Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (52 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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Weiskopf spent most of the next day (Sunday) fulfilling the duties of the gracious champion. He posed for pictures—kissing either the Claret Jug or his wife, Jeanne—sent a case of champagne to the writers’ tent, and, joined by Nicklaus, even sang songs with Scottish fans at the Marine Hotel.
Fittingly, while her son basked in the joy of undeniably “making it” as a major winner, Eva Shorb Weiskopf was hitting balls down the fairways of a public golf course.
“[The phone] must have been ringing for eight and a half hours straight yesterday,” she said. “It finally got to the point where I had to leave for a while.”
The fifty-five-year-old widow spent most of Saturday in her home, watching her son win the British Open on television. But the barrage of congratulatory phone calls forced her to drive thirty miles northeast of her Cleveland home to Chardon Lakes Golf Club. She shot 86.
To those who saw her play that day, Eva was beaming.
“I’m just so happy I can’t even describe it. I’m very proud of him,” she said, “and his father would have felt the same.”
Everyone was pleased to see Weiskopf finally win a major. Arnold Palmer’s famous prophecy about Nicklaus—“Now that the big guy is out of the cage, everybody better run for cover”—seemed apropos. Prognosticators couldn’t help but speculate on the dawn of “the Tom Weiskopf Era.”
“[To] compare him right now with a Jack Nicklaus or an Arnold Palmer isn’t fair,” said Byron Nelson, who witnessed Weiskopf’s British Open win as an ABC commentator. “Tom has had a late start winning big, while both Nicklaus and Palmer started winning consistently in their twenties. However, I’m reminded of another golfer who didn’t get it all together until he was about thirty-six years old. His name was Ben Hogan.”
Comparisons to Hogan would have been absurd just a year earlier. But Weiskopf’s newfound ability to keep his composure when in “other years, he has lost his temper and exploded,” accounted for his victory far more than his native talents.
“Others had told me of the new, mature Weiskopf,” wrote
Cleveland Plain Dealer
columnist Hal Lebovitz. “I had known the younger one. I wondered if the maturity was speculation or real. The Tom I had met before seemed edgy, talked with serious reflection and appeared to put on a confident front in an effort to hide his uncertainty. This time it was a self-assured Weiskopf talking. This one clearly believed in himself.”
No longer did anyone question Weiskopf’s desire to become the best golfer in the world ... better than even Jack Nicklaus.
“How bad do I want it? Well, all I can say is, it’s one down and thirteen to go.”
Weiskopf continued to chase greatness—in the form of major championships
and
Jack Nicklaus—immediately following his British Open triumph. He won the Canadian Open two weeks afterward and, in late July, arrived in Cleveland. He had been to the city several times during the previous weeks—to visit his mother, accept a key to the city, and be honored as chair of the Schmidt’s beer company’s “Hole in One” program, which sent children to summer camps.
But when he arrived in his hometown again in mid-August, the prodigal son had truly returned. With the PGA Championship being played at Canterbury, a course he knew from his high school days at Benedictine, he was more than just a sentimental favorite.
“I think everybody has his ten best years. I figure the next ten will be my best in golf,” he said before the fifty-fifth PGA. “During that period, there will be forty major championships played. I see no reason that I shouldn’t win a third of them. That would be thirteen. That’s as many as Jack Nicklaus has won.”
Weiskopf kept within two strokes of the leaders at the halfway point, but a pair of par 71s on the weekend dropped him to sixth place. Given that Nicklaus won, Weiskopf now had to change his slogan: “One down and fourteen to go.”
Still, he did get the best of his mentor later in the year. In September 1973, Weiskopf defeated Nicklaus (along with Tommy Aaron and Johnny Miller) in the World Series of Golf in September—a thirty-six-hole, made-for-television event featuring the season’s four major championship winners. Playing at Akron’s Firestone Country Club, not far from his birthplace in Massillon, helped inspire Weiskopf, though not as much as being paired with Nicklaus during both days.
“I thought it would be great for me to beat Jack, who’s the greatest player in the world. I really wanted to beat him and I think that’s what won it for me. You know, this tournament is as much match play as it is medal and you’re always aware of Jack.”
A changing of the guard now seemed inevitable.
“As Palmer found out a few years ago, there are always footsteps at the door,” one Ohio columnist explained. “Nick had best look over his shoulder and listen to the footsteps too ... the steps of Tom Weiskopf, two years his junior, only one major title to his credit, yet coming on. A transformed man, able to drive tall buildings in a single bound, saying, ‘Jack is the greatest, his record proves it, but let’s wait until we both retire ... then maybe we can compare things.’”
Revealing the radical transformation in Weiskopf’s reputation, the Golf Writers Association of America chose him as its 1973 “Player of the Year.” Nicklaus may have won more money and owned a lower scoring average, but because Nicklaus and Weiskopf won the same number of tournaments (Weiskopf won the South African PGA in October) and each man won a major championship apiece, some voters felt the tie should go to Weiskopf. And in the fifteen tournaments that featured both men, Weiskopf finished higher than Nicklaus nine times. When he heard that statistic, Weiskopf joked: “I didn’t know that. I gotta tell the Bear he’s over the hill.
“Everybody said that I ought to have a letdown after the British Open, and my life would get complicated,” he said shortly afterward. “I’m playing great. I don’t see why I ever have to play bad. And I love attention. Man, so far I think the heat’s fun.”
Weiskopf didn’t exactly handle the pressure that well. He still quarreled with cameramen, both amateur and professional. At several tournaments during 1973—the American Golf Classic, the Westchester Open, the Canadian Open, and even during the U.S. Open at Oakmont—someone snapping photographs enraged Weiskopf and he made a fuss about it.
Weiskopf believed that a foreign photographer, Toshio Yamamoto of Japan’s
Asahi Golf Magazine
—who persistently stood in his line of sight—sabotaged his chances in the American Golf Classic at Firestone, and was responsible for his triple bogey on the sixth hole. Yamamoto, who did not speak English, told a translator he was not in the way, but a nearby marshal and a few tour pros backed up Weiskopf; Yamamoto had been a distraction to golfers the week before at Oakmont. Within a few weeks Weiskopf would lead a charge demanding that the PGA ban spectators from having cameras and that marshals better supervise credentialed photographers.
Worse than this impatience with photographers was Weiskopf’s casual attitude toward withdrawing or being disqualified from tournaments. Old habits returned in full force.
A betting favorite (with Nicklaus, of course) to win at Augusta National in 1974, Weiskopf tied for second, just two behind the winner, Gary Player. And he performed fairly well at the following two majors: He tied for fifteenth in the Massacre at Winged Foot, and seventh in the British Open. But the man who notched six wins in less than five months the previous summer was winless a year later, including a collapse during the final round of the Pleasant Valley Classic in early August to finish second.
A week later, Weiskopf arrived at Tanglewood Park for the PGA Championship. He had sustained a hairline fracture to his wrist earlier that summer, but assured the press he was healthy before the season’s final major. After criticizing the course and its renowned architect, Robert Trent Jones—Weiskopf had already made news that summer by saying of another course, “I feel like I might as well be playing on the women’s tour. They set courses up too easy.... It’s just a putting contest each week”—he stirred up even more controversy in North Carolina.
On the Thursday that President Nixon resigned from office, Weiskopf shot 75, five over par. On Friday, Weiskopf—who for some reason chose a local high school football coach to serve as his caddie—five-putted the sixteenth green. Annoyed by a few rain delays and his thirteen-over-par total, Weiskopf simply walked off the course after posting his nine on the sixteenth, telling an official that his injured wrist had flared up.
“Are you injured?” someone asked in the Tanglewood dining room afterward.
“No ... I just wanted to quit—I didn’t need a reason.”
A month later, Weiskopf simply refused to sign his scorecard after finishing the second round of the World Open golf tournament at Pinehurst with consecutive double bogeys. As was the case at Tanglewood, where he was fined, Weiskopf was disciplined by Deane Beman of the PGA tour.
Weiskopf would finish the 1974 season winless, earning less than half of what he made the previous year. Despite the antics, his friend Jack Nicklaus stood by him and refused to replace Weiskopf as his teammate for the season’s final event, the Walt Disney World Golf Classic, a $250,000 best-ball competition.
“Tom never pulls stuff like that when I’m around and I think it’s about time he reaches the point where he wouldn’t want to lose face with the public,” Nicklaus said.
Together, the world’s two most powerful hitters could finish only in a three-way tie for eleventh, five strokes behind the Hubert Green-Mac McClendon duo.
But at least for a time, his initiation into the fraternity of major champions shielded Weiskopf against sharp barbs from the press.
There was a second consecutive agonizing heartbreak in the 1975 Masters, as Weiskopf and Johnny Miller finished a shot behind Nicklaus; Weiskopf claimed that Nicklaus’s forty-foot birdie putt on number sixteen, right after Weiskopf eagled the fifteenth, “broke my concentration.” In just seven years, he now had four Masters runner-ups, a record matched by only Hogan and Nicklaus. And Weiskopf also turned in exceptional performances in the PGA in 1975, 1976, and 1978, the last played at Oakmont. At 280, he finished tied for fourth—one stroke lower than in the U.S. Open five years earlier.
During a period in the mid-1970s, Weiskopf even defeated Nicklaus twice, “head-to-head,” in prestigious PGA events: A year after his play-off birdie edged out Nicklaus for the 1975 Canadian Open, Weiskopf won the 1976 Doral-Eastern Open Invitational, holding off an incredible charge by the Golden Bear, who birdied number nine and eagled numbers ten and twelve without a single putt.
Despite those triumphs over Nicklaus, one
tournament
—not one player-seemed to bring out the best in Tom Weiskopf. From 1976 to 1979, no one turned in better overall U.S. Open performances than he did. Weiskopf’s U.S. Open scoring average was a full stroke lower (71) than Nicklaus’s. He also finished inside the top five each of those years. By comparison, neither Nicklaus nor anyone else finished higher than sixth during that stretch.
Fittingly, when the first U.S. Open of the new decade began, the two biggest stars were the pair of Ohio State Buckeyes. In the opening round at Baltusrol, Weiskopf teed off just after noon, and limped out with a bogey on number one. Then he got hot: four birdies on the front, four more on the back. On the par-five closing hole, Weiskopf found himself in easy range of another birdie and a major-championship record 62.
“[But] then I got cute,” he said about his wedge approach that landed in a green-side bunker. He still got up and down to save par and close out the day with a 63, tying Johnny Miller’s 1973 U.S. Open final round.
“Of course, that was a much easier course than this one,” a grinning Weiskopf said afterward.
For all the headlines that he grabbed with his 63, Weiskopf had to share every bit of the spotlight with Nicklaus.
Teeing off just thirty-six minutes after Weiskopf, Nicklaus overcame an early bogey of his own to make the turn at two under.
“I knew Tom had made the turn in four under par and was cruising along,” Nicklaus said. “We saw him get another birdie at the fifteenth. That’s when Angelo [Nicklaus’s caddie] turned to me and said, ‘Answer him, answer him.’ When I got to the thirteenth I almost knocked my second into the hole.”
From there, Nicklaus made an easy birdie, his third in a row, then carded two more, matching Weiskopf at seven under par with one hole to play. Nicklaus nailed the fairway, placed his second shot to the base of the green, then deftly chipped to within three feet of the flag. But he missed the birdie try. A score of 62 in a major championship must have felt—and still feels—like golf’s version of the three-minute mile.
“I knew Jack would get charged up when he saw what Tom was doing,” Jeanne Weiskopf said. “It’s been that way all their lives. They really get their incentives fired up when they are going head-to-head.”
Weiskopf usually needed Nicklaus to jump-start his motivation; Nicklaus never needed such a push. Nicklaus’s two-day total of 134 at Baltusrol established a new two-round record for the U.S. Open. By Sunday evening, he had defeated Japan’s Isao Aoki to claim his fourth U.S. Open trophy by posting the lowest four-day total in the championship’s history.
“I’ve always felt that a large part of winning comes from true desire,” Nicklaus said that evening. “If you don’t have the desire to spend a lot of time working at it, you’re not going to do it.... Then you go out and spend six months working your tail off and you wonder if you’re doing the right thing. The right thing for the game, the right thing for your family, the right thing for your friends. You wonder if it’s right to put them through that.”

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