A Golfer's Life (29 page)

There will be yet another U.S. Open playoff for me.

*  *  *

T
he playoff was an eerie reprise of the fourth round. Once again I played solid shots and went out in 33 against Bill’s 35, and once again he started picking up strokes the way he had the previous day. He dropped a dramatic fifty-footer for a birdie two at 13, going ahead for the first time. In all the high drama of my collapse, it’s sometimes forgotten that Bill Casper played almost flawless golf down the stretch. That point can’t be driven home enough. I didn’t just lose the 1966 U.S. Open—Bill Casper’s brilliant play won it.

He finished with a 69 and I managed a 73, once again letting an Open championship slip through my fingers. Afterward in the pressroom, the shock of the previous day’s free fall had begun to wear off, and I detected a swell of great sympathy about what those on hand had witnessed, the most historic collapse in Open history. As a postscript, or epitaph, to the event, some would write that the disaster only humanized Arnold Palmer even more—simply proved he was more like the people who admired him than any professional golfer in history.

I don’t know whether that’s true or not. All I know is that, curiously, afterward I was bitterly disappointed but I didn’t feel the least bit sorry for myself. Why should I? It wasn’t a disaster. A plane crash or an earthquake is a disaster. This was a golf tournament—admittedly a huge one and one I’d desperately wanted to win. But, as I consoled myself, I’d won it before and would probably have a chance to win it again. I was only the second man in history to break 280 and not win a U.S. Open. (Jimmy Demaret was the first, in 1948, losing by three to Hogan.) I’d played well enough to win the Open. But Bill Casper had played slightly better. That’s all I can really say about it.

Fact is, I really felt worse for my fans and for those people
with long faces waiting for me at Ed and Rita’s house. I walked in following the playoff and discovered Winnie, both Douglases, and Mark and Nancy McCormack sitting silently around the kitchen table, as if they were at a wake. I didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for me. That feeling extended to my own friends and family.

“What’s wrong with you people?” I bellowed at them, forcing a halfhearted smile. “You look like you’ve been to a funeral.”

I guess they thought they had.

Well, that’s golf. My kind of golf, anyway.

L
osing three Opens in playoffs was tough, but life is tough, and even though I felt emotionally drained and a little cheated by Old Man Par at Olympic Club, I wasn’t through with the United States Open, nor it me.

The next summer, 1967, I chased Jack Nicklaus and his painted white Bullseye putter around Baltusrol’s Lower Course and was tied for the lead with him for 54 holes. I shot a 69 to his 65 in the final round, becoming the second player in history to twice break 280 and fall short of victory, this time by four strokes.

At Champions Golf Club in 1969, I three-putted the 15th hole after making a great recovery from the woods. A birdie there would have put pressure on the leader (and eventual winner) Orville Moody; maybe that would have created an outcome more to my liking. Instead, I wound up three strokes back, in sixth place.

Playing the 14th hole at Pebble Beach in 1972, I had a putt of about eight feet for birdie that would have placed me in the Open lead with just four holes to play. Nicklaus was sizing up a similar-length putt on 12 for par. If I had made my putt
and he had missed, the Open would probably have been mine. Instead, he converted and I failed—and the Open was his.

If only I could have had one of Doc Giffin’s magic mulligans …

Then there was my return to Oakmont the very next summer. By then, of course, a host of new names were regularly pegged to the leader board: Lee Trevino, Raymond Floyd, Johnny Miller, even a bright young prodigy from Kansas City who looked as wholesome as a face off a cornflakes box. His name was Tom Watson.

At the par-4 11th hole during the final round, I was four under, facing a short, four-foot birdie opportunity that would have put me five under and in command of the tournament. I made what I thought was a good stroke, and watched in disbelief as the ball grazed the hole, staying out. Two more shocks to the system followed. First, thinking I was still in the lead at four under, I glanced over at a distant scoreboard and could make out that someone else had just posted a red five. I asked my playing partner, John Schlee, who that could have been. “Miller,” he answered, meaning twenty-six-year-old Johnny Miller, who’d just finished with a sensational 63.

A few moments later, I struck what I was sure was a terrific drive at 12, only to discover a few minutes later that the ball lying in the fairway, which I thought was mine, really belonged to Schlee. Much to my surprise, my ball had caromed left instead of right and was in deep grass on the 603-yard hole. Now, instead of being tied for the lead and in good position in the fairway at a hole where I often made birdie, I was a stroke behind and facing a desperate situation. All I could do was thump a medium iron shot back to the fairway. With a four-wood, though, I attempted to reach the green but pulled the shot into the deep rough above a greenside bunker, pitched well past the hole, and made bogey six. I felt devastated and it quickly
showed—two more bogeys at 13 and 14. I finally birdied 18, but it was meaningless. Once more I’d been unable to rally from my own mistakes, and someone else’s good golf had cost me the Open.

Following a pair of top-ten finishes in ’74 and ’75 at Winged Foot and Medinah, respectively, my Open career began to fade. I played hard and never gave up; I gave my fans a few thrills here and there, but somehow I could never summon back any magic.

Then, in 1984, I came up two strokes shy at sectional qualifying on the outskirts of Cleveland. That ended my streak of thirty-one consecutive U.S. Open appearances, a record I shared with Gene Sarazen. I’m still very proud of that.

In the summer of 1994, by special invitation from the USGA, I made one final journey to Oakmont, where I had played my first National Open, as an amateur (failing to make the cut), in 1953, for my last appearance at the U.S. Open. What an emotional roller-coaster ride that week was, with parties and dinners and private conversations with old friends who’d followed my Open escapades for several decades. I must have signed a thousand autographs. The letters and telegrams poured into the Latrobe office, and it was all I could do to keep myself together emotionally, if not on the golf course.

I shot 77-81 and as most people expected, I guess, missed the cut. In the pressroom afterward, as I mopped my brow with a small towel, I was asked to reflect on my long and illustrious Open career. The proper words were difficult to find. I wanted to express so much about the wonderful way I had been treated by fans and the USGA and what playing in the National Open had always meant to me. I began by talking about the tournament’s great traditions and my own beginnings at Oakmont in 1953, moved on from there to say a few words about how grateful I was to have won at Cherry
Hills and to have had a crack at winning probably seven or eight other times, then finally … I lost it.

I apologized and bowed my head, too choked up to go on.

As I got up to leave, the members of the press accorded me a great honor, something I had never seen or heard of them doing before. One by one, they stood and applauded—and kept applauding. It’s traditional for writers to give the Open winner a standing ovation when he enters the pressroom after his victorious final round.

This time they gave me a standing ovation after my final Open round.

It was like having one of Doc’s magic mulligans, after all.

O
ur Latrobe neighbor Susie Bowman brought this postcard Winnie sent her from Troon over to the house the other evening. We sat around the kitchen table and had a nice laugh about it. She’d found it while cleaning out some drawers and thought we might want to see it. I think maybe Winnie was the most amused of all, because of the fact that she
loved
going to the British Open, and the end of the note implies that the “magic” of the tournament was wearing a bit thin—or maybe it was
my
magic she meant.

“I definitely wrote that at the beginning of the week,” she decided with a wry smile, “because the week ended pretty well, all things considered.”

Indeed it did. In 1962 I won my second consecutive Claret Jug, the name of the venerable trophy presented by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club to the winner of the British Open. Champions keep the actual trophy for a year but are offered a smaller replica of the Claret Jug. Mine still sits in my Latrobe office.

Winnie had good reason to feel a little down and worried at the beginning of the week, though. The course, thanks to a lengthy drought, was in pretty poor shape. The wind was chilly and my putting was even colder, all factors that undoubtedly affected my mood and probably made me a little tough to live with. Remember, too, that just a few weeks before I’d lost to Jack Nicklaus in a playoff in front of the hometown folks at Oakmont. That was still gnawing at me.

What Winnie’s note doesn’t begin to reflect, though, is the great depth of affection and growing admiration she and I both felt for the British people and their beloved linksland golf courses, not to mention their reverence for the traditions of the game. It’s no exaggeration to say we were having a love affair with British golf fans and their venerable Open.

But it’s a love story that really began two years prior to that, in 1960, just after I won the U.S. Open at Cherry Hills.

As it happened, we had almost no time to digest and savor the miracle that had taken place in Denver. Less than thirty-six hours later, Bob Drum, Winnie, and I met Pap and Harry Saxman (Pap’s boss, Latrobe Country Club’s president, and a close family friend) in New York for our TWA flight to Dublin, Ireland, and Portmarnock Golf Club, where Sam Snead and I were scheduled to represent America in the Canada Cup, the forerunner of the World Cup, against teams from thirty different nations. From there we would push on
to St. Andrews, Scotland, where I would play in my first British Open.

To tell the truth, I knew little about Britain’s linksland golf courses, aside from the fact that there the game began and the conditions were said to be considerably rougher than the courses we played in the States. I knew—or had been told—that fairways often resembled pastures and greens could be difficult to read. Also, the wind and weather were almost always dominant factors that greatly influenced play. Sam Snead had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with British golf. As his train was arriving in St. Andrews in 1946, and after sleeping on a bench in war-torn London en route to the tournament, he glanced at the Old Course and remarked that it looked like an abandoned golf course. His comment outraged a proper Scottish gent who overheard it. During the tournament, which he ultimately won, his first caddie had to be dismissed for being drunk as a skunk, while his replacement had a penchant for whistling through Sam’s backswing. Needless to say, Sam, who wasn’t shy about expressing an opinion, wasn’t overly enamored of the place. Though he pocketed 150 pounds sterling for winning the Claret Jug, he bitterly complained to anybody who would listen that the trip cost him almost double that in expenses. Furthermore, he created quite a stir by announcing that he had no intention of coming back to defend his title. He later added insult to injury by saying that, perhaps thinking of his first night in Britain and the deepening rift between himself and golf’s homeland fans, playing golf outside the United States “was like sleeping in the rough.”

Other American players at the time shared Sam’s attitude. Though they didn’t feel as strongly about it as Sam, they were hesitant to make the pilgrimage to the British Open. It was expensive and time-consuming, and there was no guarantee you would make a penny for your efforts. Under the
existing rules of the tournament, everyone, including the defending champion, had to go through two qualifying rounds. There were no automatic exemptions for top American players—even winners of our Open or the Masters. This fact alone kept most of the game’s established and emerging stars home in America during the British Open week, and it had certainly been a major factor in the slow deterioration of the British Open’s prestige.

But ever since I’d robbed Winnie of a Walker Cup honeymoon, I’d had it in my mind to go play the British Open championship, if for no other reason than that Bob Jones had felt such powerful kinship with the people of St. Andrews and the oldest major golf tournament in the world. Actually, come to think of it, my desire to go play the Open in Britain went back much further than that—to my days as a schoolboy golfer, when I followed newspaper accounts of the British Open and read exciting biographies of top American players like Jones and Walter Hagen, who not only played there but won there.

Somewhere on my first flight over there, during our extended cocktail hour, Bob Drum and I got to talking about Jones’s great Grand Slam. Drum remarked to me that it was a shame that the growth of the professional game, among other things, effectively ended the Grand Slam concept as it had been known in Jones’s day (the Grand Slam then comprised the U.S. and British Amateur Championships and both major Opens).

“Well,” I said casually over my drink, “why don’t we create a new Grand Slam?”

Drum gave me one of his famous contrarian glares that made him look like a cross between an annoyed college dean and a sleeping bear someone had foolishly kicked awake.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he muttered, though probably a little more colorfully than that.

I explained what I was thinking. “What would be wrong with a professional Grand Slam involving the Masters, both Open championships, and the PGA Championship?”