Moment of Glory

by John Feinstein

  “I knew what was going on up ahead,” Furyk said. “I didn’t want to tell myself yet that it was just Stephen and me, because I figured the minute I did that someone would finish with four straight birdies and I’d get tight. I knew all the stories about guys getting ahead of themselves mentally. That was the one thing I wanted to make sure I didn’t do.”

  Only at the start of the back nine did Furyk finally stumble a little. He had been the only player among the last thirty on the golf course to play the front nine without a bogey. Now, he bogeyed 10 after pushing his tee shot into a fairway bunker. Still, the lead went back to five after Leaney missed a five-foot par putt at the 11th and dropped to five under.

  “Every time all day that I had any chance to put pressure on him, he either made a putt or I missed one,” Leaney said. “A lot of it was him. It isn’t as if I played badly, because I didn’t. But I never was able to get myself into position where I was able to seriously think, ‘I can do this.’ ”

  At that moment he was trying hard not to look over his shoulder at Weir, who was having a fascinating, up-and-down tournament in his first appearance in a major as the Masters champion. On Thursday he had made back-to-back double bogeys at eight and nine but had managed to come back to shoot 73. He had followed that with 67 and 68, and, when he almost holed a wedge at 14 and made birdie, he was at three under, still seven shots behind Furyk but only two behind Leaney.

  “I knew it wasn’t likely, but I went to the back nine thinking, ‘Get on one last little roll here, and get it to six and see what happens,’ ” Weir said. “As well as Jim was playing, I didn’t expect it, but it’s the U.S. Open and things do happen.”

  As Weir played the 15th hole, Furyk and Leaney were on the 12th, the toughest hole on the golf course, a long uphill par-four. Furyk’s second shot landed just on the front of the green but spun back all the way down the hill in front of the green, leaving him with a long chip.

  Knowing the potential damage of a short pitch, Furyk pitched safely past the pin, basically accepting his bogey—always a smart play at the Open when in trouble. The bogey cut his lead on Leaney, who parred the hole, back to four again.

  Furyk wasn’t about to panic. He wasn’t happy about making two bogeys in three holes, but he hadn’t expected not to make any mistakes all day. He hit a good drive at the 13th and an excellent second shot to within 10 feet. Leaney’s second shot wasn’t nearly as close, but he rolled in his 25-footer for birdie, allowing himself a modest fist shake for the first time all day. When Furyk missed his birdie putt, the lead was down to three, and the NBC people, hoping for some drama—any drama—at the finish were practically jumping up and down for joy.

  “The game is on,” Miller shouted. “All of a sudden this has a different feel, doesn’t it?”

  “Big mo switch right there,” Maltbie added.

  The two players involved didn’t see the three-shot margin as being quite that dramatic. “That was when it occurred to me that it really was match play,” Furyk said. “We had four holes left, and everyone else was seven or eight shots back or more, and either in the clubhouse or almost there. Unless something crazy happened, Stephen was the only one who could catch me. It was clear by then, he wasn’t going to go away. The guy was a good player, and he was playing a very solid round.”

  Leaney was, but he knew time was running out. “I had started the day three back with 18 to go,” he said. “Now I was three back with five to go. Far from impossible, but I knew I had to play close to perfect to have any chance.”

  The 14th was a 414-yard par-four that was playing downwind. Both players hit good drives that allowed them to hit pitching wedges from the fairway. Leaney hit a reasonably good shot, the ball checking up about 18 feet short of the flag. “That keeps the pressure on,” Maltbie said.

  Furyk had hit a perfect four-wood down the left side of the fairway, the ball stopping just short and left of an in-ground yardage marker. It was clear that his swing was likely to be impeded as he followed through by the marker, so he called over Reed McKenzie—who, as the USGA president, was the walking rules official with the final group—to be sure he was entitled to relief. McKenzie agreed. As a courtesy, Furyk called Leaney over too to show him where the ball was.

  “You okay with that?” he asked.

  Leaney nodded assent.

  Technically, since a rules official was right there and had granted him relief, Furyk didn’t have to call Leaney over, but he did it anyway—something a player might do in a match-play situation.

  “I just didn’t see any reason for there to be any doubt in his mind,” Furyk said later. “It’s the U.S. Open; I’m an American, Reed’s an American. I just thought it was the right thing to do.”

  “Just shows you the kind of guy Jim is,” Leaney said.

  Once he had dropped his ball away from the yardage marker, Furyk took a lot of time discussing the shot with Cowen. He even backed off an extra time just to be certain he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

  “This is a green-light hole location for him,” Bob Murphy said, as Furyk fidgeted over the shot.

  A green-light hole location means that the hole is in a favorable spot for a player’s natural shot. Furyk plays a right-to-left draw, and the flag was on the left side of the green, a rare location where players had a chance to get the ball to hit and stop.

  As soon as Furyk got the ball in the air, he was talking to it. “Be right,” he said, a reference to being the right distance, not to going to the right. Walking forward, through almost clenched teeth, he said it again: “Be right.”

  It was right—close to perfect, in fact. The ball landed just short and right of the flagstick and rolled to within three feet before stopping, as the loudest roar of the day went up.

  “I knew that I’d hit it perfectly,” Furyk said. “That’s why I was begging for it to be the right distance because I thought I had a chance to get it really close.”

  As his son followed through, Mike Furyk was staring, not at the ball but at him. “I could see it in his eyes right at that moment,” he said. “The thing I always notice with the great players is their eyes. At that moment, Jim reminded me of Hogan, the way he would stare a ball down. What I’ve always noticed with Tiger when he’s hit a great shot, and he knows it at a big moment, is his eyes. You can see them narrow because he’s honed in on what he wants to see happen, what he knows is going to happen. Jim had that look. He looked like a bird of prey.

  “Right then, for the first time all day, I allowed myself to think ‘He’s got it.’ I turned to Linda and said, ‘It isn’t over yet, but right now the tournament is his.’ ”

  Most of America had been thinking that all day long. But it is a lot easier to concede victory to someone when you are spectating than when you’re in the crucible. All the Furyks had been in the crucible throughout the afternoon. Now, as he half walked, half ran to the green, Jim knew he was a lot closer to the finish line than he had been a few moments before.

  So did Leaney. “I knew even if I made my birdie putt I was going to be three down with four to go against a guy who really looked like he was in control of his game,” he said. “I knew the last couple of holes were very tough and things can happen, but the window was closing pretty quickly.”

  Leaney missed his birdie putt. Furyk looked his over carefully, going through his whole routine before knocking it in. Now the lead was four with four holes to play. The good news for Leaney was that Weir was struggling with the last two holes. On 17, the monster par-three, he hit a four-iron that looked as if it was going to bounce between the bunkers and end up close to the hole. Instead, the ball kicked dead right into a bunker, and he made bogey. Then, after finding another bunker off the tee at 18, he finished with another bogey, leaving him tied for third with the long-finished Kenny Perry at one under par.

  Leaney and Furyk both made routine pars at 15 and 16, finding the middle of the green. NBC had stopped showing any names on the leaderboard except for the top two, as if
it didn’t want to remind viewers how far back the rest of the field was at that stage.

  Standing on the 17th tee leading Leaney by four with no one else in the field closer than nine shots away, Furyk knew that only an act of God was going to stop him from winning the Open. Still, he remained steely eyed, firing a three-iron just over the back of the green, knowing that the highest number he could make from there was four. Leaney found a front bunker, and both men, playing conservatively to take a high number out of the equation, walked off with comfortable bogeys.

  There was no doubt now that the deed was done. Tabitha Furyk had started crying almost from the minute Jim had birdied 14, knowing her husband well enough to be sure he wasn’t going to blow a four-shot lead with four holes to play. “Fortunately, I was wearing sunglasses,” she said. “But I was a complete mess.”

  She had called day care and learned that Caleigh was the only child still there. Could they, she wondered, bring Caleigh to the back of the 18th green. Not only could they do it, they did it with a police escort. As her husband and Leaney walked to the 18th tee, Tabitha ran ahead to collect her daughter and prepare for her husband’s triumphant arrival.

  The 18th hole was really a coronation for both players. Furyk was going to be the U.S. Open champion. Leaney was finally going to realize his dream of reaching the PGA Tour. Furyk led Leaney by four, and Leaney led everyone else by four.

  “I’d stuck to my strategy, hitting three-woods off the tee all day,” Leaney said. “I looked at the board coming off 17 and figured, what the heck, I might as well hit driver.”

  Furyk went the other way. He too had been hitting three-woods—and the occasional four-wood—off the tee, both men wanting to stay short of the fairway bunkers as best they could. Now, as he walked onto the 18th tee, Cowen didn’t even wait to be asked his opinion.

  “I like three-iron right here,” he said, pulling the three-iron out before Furyk had a chance to start a debate.

  For the first time since his putt at the fifth trickled into the side of the hole, Furyk smiled. He knew Cowen wanted to be sure he couldn’t reach any of the bunkers, especially knowing how pumped up his man had to be at that moment.

  His three-iron went down the right side of the fairway. Leaney’s driver blew over the bunkers. Furyk hit a seven-iron second shot, and the ball bounced to the back left side of the green, about 30 feet from the hole. Leaney also found the green with a nine-iron.

  As soon as he saw his ball on the green, Furyk knew there were no more ifs, ands, or buts left. There would be no Arnold Palmer collapse or a Jean Van de Velde triple bogey or any kind of suspense. There hadn’t really been much suspense all day, but now any last vestiges were gone.

  “I didn’t think I was going to six-putt from there,” he said.

  When the realization hit him that the dream was now an absolute reality, Furyk began to lose it. As he walked up the fairway, the applause washing over him, the tears started to come. Once he had hit his second shot, Leaney’s first thought was to walk over and congratulate him, but when he saw Furyk crying, he decided to wait.

  “I wanted to go and say ‘Well done,’ right then and there,” he said. “But when I saw him crying, I thought I should just give him his space and let him drink it all in.”

  The adrenaline that Cowen had worried about on the tee actually kicked in on the green. Furyk rifled his first putt a good eight feet past the hole. By then he was able to joke with Cowen about how close he’d come to putting the ball off the green.

  He missed the putt coming back, which meant he would not break the Open scoring record but only tie it. “Never gave it a thought,” Furyk said. “All I knew when that last putt went in [it was about six inches long] was that I was a U.S. Open champion. No matter what happened the rest of my career, my name was going to be on that trophy.”

  He had shot the 72 Miller had predicted and had beaten Leaney (who also shot 72) by three, and Weir and Perry by seven. Nick Price and Vijay Singh, the two men most had thought might have a chance to go low and catch Furyk, had shot 75 and 78, respectively. Only four players had finished the championship under par.

  The Furyks had a Father’s Day moment on the green, Tabitha handing Caleigh to Jim, who hugged and kissed everyone.

  “We did it,” he whispered in his father’s ear, and it was about as warm a moment as you could hope to see.

  NBC would announce the next day that Sunday’s ratings had been the lowest for an Open since it began televising the event in 1995. Perhaps the ratings would have been higher if the network had been able to track Woods as he left for the airport. His plane was long gone by the time Furyk accepted the trophy.

  As Jim Furyk kissed it and held it up for all to see, he really didn’t care what the television ratings had been. His name was on the U.S. Open trophy. And he knew it would be there forever.

  BUT, AS IT TURNED out, Furyk’s name was not on the U.S. Open trophy.

  After he had accepted the trophy and spoken to the crowd and been put through all the media paces, Furyk finally made his way to the parking lot shortly after nine o’clock Chicago time.

  Exhaustion was kicking in. He had been up early, partly to play with Caleigh, partly because of nerves, and it had been a long, draining day—albeit one with a joyous ending. There was still some light left—Chicago is on the eastern tip of the central time zone, and June 18 is one of the longest days of the year—but Olympia Fields was largely empty when Jim and Tabitha, accompanied by a USGA official carrying the Open trophy, finally made their way to the car.

  The trophy had been wrapped up and boxed for the trip home. It isn’t very big, and, like the trophies from the British Open and the PGA, it is the champion’s for a year. (The Masters has no permanent trophy. Each champion receives one, a replica of the Augusta clubhouse, to keep. The green jacket is what comes back to the club after a year thereafter to be worn only on the grounds of the club.)

  In the case of the green jacket, players are technically not supposed to have duplicates made, but all of them do so anyway. The other three championships allow players to order duplicates of their trophies but have rules about how they should be made.

  “I think you can have it made at 90 percent the size of the original,” Furyk said. “That’s just in case something happens so there’s no confusing the original with the duplicate.”

  That was fine with Furyk. What stunned him was what the man from the USGA said as he helped load the box with the trophy into the back of Furyk’s car.

  “It’s your job to get it engraved,” he said.

  Furyk laughed. He figured that was a joke, maybe an old USGA tradition to give the champion a laugh at day’s end. Except the man wasn’t smiling.

  “Get it engraved?” Furyk said.

  “You got it,” the man said, shaking Furyk’s hand. “Congratulations. Great playing.”

  Furyk didn’t really think much about it that night or the next day. There was a celebration with family and friends back at the house, and then he had to be up shortly after dawn to take part in an Exelon outing that had been planned long before anyone thought he would be there as the U.S. Open champion. Instead of a preouting clinic, Furyk did a Q and A with the Exelon clients at the outing and couldn’t help but observe that they were hanging on his every word.

  That night, after his parents had flown to Hawaii to spend a few days together, he and Tabitha and Caleigh finally flew home to Ponte Vedra. Furyk was supposed to play at Westchester that week, and he wasn’t going to back out on the commitment. Normally, he would have gone straight from Chicago to Westchester to play a practice round, but he decided he needed a few hours at home to catch his breath.

  When the Furyks finally walked into their house Monday night, Jim carried the trophy inside, took it out of the box, and put it on a table. “Just looking at it inside my house made me smile,” he said. “Then I remembered what the USGA guy had said.”

  He took a close look at the trophy, and, sure enough, the last nam
e engraved on it was Tiger Woods—the 2002 champion. There was no sign of his name. Upon closer inspection, he could even see evidence that different engravers had been used by different champions.

  “Up until Steve Jones [1996], the names looked pretty much the same and the spacing was identical,” he said. “After that, some guys’ names were closer to the guy above, and some were farther. It was weird.”

  Furyk was amused and amazed at the notion that he was responsible for his own engraving. Like anyone who has ever played golf or watched golf, he had memories of watching the official engraver for the Royal and Ancient putting the champion’s name on the Claret Jug—the British Open trophy—before the awards ceremony took place.

  “I guess I just figured it was the same thing for our Open,” he said. “I was wrong.”

  The engraving soon became a running joke among the Furyks and their friends, especially when they showed friends the unengraved trophy.

  “We actually sat around thinking up a TV commercial,” Tabitha said. “We had Jim walking around in the mall carrying the trophy looking for a place that would engrave it for him.”

  “I’d finally find a place,” Jim added, “usually a kiosk or something, and I’d be standing there going, ‘It’s spelled F-U-R-Y-K.’ ”

  It wasn’t until January that Furyk finally boxed up the trophy and sent it off to be engraved. “It didn’t cost very much,” he said, smiling. “Actually, the insurance cost more than the engraving.

  “I did wonder, though, what they would have done if I brought it back the next June and said, ‘Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to get it engraved.’ ”

  Retief Goosen won the Open in 2004. Maybe the USGA could have asked him to take care of adding Furyk’s name while he had his own engraving done. After all, having won the championship once before (2001), Goosen clearly knew where to find an engraver.