Chasing Greatness

by Adam Lazarus

  “The greens were much softer than I expected they’d be,” he said. “The rough was there, and the course is longer than in the past, but the greens weren’t as fast.”

  FIRING A THREE UNDER PAR 68 on Friday put Jim Colbert in some elite company. Along with Ben Hogan, Deane Beman, and Gary Player, only Arnold Palmer, in the second round of the 1962 Open, had ever shot as low as 68 prior to Friday. Colbert’s 68 had tied the fourth-best championship score in course history: At Oakmont, “going low” essentially meant breaking 70.

  Colbert chalked up his fine round to more than solid ball striking, brilliant putting, or the shrewd guidance of his young caddie.

  “The greens are soft, men,” he observed early in the afternoon after completing his morning start. “If you drive well you’ve got a lot of short irons and the ball’s coming back when you hit the greens—they definitely were softer today than yesterday. That’s why you’ll be seeing some low scores today.”

  Colbert was right. For the first time in seven decades of Oakmont golf, breaking par, even shooting in the 60s, was not particularly exceptional, especially for those who teed off in the morning. And, naturally, the greens told the story.

  Ever since W C. Fownes and Emil Loeffler had reconfigured Oakmont’s putting surfaces in the early 1920s, the greens had intimidated, irritated, and occasionally humiliated just about every great golfer in the world. Except Jack Nicklaus.

  “I would prefer to see the greens as hard as a table and just as fast,” he told reporters. “Then I don’t think many players would be able to handle them.”

  No one shared the view of the man who, in 1962, had miraculously carded just one three-putt in ninety holes at Oakmont. But even Nicklaus admitted that near eighty-degree temperatures during round one—and the possibility of three more days of midsummer sun—meant that the greens needed to drink. Without some water, players would be putting on char by the end of the championship.

  U.S.G.A. and club officials, along with members of the grounds crew, met Thursday evening. Ultimately, U.S.G..A. executive director P. J. Boatwright authorized a five-minute watering of the greens.

  Oakmont’s course superintendent was Lou Scalzo, who started at the course in 1930, left seventeen years later, then returned the following decade to fill a vacant superintendent post. In 1971, the club installed a new automatic sprinkler system, and he was delighted to use it.

  “Scalzo punches some buttons and the sprinklers go on at night,” the Pittsburgh Press noted prior to the start of the championship. “[And] he seems almost smug that he will have the course in prime condition by the first round on Thursday. ‘Rain won’t bother it too much anymore,’ he said.”

  Scalzo nurtured each hole at Oakmont like a family of prize Thoroughbreds; he especially rejoiced in exasperating professional golfers.

  “I don’t have a favorite [hole], but the most stubborn is the eighth. The easiest to take care of is the twelfth, and the undulations on the fifth make it the one with the best sense of humor. But they’re all fast. I like to have ’em fast so golfers in the Open can’t break par.” With the Fownesean arrogance that made Oakmont notorious, Scalzo concluded: “I know there’ll be a lot of golfers complaining about the greens. But I don’t listen to anything they say.”

  Those prayers of dissenting golfers seemed to be answered that morning. Something went terribly wrong after Scalzo punched the buttons late Thursday evening. Unbeknownst to anyone, the five-minute watering cascaded into a deluge.

  In the wee hours before dawn on Friday, first Boatwright and U.S.G.A. executive committee vice president Frank “Sandy” Tatum, then Scalzo and the others recoiled when they walked the course and the turf squished underneath them. Whether the sprinklers were simply left on too long, or the system malfunctioned and then restarted after it shut down, or some other unknown mishap, no one knows for certain. One explanation passed on since that day seems most unlikely: The act-of-God scenario that claimed a bolt of lightning struck the sprinklers and restarted the water flow after the system had properly shut down.

  Regardless of how it happened, the putting surfaces were saturated.

  When the players gathered on the course early Friday morning, no one informed them of the problem or its source. A few assumed several sprinkler heads had broken, while another joked that he saw “casual water” on the greens.

  The situation was not funny to everyone.

  “Let’s just say the greens are softer than I’d like to see them. They won’t be watered tonight,” said Boatwright.

  Boatwright tried to hide his frustration, but apart from the unaesthetic look—a few greens looked like mush—the wet greens infuriated U.S.G.A. officials. But not nearly as much as they drove Oakmont’s proud members insane. Some even accused the U.S.G.A. of surrendering to players who complained about Thursday’s high scoring.

  Green speed is relative. The sprinkler-induced flood slowed down the surfaces early in Friday’s round, but—as Oakmont claimed the fastest greens known to man—they were still “keener” than most other putting surfaces on tour. Oakmont was tamer—just by a hair—not tame.

  Oakmont’s greens had earned their infamous reputation not simply because they were fast but because, under normal conditions, they refused to hold all but the most perfectly struck approach shots. Many seemingly excellent irons landed on the green, then rolled and rolled and rolled before finally sliding into trouble. Only the course’s unique variants of Poa annua—so fine and without grain—could explain how this happened time and time again.

  On a typical day like Thursday, a golfer might try to carry a ball onto the center of Oakmont’s slanted sixth green, then watch in horror as it darted through the putting surface and into a bushy plot of rough or one of several deep bunkers. Before the second round, anyone who shot “for the flagstick” at Oakmont was plain foolish. On Friday morning, by contrast, players encountered much softer and more inviting greens than the day before or, perhaps, at any time in Oakmont’s prior U.S. Open history.

  Significantly slower and receptive greens invariably altered how the course played. The 150-man field on Friday quickly figured out that approach shots would actually stick close to where they landed or—an incredible sight at Oakmont—spin backward after impact. Even players who teed off in the afternoon, after the course started to dry out, could be aggressive in attacking the flagstick. Iron shots and even fairway woods settled only ten or fifteen feet from where they landed; on Thursday, those same shots would have bounded another twenty or thirty feet.

  In Friday’s predawn hours before the first group teed off at seven thirty a.m., Lou Scalzo, his grounds crew, and several frantic U.S.G.A. officials scurried around the course tamping down towels or raking squeegees over the greens. With so many rounds to complete before cutting the field to less than half, a delay in the start time was not an option. The damage had been done: Oakmont’s greatest defense against subpar golf was vulnerable, and a record number of golfers took advantage.

  First to do so was Larry Wood, a thirty-three-year-old former club pro, whose only tour triumph had come in November 1970. Teeing off at 7:38 a.m., Wood shaved eight strokes off his Thursday round to shoot par 71. For decades, even par at Oakmont during a major championship was an extraordinary feat. But by sundown on Friday, twenty-six more golfers—better than one-sixth of the field—would match or break Oakmont’s hallowed par. Nearby—so the legend says—Emit Loeffler and the Fowneses were rolling over in their graves.

  Forrest Fezler, a twenty-three-year-old tour rookie, quickly eclipsed Wood. Back in February, Fezler had torn through the field at the Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic, leading at the end of rounds one, two, and three. He continued to lead through fourteen holes on the final Sunday, before Lee Trevino overtook him late on the back nine.

  Fezler contended on a few more weekends throughout the season, and later would win the PGA’s Rookie of the Year honors for 1973. But the highlight of his season came Friday morning at Oakmont. Minutes after
Wood surprised everyone in the scorer’s tent with his even-par 71, Fezler wowed them again with his two under 69. The U.S. Open newcomer shaved eleven strokes off his opening-round 80, a radical reversal in fortune at traditionally bulletproof Oakmont.

  It was only the beginning. Each with early morning tee times, Bert Yancey, Tom Joyce, and young Jerry Heard all shot 70, and Tom Shaw, another early riser, netted an even-par 71.

  As the day wore on, the field continued to assault Oakmont’s sacred identity. Journeyman John Schlee broke par by a stroke, as did fellow former Memphis State Tiger Greg Powers, a young, winless pro who had bounced back and forth between club jobs and the tour. But Powers’s 70 wasn’t even the best round in his threesome. Another winless twentysomething only three years removed from collegiate golf, Billy Ziobro, sank a twisting fifteen-foot birdie putt on the closing hole to post a 69.

  Collectively, Ziobro and Powers shot seventeen strokes lower on Friday than on Thursday. On any other day, that remarkable combined effort would have put their picture on the front page of the weekend sports section: “Unknown Duo Scores Revenge on Mean Old Oakmont.” Except that by the time Powers and Ziobro finished their rounds, they had been completely upstaged by another resurgent pairing.

  At twenty-nine years old, Brian “Bud” Allin was already one of the tour’s most well-traveled golfers. Born in Washington State, Allin, along with Mike Taylor and Johnny Miller, led Brigham Young to the school’s first Western Athletic Conference title in 1966. But the following year, at the height of the Vietnam War, he left Provo to join the army. An artillery lieutenant, the 135-pound, baby-faced Allin earned two bronze stars in eighteen months of service before returning to America to start a career as a professional golfer.

  In his first season on tour, Allin won just $355, but he somehow survived and his career truly took off early in 1973. At the Citrus Open in March, he shot 66-65-67-67 to take an eight-stroke victory, the second of his career. With more than $61,000 earned by mid-June, Allin held down the fifteenth spot on the tour’s money list. And after finishing late Thursday afternoon with a 78, Allin returned to Oakmont Friday morning and stunned the U.S.G.A. by matching Gary Player’s record-tying 67.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, Player had labeled his 67 his “finest Open round” ever. Coming from a former champion with five previous top-ten finishes, that statement carried much weight. On Friday, by the time the sun set over Oakmont’s soggy terrain, even 67 had lost its luster.

  ALLIN’S PLAYING PARTNERS IN THE first two rounds were originally Kermit Zarley and Dave Hill. Hill’s pretournament outburst and subsequent withdrawal had left an opening in the field. John Frillman, a club pro from Omaha, was the U.S.G.A.’s first alternate and would have taken Hill’s place, except he was already filling a spot vacated by Don January, who that very week abruptly abandoned the tour to focus on course design. The U.S.G.A. then turned to its second alternate, thirty-six-year-old Gene Borek, to join Zarley and Allin.

  For ten years, Eugene Edward Borek had been the head golf professional at Pine Hollow Country Club in East Norwich, Long Island. Although elite players viewed the job of club pro as a backup for those who could not survive on tour, Borek—who married young and raised four children—had chosen the more stable, family-centered life over that of a touring pro.

  Born to a Polish-American family in Yonkers, New York, Borek had first learned golf by caddying at nearby Dunwoodie Golf Course. As a teenager at Saunders High School, he captained the golf team and won consecutive Yonkers Scholastic Golf Championships. Enrolled at Oswego State the following summer, Borek quickly decided that college wasn’t the place for a blue-collar kid with seven older siblings.

  “If my family had had the money, I probably would have been able to take a scholarship and go to college. But we were basically a poor family, and none of us went to college. My father was a machinist, but he had heart problems early in life and didn’t work much during the time I was growing up. My mother carried the load during the Depression. She worked very hard. I got all of my drive from her.”

  Instead, the seventeen-year-old Borek briefly took a job at the Upper Montclair Country Club in New Jersey, then returned to work closer to home as an assistant to the pro at Scarsdale’s Sunningdale Country Club, Elmer Voight. During his apprenticeship, Borek befriended his boss’s son, Jon, and in August 1954 the two made their first trip to the Midwest for the National Caddie Championship at the Scarlet Course of Ohio State University.

  Jon lost in the quarterfinals; he would find more success as a Hollywood movie star than as a tournament golfer. Borek took third place and realized how good he might become ... and the financial constraints that would limit his horizons.

  “When we got home on the train in Grand Central we had eleven cents between us,” said Borek, who also won the Westchester caddie tournament that year. “I had the penny.”

  When he wasn’t performing the mundane chores of an assistant golf professional at Sunningdale—the club closed down for the winter, so he also worked during those months at the Estate Carlton House and Resort in St. Croix—Borek scraped up enough money to compete on two of the PGA’s minor-league winter circuits in the Caribbean and the Southern states.

  “In 1959, I played the Caribbean tour from St. Croix. I remember bringing back a lot of Panama hats and Mrs. Voigt sold them for me,” Borek recalled. “The club gave me some money the first year to play during the winter. Otherwise, I played as far as the money went. It was hard to make money. You didn’t make money just because you made the cut. If you didn’t finish in the top twenty-five, you didn’t make expenses.”

  By 1963—on the same day President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas—Pine Hollow Country Club offered Borek the head golf professional job, an unusually high position for a twenty-six-year-old.

  “Most of the guys didn’t get their first jobs until age thirty-five or so, only after they had been on tour awhile.”

  Excellent tournament performances during 1963 helped Borek land the plum job. He played in thirteen professional tournaments that season, won a (team) Metropolitan PGA event in October, and qualified for both his first United States Open and PGA Championships.

  Over the next decade, Borek remained at Pine Hollow while he and his wife, Joan, stayed in Long Island, raising two girls and two boys. He decided not to pursue the temptation of a touring pro’s fortune, but that didn’t stop him from amassing perhaps the most impressive competitive record of any club professional since Winged Foot’s Claude Harmon. Between 1963 and 1972, Borek qualified for seven U.S. Opens and three PGA Championships, and made the cut in six of those events.

  Like Lee Trevino—another golfer whose game matured without junior tournaments, amateur championships, or the college circuit—Borek’s finest season came in 1971. Since he never really enjoyed an “off-season,” Borek’s game stayed sharp all year round. So when the PGA held its championship in February (instead of the normal summer date), Borek was ready.

  After two days of play at the PGA’s National Golf Club in Palm Beach Gardens, Jack Nicklaus set the pace with consecutive three under 69s. The unfamiliar name near the top of the leaderboard was Borek, who, at two under, held a share of fourth place going into the weekend. He maintained that spot the next day, despite a one over 73, and while Nicklaus left the course Sunday afternoon with his ninth major championship, Borek left Florida knowing he could compete with the world’s best (a tired final round of 77 dropped him to a twenty-second-place tie).

  That May, Borek overcame a four-stroke deficit in the final round to win his second Long Island Open. Four weeks later at Merion, while Trevino and Nicklaus battled for another U.S. Open championship, Borek made the cut thanks to a one over par 71 on Friday: a lower round than either Trevino or Nicklaus that day. And if he hadn’t already done enough to shore up a second consecutive Metropolitan (New York) Golf Writers Player of the Year Award, he grabbed more headlines in October.

  In the Metropolitan PGA at Sunningdale, Borek
took the opening-round lead with a course-record-tying 67. The return to the club where he had spent nine years was a wonderful stroke of good fortune ... and hazardous to his health.

  In between rounds, he caught a virus and his second-round 75 dropped him out of the lead. During the thirty-six-hole final, Borek was so weak officials allowed him to use an electric cart. Despite chilly New York October weather, he shot a one under 70 in the morning, then “in the gusty cold wind that swept the Sunningdale Country Club,” shot a 73 to finish alone in third place, two behind the winner, Tom Nieporte. (Borek and Nieporte—a former Bob Hope Desert Classic champion—were the two best club pros in the New York area during the era.)

  Despite his illness, Borek returned to the tee a few days later at Pinehurst’s grueling number two course, site of the National PGA Club Pro Championship. While ageless Sam Snead took the lead (and eventually won), Borek posted consecutive 69s to tie for sixth place at the halfway point. He remained in the top ten after three rounds, then dragged to the finish with a 76, which dropped him into a tie for seventeenth place; he still outscored Nieporte by four strokes.

  Over the next year and a half, Borek padded his resume: In February 1972, he took second and third, respectively, at the Caracas Open and the International Open in Columbia. High finishes in several New York State tournaments, and a victory in the Long Island PGA Championship in July, earned Borek another Metropolitan Pro of the Year award. The next January, he won a $10,000 stroke-play championship at the PGA National and, in late spring, took runner-up to Nieporte in the 1973 Long Island Open. In June, he felt confident he would earn one of the New York Metropolitan District’s nine qualifying spots for the U.S. Open.