Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (27 page)

Read Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont Online

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
2.62Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Nevertheless, Weiskopf returned to Philadelphia in 1971, and after three superlative rounds he led by three strokes. In Sunday’s finale, “Weiskopf, the introvert, and [Dave] Hill, the extrovert,” stood tied at the turn, with Hill playing one group ahead. Several clutch, one-putt par saves put Weiskopf ahead, and when he sank a long putt for birdie on the sixteenth, he grabbed a two-stroke lead over the fiery Hill. Then, on the short par-five seventeenth, Weiskopf answered Hill’s eagle with an eagle of his own. Even though his drive found the rough, he smoked a seven-iron to twelve feet and, anxiously aware of what was at stake, made the putt.
“When I walked up to the creek [in front of the green] I wasn’t really checking anything,” he said about that critical putt to maintain a two-shot lead. “I was nervous and I was just trying to slow myself up.”
With the cushion provided by his third eagle of the week, Weiskopf bogeyed the eighteenth (after missing another fairway), but still held off Hill for his fourth PGA victory.
“I proved something to myself . . . I won this more on desire and determination than good golf.... I talked myself into winning this tournament, and I’m a better man... and I think a better golfer, for it.”
The win sparked Weiskopf to a strong finish in the 1971 season. The next week, at the lucrative $200,000 national match-play championship at Pinehurst, he toppled Raymond Floyd in the quarterfinals, then barely missed advancing to the finals that afternoon by losing on the second play-off hole. He closed out the season with eighth, twentieth, and thirty-first place finishes before missing the cut at his final tour stop in early December.
In a season of highs and lows, Weiskopf managed to top the $100,000 mark for the second time; he also topped the half-million-dollar mark in total earnings for his eight-year career. Two victories and his solid recovery from the debacle in Massachusetts reassured many golf pundits that despite his temperamental outbursts, Weiskopf belonged among the tour’s elite. Once the 1972 season began, the
New York
Times’s
Arthur Daley and
Golf Digest’
s Nick Seitz—believing that he was “now mature”—predicted Weiskopf would finally break through and win his first major championship.
And that season, Weiskopf darted out quickly, scoring his fifth career win by edging out Nicklaus in the Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic to win $52,000—the largest single payday in golf history. During the summer, he came closer to fulfilling the prophecies of greatness than at any previous time in his career. At the U.S. Open in Pebble Beach, he took eighth place for his best finish in seven Open tries. A month later at Muirfield, he again reached the top ten of a major championship with a sparkling final round of 69 in the British Open.
But it was another Masters letdown earlier in the 1972 season that continued to haunt Weiskopf. During a practice round at Augusta, he shot a 67 and oozed confidence.
“I’m playing as well as I was when I won at Inverrary,” the number two man on the money list reported.
After a slow start left him five strokes off the lead, Weiskopf surged ahead with precise iron play in the second and third rounds, and climbed into a tie for third with eighteen holes to play. Had a few short putts fallen-he missed five from inside ten feet, including two four-footers—Weiskopf could well have led the tournament.
“I turned a sixty-four into a seventy,” he complained. “The back nine was probably as fine a nine holes as I’ve ever played.”
In what was becoming a painful stigma, Tom could not wrestle away a major championship from the Golden Bear on a final Sunday. The implosion occurred early: Three bogeys over the opening four holes cost him dearly, and by the turn he trailed his playing partner, Nicklaus, by five shots. Though Weiskopf gained three strokes on Nicklaus during the back nine, every potential challenger eventually faltered; as usual, Nicklaus did exactly what it took to preserve his lead and win his fourth Masters title.
“I tried my darnedest out there today, and that’s the best I could do,” Weiskopf said about his second-place finish in the Masters (despite a closing round of 74). “He’s the greatest golfer there is in the game. I was three strokes behind. That’s a pretty big task—to come from three strokes behind and beat him.”
Reporters scrutinized every moment as the game’s biggest bombers were paired together during a major-championship Sunday. And on the eighteenth fairway, the former college teammates stopped briefly to share a moment of reflection.
“I said, ‘I wish I could have given you a better fight.... I’ll get you next time.’”
 
WEISKOPF CLOSED OUT 1972 WITH another victory as a professional, albeit not an official PGA triumph. Lashing towering drives that “turned the 6,997-yard Wentworth course into a toy,” Weiskopf won October’s Piccadilly World Match Play Championship in England, 4 & 3, over Lee Trevino. In a thirty-three-hole finale, he carded two eagles and six birdies to topple the crowd and pretournament favorite.
At his opening tournament in 1973, Weiskopf broke par during each round of the Los Angeles Open at Riviera; he tied for second, by far his best performance at that high-profile event. More good news came that week when he learned that Jeanne, pregnant with their second child, was about to give birth. Weiskopf left preparations for the Phoenix Open and flew home to Columbus, where their son joined his two-year-old sister shortly afterward.
Sadly, the Weiskopfs’ jubilation surrounding their second child’s safe arrival soon gave way to profound sadness.
As a late Christmas present to his father, who had recently been diagnosed with brain cancer, Weiskopf gave his parents a trip to the Bing Crosby Pro-Am Tournament at Pebble Beach. With Tom just a few strokes behind after two rounds, his father’s condition worsened and he was taken to a nearby hospital. The next day, Weiskopf shot an understandably distracted 84 (he missed the fifty-four-hole cut), and the entire family returned to Cleveland, where his father’s prognosis was poor.
Although Weiskopf soon returned to competition, the stress and pressures of dealing with both a newborn and a dying father proved more than he could handle. In his first start since learning of his father’s illness, he withdrew following the second round of the Andy Williams San Diego Open—after he and fellow pro Bob Goalby nearly came to blows during a locker-room shouting match.
“While my father was ill, I just couldn’t seem to get with it,” Weiskopf said later.
Nonetheless, Weiskopf steadied himself after the Goalby imbroglio and made the cut in consecutive weeks at Inverrary and the Citrus Open. The following Sunday at Doral, he pushed Trevino to the end with a closing-round 67, capped by a twenty-five-foot birdie on the legendary fountain hole. Tom took runner-up honors and just under $14,000 in prize money to show his dying father.
The following Wednesday, on March 14, with his eldest son playing in a pro-am event prior to the Jacksonville Open, Thomas Mannix Weiskopf died at age sixty. Tom immediately withdrew and returned to Cleveland, where a service was held that Friday morning at St. Pius X Church.
Weiskopf took two weeks off to grieve with family before returning to the tour, first at the Greensboro Open and then, in mid-April, at the Masters. He played valiantly in both, finishing twenty-ninth in North Carolina and thirty-fourth at Augusta.
“My father told me he lived and died for my golf. He told me if I set my goals higher I could be as good as the rest of them,” he said two months later. “I was upset at the Masters, naturally. It got down to the point [i.e., before the Masters, when he knew that his father was dying] where I didn’t spend time practicing. My father was being put back in the hospital before then, but it was not a mental thing. It was just no time for practicing.
“Two weeks after the Masters I started thinking to myself, ‘Things have got to change. I’ve got to start working on my game.’”
With his father’s expectations weighing on him, that was exactly what Weiskopf did.
He started drilling daily on putting—easily the facet of his game that had plagued him most in crucial moments.
“When I used to have a week off,” he told a Columbus reporter at the couple’s lovely Tudor home in Upper Arlington, “I wouldn’t do anything and I wasn’t sharp when I got back on the tour. I’d play halfway good, but I wouldn’t really get it back until the second week.”
Inevitably, it all came back to Nicklaus.
“Jack’s the only guy who can virtually turn it on when he wants to, but I think even he plays or practices a little more between tournaments. But he’s so great he can play bad and still win.”
A month under the new training regimen yielded results. Near the end of April, Weiskopf flew to Dallas for the Byron Nelson Classic, where, despite a disappointing final round of 73, he earned a share of eighth place. And he capped off the tour’s three-week Texas swing (after the Byron Nelson, he missed the cut at the Houston Open) with a brilliant victory—the sixth official win of his ten-year PGA career—at the Colonial Invitational in Fort Worth.
Although some writers downgraded Weiskopf’s triumph by emphasizing Bruce Crampton’s collapse in the tournament’s final moments, it took four straight rounds of par or better to earn Tom the win. He put pressure on Crampton by rolling in a thirty-foot birdie on the sixteenth from just off the green—his fourth long birdie putt of the afternoon—but a bogey on the seventeenth seemingly cost him a chance at a play-off. Crampton, the hottest player on tour, needed only a par on the final hole for his fourth victory of the early 1973 season. But he played the hole “like a duffer,” duck-hooking his drive and breaking his sand wedge en route, and scoring a double bogey to lose to Weiskopf by one shot.
“It’s a heck of a way to win a golf tournament,” Weiskopf admitted. “I know how Bruce felt. I’ve done it. I’m happy, but it’s sort of a sick feeling. Oh, it’s a happy win, but not exciting. But like Jack Nicklaus says, you’ve got to play all seventy-two holes to the end.”
Within two weeks, Tom tested that sentiment in an exciting second-place finish to Nicklaus at the Atlanta Golf Classic. Starting in second place and six strokes behind, Weiskopf seemingly shot himself out of the tournament. His second shot on the opening hole smacked a female spectator on the head, leading to a bogey. He followed that with a disastrous approach shot on the fourth that landed in a pond and resulted in a double bogey. Weiskopf now trailed the leader, Nicklaus, by ten strokes after six holes.
“I really didn’t think I could win after I got ten down. [But after teeing off], I was so charged up, I wasn’t thinking. I was just charged out there trying to catch up too quick. It always happens to me; I get too aggressive and take silly shots,” he admitted.
But the “new” Weiskopf—the confident, fully committed, more emotionally mature Weiskopf—emerged on number seven. There he rolled in the first of five birdies to close out the day and shoot his eighth consecutive round of par or better.
“Up to then I was trying to score as low as possible; then my thought became to win . . . a different attitude. I had to watch it and not make dumb mistakes. I had no intention of trying to reach eighteen in two shots. I played very well the last six holes.”
Nicklaus, on the other hand, could make no birdies down the stretch and posted bogeys on the ninth, tenth, and twelfth holes. Weiskopf’s third consecutive birdie on number fifteen cut the Golden Bear’s lead to three shots.
Still, nothing—not even a dachshund that moseyed in front of him as he prepared to hit his drive off the final tee, or a thunderstorm minutes later—could unnerve Nicklaus enough to throw away a double-digit, final-round lead. Weiskopf finished two strokes behind Nicklaus in second place.
“I’m glad I made it a tournament,” he told the crowd at the awards presentation, “interesting for you folks.”
On the heels of the best back-to-back finishes of his career, Weiskopf moved just north to the familiar Quail Hollow course in North Carolina, the site of his play-off victory at the Kemper Open two years earlier. As in 1971, the Nicklaus-less field hosted the rest of the tour’s big names—Palmer, Trevino, Player, top-money-earner Crampton, and the flashiest of the young lions, Lanny Wadkins. Weiskopf had earned more money playing the Kemper Open than any other man in the field, so his confidence was high.
Weiskopf picked up right where he left off in Atlanta. Four birdies on the first seven holes yielded a 65 and a one-stroke lead over Wadkins, who was nearly as hot. But a few weeks of outstanding play were not enough to erase the media’s long-standing doubts about how dedicated Weiskopf really was to joining the game’s all-time greats.
“A lot of skeptics find it hard to believe that Tom Weiskopf is serious about his golf game,” noted a local reporter. “They keep seeing him reeling off rounds like his seven under par 65 in the first round of the Kemper Open Thursday and they wonder when the other Tom Weiskopf—the one with the fiery temper and foreboding looks and the one who went off on a hunting trip when things were going bad on the golf tour—will emerge.”
Weiskopf did not dodge the skeptics. Indeed, he seemed eager to explain his sudden turnaround in his own terms.
“Let’s face it... I’m not getting smarter. Things that happen on the course don’t upset me now like they used to. Then, too, I’ve decided that discipline is the key to the entire thing.” With that wonderful touch of Weiskopf hubris that perhaps sought to camouflage self-doubt, he continued. “Take the other day when I was home and played a round with some friends at the Ohio State course. It took us almost five hours to play; then I went out and hit balls for three more hours. I was hitting the ball so good at the end I almost wanted to applaud.... The only thing I’ve been doing different is that I’m devoting more of my spare time to practice. When I have a poor putting round now, I’ll go out and work on my putting, where before I probably would have said to hell with it.”

Other books

Raven's Hand by James Somers
Just Before Sunrise by Carla Neggers
Duty Free by Moni Mohsin
Island Idyll by Jess Dee
Matter of Truth, A by Heather Lyons
Say Forever by Tara West
Fixing Perfect by Therese M. Travis
61 Hours by Lee Child