Chasing Greatness

by Adam Lazarus

  Alert to the unspoken, yet obvious Nicklaus-Weiskopf rivalry regarding who was longer off the tee, reporters probed the younger Buckeye for commentary on Nicklaus’s first-round eagle two on number seventeen.

  “The wind wasn’t behind my back,” he said. “But if Jack can drive it on the green, I can drive it on the green.”

  Weiskopf shot “a very easy sixty-nine” on Friday to climb back into the hunt. Though experiencing some trouble off the tee that sent him scurrying afterward to the driving range—“I’m trying to drive it right to left, but I’m hitting the ball straight”—Weiskopf maintained a solid position at the halfway point, locked in a tie for sixth. His total of even-par 142 meant that only five players owned better scores.

  “I feel I’m in excellent position to win this tournament,” he said afterward. “Five strokes in an Open is nothing, and quite truthfully, I feel lean and mean.

  Gene Borek, the Long Island club professional who broke the course record with a second-round 65, was Weiskopf’s unlikely partner on Saturday. And not surprisingly, the understated career club professional and the rich, brash touring pro had little in common.

  “Weiskopf mainly kept to himself,” Borek remembered years later. “He came across as a somewhat aloof kind of guy; you felt that when he walked into the locker room, he could see right through you. Most guys say hello and give you some kind of acknowledgment when they pass by you in the locker room. With Weiskopf on some days, it was like you didn’t exist.”

  Weiskopf drove the ball exceptionally well on Saturday, missing only a single fairway. He overcame an early bogey by sinking midlength birdie putts on numbers three and five, only to have a three-putt on the eighth drop him back to even par for the tournament, and more than a half dozen strokes behind the leaders. He also was unable to gain a stroke on the par-five ninth, an essential birdie hole for one of the game’s longest hitters.

  Weiskopf gained ground by sinking a tricky twelve-footer for birdie on the eleventh, but he not only failed to birdie the twelfth but bogeyed the par-five. Comfortably on the green in three, he stared down a slippery, twenty-five-foot birdie putt. Even after Borek—on the same line, a little farther away—showed how slick the green was by putting well past the hole, Weiskopf also stroked too firmly, and the ball galloped beyond Borek’s. Weiskopf flailed at the comeback putt, and was lucky to escape with a bogey six.

  One over for the last two par-fives, Weiskopf gave vital strokes back to the field precisely where he had to catch up. Tellingly, however, even after botching the twelfth, the Tom Weiskopf of 1973 did not implode; instead, he put his failings in perspective and moved on.

  “I knocked my first putt past so hard that I had almost an impossible putt coming back. I was actually afraid I could four-putt,” he said. “I was so hot, really steaming. But I said to myself, ‘This is ridiculous. You made the mental error, but don’t let it ruin your day. Put it behind you.’ A couple years ago, a thing like that would have destroyed me. But I’m more patient now.”

  On number fifteen, Weiskopf’s newfound patience paid off. He mishit a four-iron that sailed left and struck a spectator, settling into deep green-side rough. He was left with an unpredictable chip to a green that ran sharply away from him, with a huge, deep bunker looming beyond. Facing another possible disaster, he calmly chopped the ball to within twelve feet of the flagstick, after which he deftly sank the putt.

  “It was like an eagle,” he acknowledged afterward.

  After a solid par on number sixteen, Weiskopf approached the short, par-four seventeenth knowing that this was a birdie opportunity he simply couldn’t miss if he wanted to contend for the championship. A well-placed long iron off the tee put him seventy yards from the pin, and after a decent pitch, he rolled in the slick, downhill eighteen-foot birdie to go one under par for the day and the tournament.

  At the final hole, Weiskopf again tattooed his drive and stroked a towering high iron onto the green. From twelve feet—still using the vintage Tommy Armour putter he had received earlier that year as a gift—he sank the putt and received “some of the birdie roars from the crowd that had accompanied hometown favorite Arnold [Palmer] most of the day.” Weiskopf finished two under par, a second straight 69 that left him only one shot behind the leaders after three rounds.

  “After those two birdies on the last two holes, I feel like I’d like to go out and play another eighteen holes,” he told reporters. “I don’t feel like I’m one stroke behind. My concentration has improved each day of this tournament.

  “Somebody’s going to have to shoot a heckuva round tomorrow to beat me.”

  • 8 •

  A Day for All Ages

  The marquee matchup for Saturday’s round was no doubt the third-to-last: Lee Trevino and Jack Nicklaus. Together, the 2:16 p.m. pairing had won four of the previous six U.S. Open championships. During the early 1970s, no matter where or what the tournament, Nicklaus and Trevino had to be considered the favorites.

  Certainly their most famous duel had come two years earlier when, in a Monday-afternoon play-off, Trevino outlasted Nicklaus at Merion for his second U.S. Open title. Nearly as memorable as Trevino’s three-stroke victory was his preround icebreaker of tossing a rubber snake at Nicklaus’s feet just before they teed off. One female spectator, thinking the snake was real, shrieked so loudly that it broke Nicklaus’s normally stoic intensity.

  Though the most celebrated, the Merion showdown was not the only time that Trevino got the better of his friend. With one swing the following summer, he stole from Nicklaus both the British Open crown and a realistic shot at the Holy Grail of prizes, modern golf’s Grand Slam.

  Heading into the final round of the 1972 British Open at Muirfield, the “Happy Hombre” enjoyed a one-stroke lead over former Open champion Tony Jacklin. Nicklaus was six strokes behind Trevino, and it seemed highly unlikely that—following his victories earlier that year at the Masters and the U.S. Open—he could still challenge for the Claret Jug. Six birdies by Nicklaus on the first eleven holes—mainly the result of a decision to boldly use a driver on tees where he’d previously used a long-iron—resurrected hopes of victory. He held the outright lead after a birdie on the long tenth hole, then after Trevino spectacularly eagled the ninth, the Golden Bear tied the Merry Mex by birdying number eleven. Trevino maintained his trademark consistency, despite Nicklaus’s charge, and when Nicklaus bogeyed the par-three sixteenth after missing the green, Trevino re-took the lead by a single stroke.

  Then apparent disaster struck. On the par-five seventy-first hole, Trevino drove into deep rough, hacked into a bunker, sailed his next shot back into the rough, then buried his fourth stroke into “three inches of heather and thistle,” thirty feet above the hole on a lightning-slick green. A double bogey appeared inevitable, opening the door for Nicklaus or Jacklin to overtake Trevino.

  Somehow, Trevino popped the ball gently out of the thick clump and—before millions of startled TV viewers and the record-breaking crowd—watched it trickle into the cup. Trevino sheepishly stepped toward the hole and retrieved his ball, having made a par for the ages—never once hitting fairway or green, with the British Open championship on the line. Trevino defeated Nicklaus by a single stroke and Jacklin by two.

  In addition to his triumphs at Merion and Muirfield, a four-stroke victory in the 1968 U.S. Open at Oak Hill, and a PGA Championship that would come in 1974, Trevino rendered Nicklaus a runner-up in four major championships during the Golden Bear’s golden age. And he again showed up Nicklaus at Oakmont in the third round of the 1973 U.S. Open, beginning on the starting hole.

  Trevino—not surprisingly, for he had missed just one of each to this point-nailed both fairway and green on number one, and narrowly failed to convert a long birdie putt that would have placed him within four shots of the leader, Gary Player. While Trevino easily tapped in for par, Nicklaus, whose six-iron approach bounded well over the green, opened to a bogey five.

  Each gave up a stroke to par on the rema
inder of the front nine, with Trevino finishing at 37 and Nicklaus at 38. Nicklaus’s score could have been much worse; he rarely hit the fairways and his putting blew hot and cold. A three-putt from forty feet on number nine—where he reached the green in two—already tripled the number of three-putt greens he’d suffered during the entire 1962 U.S. Open championship.

  More un-Nicklaus-like play followed on the back nine. He three-putted the tenth green and then found bunkers with two different shots to bogey the “easy” eleventh. “So, I should have been four-four-four and instead I was five-five-five,” Nicklaus told his hometown newspaper, “and that was the difference in my round right there.”

  As Nicklaus stumbled, Trevino’s steady tee-to-green excellence gained additional shots on his rival. Two successful birdie putts from short distances on the eleventh and sixteenth gave him a 33 for the back side and a 70 for the day—his second under-par round for the championship. If only he could find the cup, he’d run away with his third U.S. Open championship in six years.

  “I’ve played fifty-four holes and missed only two fairways and two greens; that means I’m not happy with my putting.”

  He also wasn’t happy with his choice of equipment: “I’ve tried fifteen putters this week,” he half joked. And the disadvantage of drawing an inexperienced, shaggy-haired thirteen-year-old caddie didn’t help either.

  But amidst this flurry of complaints, Trevino stewed most about the absence of privacy.

  “People bug me everywhere I go. I know that this is supposed to be the price of fame but it starts to get you after a while. I can’t go to a bar and relax over a beer without some guy wanting to put the crushing handshake on me to prove how strong he is ... My wife is so annoyed that we can’t go out to dinner in public that she stays home now. What fun is there sitting around a motel all day by yourself while your husband is out playing golf? ... The way it’s going, I’m looking forward to retiring in a few years and do all the things I like to do—in public as well as in private.”

  Though not as somber, Nicklaus was similarly frustrated. He had drained a twelve-footer for birdie on the short thirteenth to make up ground, but his three over 74 was his worst score ever at Oakmont. Uncharacteristically, he moved quickly past the press tent and onto the practice tee.

  “I won’t bore you with my round,” he explained as he hurried away.

  After an intense practice session, Nicklaus returned to regale writers with his customary wit. Ironically—he was notorious for reducing the speed of a round to a crawl—he even suggested how to reduce slow play. He had apparently resolved the swing flaw that hampered his consistency throughout round three, and remained optimistic he could come from behind on Sunday to defend the U.S. Open crown he’d won the year before at Pebble Beach.

  “I’ve been four strokes behind before, and I can make it up. Things didn’t go as I’d planned today, and I caught quite a few sand traps along the way. But as someone else has said, four strokes is nothing on a course like this and in the U.S. Open.”

  Of course, on a terrain like Oakmont in the U.S. Open, four strokes were just as easy to lose—a lesson that front-running Gary Player learned very quickly that Saturday.

  THERE WAS NO SPRINKLER MALFUNCTION on Saturday morning. Instead, natural water resoaked Oakmont, as a stiff rain fell between six and ten a.m., leaving the entire course soggier than the day before. Rain continued intermittently throughout the day, and then let up enough by midmorning for U.S.G.A. officials to authorize New Zealand’s John Lister to tee off, alone, at 10:21 a.m. (an odd number of golfers made the cut, and with the groupings now pairs instead of threesomes, one man was forced to play without a partner).

  Paired with Jim Colbert (a stroke behind), Player drew the final tee time at two thirty p.m. A light drizzle had resumed once the thirty-six-year-old began his round—a fitting scene for the gloom he was about to experience. Player opened with a bogey and then was fortunate to string together four pars. Beginning on number five, his remarkable comeback story wilted as he bogeyed five of the next seven holes.

  “His tee shots were flying every which way,” a Pittsburgh reporter noted. “His irons were erratic; his putter failed him. A complete and total collapse.”

  Player’s sorrows started to become evident on the sixth tee, as his fans scampered from the fifth green to watch his shot into the par-three hole. The noise from the mass of shuffling spectators in plastic slickers and ponchos so irritated Player that he stepped away from the tee and waited impatiently for everyone to settle down. Still obviously annoyed, at himself as much as his fans, he promptly drove into a bunker and bogeyed the hole. Over the next two holes, poor putting led to two more bogeys, and he made the turn with a score of 40. He took twenty putts, compared to only thirteen for the same stretch on Thursday.

  “Player had it the hardest,” Jerry Heard noted afterward. “He was playing defensive golf. He was way ahead and all he had to do was make pars.”

  Everyone in Player’s rapidly vanishing gallery also felt his pain. “I feel so sorry for him,” said a disappointed female follower. Upon missing a short par saver on the eleventh green, Player smashed the head of his putter into the ground and stared angrily into the distance. He was now six over par for the first eleven holes Saturday, whereas he had been six under par for the first eleven on Thursday.

  Player scored an impressive birdie on the long, par-three sixteenth (his first in twenty-six holes), only to give it back immediately with a bogey on the seventeenth. After completing his round, the normally chatty Player gave no excuses and refused to give interviews to the press. A 77 had left him in no mood for conversation. He ended the day four shots behind the leaders and tied with his old Big Three comrade Nicklaus.

  Player’s partner in the third round, Jim Colbert, didn’t fare much better, and certainly not at the outset. On his way to a three over 74, Colbert opened with bogeys on the first three holes. Fortunate to make consecutive birdies at the close of his round, he remained in the picture tied with Trevino at one under par, two shots behind the leaders.

  No one expected a repeat, record-setting performance from Gene Borek on Saturday afternoon. By the end of the day, he returned to club pro anonymity by shooting an 80. Unbeknownst to others, Borek’s right shoulder still throbbed following Friday’s heroic four-iron from the fairway bunker on number ten. He aggravated the injury on Saturday when he tried, unsuccessfully, to execute a long explosion shot from a wet green-side bunker on number nine.

  The greens gnawed at him even more than the shoulder. Wet, arguably even slower on Saturday than on Friday, the putting surfaces still remained precariously slick downhill. Regardless of the level of saturation, the speed and contours of Oakmont’s greens still confounded Borek.

  “When I shot eighty in the third round, I played pretty well but I three-putted six times.... I could have three-putted another six times in that round except I made several good comeback putts.”

  Once the championship ended, Borek would leave Oakmont with a career-best thirty-sixth-place finish, clutching a piece of U.S. Open history and the battle scars (his shoulder) to prove it.

  On Friday, Borek and his playing partner, Bud Allin, together shot the two lowest scores of the day, 65 and 67. While no one on Saturday could match Borek’s 65, the two lowest scores of the day, 66 and 67, again came from a single pairing: veteran long shot John Schlee and his hungry young lion playing partner, Jerry Heard.

  After a frustrating start to the Open, the congenial Heard left Oakmont Saturday evening tied for the lead.

  Blessed with abundant athleticism, the six-foot-three twenty-six-year-old from Visalia, California, had played tackle for Redwood High School’s varsity football team, and in a Central Yosemite League track meet even ran the hundred-yard dash in 10.1 seconds.

  But Heard was most gifted as a golfer. By age twelve, he had already shot 70 in the Fresno Bee Junior City Golf championship, an event he won four of the following five years. In August 1964—the same month
his friend and northern California rival John Miller won the National Junior Amateur—Heard nabbed the California Junior title. He then moved on to Fresno State College, where, as a junior, he set the school record for low scoring average in a single season. He then left college without a degree and earned his pro credentials by taking sixth place in the PGA’s Q School in October 1968.

  Despite a great resume and a classic golf swing—he channeled great natural power into a rhythmic, seemingly effortless flow—Heard struggled early on the tour. He missed most cuts and could barely make expenses; even in 1970, when he moved up to fifty-fourth on the tour performance chart and earned nearly $45,000, he left his supporters in the red.

  “I wasn’t doing too well when I first came out here,” he later said. “[My] dad told me I had the game and that I just had to have some fun playing.”

  Heard listened to his father’s advice and soon began having more fun. In 1971, he took thirteenth in the U.S. Open, nailed second- and third-place finishes in two other tournaments, nearly tripled his earnings, and burst through for his first victory in the prestigious American Golf Classic at the Firestone Country Club. Suddenly among the tour’s top ten in earnings, Heard blew past his California pal John Miller, who also enjoyed his first victory the same year.

  The next year, Heard began to make his case as the tour’s “next great star.” Early in the season at the Bob Hope Desert Classic, he held the lead going into the final round, and ultimately finished third in the star-studded field. His fast start foreshadowed a tremendous stretch over the next three months. In between his second and third tour wins at the Florida Citrus Open in March and the Colonial in May, Heard made a run for the Green Jacket at Augusta National. Two early birdies in the final round pulled him into second place behind Nicklaus; he ultimately finished tied for fifth. After competing well at the U.S. and British Opens, Heard assumed sole possession of the halfway lead in the 1972 PGA Championship, and eventually tied for seventh place.