A Golfer's Life (20 page)

Here’s what happened:

My opening-round 68 was good enough for the lead, and I kept it going with a 69 on Friday. That meant I’d been in first place after each of six consecutive rounds over two years at Augusta. But on Saturday, the streak came to a halt when I skidded to a sloppy 73 and Gary Player, capitalizing on everyone else’s mistakes, vaulted four strokes into the lead. Sunday dawned dark and stormy and the round was washed out. Such a wait can be murder on a leader’s psyche, and the delay seemed to take a toll on Gary, who was otherwise one of the best front-runners who ever played the game, a real mongoose who never let up.

His game slipped and he finished with a two-over 74. Meanwhile, I recovered my putting touch and “charged.” I came to the final tee three under for the day, holding a one-stroke lead, needing just par to become the first man in history to win consecutive Masters championships.

Then I simply blew it.

My tee shot was fine, slightly down the left side of the fairway. I walked to my ball feeling really good about the situation. All I had left was a 7-iron approach shot I’d executed dozens of times. As I neared my ball, however, I saw someone at the gallery rope motioning me over. It was none other than my good old friend George Low, looking dapper as ever in his jacket and necktie. “Nice going, boy,” he said to me, patting my arm affectionately. “You won it.”

I made the biggest mistake you can make in such a situation—I accepted his congratulations prematurely and, in doing so, completely destroyed my concentration.

As I stood over the ball, my brain seemed to completely shut down. I was suddenly unsure what I should be thinking about. Instead of seeing nothing around me except the business at hand—which is what any player needing birdie or par
to finish and win at Augusta must do—I suddenly seemed to notice everything around me, the color of the sky, the expectant faces of the people in the gallery, you name it. The pin was in its customary Sunday placement, front left, behind the bunker. I remember telling myself to focus only on getting the ball on the green and two-putting. That was where I made my big mistake. As Pap had always sternly advised me in such situations, I should have been thinking only about swinging the club properly and keeping my head still through the impact. Instead, I lifted my head a little and came out of the shot too soon. The ball went right into the bunker.

I compounded that mistake with a worse one. Instead of taking a moment to compose my thoughts and regain my cool, I hurried to the ball and struck an explosive shot that sent it flying out of the sand, across the green, and down a slope toward the television tower. Now, dying inside, I needed to get down in two simply to get into a playoff with Gary. My fourth shot ran fifteen feet past the hole, and my attempt for bogey failed. I’d double bogeyed the final hole to lose the Masters by a stroke.

The friendly fraternity of reporters I faced in the pressroom now felt more like a hanging tribunal. They appeared almost as shell-shocked as I, and their questions were tough, as I recall, but fair. After all, I’d blown it and the whole world had been watching and what was there to say? I had no excuses to make.

I remember walking briskly to our car afterward, in quiet fury and agony, feeling as awful as I ever had coming off a golf course. In self-disgust, I slammed my golf shoes onto the front seat, denting the lovely engraved silver cigarette case Clifford Roberts had presented as a gift to the players’ wives that year. I really knocked the hell out of that little box—and later felt pretty bad about that.

What really tore me up inside was the knowledge that I’d lost because I’d failed to do what Pap had always told me to do—stay focused until the job is finished. This wasn’t the first tournament I’d blown in such a manner. It was simply the biggest to that point. Unfortunately, there would soon be others.

Today, that same dented silver box sits on my office desk in Latrobe. I use it to hold business and membership cards. It also holds a lot of memories and a painful reminder.

O
ne of the first Augusta members to privately express his sympathies to me was Clifford Roberts.

That might seem a bit odd to those who knew Mr. Roberts only from his public persona as the austere, dogmatic, seemingly unsympathetic chairman of Augusta National Golf Club.

But both Winnie and I had gotten to know Clifford Roberts pretty well since I won the tournament in 1958, and we found him to be a deep and surprisingly warm man who cared immensely about Augusta National and the Masters and what they symbolized not only in the world of golf but in all of sport. As Frank Stranahan had discovered the hard way, Mr. Roberts could be a ruthlessly unforgiving presence if you dared cross him, challenged a club policy, or behaved in a manner he deemed unsuitable. He believed to his marrow that if you made a rule, you lived by it.

There’s no question that the tournament rose to the prominence it enjoys today because of the personal drive, conviction, and vision of Clifford Roberts. Among other things, he warned that if and when the prize money offered at the Masters—or any golf tournament, for that matter—became the primary attraction to the game’s best players, the tournament would be in danger of losing its purpose, integrity, and uniqueness. A highly astute New York banker whose private
client list read like a Who’s Who of business and political leaders (including President Eisenhower), Mr. Roberts was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the major threat to the golf tournament he and Bob Jones created to celebrate the game’s finest traditions, the only factor that could really undermine the Masters, was
too
much money.

I think about his concerns these days, as purses continue to spiral to unimaginable heights and an increasing number of top young players seem almost blissfully ignorant of the game’s history and traditions, the people who made the game what it is today, and above all the fact that it is at heart still a
game
—not a business. It’s true that my dramatic success in the 1960s and 1970s—particularly my domination of the Masters between 1958 and 1964—helped fuel the popularity of tournament golf and provided the basis for my success in the business world. But I never confused the two, the love of competitively playing the game, and the good fortune of enjoying the financial rewards that come from playing it well. It greatly distresses me to hear modern players base their decisions to play in this tournament or that one simply on the prize-money values. It angers me to think there have been name players who snubbed a Masters invitation simply because they didn’t think the money was good enough or didn’t care for the way Mr. Roberts or his successors as chairman operated the tournament.

Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you Mr. Roberts took a while to size you up, and I, for one, was almost scared to death of the man for years. But as our friendship grew, I found him a surprisingly warm, generous, and even compassionate man who quietly did things for a broad range of people that the public had obviously never heard boo about. His close relationship with President Eisenhower, in my book, spoke volumes about the man’s character and integrity. As our own friendship deepened with the years, we
enjoyed many hours of pleasant, frank conversation, either at Augusta or out at Eldorado in Palm Desert, where he went for a month or so every winter, on a host of subjects near and dear to both our hearts, everything from politics to putting surfaces, Wall Street to world war.

The man was as tough as nails. But he was also as decent as the day is long, and brilliant. Far less known, beneath that stern headmaster exterior he possessed a schoolboy’s wry sense of humor. One year, just prior to what Augusta’s members know as “Jamboree,” a club tournament that takes place two weeks before the Masters, Mr. Roberts ordered the water level in the pond by the 16th tee drawn down by about eight inches. He then had workmen construct a small boardwalk across the pond before raising the water level back to normal. At a critical moment during the members’ tournament, Cliff strolled expressionlessly off the tee and straight out onto the pond—proving, to anyone who doubted it, that the godlike chairman of Augusta National Golf Club really could walk on water!

I was pleased when, around 1965, Cliff invited me to make suggestions about how the golf course could be improved. My actual belief was that there wasn’t a whole lot to do—that Alister Mackenzie’s wonderful design ought not to be tampered with very much. For such a sturdy guardian of tradition, some of the changes Mr. Roberts said he wanted to make surprised me. For example, he wanted to create a new lake that would stretch almost the entire length between tee and green of the par-3 fourth. But I argued that a lake in that spot simply wouldn’t fit the tradition of the course. He accepted that argument and the lake was never built (and I hope it never is). He also wanted to switch the greens from Bermuda to bent-grass surfaces, and I wasn’t a bit keen about that idea, either, because it would drastically alter their character, in my view. Bermuda is a tougher, coarser grass that causes a
ball to bounce slightly when it lands. Part of the challenge of hitting a ball onto a green at Augusta National was allowing for the tricky undulations of the putting surfaces.

When they put in the smoother, finer bent grass, some of those undulations had to be flattened out or else the greens would have become unplayably fast. Today, the course’s putting surfaces are extremely fast, as you may know from the ritual spring chorus of gently complaining Tour players, owing to the firm bent-grass surfaces, but I’m not sure they are any better than the old Bermuda greens, which required a lot of imagination and courage to get your ball close.

My major contribution to Augusta’s endless process of recreation, I suppose, was to suggest that the tees on holes one, two, seven, eight, nine, 15, and 18 be moved back to accommodate the longer modern game. Mr. Roberts also championed the creation of the club’s adjacent par-3 course, and I fully agreed with him that it was an excellent idea—adding a bit of useful mirth and even comic relief to the air of tension that normally precedes the high drama of Masters weekend.

S
ometimes, as the saying in golf goes, it’s better to be lucky than good, and at the Masters of 1962, I think I was a little bit of both. As someone in the press tent wrote, that particular Masters showcased the best and the worst of Arnold Palmer’s style of golf. Doggedly determined to make up for my embarrassing collapse at 18 the year prior, I played superb golf for three rounds, shooting 70, 66, and 69 to take a two-stroke lead heading into Sunday’s action.

A record crowd estimated at 40,000 was on hand, and I began the fourth round miserably by missing a short, easy putt for par on the first hole. My problems were compounded after that by a mind that seemed to drift in and out of focus. I hit balls into the woods and missed putts I normally could
have made in my sleep. As a consequence, I finished the outward nine in a dreadful 39 and after fifteen holes found myself two behind Gary Player and Dow Finsterwald. In retrospect, I was lucky to be just two back—it could have been much worse.

Golf is a game composed of human failings, and I don’t suppose, given the way the first fifteen holes had gone, that anybody in the gallery gave me much hope of catching Gary and Dow—especially after I missed yet another green on 16 and faced a difficult forty-five-foot chip to try to get up and down for par. As the gallery was being moved and I stood looking over my dismal situation with disgust no doubt showing on my face, I happened to overhear on-course commentator Jimmy Demaret remarking to his audience that I faced a nearly impossible shot, that I’d be extremely lucky just to get down in two. The much-needed birdie was unthinkable. “This shot will perhaps put Arnold Palmer out of contention for the Masters championship.”

I think I turned and looked at Jimmy wearing a little smirk of exasperation. I can tell you his comments really revved me up inside, and when I chipped the ball into the hole and the crowd went crazy, I felt a rush of adrenaline that seemed to have been missing all day long. The charge was now on, in my mind. At 17 I made a twenty-footer for a birdie and at 18 missed my birdie attempt and had to settle for par. The Masters championship had its first-ever three-way tie.

Al Wright of
Sports Illustrated
described the drama as “characters by Saki, plot by Hitchcock” and also cheekily noted, though fairly enough, that I blew my two-stroke lead that Sunday “by hitting golf shots that would have sent a duffer scurrying over to his pro for help.”

It was true. I was damned lucky to have made the playoff. But, once again, I’d also pulled off the miraculous shot when I had to.

The playoff threesome provided an interesting mix of styles. Dow epitomized regal conservatism—always taking the intelligent and safe path to greens, seldom risking his gains with a chancy, low-percentage shot. Gary, as I’ve noted, was the complete grinder, the hardworking little opportunist who never seemed to back up and always remained upbeat. I suppose I was by far the most unpredictable factor in the group, prone to either charge for the green jacket or blow myself out of contention with a risky shot. After the first nine holes on Monday, it appeared to be the latter option. I started poorly and trailed by three at the turn. Dow’s putter utterly abandoned him, too—perhaps mental exhaustion had set in. For his part, reliable as a Swiss watch, Gary valiantly battled Augusta’s lethal greens to finish with a solid one-under 71.

I suppose I was the really “lucky” one of the threesome that afternoon. My form of the first three rounds returned on the back nine, and I ripped off birdies on four of the first five holes down the backstretch to take the lead and held it to earn my third green jacket in five years. My 68 beat Gary by three strokes and Dow by nine.

I admitted in the pressroom afterward that I felt very fortunate to have won the tournament and really looked forward to the day when I might walk up the 18th hole with the tournament safely in hand, actually able to enjoy the experience of knowing I didn’t have to pull off another miracle shot to win my favorite golf tournament.