Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (51 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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“This may be as fine a round of golf as I ever played, particularly those last ten holes.”
Nicklaus never won another PGA event following that indelible scene: the aging, still long-haired champion, in yellow shirt and checkered pants, joyfully raising his putter in triumph. Nicklaus tapered down his already limited playing schedule, spending more time with his large family, refining the Muirfield Village Golf Club and its Memorial Tournament, as well as expanding his architectural firm and other golf-related businesses into a worldwide empire.
Still, as a tournament host and course design magnate, Nicklaus could not completely purge his competitive fire. In early 1990, having turned fifty, he joined the Senior Tour and immediately crushed the familiar field of competitors.
In his Senior Tour debut on the Cochise Course at Desert Mountain in Scottsdale, Arizona—a course he designed—Nicklaus won the season’s first major championship, the Tradition. A week later at the Masters, in the best finish ever by a player in his fifties, Nicklaus finished sixth; only three bogeys on the back nine kept him from another Green Jacket miracle. The following Sunday, he tied for third in the Senior PGA Championship. Nicklaus was renowned for competing in tournaments rather sparingly, and his three top tens, in three major championships, in three weeks, reaffirmed his place among the greatest on
any
tour.
With a win at another major, the Senior Players Championship, in June, Nicklaus had won two of the three senior majors in his rookie season. And in sole possession of the lead during the final round of July’s United States Senior Open, Nicklaus was all set to claim a third senior major until he was once again stymied by a familiar foe: Lee Trevino.
 
AS FAR BACK AS 1968—following his improbable U.S. Open win at Oak Hill and subsequent meteoric rise to stardom—Trevino had charmed the press with his fresh enthusiasm for the game.
“My goal is to play as good as I can for as long as I can. I’m going to keep practicing and playing until I get about hundred years old.
“I don’t care if it’s the Screen Door Open! If the money’s out there, I’ll tee it up on a gravel road.”
That bubbly Trevino had almost disappeared by 1973. During one of many vent sessions to the media at Oakmont, he said, “I don’t want to play after I’m forty. That would give me seven more years. I don’t have a day off until [December] eighth. Of course, it’s my own fault, but I’m scheduled for something every day.”
Trevino’s frustrations continued well after he pulled his $30,000 mobile home out of Oakmont’s parking lot. Putting woes resurfaced the next week at the American Golf Classic; then, at Royal Troon a few weeks later, he couldn’t figure out the winds well enough to defend his British Open crown. Still, he finished tenth: his fourth straight year in the top ten in the game’s two preeminent national championships (a record only surpassed by Nicklaus).
Regardless of how well he played—he still finished fourth on the 1973 money list, despite not winning another time—Trevino’s irritability did not subside. He took a break from the tour in late July and hinted that he might not even play in August’s PGA Championship; reporters speculated that he and Claudia were having marital problems.
Trevino eventually decided to play in the PGA, but after shooting 76, then telling a reporter that his desire was not there, he brushed “aside newsmen on his way to his car. A youngster seeking his autograph reached out and grabbed Trevino, and he turned around angrily and told the youth: ‘Get your hands off me. Don’t touch me again.’ Trevino got into his car, slammed his fist against the dashboard, and left.”
Once his draining 1973 season came to an end, however, Trevino steadied the ship and the lovable, smiling “Happy Hombre” returned.
In March 1974, he won the Greater New Orleans Open, his first victory in more than a year. By August his revival—in every sense—was complete. “[Twirling] his putter in familiar, fidgety fashion, joking all the while,” Trevino grabbed the third-round lead of the PGA Championship at Tanglewood Park. The next afternoon, he held on to win his fifth major championship, defeating, naturally, his playing partner, Jack Nicklaus.
“I was charged up like I always am when I play with Jack and I really hit the ball super.”
That week, Trevino confessed that he had tried to bring a measure of stability to his life after years of stealing the last buck from a grueling exhibition and personal-appearance schedule.
“Now I’m learning the way to handle these things. My problem has been scheduling things too far ahead, like making commitments in January for August. Well, the kids are on vacation then, but I forget that in January. I’m figuring out ways of allowing time for my kids. I don’t want to raise my family in a hotel room.”
But Trevino could never resist the temptation of tournament golf. Not even a bolt of lightning could keep him off the tour for more than a few weeks. While playing the Western Open in June 1975, Trevino, Jerry Heard, and Bobby Nichols were struck by lightning during a rain delay on the thirteenth green at Butler National Golf Club. Trevino had persuaded his friends to wait out the storm.
He suffered a serious back injury that would last for years. Fluid in his spine dissolved from the electrocution, leaving little lubrication between the disks in his vertebrae. Still, Trevino left the hospital early and within two weeks he was at Carnoustie, playing the British Open; he tied for fortieth. By November, he returned to top form and won the Mexican Open. The lightning had sapped some of his strength and endurance, but Trevino’s generosity never waned. He donated his $8,000 winner’s check to “my good friend Father Wasson, who has an orphans’ home in Cuernavaca.”
Trevino won one official PGA event per year for the next four seasons, and finished fourth in the 1977 British Open at Turnberry. In 1980, he won a record-tying fifth Vardon Trophy: If being struck by lightning wasn’t going to force his retirement, neither was turning forty.
Still, despite some patching up, Trevino’s life away from the greens and fairways remained as turbulent as ever. The disintegration of several business deals, and ugly divorces from both his wife and longtime manager, Bucky Woy, left him flat broke in 1977, and then again in the early 1980s.
“It didn’t bother me a bit,” he said two decades later. “If you’ve been poor once, being poor again is no big thing. You just look at it as a challenge.”
He eventually got back on his feet financially, thanks to his earnings on tour and the endorsements he continued to attract. And in 1984, at age forty-four, Trevino won his second PGA Championship at Shoal Creek. His fifteen-under-par total set a PGA scoring record that would last more than a decade.
There to greet her husband at Shoal Creek was Claudia Trevino, though not the same Claudia Trevino who had stood beside her flawed husband throughout the 1970s. Barely a year after his divorce, Trevino married twenty-four-year-old Claudia Bove, whom he had met at a tournament years earlier when she was just a child. Trevino and “Claudia II” (as the press dubbed her) soon started a family of their own with two young children.
“First, I never used to put anything before or above golf. I can do that now, although it’s not easy, because I can still play,” he later said.
“To be the best at anything, you have to be a little selfish. Selfishness is the reason I didn’t know my first four children. I could have been a better dad, but I would have been an average golfer.”
With his home life crawling toward stability, Trevino finally began to reduce his tournament appearances. He joined NBC Sports as an analyst and was often paired with Vin Scully. He still played as often as his body and new wife would allow.
In a year better remembered for Nicklaus’s victory at the Masters, and despite playing only four events beforehand, Trevino birdied the opening hole to grab a share of the final-round lead of the 1986 U.S. Open at Winged Foot. A solid 71 to close the championship—won by his former hustling mark at Horizon Hills in El Paso, Raymond Floyd—earned Trevino his fifth top-five U.S. Open finish. He, too, could compete on equal terms at age forty-six with the world’s premier golfers.
Born less than eight weeks apart, Nicklaus and Trevino both joined the Senior Tour in 1990. And, as had been the case at Oak Hill in 1968, Merion in 1971, Muirfield in 1972, and Tanglewood Park in 1974, it seemed that only Lee Trevino could foil Jack Nicklaus’s major championship conquests.
In July 1990, both men appeared in their first U.S. Senior Open, held at New Jersey’s Ridgewood Country Club. In search of his third straight victory in a senior major, Nicklaus posted a Saturday 67 to take the lead with one round to play.
For all of Nicklaus’s immediate achievements on the over-fifty circuit (two wins in three tries), Trevino became the Senior Tour’s most popular draw. He won five of ten tournaments in 1990, finishing in the top seven all but once. And in the more laid-back environment of the Senior Tour, Trevino’s personality flourished.
“I know guys who are hysterically funny in the clubhouse, and when they step to the first tee, they turn stone silent. Then after they’re done and back in, they’re funny again. But if I had to concentrate every minute, I’d be spastic out there.”
Just as at the height of his popularity in the 1970s, Trevino was the same affable showman who clowned around with the galleries, chatted midbackswing, and ribbed his fellow touring pros; and he was also the same fierce competitor.
Nine birdies on the first thirty-six holes gave Trevino a one-stroke lead over Jim Dent at the halfway point. Nicklaus, trailing by six shots, promptly stole the lead on Saturday from Trevino, who shot a one over 73.
“I’ll have to play good, 5 or 6 under, to have a shot,” Trevino said before the final round. “I know him like a book. Jack will shoot sixty-eight.”
Trevino held up his end of the bargain: He played the front nine at four under to forge a four-stroke lead over Nicklaus. But the Golden Bear staged a late charge with birdies at numbers nine, eleven, and thirteen to pull within one. With the lead dwindling, Trevino leaned on the only facet of the game where Nicklaus could never match the Super Mex: his gamesmanship.
“Just when it seemed he might be losing his grip on the tournament, however, Trevino hit an eight-iron to fifteen feet on the 151-yard, par-three fifteenth and drained the putt,” the
New York Times
reported. “Then with a vigorous lifting motion of his arms, he urged the crowd to cheer louder.
“‘When I made that putt, the cheer wasn’t loud enough,’ said Trevino.
“‘[Nicklaus] might have thought Dent made it, and I wanted to make sure he knew I made that thing.’”
Preparing to chip onto the fourteenth green, Nicklaus heard the roar, didn’t hit his shot firmly enough, and promptly missed the par save.
Nicklaus then birdied numbers fifteen and sixteen to narrow the gap, again, to a single stroke. Trevino closed out his round with a trio of pars for a five under 67, then watched Nicklaus from the television booth.
“As Jack was coming up seventeen, I thought back to Merion in 1971. That year I was sitting in the locker room when Jack had a fifteen-foot birdie putt to win. But when I heard the gallery groan, I knew we were in a play-off. This time, I told my wife, Claudia, ‘You better call the Hilton and tell ’em we have to stay over for a play-off.’”
Playing the par-five seventeenth in a light drizzle—“If Jack had kept up [with the pace of play], he wouldn’t have to play in the rain,” Trevino joked—Nicklaus came up short with his eight-iron approach from 128 yards away. A weak chip left him a four-foot putt; if he could save par, he would still have a chance to tie Trevino with a birdie on number eighteen.
“But sometimes Jack has a bad habit of looking up on short putts,” Trevino told the press, showing how intimately he knew his great rival’s game. “When he moved his head too quick on that putt at seventeen, the ball spun off the lip.”
Seeing the surprising bogey six, Trevino claimed victory, shouting, “Gimme the trophy!”
Minutes later, Nicklaus walked into the interview tent to find his beaming, silver-haired rival.
“Well-done,” Nicklaus said as the two shook hands.
“Where you playing next?” Trevino asked.
“The British Open.”
“I’ll see you there.”
Three weeks later at St. Andrews, they shot matching final-round 71s.
•
15
•
Tom Weiskopf
A
new Tom Weiskopf had emerged during the spring and summer of 1973. Although his gutsy third-place finish at Oakmont cemented his place among the tour’s elite, Weiskopf’s crowning achievement came a month later.
Playing underneath a Scottish rain at Royal Troon on July 15, Weiskopf shot a final-round 70 to win the hundred and second British Open Championship. Not even a closing-round 65 by Nicklaus, a fantastic final round of ball striking (but poor putting) by Johnny Miller, or a valiant six-birdie effort by Britain’s Neil Coles could deprive Weiskopf of his first major championship.
“I was in complete control of myself. I was never really worried,” he said. “Not that I don’t respect the ability of Johnny, or Jack or Neil, but I just knew that no matter what happened, I was gonna win.”

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