Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (26 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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Handsome, awesomely powerful, married to a charming, down-to-earth beauty queen, and moving steadily toward the top of his profession, Tom Weiskopf had seemingly arrived. As Nicklaus, Snead, Venturi, and Lema had predicted, his promise looked boundless.
That was until the spring.
In March 1968, Weiskopf received the greatest thrill that young pros on tour ever experience: his first invitation to the Masters. Besides an admirable sixteenth-place finish, Weiskopf thrilled the Augusta National gallery as the only competitor who could consistently match Nicklaus in distance. At the famed par-five fifteenth—fronted entirely by water that guards a wickedly shallow green—the two Ohio State products were the only golfers who hit the ball far enough and high enough to hold the firm green in two. Both reached with two-irons and scored easy birdies, a feat Weiskopf replicated in each of his four rounds.
But the Tuesday before the Masters began, Weiskopf had been summoned to Columbus by his draft board to take an army physical. With the Vietnam War at its peak, the goal was to determine whether he was fit for military induction. Granted a week’s deferment to play in the Masters, he darted back to Columbus immediately afterward at the behest of Uncle Sam, an excursion that would soon become routine for him.
Still holding down second place on the money list by mid-June, Weiskopf played very well in the U.S. Open at Rochester’s Oak Hill Country Club, finishing twenty-fourth. A month later, he became a two-time PGA winner with a swarm of Sunday back-nine birdies at the Buick Open in Grand Blanc, Michigan. Despite a bogey on the eighteenth, he closed with a 69 to outlast tour rookie Mike Hill, add $25,000 to his yearly tally, and reclaim the top spot on the PGA money list.
Unfortunately, a rash of poor performances during the next three months, most notably missing the cut at the last major championship, the PGA, had Weiskopf ending the season on a disappointing note and dropped him far behind in the money race.
But this was hardly Tom’s biggest career concern. On October 26, he headed south to Fort Polk, Louisiana, to begin active military duty: his mandatory eight weeks of basic training followed by MOS (specialty) training—in Tom’s case, the rather sweet assignment of learning to be a clerk in his army reserve unit. As a high-profile tour professional among golf-crazy generals and other high-ranking officers, Weiskopf soon spent as much time on military golf courses as he did at a desk. After completing active duty, Weiskopf admitted that the only aspect of his game that actually suffered at Fort Polk was his putting. And while he claimed not to resent the four-month disruption to his career, he later admitted that the next five years of “dumb meetings” in Columbus (which he estimated cost him $6,000 a year in extra travel expenses) bordered on the absurd.
“I guard the United States,” he said sarcastically, several years after beginning reserve duties. “I sit there every Monday night and play tiddledy winks for four hours. It’s something I look forward to, flying back all the time to the reserves.”
Weiskopf would qualify those remarks—“It hasn’t helped me, but it’s an obligation everybody has. I’m grateful to the country that allows me to make such a good living”—but some bitterness on his part was probably warranted. Unquestionably, Weiskopf got special treatment shaped around his career needs; he was allowed to fill his reserve obligation by four-hour stints every Monday night, rather than a full weekend each month, which would have seriously hampered his career. Still, even during the height of the draft and the Vietnam War, very few young tour members had their careers impeded by military duty of any kind. Weiskopf’s service in the reserves, no matter how casual, was in fact not an “obligation” most young professional golfers in the 1960s were compelled to fulfill.
Weiskopf’s active duty ended in late February 1969, and he immediately returned to the tour. In the opening round of the Doral in Miami—where he had finished second the previous spring—he carded a one under 71 and finished twenty-sixth in his first event in nearly five months. A week later, he continued to show no effects of his tour hiatus. Shooting a brilliant 32 on the back nine to share the first-round lead, he ultimately finished tied for sixth in the Florida Citrus Open. And, on the eve of his second Masters appearance, he fought his way into a tie for the final-round lead in the Greensboro Open before losing to Gene Littler in a play-off.
Weiskopf then reclaimed his spot as the tour’s most promising young star at Augusta National. Playing beside Nicklaus during the opening two rounds, he scored back-to-back 71s that kept him within five strokes of front-running Billy Casper. A bogey-free Saturday moved “the tall and stately Columbuson by way of Cleveland” to within three strokes heading into the final eighteen holes. His confidence soared.
“I’m looking forward to winning it, just like everybody else,” he said. “I just hope I play well. If I can putt a little better tomorrow, I’ll be right there.” And Tom was indeed “right there” on Sunday, until an errant tee shot on the seventeenth (compounded by an unfavorable bounce off a television cart) dropped him into a tie for second place.
“Sure, I’m disappointed. I must have played better from tee to green than anybody in the field,” Weiskopf said. “It’s great to finish second, but there are only so many major tournaments, and how many times do you have the chance to win?”
Over the next four years, that candid question would come to haunt Tom Weiskopf.
FOLLOWING HIS RUNNER-UP FINISH IN the Masters in 1969, Weiskopf finished the season strong: posting eight top-ten finishes, making the cut in both the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship, and earning nearly $100,000. And in November, at Pete Dye’s new Harbour Town Golf Links in Hilton Head, he again made a run at a title. He entered the weekend tied with Palmer for the lead, but consecutive rounds over par dropped him into a four-way tie for ninth.
But for the next three seasons, Weiskopf’s career began to stall; no matter how well he played, he just couldn’t win tournaments. He would periodically climb to the top of the leaderboards, only to falter in the later rounds. In 1970, despite playing consistently well, he again went winless on tour, coming very close to victories in Atlanta, Memphis, and Massachusetts, only to suffer final-round letdowns.
Still, Weiskopf’s steady improvement validated his enormous hype—the same hype that had led to a June 1968 Golf Digest cover story tabbing him “The Man to Succeed Arnold Palmer.” Even though he didn’t win in 1970, he posted the lowest scoring average and should have edged out Lee Trevino for the Vardon Trophy. (Under stringent tour rules, Weiskopf had filed his application for a Class A PGA membership two days too late to be granted a full membership, and was therefore ineligible for the Vardon until the following year.)
When he returned to Augusta National in 1971 for a fourth try at a Green Jacket, Weiskopf again played his way to the top of the early leaderboard. Late in the second round, he grabbed the lead at five under par before a bogey on the eighteenth, combined with strong finishes by others later in the day, knocked him two shots off the pace.
“There’s no doubt in my mind, I think I’m going to win this tournament. I’m so confident I can play this golf course. I’m going to play great the rest of the week,” Weiskopf proclaimed. “I’m hitting it as good as I’ve ever hit it in my life. I don’t feel I’ve misplayed a shot in the last thirty holes, an iron shot anyway.”
Some of that confidence evaporated the following afternoon when bogeys on numbers fifteen and sixteen forced Weiskopf to admit he was “not feeling too swift.” An even-par 72 on Sunday gave him another excellent finish (tied for sixth), but, as was all too frequently the case throughout his career, even in his hometown he was relegated to “Columbus’s other hope,” as Nicklaus chased Charles Coody for the Masters title.
In June 1971, Weiskopf finally returned to the winner’s circle. In a tense four-man play-off at the Kemper Open in Charlotte, he rolled in a birdie putt on the first extra hole to edge out Gary Player, Lee Trevino, and Dale Douglass.
“I was so nervous at the extra hole after the other fellows had missed their birdie putts that I was shaking,” he told reporters shortly after exploding with joy when his fifth consecutive birdie dropped (he made four birdies to close out the round, then another to win the play-off). “I had to back away from the ball. Then I stepped up and it was a straight putt and it went in. I really don’t know how long it was, but Gary said it was seven or eight feet.”
The sweet taste of his first victory in nearly three years quickly soured; in Weiskopf’s worst U.S. Open performance, he missed the cut the next week at Merion with a nightmare second round of 83. “[I] lost my concentration and my desire to keep playing,” he said about his horrendous start (triple bogey followed by bogey) to start the day.
Things only got worse during the summer, including a lackluster performance in the British Open at Royal Birkdale. But Weiskopf’s hopes for another victory rose considerably when he headed in mid-August to Sutton, Massachusetts, and Pleasant Valley Country Club, where he looked to take advantage of a depleted field, i.e., no Nicklaus, Palmer, or Trevino.
Weiskopf made his case quickly as the top star when only one other golfer, journeyman John Schlee, bested him by a single stroke on the first day. During the next two rounds, despite missing several makeable birdie putts, Weiskopf kept within two strokes of the lead. But everything fell apart on Sunday. Though unable to keep pace with the leaders, Weiskopf still came to the seventeenth in line for another top finish. That was until he totally lost his concentration and followed a double bogey on the seventeenth with a triple bogey on the eighteenth to shoot 78, dropping him from a share of fifth place to an eight-way tie for thirty-sixth and a meager check of $710.
Weiskopf erupted in the locker room. “I’m withdrawing from every tournament for the remainder of the year,” he told reporters. “I mean it. I’ve taken time off from the tour and I’m going to do it again.”
This was the type of whining that led the media increasingly to tag him as the “Towering Inferno.” And it was no idle threat. After a second-place finish to Billy Casper the previous August (1970) at the same Pleasant Valley course, Weiskopf had complained to reporters, “[If] I could putt, I’d beat everyone out here.” That frustration had prompted Weiskopf to withdraw from the tour for nearly four months at the end of the 1970 season, taking a prolonged hunting “vacation.”
Bucky Woy—the agent who managed Lee Trevino and who also had an agreement to manage Weiskopf until Weiskopf “remembered,” six months later, that he already had representation -knew the impact that a poor round could have on his would-be client.
“He couldn’t stand being bugged [by the media] after an unfortunate round,” wrote Woy, who, despite their business mishap, considered Tom and Jeanne Weiskopf close friends. “One of his detracting points is a high-pitched voice, which sounds babyish when he complains. He often sulked, pouted, and was curt with writers because he was disappointed with his own performance.” A few years later, at the height of his career, Weiskopf admitted he nearly left the game at several stages of his young career.
“Sometimes I used to get so down on myself that it was terrible. I got so upset when I didn’t hit every shot perfectly and win every tournament that I thought seriously about quitting the tour.”
Perhaps Jeanne intervened to end to her husband’s latest public pouting, but in any event, Weiskopf headed to the Whitemarsh Valley Country Club for the Philadelphia Classic. The “City of Brotherly Love” was, in fact, well-known in the sports world for its harsh spectators and ultracritical press, so Weiskopf’s decision to resume playing there carried risks. Not only was his embarrassing blowup in Massachusetts fresh in everyone’s mind, but his prior record in Philadelphia earned him few friends.
In 1970, Weiskopf had stormed out of the scorer’s tent at the Philadelphia Classic after an opening-round 77 (which featured a quadruple bogey on the par-three ninth) without signing his card, essentially withdrawing from the tournament. He was convinced shortly afterward by a sympathetic tour official to sign his card, but two days later, his first-round card was declared invalid because he had not submitted it “as soon as possible” following the round. Only seven shots behind the leaders following a great comeback on Friday and Saturday, Weiskopf ultimately decided to withdraw before the final round on Sunday because he did not “feel that he could rightfully compete and accept prize money when he had in fact violated a rule.”

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