by Adam Lazarus
He just missed makeable birdie tries on numbers ten and eleven, then holed short birdie putts on numbers twelve and thirteen. A few more birdies and he might sneak up on the leaders—an even more shocking thought than Miller’s doing so. On the fourteenth, Wadkins carried a nine-iron to the perfect spot on the green—just beyond the back ridge, eight feet from the cup, slightly downhill—and readied for a third consecutive birdie.
Dressed sharply in powder blue slacks and white shirt—the same colors as his model, Arnold Palmer—the wavy-haired Wadkins played with familiar urgency. He took two practice strokes and two darting peeks at the flag, then fired at the hole.
But he flubbed the putt: opening the blade, abbreviating his follow-through, and pushing the ball right. It never had a chance. Wadkins tapped in with obvious annoyance, cupped the ball in the air twice to vent, and tossed it toward his bag.
Despite hitting five straight approach shots stiff, Wadkins had only two birdies on the back nine to show for it, and with par at a premium on the fifteenth and sixteenth, he had blown a golden opportunity. Making matters worse, Wadkins—a habitual scoreboard watcher—could plainly see that Miller had just birdied the thirteenth to move three strokes ahead of his fast-charging friend.
Wadkins could make only pars on numbers fifteen and sixteen, but he remained confident that two more birdies and a final-round 63 might just be enough to unnerve anyone still chasing him during the last hour. From the seventeenth tee, he nailed the left side of the fairway, leaving only a choked-down three-quarter wedge to a flag placed far back on the left sliver of the narrow green. He opened his stance and placed the ball across from his right heel, trying to carry it to the rear of the putting surface and spin it to a quick stop. His ball bounced eight feet short of the flagstick, took one large hop, and came to a halt—four inches from the cup.
“Look at that, Lanny Wadkins! That’s the closest I’ve seen in four days of golf,” ABC’s Keith Jackson screamed about the near-eagle. “The way they are slicing this course today you’ve got to think that the membership will just be suffering all over the place.”
The small green-side gallery burst into applause, as Wadkins and Vinny Giles walked side by side. Wadkins certainly benefited by having his rival and friend—who years later would become his agent—provide counsel and encouragement. After the tap-in birdie on number seventeen, Wadkins eyed another on the closing hole: a fifth (along with his two eagles) that would yield Wadkins an outside chance to win the championship, while sitting in the clubhouse and waiting for everyone to choke.
Unfortunately for Wadkins, a final-round 63 to win the U.S. Open was not his destiny. Wadkins swung as hard and fast as anyone on tour, in an attempt to generate as much power as possible from his strong, five-foot-nine-inch frame. For whatever reason—perhaps because he was trying to drive the ball farther than normal—Wadkins’s right foot slipped during his swing on the eighteenth tee. The ball hooked wickedly and had no place to go but one of several deep bunkers left of the fairway. The unforced error cost him—he had no choice but to pitch to safety—and he suffered a bogey on the home hole.
With Giles, Wadkins walked off the course and into the scorer’s tent. Since Johnny Miller had not yet completed number seventeen, Wadkins’s effort earned him a fleeting place in Oakmont’s history: His six-under 65 matched Gene Borek’s record-setting Friday score. “[For] about two minutes,” Lanny Wadkins owned a share of the course record.
“At least I finished well. I really felt like I had it going,” he told reporters. “If I had made that little putt at fourteen, I could get in and give them something to shoot at. If I could get three or four under....”
JULIUS BOROS NEEDED TO PLAY only even par through Oakmont’s back nine to achieve Wadkins’s goal. But he couldn’t. The three-putt par he made at number nine turned out to be the beginning of the end for the fifty-three-year-old. He promptly pushed his tee shot on number ten and, from the tangled rough, nailed a spectator on the other side of the fairway with his approach-still sixty yards shy of the green, and buried again. A bogey there, along with another on number twelve, and the oldest man ever to win a major championship knew he was out of the race.
Very soon, so too was his partner, Jerry Heard. Heard kept within one stroke of Miller by securing a safe par on number ten. But the same inaccuracy off the tee that landed him in the first fairway when he teed off from the ninth tee cost him dearly on the back nine. On numbers eleven and twelve, he carded bogeys to drop three shots behind. Boros and Heard posted matching two-over-par 73s on Sunday to tie with Wadkins for seventh place, one under par for the championship.
JUST FOUR MEN NOW REMAINED on the course with a real chance to catch Miller: Schlee, Palmer, Weiskopf, and Trevino. And even though his rival, Nicklaus, had essentially dropped from contention—despite a sparkling 33, the Golden Bear just couldn’t birdie enough of the back nine to make up the five strokes he needed—Lee Trevino kept fighting.
Fresh off his birdie on number nine, Trevino hit both fairway and green on the challenging tenth. His ball rested on the same terrifying line as Johnny Miller’s uphill curler a half hour earlier, but about ten feet closer. Prior to the opening round, Trevino had harped on the importance of leaving uphill rather than downhill putts at Oakmont.
Still, his birdie attempt came up short. And while he couldn’t be too upset by missing such a difficult putt, it was yet another one he misjudged. For Trevino, figuring out the speed of Oakmont’s greens had become an impossible riddle—one that if he could only solve would earn him that third U.S. Open trophy in six years. He tapped in the par and sulked, head down, over to the eleventh hole, where his mood was not going to change any.
On the green in regulation, Trevino’s uphill ten-footer could vault him into a share of the lead at four under. All week long, he had expected to make a birdie here, stating that number eleven, along with number fourteen, were Oakmont’s “easiest” holes. From his crouched, tight stance, the stocky Mexican-American in red patent-leather shoes stroked his putt dead center—before it stopped two inches short.
Trevino knew immediately that he’d babied the putt, walking in glaring disgust behind the ball before it was halfway to the hole. Angrily tapping in—head still down, another birdie opportunity frittered away—he toyed with his putting grip numerous times before moving on to the par-five twelfth.
Trevino found the fairway with his drive on number twelve and, from a reasonably flat lie, piped a three-wood to within wedge distance of the green. Anticipating yet another chance to catch the leaders, he walked spryly toward his ball, nodding to a member of the gallery, flashing them a thumbs-up and a quick grin.
“This is Lee,” Jim McKay told ABC viewers. “He is a little under a hundred yards from the flagstick, which is on the front of the green. Now remember, this runs away from the golfer.”
Trevino daringly directed his approach left of the pin, on his predictable low trajectory, expecting the green’s natural slope to redirect the ball to the right. But it skidded a bit, stayed left, and rolled fourteen feet past. Still a fine shot, leaving himself just the kind of uphill putt he wanted.
“I have never in my life seen so many golfers playing so well; in fact, it’s never happened in the history of the U.S. Open,” McKay observed, filling in the dead air while Trevino lined up the birdie putt. “And it isn’t a question of people stumbling to victory, the way [it] sometimes happens. They’re all going for it. Trevino started the day one under; he’s now three under. This could make him four under.”
The reigning two-time British Open champion appeared to hit an ideal putt, but it was a trifle hard and lipped off the cup’s right edge. A gutsier putt than he’d hit on number eleven, but another miss despite his playing every shot superbly.
His final-round partner, Jim Colbert, shared Trevino’s frustration.
“[Colbert] started one under; he’s even, so he’s just one over on today’s round,” McKay noted. “But that’s the quality of the play. One
over doesn’t get you anywhere. You just keep falling back.”
Trevino’s Sunday round of two under par through twelve holes was better than anyone except Miller and Wadkins. His tee-to-green game remained as sharp as theirs, but with much less reward. No matter how well he played, he couldn’t climb the leaderboard without dropping a few short putts.
Trevino was unaccustomed to a final-round U.S. Open where birdies were so prevalent. At Merion in 1971, he’d needed only two birdies in the final round to force a play-off with Nicklaus; at Oak Hill in 1968, he’d also carded two lone birdies and still won by four strokes. Two front-nine birdies and a mob of pars just didn’t seem good enough on this Sunday at Oakmont.
Still, Trevino wasn’t done yet, and nobody wrote him off.
“And this is Lee Trevino at the par-three thirteenth, a man who can charge; we’ve seen him,” Frank Gifford noted as Trevino prepared to hit. “We saw him reel off five birdies at the Tournament of Champions in a row earlier this year.”
Trevino’s wonderfully struck four-iron—“he drilled that one in there beautifully,” Marilynn Smith chimed in—stopped ten feet below the hole. And once again, Trevino’s putt steered clear of the cup, and he had to settle for a maddeningly short tap-in.
On the fourteenth tee (in his mind, the other “easiest” hole on the course), Trevino was one of the few players to select a driver. He found the ideal spot to take dead aim at the flagstick from the fairway’s right side, and his approach climbed just over the ridge that protected the pin: in ideal position to card just the fifth birdie on that hole on Sunday.
While the shot was excellent, Lee’s body language continued to shout misery. A demonstratively “unhappy Hombre” paused in the fairway to stroke a few imaginary putts: Oakmont’s greens had hypnotized him. Not unexpectedly, Trevino missed the fourteen-footer: still two shots behind Miller, with four to go.
Unable to nab birdies on the next two holes, Trevino walked onto the tee at number seventeen. He didn’t want to, but he now had no choice but to rely on his emergency plan. Thursday evening, reporters had asked Trevino about Nicklaus’s audacious play on the short par-four, reaching the green in one stroke with a driver.
“I won’t do it unless I’m two shots behind on Sunday, and I have to make up some ground,” Trevino said. “I have a game plan and I stick to it. That’s not in my game plan.”
Just as he hypothesized, he now found himself two shots behind the leader, with two holes to go. The eighteenth was just too long and hard to contemplate a birdie, so Trevino reasoned that he had to make an eagle of his own to catch Miller.
Trevino smacked his Faultless with all the force his solid frame could summon, but it was an unnatural gesture. A man who made big money spiking every drive down the middle on a low-trajectory fade could not easily improvise a long, high, soft hook to cut the dogleg. Even for a man who had more creative shots in his arsenal than anyone on tour, it was perhaps too great a stretch.
The drive soared farther than usual, but refused to draw. The ball finally settled well off the fairway’s right edge, mired in thick rough and with Big Mouth between him and the pin.
“Trevino had to pitch over a cavernous trap and he had little green to play with,” wrote El Paso Herald-Post reporter Bob Ingram—the only reporter to record Trevino’s Hail Mary attempt. “The pin was in the neck of the green. On the other side of the green from Trevino was another deep trap. The El Paso golfer got the ball on the green but it didn’t bite and rolled into [a] trap on the other side. Coming out of it, Trevino hit the ball too hard and it skidded past the hole and close to the fringe near the trap he had to shoot over. It took two putts to get down for a bogey five and it put him out of contention. Using the driver on number seventeen was a desperation gamble for Trevino. It didn’t pay off.”
Having suffered a bogey on the short seventeenth, thanks to a high-risk shot that conflicted with his normal style of play, Lee Trevino left yet another Oakmont green depressed: a recurring sight that week for the popular, misunderstood champion. He finished up number eighteen—straight drive, solid approach, two putts—and headed back to his mobile home, exactly how he wanted to be: alone.
LEE TREVINO AND TOM WEISKOPF were polar opposites.
Trevino was short, stocky, mentally tough. Weiskopf was the tall, thin “guy with the million-dollar swing and the ten-cent mind.”
Trevino might never have become a professional golfer—let alone an international superstar—had it not been for his days as a marine, where both his life and golf game took shape. For Weiskopf, his five-year stint as an army reservist was merely an inconvenience that sidetracked his rise to stardom (and just happened to occur the same summer as Trevino’s improbable U.S. Open victory at Oak Hill).
While Trevino—abandoned by his father and left in abject poverty—spent the better part of two decades honing his game in solitude at dusty Texas driving ranges, hunger did not inspire Tom Weiskopf until after his thirtieth birthday, and the unexpected death of his supportive father.
And even though their fortunes seemed to reverse during the summer of 1973—Trevino’s bulletproof facade crumbling, as Weiskopf finally blossomed into a winner—both men’s U.S. Open ride ended on the seventy-first green.
Weiskopf’s Sunday caucus with U.S.G.A. officials didn’t end on Oakmont’s ninth. In fact, it reconvened on the very next hole.
Slicing his tee shot far into the rough turned out better than Weiskopf had reason to expect. He was allowed a free drop two club lengths from the original position of his ball, which came to rest in an area designated as ground under repair. This time, however, he couldn’t follow up the lucky break with another miracle shot, like the one a hole earlier. From the tall grass, his ball came up twenty-five yards short of the green.
Confident he could scramble for par, Weiskopf readied to pitch downhill onto the green, then suddenly backed away: On the parallel fairway, Arnold Palmer had just made an approach shot, and the army bellowed. Weiskopf reset, gently chipped the ball across the downsloping fairway and fringe, and looked satisfied when it came to rest only twelve feet past the cup. The putt looked fairly straight, but in a classically deceptive Oakmont nuance, it broke much more to the right than he expected.
“That’s too bad; you hate to see a man start making bogeys at this point,” Marr said, empathizing.
Weiskopf couldn’t regain a stroke on the eleventh, the spot where he had made the first of three back-nine birdies on Saturday. Walking down the twelfth fairway, he spotted on a nearby scoreboard the red number next to Johnny Miller’s name.
“I couldn’t believe it when I read one of the boards out there and saw that Miller was five under. Bob Charles, who I was playing with, couldn’t believe it either. He said, ‘there must be some mistake.’ But I told him they don’t make mistakes like that unless Miller’s mother came down to keep score for him.”
Afterward, Weiskopf told reporters he was not terribly surprised by the 63: All week long, he had downplayed the intrinsic difficulty of Oakmont, saying, “Oakmont is not a long course. Matter of fact, it’s rather short. I had only one difficult hole to play, I thought. That was the fifteenth hole.”
The identity of the man who shot the 63, that was another story.
“Johnny Miller?” he told the press. “I didn’t even know Miller had made the cut.”
By the twelfth, Weiskopf knew but remained confident.
“I really still thought I could catch him at twelve.”
But the long-hitting Weiskopf, like Nicklaus, failed to birdie the challenging par-five hole. Still, the deficit—he needed to make up two strokes in six holes—didn’t seem to bother Weiskopf. Nor did he give up when he three-putted the fourteenth green to fall back to two under par, a trio of strokes behind Miller.
The new Tom Weiskopf—the motivated, mature, patient winner of three tournaments in four weeks—didn’t run and hide. He parred number fifteen, the “one difficult hole” he had deigned to recognize, then moved on to
the sixteenth, where he absolutely had to make a birdie.
Oakmont’s sixteenth was often overlooked as a torturer of golfers. A lengthy, slanted par-three guarded by bunkers front and left and a steep falloff on the green’s right side, the tee shot required a long iron or fairway wood to get home. Shaped like an upside-down punch bowl, the putting surface featured a pronounced hump at its center that made any putt from the more inviting left side of the green extremely difficult.
Weiskopf pulled a three-iron from the bag and, with his unique blend of grace and power, stroked a towering shot that landed pin-high near the center of the green, then anchored twelve feet left of the pin. From there, he drained the quick, downhill putt off the hump to reach three under and strode briskly to the next tee; one birdie down, two more to go.
“When I made a twelve-footer for a bird at sixteen, I thought I was back in, playing for the lead.”
Then came the seventeenth. Trevino may have failed to reach the green in two, but the Merry Mex was not Nicklaus’s heir apparent off the tee; Weiskopf was. Only he possessed the muscle and high ball flight to launch a driver all the way onto the green. And while Thursday evening Trevino criticized Nicklaus for choosing the high-risk, high-reward approach on number seventeen, Weiskopf saw the perfect opportunity to match his rival and friend.
“[If] Jack can drive it on the green, I can drive it on the green.”
Weiskopf tried, but the air was heavier than on Thursday, and the increasing wind kept even the long-bombing Weiskopf from reaching the green. His drive perched just right of the fairway’s center, less than forty yards from the flagstick; he could easily pitch over Big Mouth and leave himself a short birdie putt. Weiskopf’s bold tee shot had paid off well enough for him to keep his dream of victory alive—and among the leaders, only he had birdied number eighteen the day before.