The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (6 page)

Elder was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1934 just three-and-a-half months after the inaugural Masters. His father was killed in the Second World War, and his grief-stricken mother passed away soon thereafter. To help support his other nine siblings, Elder began caddying at a local course and became enamored with the sport of golf. As a teen, he dropped out of high school and, instead, honed his golf game and began playing big-money matches under the tutelage and support of legendary hustler Titanic Thompson. Later he refined his game under former Tour player Ray Mangrum and the legendary black golfer Ted Rhodes.

After a stint in the U.S. Army, Elder started on the professional tour—but not the PGA Tour, where a “Caucasian only” rule was enforced until 1961. Elder began competing in the United Golfers Association, which he dominated for nearly a decade, winning four national titles on whatever hardscrabble municipal tracts they could find that were open to minorities.

In 1967, Elder captured more than three-quarters of the UGA events and scraped up enough money to try the Qualifying Tournament for the PGA Tour. “You had to have proof of $20,000, that was the exact number,” says Bob Murphy, who had a sponsor and entered the same year. Players such as Elder, who was thirty-three years old and black, didn’t have those same opportunities, but Elder made it through on his first try.

The 1974 season was his seventh on the PGA Tour. He had failed to convert three final-round leads into a win. His career record included six runner-up finishes, three third-place finishes, and a load of heartbreak. “I’d be thinking about Augusta rather than taking my time and focusing on winning a golf tournament,” he admitted.

At Memphis in 1969, he was the 54-hole co-leader before Dave Hill fired a 65 to pass him. A few weeks later at the Buick Open, using a borrowed putter, he led the field after the second and third rounds, but on the last day he ballooned to an 80, which left him tied for 12th. There was another 54-hole lead squandered at San Diego in 1971. The next year at Hartford, he hung a five-foot birdie putt on the lip at the 72nd hole that would have won, only to have good friend Lee Trevino make one from twelve feet on the last and sixteen feet on the first extra hole to deny Elder again.

The closest call of all had occurred in Elder’s rookie season of 1968 at the American Golf Classic where he faced Jack Nicklaus in a sudden-death playoff on national television. The two matched each other for four holes. “I had to make a putt at every one of them to keep it going, and I made them all,” recounts Nicklaus. “I think I wore Lee out.” Finally on the fifth extra hole, Nicklaus prevailed. Elder may not have won, but it was a victory for black golfers everywhere. “Elder did more for Negro golf in forty-five minutes than everybody else put together had done in forty-five years,” said Maxwell Stanford, then president of the UGA.

This time around in Pensacola, Elder entered the final round in 3rd place, trailing another player anxious for his maiden PGA Tour title. Peter Oosterhuis was twenty-five years old—fourteen years Elder’s junior—with just eight starts in the United States but a wealth of experience. He had already won eleven times around the world (two of those in duels with Gary Player), led the Order of Merit in Europe three years running, and played on two Ryder Cup teams. He stood out on a golf course as much as Elder did. He was six-feet, five-inches tall. And he was English.

Although his parents played golf, Oosterhuis didn’t take to the game until age twelve when he caught the eye of a professional during a clinic for school kids in southeast London. Oosterhuis took divots on his shots when nobody else did. He began spending more time at golf than on his school work as he rose up the amateur ranks. After going to work for an insurance brokerage, visions of a professional career never entered his mind until the 1968 World Amateur Team, when someone asked him if he’d ever thought about turning professional. He hadn’t until that moment. Oosterhuis turned pro and took his game around the world, from Europe to Australia to South Africa and back, but the Englishman longed to play in America. He had already played in the Masters, his first invitation coming as a complete surprise to him when it arrived in the winter of 1971 at his parents’ home in England while he was in South Africa. They called him with the words, “Peter’s got an invitation to the Masters.” He even led the Masters going into the final round in 1973 by three shots and was still in it toward the end until a bogey at the par-five 15th left him two shots behind.

“Accurate and steady was the name of Elder’s game,” says Oosterhuis. “You got a feeling he was pretty determined when he was out there.” Oosterhuis wasn’t aware of the significance of a possible victory for Elder, but as the afternoon progressed, he remembers many more cheers for the American than the Englishman, no matter the race. “I felt that they were rooting for Lee,” recalls Oosterhuis, “the American as opposed to the foreigner.” Elder felt the support, saying, “It was a white gallery, and they were pulling for me, a black man. But I felt they were pulling for me as a golfer, not a black man. That’s the way I want it.”

On the final nine, the tournament became a two-man battle on a layout that suited each. Pensacola Country Club was a flat, short (6,679 yards), tree-lined layout just off Pensacola Bay with small, pushed-up greens. Oosterhuis considered his irons and short game his strengthens, but his driving could be wayward. Off the tees at Pensacola, he could utilize his 1-iron that had brought him so much
success elsewhere. Elder was known for his accuracy tee-to-green, and this type of course helped separate him from the field as well. But reading the extremely grainy Bermuda grass greens was a challenge. On Friday alone, Elder had missed six putts inside seven feet.

Oosterhuis’s short game shone going down the stretch. He chipped in for birdie on the 11th. He holed out a bunker shot for birdie on the 13th. After rolling in a twelve-foot birdie on the 16th, the Englishman held a two-shot lead with two holes to play. He looked like a winner, so much so that Tour officials were huddling to determine whether or not a win would make him a Tour member and whether or not he’d be eligible for the following week’s Tournament of Champions.

Then, Elder hit a 7-iron to three feet for birdie at the 17th hole. One behind on the 18th, he pulled his drive left. Looking forward, there was a path to the green. He hooked a low 6-iron around the trees to four feet. He made the putt to force the playoff.

Pensacola, like a majority of PGA Tour events in the mid-1970s, was not televised. So Rose Elder was kept up to date via telephone from the course courtesy of Hubert Green and his wife.

The playoff began on the 1st hole, where Elder again found trouble off the tee, but the normally sure-footed Oosterhuis missed a two footer for the win. Then on the 2nd hole, Oosterhuis missed a four footer for birdie to win, and followed that with another short birdie miss on the 3rd.

With both players lying two on nearly the same line at the 4th hole, Oosterhuis, just a foot farther out, cozied his putt up to the hole for a certain par. Elder had an eighteen-foot putt for birdie. After seeing his opponent’s putt, he struck his on-line, and when it hit the back of the cup and disappeared Elder literally leaped right into the history books.

“One of the happiest things is that now that story, the blacks and the Masters, is done with,” said Elder later. “All of this publicity has given them a kind of bad name.”

The club, tournament, and Clifford Roberts had taken widespread criticism over the years, with charges of racial discrimination coming from black players, journalists, and even U.S. Congressmen. In June 1971, Roberts announced a series of changes in Masters invitation categories. Beginning for the 1972 tournament, winners of PGA Tour events in the preceding twelve months would earn invitations. The Masters had always said that if a black player qualified under one of the entry criteria, he would be invited. Roberts was true to his word, almost immediately calling Pensacola Country Club. Unable to talk personally with Elder, he passed along his congratulations and told officials that he was delighted Elder would be invited. A statement he later released read: “I believe that the PGA has designated the Monsanto Open as one of its major tournaments. In that case, Lee Elder has earned his invitation and he will receive it. We’re pleased that Elder is the representative of his race to qualify here because he has been a fine player for a number of years. He is quite likely to make a good showing.”

After years of coming up short, Elder was a PGA Tour winner. Relieved, he told his wife on the phone after the tournament, “It’s finally over.” But it was only the beginning.

“
IT REMINDS ME
of the first Masters in 1934,” said seventy-year-old Fred Corcoran, a former PGA Tournament Director who was a pioneering organizer and agent in the game. “Then everybody was talking about Bob Jones’s return to golf. Now, everybody is talking about Elder.” But just days before, his golf game was in shambles before the biggest week of his career. He sat sixty-first on the money list with only $10,313 in earnings. All of the distractions had brought down his game.

After his Monsanto Open victory, Elder returned home the next morning to a large welcoming party at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. He was front page news in that morning’s
Washington Post
with a large photo and story just across from
another headline that read “President To Reply On Tapes.” The next fifty weeks would be quite eventful for both Elder and the country as a whole. Immediately, the Elders’ phone was besieged with dozen of interview and media requests and kept ringing for twelve months:
Sports Illustrated, Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, People, Ebony, Jet
, the
New York Times
, and
The Flip Wilson Show
just to name a few.

In addition to the constant media queries, Elder sat through countless meetings for his scholarship fund and attended to endless sponsorship obligations. Of course, there were death threats. Some said watch out when you get to Augusta. Others said you’ll never make it to Augusta. He had to endure political and social pressures from both outside and inside his camp. There were whites who didn’t want him to play and blacks who thought he wasn’t black enough and that Charlie Sifford deserved to be the first. Some thought he should boycott as a protest. “As hard as I’ve tried to get there, how can I run away?” he said.

The pressures even came from his inner circle. “They used to have a virtual entourage around them and with them all the time,” says Murphy. “I always felt there were people trying to get him to do something for them all the time. That’s distracting.”

The attention increased beginning on August 8, 1974, when President Richard Nixon resigned and Vice President Gerald Ford became president. Ford was a terrific athlete growing up and star football player at the University of Michigan; yet he didn’t start playing golf seriously until the mid-1960s. Ford soon played golf religiously and enjoyed his time around professional golfers. He was hooked on golf and on Elder as well. They played a casual round on October 20, and, on December 1, Ford attended a dinner in honor of Elder at the Washington Hilton to raise money for his scholarship fund. Ford told the attendees, “People won’t remember 1975 as the first full year of Gerald Ford’s presidency; they’ll remember it as the year Lee Elder first played in the Masters.”

Elder must have felt like he was running for political office, as every move he made was followed and dissected. Even normally innocent practice rounds like the one he played on October 28 became national news. That’s when Roberts took the proactive step of arranging a trip to Augusta National for Elder. He would play with Deane Beman; Jim Gabrielsen, a standout amateur from Atlanta; and their host member, J. Paul Austin, president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Coca-Cola and chairman of the TPD policy board. Roberts sent a chauffeured-driven limousine to pick them up at nearby Daniel Field. Roberts also invited CBS News and the Augusta newspapers to cover the occasion. Elder hit his first tee shot into the right trees. Everyone took a mulligan, but Elder couldn’t break par, shooting a two-over 74.

Being under a magnifying glass took its toll. “I was tight,” said Elder. “I never had that much attention, where all eyes are on you and every place you turn someone is talking to you. It certainly weighs pretty heavy.” Elder didn’t have the time to put as much work into his golf game. He put on weight. A chronic back condition flared up. He began having knee pains.

His outlook remained bleak until April 6. In one day, Elder’s mood changed with a final-round 69 at the Greater Greensboro Open. The round included a double eagle on the par-five 14th, holing a 5-iron from 181 yards—the first on Tour in one year. The 12th-place finish was his best result in more than six months.

Elder’s original goal at the Masters was to finish in the top-twenty-four, which earned invitations for the next year. His result in Greensboro elevated his optimism. “I’m thinking along the lines of winning,” he said. “I feel I have a good shot. I’m playing well enough to win perhaps, if the breaks go my way.”

Lee Elder arrived at the Augusta National Golf Club for the 1975 Masters around 2:30 p.m. Monday with his wife Rose and longtime friend Dr. Philip Smith, the director of the Martin Luther King Hospital in Los Angeles. Immediately, he was enveloped by
members of the press—sportswriters, television and radio reporters, some of whom had been waiting in the parking lot for several hours. Walking from his car to the clubhouse, he said, “I’m not talking. Every time I talk, I get in trouble.”

The constant attention had overwhelmed even one of the most accommodating pros. He had already shunned most media requests the previous few weeks. “All he asks is a week to be left alone,” said Rose. “He is here to play a tournament. After all, he has been talking for fifty-two weeks.” But the demand to hear from Elder was so great that all parties agreed it was best for one more press conference to be staged Tuesday afternoon.