Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (53 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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During the summer of 1973, Tom Weiskopf had proved he could summon Nicklaus’s brand of desire to achieve Nicklaus-like achievements; but he could not sustain it.
So when Weiskopf carded a five over 75 on Friday—he would plummet with a 76-75 weekend performance to finish in thirty-seventh place, seventeen strokes behind Nicklaus—he took the fall gracefully.
“Yesterday was my day,” he said after his second-round 75. “Today was not. It’s that simple.”
There were not many more days on tour that belonged to Weiskopf. He remained a relevant force during the early 1980s: tenth-place finishes in the 1980 PGA and 1982 Masters, along with a pair of tournament wins during a ten-month period in 1981 and 1982.
Neither victory convinced anyone that
these
next ten years would be Weiskopf’s best in golf. His September 1981 win in the LeJet Classic in Abilene, Texas, came while all the tour stars, including Nicklaus, were out of the country crushing Europe in the Ryder Cup. His final PGA win came the following Fourth of July. Again, the field that week at the seventy-ninth Western Open was fairly depleted, without Nicklaus, Trevino, Miller, Palmer, Tom Watson, and six of the season’s top-ten money earners. But Weiskopf sank a seven-foot birdie on the seventy-second hole of Butler National to edge out Larry Nelson, playing what he called “the best I’ve ever played from tee to green for four straight days.” His sixteenth tour victory also came with a piece of irony: Weiskopf had earned his first paycheck ($487.50) at the Western Open twenty-eight years earlier.
“The press and the fans basically have always kind of pulled for me,” he explained. “They don’t like to see me do some of the things I do. I guess I don’t like to see me do them either. But I’m always trying to improve myself. I don’t know if you believe this or not, but I care what people think. I really do.”
As much as Weiskopf claimed to have cared what others thought, those who knew him best admired him for the exact opposite.
“[Weiskopf has been] frequently criticized for not being ‘more dedicated to golf’ or ‘true to [his] talent,’” Jack Nicklaus wrote years later. “In my opinion, what [he] really [deserves] is applause for being true to [himself].”
Being true to himself, Weiskopf essentially dropped off the PGA tour in 1984. He joined CBS Sports for a time and, after a tryout in 1981, served as a Masters commentator from 1985 to 1995. Fittingly, Weiskopf was at the microphone to analyze Jack Nicklaus during his memorable victory at Augusta National in 1986.
With Nicklaus standing on the tee at the par-three sixteenth, two strokes behind and in desperate need of a birdie, CBS announcer Jim Nantz asked Weiskopf—on air—what the Golden Bear’s mind-set was at this moment.
“If I knew the way he thought,” Weiskopf replied, “I would have won this tournament.”
Weiskopf still loved to hunt and, as he did on several occasions during his tour days, spent weeks away from everything, secluded in Arizona or Montana cabins while pursuing big game. By the late 1980s, nabbing Alaskan Kodiak and mountain grizzly bears far outweighed birdies and eagles.
But Weiskopf never left the game of golf behind.
To his critics, Weiskopf had “wasted” much of his athletic prime—hunting, fishing, and unwinding while others focused on making themselves great golfers. An ugly dispute with Fred Couples in 1991 highlighted this common belief.
In response to Weiskopf’s charge (in a
Golf Digest
article) that Couples had “no goals in life ... He has great touch and power, but if he had Jack’s goals ...” Couples returned the favor.
“He’s a waste product.... What did he do, quit at forty? He was supposed to have all that talent. How many majors did he win? ... I don’t think Tom Weiskopf is any Jack Nicklaus, so it goes in one ear and out the other.”
Perhaps the most infamous of all Weiskopf indiscretions derived from his refusing a 1977 Ryder Cup invitation in order to go hunting.
“I told them I had applied and had been accepted to go Dall sheep hunting in the Yukon and try to complete my Grand Slam of North American sheep [including bighorn, desert bighorn, and stone],” Weiskopf explained years later. “I told them how I had to book the trip two years in advance, had finally been accepted, and had already put my deposit in. I expressed how much I had enjoyed playing on two Ryder Cup teams, but how I’d rather have someone else have the opportunity.”
But all that time in the mountains would eventually make Weiskopf a shining star in another realm of the sport.
“At the end of 1984 I quit the regular tour, because of the way I was handling my temperament,” he told the golf journalist and historian Al Barkow. “I was offered an opportunity to work with [famed golf course architect] Jay Morrish in creating Troon North in Scottsdale. I knew I had to get away from the game for at least a year, so I thought I’d see if I liked architecture. I could still go back on tour if I wanted to, but I never did.”
While Morrish initially handled the more technical elements of course design, Weiskopf brought to the project a creative imagination, a love of nature and the land, as well as a delight in golf’s mental intricacies. By 1986, the duo finished Troon North, which shared the site name of his lone major championship. Eventually, Weiskopf began working more on his own designs (Morrish and Weiskopf parted ways in 1994), and his signature became mountain courses. The Ridge at Castle Pines North in Castle Rock, Colorado, and Loch Lomond Golf Club near Glasgow, Scotland, were among several creations that won him special acclaim.
So dedicated was Weiskopf to making Loch Lomond a gem, he actually spent two summers living in the Garden Cottage near the third tee while he oversaw the project.
“When it’s all over, when I’m gone, if people would say, ‘You know, I think Tom Weiskopf was a better designer than he was a player,’ that would be the best compliment I could ever have.”
Weiskopf was now revered as a great course designer and a connoisseur of the game’s aesthetics. But—when he wanted to—the man could still play.
In 1993, Weiskopf once again joined the tour ... the Senior Tour. Like Nicklaus before him, he won his first (unofficial) Senior Tour appearance, shooting 66-67-69 in the Chrysler Cup at the TPC Prestancia Stadium Golf Course in Sarasota.
“There was a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear and a lot of doubt,” he said. “It meant so much to play well here.... I wanted to show these guys I could still play. I think they know it now.”
Weiskopf played exceptionally well during the spring, posting top tens in his next two senior events, and then, at Nicklaus’s Cochise Course, placed eighth in the Tradition (one stroke better than the course architect). And a course-record-tying 64 in the PGA National in April gave Weiskopf the lead halfway into the season’s second major, the Senior PGA Championship.
Despite a gimpy knee, the familiar 1970s version of Tom Weiskopf—tremendous power, punctuated by laser-perfect long irons—reemerged that week. So, too, did the plainspoken Ohioan who made headlines just by opening his mouth.
Weiskopf’s third-round 72 dropped him into a tie for third place, four shots behind the leader, Tom Wargo. A former assembly-line worker at General Motors who began playing the game at age twenty-five, Wargo hadn’t cut his teeth on the PGA tour like most of his senior peers.
“Hopefully, it’s going to be quite difficult [for Wargo],” Weiskopf said about the final round. “I don’t mean that in a nasty way, but it’s a little bit different. I don’t know what type of player he is—obviously, he’s a heck of a player. But has he won out here? That’s a big deal. There will be a lot of thoughts going through his head. He’ll see names on the scoreboard he knows that are going to put pressure on him. Capable players, accomplished players.”
In the end, Wargo hung on and defeated such “capable ... accomplished” players as Nicklaus, Trevino, Isao Aoki, Bob Charles, and Bruce Crampton, whom he beat in a play-off. Poor play down the stretch crushed Weiskopf’s chance to catch Wargo. He finished fourth, tied with his 1973 U.S. Open final-round playing partner, Bob Charles.
Although Weiskopf finished twenty-sixth on the 1993 Senior Tour earnings list, money was not why he had interrupted his semireclusive—and lucrative—course-design career.
“I had one goal in mind as a senior,” he said years later, “to win the U.S. Senior Open, because it’s the only championship for seniors that is pure. It’s on a championship course at around seven thousand yards, has fast greens, rough, tough pins; you have to walk; it has a full field and a cut.”
Weiskopf’s chance for that first career U.S.G.A. championship came in July.
Although Senior Tour star Chi Chi Rodriguez (five under par) closed out each of the opening two rounds in the lead, Weiskopf played the best of anyone from tee to green. And he still spoke with the swagger of his early days on tour.
“I played perfect today; I have for two days,” he said about a 69 on Friday that brought him back to even par. “I hit fifteen greens [Thursday] and never made a putt. I had a lot of opportunities and missed them and got a little frustrated. Situations like that are trying on your patience, and I’m not a patient person, but I stuck with it.”
Weiskopf believed he could score at Cherry Hills—“This course suits my game because I’m a good long-iron player and I can use them off the tee”—and he had proven as much by finishing fourth in the U.S. Open there in 1978.
Nevertheless, Nicklaus—not Weiskopf—stepped to the fore on moving day.
Nicklaus wanted the 1993 Senior U.S. Open to be the stage for his first tournament win in nearly two years. And a four under 67 on Saturday pushed him within one round of ending the embarrassing streak.
“Saturday is the day you usually get yourself in or out of the tournament,” he told the press about his one-stroke lead before the final round. “It’s the first Saturday I’ve gotten myself in the tournament in quite a while.”
With another rendition of “Jack is back!” sweeping through the gallery and press tent, Weiskopf’s two under par on Saturday went largely unnoticed. Four strokes behind Nicklaus and still unable to turn good shots into birdies, the Towering Inferno bubbled over.
An iron off the tee on the 222-yard, par-three eighth landed on the green and skidded into the rough.
“I guess I just don’t have the talent to hit this green,” he blurted out.
Carding a bogey there, Weiskopf took his frustration out on nearby U.S.G.A. officials.
“This is ridiculous,” Weiskopf shouted for all to hear. “If you’re going to keep the greens this hard, move the tees up and give us a chance, let us hit five- or six-irons. Where it is now, I could sit out here all day long and not get the ball close to the hole.”
Putting that frustration behind him, Weiskopf played brilliantly on Sunday, birdying five of the first eight holes to tie Nicklaus for the lead. He nearly seized another on the ninth—to card an amazing 29 on the front—but his twelve-foot birdie try died just before the cup.
“I was going under the basic principle that somewhere along the line, things were going to change because I’d putted so poorly in the first three rounds,” he said afterward.
“And the only reason I made some [Sunday] was because I was determined that I was going to make these putts. Basically, it’s a mind game. You have to be your best cheerleader. You have to just tell yourself you can do these things.”
Weiskopf dropped a stroke on the tenth by failing to save par from four feet, then sank a twelve-foot birdie on the thirteenth, to again vault him over Nicklaus. After a three putt on the par-three fifteenth cost him the lead, Weiskopf could still pressure Nicklaus with a birdie or eagle on the 540-yard, par-five seventeenth, reachable in two. But he drove the ball into the rough and settled for par.
Minutes later, Nicklaus sank a twelve-foot birdie on the sixteenth. Although not as dramatic as the forty-footer he drained on Augusta National’s sixteenth in 1975, this putt had the same effect: It sealed another major championship for Nicklaus, at the expense of Tom Weiskopf.
Nicklaus preserved his one-stroke lead with a par on number seventeen, and with Weiskopf unable to birdie number eighteen, the toughest hole that week, Nicklaus just needed a par to win. He landed a one-iron safely in the fairway, then took a five-iron from his caddie—once again, his son Jackie—and nailed the middle of the green.
“I knew it was over as soon as he hit his shot on the green,” Weiskopf admitted. “Who can tell me when he’s three-putted to lose a major championship? The guy is the greatest putter under pressure of all time, bar none.”
Weiskopf, watching from behind the eighteenth green, knew his rival well: Nicklaus lagged his thirty-five-footer to less than three feet, then sank his par putt for the victory.
“I gave it the best run I possibly could,” Weiskopf said afterward. “I played the best four rounds of golf I have ever played under those types of (major tournament) conditions. I know in my mind no one played better than I did from tee to green.
“The guy is just one stroke better than me all the time, it seems.”
•
16
•
John Schlee
I
t could have been John Schlee, the 1973 United States Open Champion. Yet golf never had a prouder second-place finisher than the Seaside, Oregon, native.

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