, the flight of the ball, thrilled me. I was hooked even before I started playing.”
That summer, Tom caddied and played golf for the first time. He immediately set about learning the game—putting, hitting buckets of balls for hours, occasionally under his parents’ grateful eyes. Although he made rapid progress, he remained a relatively small child and did not make Benedictine High School’s golf team on the first try. He did qualify as a sophomore, and throughout the season competed on equal terms with most of his teammates, all of whom were considerably bigger and stronger.
Weiskopf’s game blossomed during his junior year, and the team won the Cleveland city championship in 1959. Shortly afterward, Tom placed eighth in the Ohio Junior Chamber of Commerce tournament in Mansfield, his first sanctioned tournament appearance outside of high school.
As a senior, aided by his continued growth spurt, Tom moved his game to another level. He led Benedictine to another city title and won the individual championship as well. Shortly afterward, he slaughtered the field by six strokes in the Ohio Jaycee Junior Championship, held at the Lost Creek Country Club in Lima, Ohio.
The steep learning curve that Weiskopf displayed over a short time period was enough to convince Ohio State’s golf coach, Bob Kepler, to grant Weiskopf a scholarship for the fall of 1960. The Buckeyes already featured golf’s greatest amateur sensation since Bobby Jones in Nicklaus, and hopes were that Tom might—if his game kept improving, and his new body filled out—eventually replace Nicklaus as the team’s superstar.
As a freshman, Weiskopf had the extraordinary good fortune to practice regularly with Nicklaus (contrary to myth, Weiskopf did not caddie for the upperclassman). But it was largely coach Bob Kepler—who was delighted with Weiskopf’s additional six-inch growth spurt that year, taking him to his adult height of six-three—who turned the raw, bony kid into a full-bore athlete.
“Bob put forty yards on my tee shots,” Weiskopf said in 1965. “He changed my swing, made it more upright. It made my arc bigger.” Weiskopf could not hit his tee shots as far as Nicklaus when the two were briefly teammates at Ohio State, but as a result of Kepler’s teaching, he was definitely on his way.
Due to NCAA regulations at the time, Weiskopf could not compete in intercollegiate matches during his freshman season (spring 1961). By his sophomore year—with Nicklaus now on tour—Weiskopf made a push to fill the enormous void. He seemed ready to ascend to Nicklaus’s throne when, a month before the start of his sophomore year, he overcame a two-stroke deficit to edge out a thirty-one-year-old former prizefighter, Lalu Sabotin, and win the Ohio Public Links Championship. As a sophomore, Weiskopf led the Buckeyes to the Ohio Intercollegiate Championship and posted the individual low score, 72-76. Two weeks later, he took third place in the Big Ten championship.
Tom’s dedication to golf continued to grow, and during the summer of 1962, following his sophomore year, he finished second in the Ohio State Junior Championship, reached the quarterfinals in the Ohio State Amateur, and successfully defended his Ohio Public Links Championship in August. He also finished fourth in local qualifying for the U.S. Amateur, one spot too low for a chance to compete in the championship at Pinehurst.
But it was a tournament where Weiskopf was merely a spectator that jump-started his ambition to chase greatness at the professional level.
The father-son trip on which Snead’s sweet swing had captured young Tom was the first of several annual pilgrimages that the two of them made to the world’s grandest golf stage, the U.S. Open. Despite the cost of traveling to faraway courses in Missouri, Colorado, and California, Weiskopf did not miss an Open championship after he experienced the Snead revelation at Inverness.
There was never a doubt Tom and his father would drive two hours from Cleveland to the 1962 U.S. Open at Oakmont, not only to seek inspiration from the game’s established stars, but also to cheer his friend and former teammate Nicklaus, who was playing in his first Open championship as a professional. Watching Palmer and Nicklaus compete head-to-head transfixed young Tom.
“Jack’s ball just disappeared into the sky. I ran down the fairway to get ahead of them. Arnold took off fast, as always, but as he approached his own ball he continued to look down the fairway. He looked and looked and his neck seemed to get longer, like an ostrich. Then his step slowed. He saw Jack’s ball, a full twenty-five yards ahead of his. I could see it in Arnold’s face. Jack had arrived.”
Observing Nicklaus’s arrival firsthand on the national golfing stage was pivotal for Weiskopf. He too came from Ohio. He too played at Ohio State, and could smash the ball out of sight. He now was ready for bigger stages than amateur championships and intercollegiate team matches.
Weiskopf decided not to return to Ohio State for the fall semester. He had begun to chant the mantra that would drive him throughout his career:
“If Jack can do it, I can do it.”
 
ASIDE FROM HIS READY ACCESS to Ohio State’s superb Scarlet Course (arguably the best collegiate facility in the nation), Tom Weiskopf had shown very little interest in college. Golf clearly trumped his studies.
Tom made a regular practice of sneaking out of an afternoon class—after roll call, and with the professor’s back turned—and hopping aboard the women’s physical education bus headed in the direction of the Scarlet Course.
“It was really funny. I never got caught—but I failed the course.”
In the early 1960s, the PGA closely regulated who could join the tour. Among other requirements, an applicant needed to have $5,000 saved in the bank. Tom didn’t have nearly that amount of savings, and his father never earned enough money to fully subsidize Tom’s play in his amateur days.
BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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