by Adam Lazarus
“In high school, I competed in football, basketball, baseball, wrestling, and track and wasn’t any good at any of them,” Weiskopf candidly admitted at the height of his professional career.
Even golf, his birthright, did not come naturally. Tom’s parents would take him out to local courses and try to persuade him to play, but he refused to do so. “When they played they took me out on the course with them when I was a boy eight to ten,” Weiskopf recalled shortly after he turned pro. “I never liked the game then.” Instead, he hung around the clubhouse with other kids whose parents forced them to remain there.
“He was a very impetuous boy,” Eva later remembered. “He could never sit still. In fact, there were times when I wished I didn’t have him.”
It was not until father and son attended the 1957 U.S. Open at Inverness Country Club in Toledo that golf grabbed fourteen-year-old Tom Weiskopf’s imagination. At his father’s urging, he watched close-up and was transfixed by the smoothest, most perfect golf swing since Bobby Jones’s.
“After we walked through the gate, he took me straight to the practice range and pointed out Sam Snead. The sound of Sam’s iron shots, the flight of the ball, thrilled me. I was hooked even before I started playing.”
That summer, Tom caddied and played golf for the first time. He immediately set about learning the game—putting, hitting buckets of balls for hours, occasionally under his parents’ grateful eyes. Although he made rapid progress, he remained a relatively small child and did not make Benedictine High School’s golf team on the first try. He did qualify as a sophomore, and throughout the season competed on equal terms with most of his teammates, all of whom were considerably bigger and stronger.
Weiskopf’s game blossomed during his junior year, and the team won the Cleveland city championship in 1959. Shortly afterward, Tom placed eighth in the Ohio Junior Chamber of Commerce tournament in Mansfield, his first sanctioned tournament appearance outside of high school.
As a senior, aided by his continued growth spurt, Tom moved his game to another level. He led Benedictine to another city title and won the individual championship as well. Shortly afterward, he slaughtered the field by six strokes in the Ohio Jaycee Junior Championship, held at the Lost Creek Country Club in Lima, Ohio.
The steep learning curve that Weiskopf displayed over a short time period was enough to convince Ohio State’s golf coach, Bob Kepler, to grant Weiskopf a scholarship for the fall of 1960. The Buckeyes already featured golf’s greatest amateur sensation since Bobby Jones in Nicklaus, and hopes were that Tom might—if his game kept improving, and his new body filled out—eventually replace Nicklaus as the team’s superstar.
As a freshman, Weiskopf had the extraordinary good fortune to practice regularly with Nicklaus (contrary to myth, Weiskopf did not caddie for the upperclassman). But it was largely coach Bob Kepler—who was delighted with Weiskopf’s additional six-inch growth spurt that year, taking him to his adult height of six-three—who turned the raw, bony kid into a full-bore athlete.
“Bob put forty yards on my tee shots,” Weiskopf said in 1965. “He changed my swing, made it more upright. It made my arc bigger.” Weiskopf could not hit his tee shots as far as Nicklaus when the two were briefly teammates at Ohio State, but as a result of Kepler’s teaching, he was definitely on his way.
Due to NCAA regulations at the time, Weiskopf could not compete in intercollegiate matches during his freshman season (spring 1961). By his sophomore year—with Nicklaus now on tour—Weiskopf made a push to fill the enormous void. He seemed ready to ascend to Nicklaus’s throne when, a month before the start of his sophomore year, he overcame a two-stroke deficit to edge out a thirty-one-year-old former prizefighter, Lalu Sabotin, and win the Ohio Public Links Championship. As a sophomore, Weiskopf led the Buckeyes to the Ohio Intercollegiate Championship and posted the individual low score, 72-76. Two weeks later, he took third place in the Big Ten championship.
Tom’s dedication to golf continued to grow, and during the summer of 1962, following his sophomore year, he finished second in the Ohio State Junior Championship, reached the quarterfinals in the Ohio State Amateur, and successfully defended his Ohio Public Links Championship in August. He also finished fourth in local qualifying for the U.S. Amateur, one spot too low for a chance to compete in the championship at Pinehurst.
But it was a tournament where Weiskopf was merely a spectator that jump-started his ambition to chase greatness at the professional level.
The father-son trip on which Snead’s sweet swing had captured young Tom was the first of several annual pilgrimages that the two of them made to the world’s grandest golf stage, the U.S. Open. Despite the cost of traveling to faraway courses in Missouri, Colorado, and California, Weiskopf did not miss an Open championship after he experienced the Snead revelation at Inverness.
There was never a doubt Tom and his father would drive two hours from Cleveland to the 1962 U.S. Open at Oakmont, not only to seek inspiration from the game’s established stars, but also to cheer his friend and former teammate Nicklaus, who was playing in his first Open championship as a professional. Watching Palmer and Nicklaus compete head-to-head transfixed young Tom.
“Jack’s ball just disappeared into the sky. I ran down the fairway to get ahead of them. Arnold took off fast, as always, but as he approached his own ball he continued to look down the fairway. He looked and looked and his neck seemed to get longer, like an ostrich. Then his step slowed. He saw Jack’s ball, a full twenty-five yards ahead of his. I could see it in Arnold’s face. Jack had arrived.”
Observing Nicklaus’s arrival firsthand on the national golfing stage was pivotal for Weiskopf. He too came from Ohio. He too played at Ohio State, and could smash the ball out of sight. He now was ready for bigger stages than amateur championships and intercollegiate team matches.
Weiskopf decided not to return to Ohio State for the fall semester. He had begun to chant the mantra that would drive him throughout his career:
“If Jack can do it, I can do it.”
ASIDE FROM HIS READY ACCESS to Ohio State’s superb Scarlet Course (arguably the best collegiate facility in the nation), Tom Weiskopf had shown very little interest in college. Golf clearly trumped his studies.
Tom made a regular practice of sneaking out of an afternoon class—after roll call, and with the professor’s back turned—and hopping aboard the women’s physical education bus headed in the direction of the Scarlet Course.
“It was really funny. I never got caught—but I failed the course.”
In the early 1960s, the PGA closely regulated who could join the tour. Among other requirements, an applicant needed to have $5,000 saved in the bank. Tom didn’t have nearly that amount of savings, and his father never earned enough money to fully subsidize Tom’s play in his amateur days.
Nobly stubborn on this point, Weiskopf insisted on earning his own way onto the tour, and turned down a number of sponsors’ offers to pay his way. Having dropped out of college and looking for ways to save money, he left Columbus and returned to live with his parents in Cleveland. While retaining his amateur status, he worked as an assistant to a club professional in Cleveland, which provided both a steady paycheck and free access to a first-class golf facility to develop his game.
During the summer of 1963, Weiskopf competed regularly in many prominent local events. The highlight of his postcollegiate amateur play came in August. After a disappointing first-round loss in the Ohio State Amateur that July, he passed up defense of his Ohio Public Links title to prepare for the Western Amateur, a high-profile, national match-play event, conveniently being held that year in nearby Benton Harbor, Michigan.
Despite posting the second-lowest score in the stroke-play qualifier, Tom was not among the favorites at the 6,943-yard Point O’ Woods Country Club. The reigning U.S. Amateur and NCAA champions, Labron Harris Jr. and R. H. Sikes—both former Walker Cup players as wen—highlighted the field. Weiskopf’s credentials as an accomplished state-le
vel amateur didn’t measure up.
He survived the second-cut qualifier for match play by shooting 76-73. With the field now reduced to sixteen, Weiskopf toppled Cliff Taylor of Spring Lake, Michigan, 6 & 5, to advance to the quarterfinals, where he faced Sikes.
Not in the least intimidated by his much-decorated opponent, Weiskopf won four of the first six holes on the way to a 3 & 2 victory. In the semifinals match, he defeated another hotshot with a solid record in his home state, two-time Kansas champion Johnny Stevens, to reach the finals. There he faced the only golfer with better credentials than Sikes’s. The son of a fine public links player (and legendary golf coach at Oklahoma State University), Labron Harris Jr. won the 1962 U.S. Amateur at Pinehurst. Despite a close call in the quarterfinals, Harris was expected to eliminate the upstart Weiskopf at the Western Amateur with little difficulty.
The crowd for the final match turned out to be the largest in the long history of the tournament. With Tom’s mother and his two siblings among the record-setting twenty-five hundred spectators, the twenty-year-old bolted out of the gate quickly, taking the first two holes from the “bespectacled Oklahoman.” Lights-out putting helped Weiskopf maintain a two-hole lead after the turn (although he did miss a three-footer that cost him the ninth hole). Then Weiskopf surged ahead, one-putting the next five greens, to take the title on the fourteenth.
Everything seemed to go Weiskopf’s way that late-summer afternoon. On the par-five thirteenth, he missed the green in the left-side bunker. His thin blast appeared headed well off the green, but it caromed hard off the pin and came to rest six feet away. He nailed the birdie to take another hole from Harris.
On the fourteenth, after his booming drive split the fairway, Weiskopf socked an iron to fifteen feet and holed yet another birdie to close out Harris. He finished the fourteen holes at one under, the only player that week to break par for a full round at the difficult Benton Harbor course.
“I’m glad it’s all over,” Weiskopf told reporters. “I never did like match play... although this tournament may change my mind.
“All I can say is ... I don’t know.... Everything has been just wonderful,” an exuberant Tom said at the trophy presentation. “This has been the greatest thrill I’ve ever had.”
Almost overnight, Weiskopf became a prominent figure on the national golfing stage. A week after the Western, he played in a one-day event in his childhood home of Massillon that was a warm-up for the Akron Golf Classic at famously difficult Firestone Country Club. He took the top amateur spot in Massillon and then showcased his game at Firestone, finishing fifty-third in a stellar field to earn the low amateur prize—a shiny silver tray—after a one-hole play-off with the current Ohio State Amateur champion, Bob Bourne.
Shortly afterward, Weiskopf qualified for the first time for the U.S. Amateur at the Wakonda Club in Des Moines, Iowa. Disappointingly, he lost one-down in the first round of match play. But he soon grabbed another top-amateur spot in a mixed field at the prestigious Ohio State Open (where Nicklaus had startled the golfing world in 1956 by winning at age sixteen), finishing four strokes behind the professional winner, Bob Shave.
It didn’t take long for the national press to jump on the fast-charging Weiskopf bandwagon. In January 1964, Golf Digest ranked him tenth on its list of top-ten male amateurs in the country.
That April, Weiskopf broke his finger playing basketball with a group of grammar school kids, and was unable to defend his Western Amateur title the following month. Once the hand healed, he made a bold decision. Now—with an impressive amateur resume, $2,100 saved in the bank, and endorsement-deal offers from both a clothing company and a Cincinnati golf firm—he chose to turn pro on May 1, 1964.
Those first three months on the PGA tour, Weiskopf lived on $325 a week to cover all expenses, until earning his first paycheck. At the Western Open in Chicago in early August, he followed two marginal rounds with a stellar Saturday 68; only Palmer (67) and Nicklaus (65) posted better scores that day. An even-par 71 the next day pushed Weiskopf into a tie for twenty-ninth place, and he left the Tam O’Shanter Golf Course with a check for $487.50. Weiskopf never forgot those first dollars he earned, and every year afterward he wrote a check for that same amount to the Western Golf Association’s Evans Caddie Scholarship fund.
As the 1965 season began, Weiskopf raised his game to the next level. In February at the Tucson Open, he tied for tenth and earned $1,170 as a result of two excellent weekend rounds. A few months later, after years of attending the U.S. Open as a spectator, Weiskopf qualified for and competed in the world’s toughest golf test. Though never a threat to win at the Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, and somewhat thrown by the enormous stage—“I’m so nervous right now I can hardly see,” he said at the first tee—Weiskopf performed admirably. On the first day, he outshot Nicklaus by two strokes before finishing in fortieth place. A week later, in the St. Paul Open, he carded an opening 65 before falling out of contention.
Both the media and his fellow pros took notice.
“Tom Weiskopf. Now, there’s a boy who hits it a ton,” Sam Snead told a writer in the locker room during the U.S. Open. “He’s longer than Nicklaus. Go watch this boy.”
Weiskopf’s confidence grew notably during the autumn season. At an unofficial PGA event, he repeated another Nicklaus feat when he shot all subpar rounds to earn an impressive nine-stroke victory in the Ohio State Open at the Walnut Hill Country Club in Columbus.
Nicklaus not only provided motivation for Weiskopf’s first professional win; he served as transportation. Five days before winning in Ohio, Tom had missed the cut in the Seattle Open, but decided to remain in town and hit the practice range. The Golden Bear—who had already earned enough on tour to afford his own plane—offered to fly Weiskopf from Seattle to the Columbus event. Immediately after Nicklaus completed his final round (he finished ninth), the former Buckeye teammates, along with Youngstown pro and future PGA tour official Ed Griffiths, made the grueling trek back to the Midwest.
“We left Seattle at six p.m.,” Weiskopf told reporters following his victory. “We had to stop in Salt Lake City and Omaha for refueling and landed in Columbus at nine thirty a.m. It was a little bumpy so we didn’t get too much sleep.”
That first full season on tour in 1965, Weiskopf banked just under $12,000—good enough to reach the top seventy-five on the money list and second among rookies. The praise he received from his peers meant much more to him.
“Actually, it gives me confidence to know that other players think that much of me,” he said. “They come and congratulate you, and you know they’re the best, and it makes you feel good. It flatters you. Ken Venturi has called me the longest, most consistent driver on tour. I think Jack is.”
Not long before dying in a tragic plane accident, “Champagne” Tony Lema told Weiskopf, “I’d like to have what you’re going to make in the next ten years.”
And Tom took fierce pride in how he had built himself up.
“Everything I’ve gained in golf I’ve done it by myself,” he said in the summer of 1965. “I feel I might try harder on my own. It would be more personal pride if I make it. I’m about even for the five months I’ve been on tour this year.”
Several great chances for a first PGA victory slipped through Weiskopf’s hands in early 1966. He finished in the top five four times during the spring, including a heartbreaking loss to Doug Sanders on the second hole of a play-off at the Greensboro Open.
“I hadn’t had much experience in big amateur tournaments because I couldn’t afford it,” Weiskopf recalled a few years later, “and I didn’t have the patience and concentration to win out here.”
But that summer, Weiskopf did win the heart of a nineteen-year-old beauty queen. Jeanne Marie Ruth, Miss Minnesota of 1965, fell for Tom while handing out invitations to the Minnesota Golf Classic in St. Paul in July.
“I had seen Tom and thought he was quite handsome, and I was hoping to be introduced to him and maybe be asked for a date
,” Jeanne remembered. “Well, I handed him his invitation, and he thanked me and just walked away! I was crestfallen. But we ran into one another on the course later in the week, and he asked me if I’d like to do something that evening.
“He seemed so lonesome,” she added. “I was sure he didn’t like me. I decided I would be like a sister to him—write him letters while he was traveling to cheer him up. We didn’t see each other much until we were engaged later that summer; then Tom started commuting from the tour to St. Paul—I think he was pleading nonexistent illnesses and deliberately missing the cut sometimes—and we were married in October, three months after we met.”
Along with several young tour couples, Jeanne joined her husband on the road, enjoying (at least for a time) the glamorous perks of each tour stop: the travel, interviews, fashion shows, and luncheons, as well as the pride of walking beside her husband on every hole.
“Watching Tom improve is thrilling,” she said.
But Jeanne’s first impression of Weiskopf never truly changed.
“Tom is basically a lonely person. He thinks most of the time. Now he thinks about the difference between being good and great.”
Like Jeanne, Weiskopf himself noticed how his mood affected his performance.
“I’m so darn moody. I can feel great one minute and sluggish the next. Gee whiz, it used to take me three holes to get over a poor shot. I got discouraged too quick,” Tom said. “Jeanne’s wonderful. She doesn’t know golf, but she knows me. She’s witty and has a little streak of sarcasm in her. She can jar me out of my bad moods. She’ll come up to me on the course and tell me how silly I look pouting.”