Faldo/Norman (10 page)

Price added: ‘One of the things I’m most proud of is that I did it with a wooden driver. That’s not to take anything away from Greg’s 63, but I think he shot his in ’96, ten years later, so technology in drivers had changed considerably. I’d like to think there would be an asterisk on mine for using medieval clubs.’ Equipment improvements, better strength and fitness from the players and a more scientific approach to coaching all suggest scoring should be getting lower. And it is, as an average, but 63 still stands as a barrier or, indeed, curse.

On the other hand, courses are getting longer and tougher, especially for majors. Augusta has had two sizeable stretches in the last decade or so, while more trees and some semi-rough have also increased the degree of difficulty. Narrow fairways and serious rough of the thick and long variety is often employed liberally at the venues of the other majors in an attempt to keep scoring values in tune with the recent past.

‘Majors are set up so difficult,’ Dufner said at Oak Hill. ‘It’s just hard to shoot a 62. Even on some of the set-ups we have on tour, you
don’t see many guys shooting 62 or lower. There are just not that many out there. Being in a major championship, how much pressure there is playing in those, it’s just a really difficult thing to do.’

‘Every guy on Tour knows about 63s,’ Miller told
Sports Illustrated Golf Plus
. ‘There is a historical barrier there. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do.’ Thinking back to his own 63, Miller added: ‘It’s not like I ran the table, chipped in, holed bunker shots and made 60-foot putts. It was sort of an easy 63. It can be done, is what I’m trying to say. It’s just hard to get to 62 under the pressure of a major. Guys get close, maybe get to six under par through 12 holes and then sort of drop anchor.’

Dufner had a golden chance to be the first to score a 62 when he gave himself a 12-footer up the hill on the final green at Oak Hill. He did not put the most positive stroke on the putt and left it two and a half feet short, almost missing that one for the 63. There have been many chances of a 62 over the years. Steve Stricker missed a ten-footer on the last green at the end of his first round at the Atlanta Athletic Club in 2011. Woods lipped out a putt that seemed destined to go in when he made his 63 at Southern Hills in 2007. Price’s putt for a 62 at Augusta in 1996 did a complete horseshoe.

No one had a better chance of a 62 than Nicklaus at Baltusrol in 1980. He had a three-footer for a birdie at the last and allowed too much break. But there were also two occasions when a player came to the last needing only a
par
to complete a 62, and instead made a bogey. Both instances were at Turnberry. Hayes drove into a bunker at the 18th and made a five in 1977 while in 1986 Norman had a 28-footer for a 61 and three-putted. Norman’s Turnberry round is unique in that it contained no less than three bogeys.

Norman made his debut in the majors at Turnberry in 1977, missing the cut. It was the first time the Ayrshire course, perhaps the most scenic on the Open rota, had hosted the game’s oldest championship. It was quite an introduction, hot and dry for the week and a famous climax, the ‘Duel in the Sun’, in which Watson beat Nicklaus by a stroke at the final hole.

When everyone returned nine years later it was very different. After a hot Monday, the rest of the week was wet, cold and windy – often all three at once – while instead of a browned and burnt-off links, the fairways were narrow and lined with thick rough thanks to a rampant spring growing season.

Norman arrived having lost the first two majors of the year after leading each with a round to play. If anything, the conditions helped to distract his thoughts from his misfortunes and left him in the same boat as everyone else. There would not be such a cacophony of moaning about the course set-up again until Carnoustie in 1999. Nicklaus said in 1986 that it would be the ‘Survival Open’. On the first day, when a cold wind sprang up, Ian Woosnam was the only player to match the par of 70, and was the only player to birdie the 14th, the Welshman blasting a driver and a one-iron onto a green that most could not reach. Norman opened with a 74, which left him tied for 16th place, perfectly respectable.

The next day Norman went to the 1st tee repeating a mantra of ‘blue skies and 65’. He was wrong on both counts, although at least the wind had calmed down a bit and he quickly got into his stride with birdies at the 2nd, 3rd and 4th holes. He three-putted from short of the 5th green for a bogey but eagled the 7th from 20 feet before another bogey at the 8th. Then he really set the pace. At the 10th he hit his approach to five feet, hit it to a foot on the 11th, three feet on the 14th and holed from eight feet on the 16th. By now he had picked up a sizeable gallery who were
cheering him on and Norman admitted they had kept him going. When he hit a five-iron to 12 feet on the par-five 17th he thought he could get home with a 60. He two-putted there for his eighth birdie of the day and when he found the green at the last all he was thinking about was a 61.

‘I really want this one, Pete,’ Norman said to his caddie, Pete Bender. ‘I really want a 61.’ His first putt was from 28 feet and there was no way it was going to be short. He raced it far enough past to miss the one back. It meant a closing bogey and a 63, tying the Open and major records. ‘I was just trying to shoot the lowest score I could,’ he said. ‘That’s the type of person I am. I totally misjudged the speed of the putt at the last.’ He added: ‘I don’t want people to think the score I shot today makes the course easy. It still played tough, just not brutal like yesterday.’

Even though Turnberry had produced a thrilling contest between two of the greatest golfers in the world in 1977, there were suspicions that the course was too easy to host the Open. A second score of 63 in two stagings added to the ammunition but it is never as simple as saying low scores equate to easy course. If everyone is scoring low, then, yes. But the average score on the day that Hayes made his 63 in 1977 was 74.29 and on the day Norman returned his 63 was 74.07. While Watson and Nicklaus finished at 12 under and 11 under respectively, only one other player beat par in 1977, Hubert Green on one under. He finished third and said: ‘I won the other tournament.’ Norman’s winning score in 1986 turned out to be level par.

Back on the second day, the next best score was a 67 from Japan’s Tommy Nakajima. Norman had gone from four behind the leader to two strokes in front of Yorkshire’s Gordon J. Brand, with Nakajima and Faldo tying for third place, the latter having returned steady efforts of 71 and 70 in contrast to Norman’s extreme yo-yoing. The Australian’s performance was off in the
other direction again on Saturday but then the weather had got really nasty, driving rain completing a miserable picture for the leaders late in the day. Norman hung on to the lead after a 74 but was only one ahead of Nakajima, who had a 71, and three ahead of Woosnam, after his second 70 of the week, and Brand, who had a 75.

That night, the third time in a row that he had held the lead in a major championship with 18 holes to play, Norman pondered what was to come while at dinner in the hotel. Several players wished him well but the most meaningful interaction came when Nicklaus pulled up a chair and told him: ‘Greg, no one in the world wants you to win the tournament more than I do. You deserve to win.’ Norman said later: ‘When the greatest golfer the world has ever known tells you something like that it makes you feel very special.’ Nicklaus also suggested he should be aware of the pressure of his grip during the final round. A couple of months later Norman ‘thanked’ Nicklaus for his advice by holing a 60-footer for an eagle at the 35th on the way to winning their semi-final of the World Match Play by one hole.

After a restless night, Norman was determined to keep himself on edge the next day, but even though Nakajima took a double bogey at the 1st and it was not long before he had a five-stroke lead, he became too tense. He hit a low snap-hook off the 7th tee and Bender, an experienced caddie whose previous bosses included none other than Nicklaus, knew he had to intervene. He got Norman to slow down, walk at the pace his caddie was setting, rather than charging off down the fairway as usual. He told a few jokes and added: ‘You’re the best player here and you’ll win this golf tournament but you’ve got to take time and enjoy it. Don’t rush it, don’t be nervous. I’m here to help.’ At the 8th, Norman hit a four-iron to eight feet and settled down.

His only miscue after that was to leak his drive at the 14th into the rough but his next with a seven-iron hit the flagstick. He was able to enjoy the walk up the 18th fairway, at least after escaping the then traditional stampede of spectators in front of the final green. With a 69 he won by five strokes from Brand, six from Woosnam and Bernhard Langer, and seven from Faldo. Seve Ballesteros was tied for eighth after a closing 64.

‘Everybody knows how much I wanted to win a major,’ Norman said. ‘Everyone is always saying, “Come on, Greggy, you can do it,” and even if you know you can, it starts to get you down. You get a monkey on your back.’ Until the moment the claret jug was placed in his hands, Norman still feared the worst. ‘I just knew somebody was going to walk up and say, “Gee, I’m sorry, Greg, but we can’t give you this after all.” I was petrified that I might have signed the card wrong or put down my nine-hole score in the box for the 9th hole.’ Given his near misses in recent times it was an understandable anxiety. And given how the next two majors were snatched away from him – by Bob Tway at the US PGA the following month, by Larry Mize at Augusta the following April – it was a spooky premonition.

For the first time since before Palmer led an American resurgence at the Open in the early 1960s, there had been three non-American winners in a row, with Norman following Ballesteros and Sandy Lyle, and Faldo and Seve later extending the run to five – the US domination of the game was no longer as strong as it once was. With the world rankings having been launched in April 1986, Norman entered the Open that year third on the table behind Ballesteros and Langer.

By the end of the year, which saw him win nine times in all, including six in a row in the autumn and the European Open and World Match Play titles, Norman was the world number one. It was only ten years after he had turned professional and little
more than a decade and a half after taking up the game aged 16. He had got started by caddying for his mother, Toini, who after staying up all night to watch Greg win the Open celebrated by going out and winning the women’s club championship at Royal Queensland.

Norman celebrated by, among other things, buying an Aston Martin. His first Ferraris had arrived after his first victory in Britain at the 1977 Martini International. Fast cars, speedboats, riding in military jump jets, all these things went along with a fast-paced life, attacking the day from well before dawn. If he could think it, he could do it. ‘It was a triumph over course and conditions,’ wrote Norman Mair of Norman’s victory at Turnberry, ‘a triumph which owed a great deal to a refreshing and determinedly positive attitude.’

Golf had rarely seen the like before. Jim Murray, the renowned sports writer for the
Los Angeles Times
, wrote: ‘If you wanted to be a golfer, this is the one you’d want to be. Like a lot of great athletes, energy just seems to radiate out of him. He lashes at the ball as if it were something he caught coming through his bedroom window at two in the morning. He’s an unselfconscious puppy with a ball of yarn. He’s flashy. He’s got a shock of platinum hair that makes him look like Jean Harlow from a distance. When he smiles, which is a lot, his teeth light up like a keyboard. He could give Liberace lessons in glitzy.’ The hair, the yellow sweater, the smile, the sun finally reappearing over Turnberry – the claret jug completed the picture perfectly.

Backing up a round as low as a 63 is not easy, which is one of the reasons so few of those who have achieved it in a major went on to win. Somehow all the magic gets used up, the feel is just not
the same for the rest of the tournament. Of the 22 players who did not score their 63 in the final round, only six have broken par the next day. The average next-day score is 72.05. At Turnberry in 1986 Norman returned a 74 in the third round, although that was partly explained by miserable weather. No one has gone better than a 69 the day after a 63 and Norman was one of them at the 1996 Masters.