Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (25 page)

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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

BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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Nobly stubborn on this point, Weiskopf insisted on earning his own way onto the tour, and turned down a number of sponsors’ offers to pay his way. Having dropped out of college and looking for ways to save money, he left Columbus and returned to live with his parents in Cleveland. While retaining his amateur status, he worked as an assistant to a club professional in Cleveland, which provided both a steady paycheck and free access to a first-class golf facility to develop his game.
During the summer of 1963, Weiskopf competed regularly in many prominent local events. The highlight of his postcollegiate amateur play came in August. After a disappointing first-round loss in the Ohio State Amateur that July, he passed up defense of his Ohio Public Links title to prepare for the Western Amateur, a high-profile, national match-play event, conveniently being held that year in nearby Benton Harbor, Michigan.
Despite posting the second-lowest score in the stroke-play qualifier, Tom was not among the favorites at the 6,943-yard Point O’ Woods Country Club. The reigning U.S. Amateur and NCAA champions, Labron Harris Jr. and R. H. Sikes—both former Walker Cup players as wen—highlighted the field. Weiskopf’s credentials as an accomplished state-level amateur didn’t measure up.
He survived the second-cut qualifier for match play by shooting 76-73. With the field now reduced to sixteen, Weiskopf toppled Cliff Taylor of Spring Lake, Michigan, 6 & 5, to advance to the quarterfinals, where he faced Sikes.
Not in the least intimidated by his much-decorated opponent, Weiskopf won four of the first six holes on the way to a 3 & 2 victory. In the semifinals match, he defeated another hotshot with a solid record in his home state, two-time Kansas champion Johnny Stevens, to reach the finals. There he faced the only golfer with better credentials than Sikes’s. The son of a fine public links player (and legendary golf coach at Oklahoma State University), Labron Harris Jr. won the 1962 U.S. Amateur at Pinehurst. Despite a close call in the quarterfinals, Harris was expected to eliminate the upstart Weiskopf at the Western Amateur with little difficulty.
The crowd for the final match turned out to be the largest in the long history of the tournament. With Tom’s mother and his two siblings among the record-setting twenty-five hundred spectators, the twenty-year-old bolted out of the gate quickly, taking the first two holes from the “bespectacled Oklahoman.” Lights-out putting helped Weiskopf maintain a two-hole lead after the turn (although he did miss a three-footer that cost him the ninth hole). Then Weiskopf surged ahead, one-putting the next five greens, to take the title on the fourteenth.
Everything seemed to go Weiskopf’s way that late-summer afternoon. On the par-five thirteenth, he missed the green in the left-side bunker. His thin blast appeared headed well off the green, but it caromed hard off the pin and came to rest six feet away. He nailed the birdie to take another hole from Harris.
On the fourteenth, after his booming drive split the fairway, Weiskopf socked an iron to fifteen feet and holed yet another birdie to close out Harris. He finished the fourteen holes at one under, the only player that week to break par for a full round at the difficult Benton Harbor course.
“I’m glad it’s all over,” Weiskopf told reporters. “I never did like match play... although this tournament may change my mind.
“All I can say is ... I don’t know.... Everything has been just wonderful,” an exuberant Tom said at the trophy presentation. “This has been the greatest thrill I’ve ever had.”
Almost overnight, Weiskopf became a prominent figure on the national golfing stage. A week after the Western, he played in a one-day event in his childhood home of Massillon that was a warm-up for the Akron Golf Classic at famously difficult Firestone Country Club. He took the top amateur spot in Massillon and then showcased his game at Firestone, finishing fifty-third in a stellar field to earn the low amateur prize—a shiny silver tray—after a one-hole play-off with the current Ohio State Amateur champion, Bob Bourne.
Shortly afterward, Weiskopf qualified for the first time for the U.S. Amateur at the Wakonda Club in Des Moines, Iowa. Disappointingly, he lost one-down in the first round of match play. But he soon grabbed another top-amateur spot in a mixed field at the prestigious Ohio State Open (where Nicklaus had startled the golfing world in 1956 by winning at age sixteen), finishing four strokes behind the professional winner, Bob Shave.
It didn’t take long for the national press to jump on the fast-charging Weiskopf bandwagon. In January 1964,
Golf Digest
ranked him tenth on its list of top-ten male amateurs in the country.
That April, Weiskopf broke his finger playing basketball with a group of grammar school kids, and was unable to defend his Western Amateur title the following month. Once the hand healed, he made a bold decision. Now—with an impressive amateur resume, $2,100 saved in the bank, and endorsement-deal offers from both a clothing company and a Cincinnati golf firm—he chose to turn pro on May 1, 1964.
Those first three months on the PGA tour, Weiskopf lived on $325 a week to cover all expenses, until earning his first paycheck. At the Western Open in Chicago in early August, he followed two marginal rounds with a stellar Saturday 68; only Palmer (67) and Nicklaus (65) posted better scores that day. An even-par 71 the next day pushed Weiskopf into a tie for twenty-ninth place, and he left the Tam O’Shanter Golf Course with a check for $487.50. Weiskopf never forgot those first dollars he earned, and every year afterward he wrote a check for that same amount to the Western Golf Association’s Evans Caddie Scholarship fund.
As the 1965 season began, Weiskopf raised his game to the next level. In February at the Tucson Open, he tied for tenth and earned $1,170 as a result of two excellent weekend rounds. A few months later, after years of attending the U.S. Open as a spectator, Weiskopf qualified for and competed in the world’s toughest golf test. Though never a threat to win at the Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, and somewhat thrown by the enormous stage—“I’m so nervous right now I can hardly see,” he said at the first tee—Weiskopf performed admirably. On the first day, he outshot Nicklaus by two strokes before finishing in fortieth place. A week later, in the St. Paul Open, he carded an opening 65 before falling out of contention.
Both the media and his fellow pros took notice.
“Tom Weiskopf. Now, there’s a boy who hits it a ton,” Sam Snead told a writer in the locker room during the U.S. Open. “He’s longer than Nicklaus. Go watch this boy.”
Weiskopf’s confidence grew notably during the autumn season. At an unofficial PGA event, he repeated another Nicklaus feat when he shot all subpar rounds to earn an impressive nine-stroke victory in the Ohio State Open at the Walnut Hill Country Club in Columbus.
Nicklaus not only provided motivation for Weiskopf’s first professional win; he served as transportation. Five days before winning in Ohio, Tom had missed the cut in the Seattle Open, but decided to remain in town and hit the practice range. The Golden Bear—who had already earned enough on tour to afford his own plane—offered to fly Weiskopf from Seattle to the Columbus event. Immediately after Nicklaus completed his final round (he finished ninth), the former Buckeye teammates, along with Youngstown pro and future PGA tour official Ed Griffiths, made the grueling trek back to the Midwest.
“We left Seattle at six p.m.,” Weiskopf told reporters following his victory. “We had to stop in Salt Lake City and Omaha for refueling and landed in Columbus at nine thirty a.m. It was a little bumpy so we didn’t get too much sleep.”
That first full season on tour in 1965, Weiskopf banked just under $12,000—good enough to reach the top seventy-five on the money list and second among rookies. The praise he received from his peers meant much more to him.
“Actually, it gives me confidence to know that other players think that much of me,” he said. “They come and congratulate you, and you know they’re the best, and it makes you feel good. It flatters you. Ken Venturi has called me the longest, most consistent driver on tour. I think Jack is.”
Not long before dying in a tragic plane accident, “Champagne” Tony Lema told Weiskopf, “I’d like to have what you’re going to make in the next ten years.”
And Tom took fierce pride in how he had built himself up.
“Everything I’ve gained in golf I’ve done it by myself,” he said in the summer of 1965. “I feel I might try harder on my own. It would be more personal pride if I make it. I’m about even for the five months I’ve been on tour this year.”
Several great chances for a first PGA victory slipped through Weiskopf’s hands in early 1966. He finished in the top five four times during the spring, including a heartbreaking loss to Doug Sanders on the second hole of a play-off at the Greensboro Open.
“I hadn’t had much experience in big amateur tournaments because I couldn’t afford it,” Weiskopf recalled a few years later, “and I didn’t have the patience and concentration to win out here.”
But that summer, Weiskopf did win the heart of a nineteen-year-old beauty queen. Jeanne Marie Ruth, Miss Minnesota of 1965, fell for Tom while handing out invitations to the Minnesota Golf Classic in St. Paul in July.
“I had seen Tom and thought he was quite handsome, and I was hoping to be introduced to him and maybe be asked for a date,” Jeanne remembered. “Well, I handed him his invitation, and he thanked me and just walked away! I was crestfallen. But we ran into one another on the course later in the week, and he asked me if I’d like to do something that evening.
“He seemed so lonesome,” she added. “I was sure he didn’t like me. I decided I would be like a sister to him—write him letters while he was traveling to cheer him up. We didn’t see each other much until we were engaged later that summer; then Tom started commuting from the tour to St. Paul—I think he was pleading nonexistent illnesses and deliberately missing the cut sometimes—and we were married in October, three months after we met.”
Along with several young tour couples, Jeanne joined her husband on the road, enjoying (at least for a time) the glamorous perks of each tour stop: the travel, interviews, fashion shows, and luncheons, as well as the pride of walking beside her husband on every hole.
“Watching Tom improve is thrilling,” she said.
But Jeanne’s first impression of Weiskopf never truly changed.
“Tom is basically a lonely person. He thinks most of the time. Now he thinks about the difference between being good and great.”
Like Jeanne, Weiskopf himself noticed how his mood affected his performance.
“I’m so darn moody. I can feel great one minute and sluggish the next. Gee whiz, it used to take me three holes to get over a poor shot. I got discouraged too quick,” Tom said. “Jeanne’s wonderful. She doesn’t know golf, but she knows me. She’s witty and has a little streak of sarcasm in her. She can jar me out of my bad moods. She’ll come up to me on the course and tell me how silly I look pouting.”
Jeanne also helped Tom mend a growing
physical
ailment that may have been tied to his self-destructive moods. During the 1966 season, Weiskopf reportedly lost twenty pounds when the lining of his stomach started to deteriorate. As his health improved, he attributed much of the recovery to Jeanne. In fact, when Tom assumed the fifty-four-hole lead at the Bob Hope Desert Classic in February 1967, he pointed to Jeanne’s presence in his gallery—and her newly acquired culinary skills—to explain his success.
Although he enjoyed moderate financial success on tour, Weiskopf remained sullen and dour, both on and off the course. His was more an inner than an outer boil, manifesting itself in these periodic stomach ailments (he regularly hinted at having ulcers) and self-destructive play rather than emotional venting.
Nonetheless, through all the physical and emotional ailments, Weiskopf’s game became more consistent over the next two years, even though he rarely put himself in a position to win. At the U.S. Open at Baltusrol in 1967, he shot four steady rounds and finished fifteenth, twelve shots behind Nicklaus’s record-setting performance. He reached thirtieth place on the earnings list at the end of his third full year on tour.
In February 1968, Weiskopf finally broke through and won his first PGA event, the Andy Williams San Diego Open. After an opening-round 66 at Torrey Pines, he braved unusually cold weather to take the thirty-six-hole lead by one stroke over Dave Hill. Nicklaus and Al Geiberger caught him the following day, but on Sunday, the “likable young fellow from Bedford, Ohio,” shot a final-round 68 to earn $30,000 in first-place prize money. Tom saved the tournament’s best drama for the seventy-second hole.
Thirteen under par for the tournament and tied with Geiberger and a late-charging Raymond Floyd, Weiskopf stroked a bold second shot that carried over the water and stopped just shy of the green on the dramatic par-five finishing hole.
“I was trying to get it close and make four,” Weiskopf said. “Then [Geiberger would] have to sink his putt to tie me.”
But to Weiskopf’s delight, his putt off the apron curved, curled, and found the cup for a brilliant eagle three to close out Geiberger.
“I played real well all the way. It’s probably the best four rounds I’ve put together. I only made five bogeys in the tournament and I didn’t three-putt a green in seventy-two holes,” Weiskopf noted.
“It’s probably the biggest day of my career.”

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