Chasing Greatness

by Adam Lazarus

  Although everyone wanted to see Palmer close out his U.S. Open career by sinking a long, winding birdie on Oakmont’s harrowing eighteenth green—just as he had done in 1973, after John Schlee almost sank his chip to tie Johnny Miller, twenty-one years earlier to the day—it didn’t happen. The try rolled six feet past the hole, and he missed the comebacker.

  Palmer putted out, and again, the fans exploded.

  “When you walk up the eighteenth and you got an ovation like that,” he said, fighting back tears, to an ESPN television reporter, “I guess that says it all.”

  Not long afterward, in the press tent, Palmer sat down to answer more questions. But no one said a word.

  “I think you all know pretty much how I feel,” he said.

  After toweling tears from his face, he haltingly continued. “It’s been forty years of fun, work, and enjoyment.... The whole experience ... I haven’t won all that much. I won a few tournaments. I won some majors. I suppose the most important thing ... [long pause] ... is the fact it’s been as good as it’s been to me.”

  Palmer apologized to his audience; he just could not continue.

  “[Then came] a rare standing ovation from the assembled press,” Jim McKay noted. “They know, as do we all, that whatever any future giants may achieve in this game, there will never be another Arnold Palmer.”

  JACK NICKLAUS TURNED FIFTY-FOUR IN 1994, and that year, unusually, he played a great deal of competitive golf on both the senior and regular PGA tours. Although he won an event in January and accumulated three additional top tens on the Senior Tour, his game was not PGA-tour sharp: in all six of his “regular” tour appearances, including the Masters, he missed the cut.

  Still, Nicklaus believed that a miraculous, turn-back-the-clock victory rested inside of him. And there was no better place for that than the 1994 U.S. Open at Oakmont. For inspiration, throughout the tournament Nicklaus even used balls branded with the number five: A win that week would be his fifth U.S. Open Championship.

  Aside from playing together in their wistful practice round, Nicklaus largely took a backseat to Arnold Palmer prior to the Open: References to the Golden Bear centered on his heart-rending defeat of the local hero in 1962, not his indisputable place as golf’s finest champion of all time. And although Palmer certainly grabbed the headlines on Thursday and Friday, Nicklaus made news.

  Barbara Nicklaus had been there in 1962 to suffer the gallery’s harsh words when Jack toppled the King. Nevertheless, the morning the 1994 U.S. Open began, she encouraged her husband to flash back to that week.

  “Usually, when he leaves, I say, ‘Play well,’ or, ‘Good luck,’ or something. But this morning, for some reason [while dangling her fingers in his face to mimic a hypnotist], I told him ‘You’re twenty-two, you’re twenty-two, it’s 1962 again.’”

  Nicklaus did not repeat that first-round performance; he played better.

  In 1962, he had birdied the opening three holes, then fallen apart toward the end of the front nine. Thirty-two years later, again armed with a wooden driver—Nicklaus switched back to persimmon that week—his tee shot on number one sliced into the right rough. He gouged out onto the fairway, then struck a low-running pitch some ninety yards to within par-saving range. He hit the ball well for the next several holes but struggled with his putter, missing makeable birdie putts on numbers two, four, and five before bogeying the sixth and saving par on the seventh.

  “And then I started to play golf.”

  On the par-three eighth, Nicklaus’s two-iron landed three feet from the pin. He made birdie there, then sank two birdie putts—a curving twenty-footer on number twelve, and another from twelve feet on number fourteen. Five hours into the round, at two under par, Nicklaus held a share of the U.S. Open lead.

  Shaking off a bogey on the sixteenth, Nicklaus parred the seventeenth—he didn’t try to repeat his first-round eagle magic from 1973—then lashed a great drive onto the eighteenth fairway. A mediocre approach left him pin-high, forty feet left of the pin.

  “I was just trying to figure some way to get close to two-putt,” Nicklaus explained, “and it went in.”

  The thrilling birdie at the home hole dropped Nicklaus to two under par—the first time he ever broke par in the opening round of a championship at Oakmont. And if Tom Watson had not shot a three under 68 later that day, the Golden Bear would have been tied for the lead.

  The next afternoon, Palmer completed his tearful good-bye to the U.S. Open.

  “I think Arnie feels he’s had enough of it. We’ve played a lot of golf together for a lot of years, and I think we are all sorry to see anyone finish their career in anyplace, but I think he feels a little bit like I do,” Nicklaus said. “There’s a time when you sort of pass it on, let the younger players have it. I’m at that point, too. I don’t want to be around when I shouldn’t.”

  During Friday’s second round, Nicklaus proved he still belonged.

  Four front-nine birdies dropped him to five under par. Although he missed six fairways—“the weakest part of my game is off the tee. It used to be my strength”—and carded a trio of bogeys in the late afternoon, Nicklaus reached the halfway point with his trademark confidence on full display.

  “I feel very calm about the way I’m hitting the ball. If I get myself in position on Sunday, I think I have a good shot to win.”

  Friday’s 70 put Nicklaus at three under going into the weekend: a better thirty-six-hole total than he’d ever posted at Oakmont. Tied for fifth, he trailed the leader by three strokes.

  The magic disappeared over the weekend. A 77 on Saturday and a 76 on Sunday dropped him back into the pack, but for a senior player who hadn’t made a PGA tour cut all year, a twenty-eighth-place finish at Oakmont was still impressive. Even for Jack Nicklaus.

  FOLLOWING HIS FOURTH-PLACE FINISH BEHIND Johnny Miller in the 1973 U.S. Open, Nicklaus had immediately resumed his quest to become the greatest golfer of the century.

  Eight days after shooting a 68 in the final round (only Miller and Wadkins scored lower), Nicklaus served as the unofficial host of the eighth-annual Columbus Invitational Charity Pro-Am. All proceeds from the one-day, Monday event went to the Columbus Dispatch Charities and the area’s Children’s Hospital. Saddled with a well-known hacker named Bob Hope—who managed to birdie the home hole—Nicklaus and three local area pros carded an aggregate 55, the event’s lowest score.

  Nicklaus played in only seven tournaments the remainder of the season. He posted three wins, a fourth in July’s British Open, and three additional top tens. At age thirty-three, Nicklaus dominated 1973: nineteen tour starts, seventeen top tens, seven wins, first on the money list ($308,362), and the lowest stroke average of his career (69.81). It was another season filled with remarkable highs—arguably equal to his celebrated 1972 season.

  His most notable feat came in August. Three closing rounds under 70 at the Canterbury Golf Club in Shaker Heights, Ohio, earned Nicklaus a four-stroke win in the last major of the season, the PGA. That fourteenth major championship (including two U.S. Amateurs) pushed him one past the late Bobby Jones.

  “Everything was Bobby Jones,” Nicklaus told the press afterward, “and the fact that he had won thirteen major championships, a record, was hammered into my mind.”

  Nicklaus’s excellence in majors only continued after he surpassed his hero. In addition to twenty-one more regular tour victories, he won six additional majors. And he did so in practically every way imaginable.

  In perhaps the most exciting Masters of all time, Nicklaus edged out both Tom Weiskopf and Johnny Miller by a single stroke in 1975 to earn a record fifth Green Jacket. In 1978, a year after losing to Tom Watson in Turnberry’s famous “Duel in the Sun,” Nicklaus overcame a balky putter to win his third British Open—a second straight at his beloved St. Andrews.

  But in a career filled with awesome highlights, Nicklaus most enduring victory came in April 1986. He’d turned forty-six three months earlier, and without a victory in nearly two
years, chatter pervaded Augusta National the week before that he could no longer compete.

  “Nicklaus is gone, done,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer Tom McCollister declared the week of the fiftieth Masters tournament. “He just doesn’t have the game anymore. It’s rusted from lack of use. He’s 46, and nobody that old wins the Masters.”

  Nicklaus had set the bar so high that even in his mid-forties, he was destined to disappoint if not chasing the Grand Slam or winning six tour events each year.

  Rather than ignoring the criticism, Nicklaus used it as motivation, and kept within four shots of the pace entering Sunday’s final round. Still trailing Seve Ballesteros, Greg Norman, and Tom Kite by several strokes, Nicklaus scored birdies on numbers nine and ten, then grabbed two more (and a bogey) at Amen Corner to close the gap to two.

  With his son Jackie serving as his caddie, Nicklaus eagled the par-five fifteenth after a brilliant long-iron approach, then drained a short birdie putt on number sixteen and a ten-footer on number seventeen to steal the lead. Playing behind Nicklaus, Norman and Kite couldn’t catch up, and from the clubhouse, the Golden Bear won at Augusta National for the sixth time. His final-round 65—and an incredible 30 on the back nine—remains the greatest finishing performance in Masters history.

  “This may be as fine a round of golf as I ever played, particularly those last ten holes.”

  Nicklaus never won another PGA event following that indelible scene: the aging, still long-haired champion, in yellow shirt and checkered pants, joyfully raising his putter in triumph. Nicklaus tapered down his already limited playing schedule, spending more time with his large family, refining the Muirfield Village Golf Club and its Memorial Tournament, as well as expanding his architectural firm and other golf-related businesses into a worldwide empire.

  Still, as a tournament host and course design magnate, Nicklaus could not completely purge his competitive fire. In early 1990, having turned fifty, he joined the Senior Tour and immediately crushed the familiar field of competitors.

  In his Senior Tour debut on the Cochise Course at Desert Mountain in Scottsdale, Arizona—a course he designed—Nicklaus won the season’s first major championship, the Tradition. A week later at the Masters, in the best finish ever by a player in his fifties, Nicklaus finished sixth; only three bogeys on the back nine kept him from another Green Jacket miracle. The following Sunday, he tied for third in the Senior PGA Championship. Nicklaus was renowned for competing in tournaments rather sparingly, and his three top tens, in three major championships, in three weeks, reaffirmed his place among the greatest on any tour.

  With a win at another major, the Senior Players Championship, in June, Nicklaus had won two of the three senior majors in his rookie season. And in sole possession of the lead during the final round of July’s United States Senior Open, Nicklaus was all set to claim a third senior major until he was once again stymied by a familiar foe: Lee Trevino.

  AS FAR BACK AS 1968—following his improbable U.S. Open win at Oak Hill and subsequent meteoric rise to stardom—Trevino had charmed the press with his fresh enthusiasm for the game.

  “My goal is to play as good as I can for as long as I can. I’m going to keep practicing and playing until I get about hundred years old.

  “I don’t care if it’s the Screen Door Open! If the money’s out there, I’ll tee it up on a gravel road.”

  That bubbly Trevino had almost disappeared by 1973. During one of many vent sessions to the media at Oakmont, he said, “I don’t want to play after I’m forty. That would give me seven more years. I don’t have a day off until [December] eighth. Of course, it’s my own fault, but I’m scheduled for something every day.”

  Trevino’s frustrations continued well after he pulled his $30,000 mobile home out of Oakmont’s parking lot. Putting woes resurfaced the next week at the American Golf Classic; then, at Royal Troon a few weeks later, he couldn’t figure out the winds well enough to defend his British Open crown. Still, he finished tenth: his fourth straight year in the top ten in the game’s two preeminent national championships (a record only surpassed by Nicklaus).

  Regardless of how well he played—he still finished fourth on the 1973 money list, despite not winning another time—Trevino’s irritability did not subside. He took a break from the tour in late July and hinted that he might not even play in August’s PGA Championship; reporters speculated that he and Claudia were having marital problems.

  Trevino eventually decided to play in the PGA, but after shooting 76, then telling a reporter that his desire was not there, he brushed “aside newsmen on his way to his car. A youngster seeking his autograph reached out and grabbed Trevino, and he turned around angrily and told the youth: ‘Get your hands off me. Don’t touch me again.’ Trevino got into his car, slammed his fist against the dashboard, and left.”

  Once his draining 1973 season came to an end, however, Trevino steadied the ship and the lovable, smiling “Happy Hombre” returned.

  In March 1974, he won the Greater New Orleans Open, his first victory in more than a year. By August his revival—in every sense—was complete. “[Twirling] his putter in familiar, fidgety fashion, joking all the while,” Trevino grabbed the third-round lead of the PGA Championship at Tanglewood Park. The next afternoon, he held on to win his fifth major championship, defeating, naturally, his playing partner, Jack Nicklaus.

  “I was charged up like I always am when I play with Jack and I really hit the ball super.”

  That week, Trevino confessed that he had tried to bring a measure of stability to his life after years of stealing the last buck from a grueling exhibition and personal-appearance schedule.

  “Now I’m learning the way to handle these things. My problem has been scheduling things too far ahead, like making commitments in January for August. Well, the kids are on vacation then, but I forget that in January. I’m figuring out ways of allowing time for my kids. I don’t want to raise my family in a hotel room.”

  But Trevino could never resist the temptation of tournament golf. Not even a bolt of lightning could keep him off the tour for more than a few weeks. While playing the Western Open in June 1975, Trevino, Jerry Heard, and Bobby Nichols were struck by lightning during a rain delay on the thirteenth green at Butler National Golf Club. Trevino had persuaded his friends to wait out the storm.

  He suffered a serious back injury that would last for years. Fluid in his spine dissolved from the electrocution, leaving little lubrication between the disks in his vertebrae. Still, Trevino left the hospital early and within two weeks he was at Carnoustie, playing the British Open; he tied for fortieth. By November, he returned to top form and won the Mexican Open. The lightning had sapped some of his strength and endurance, but Trevino’s generosity never waned. He donated his $8,000 winner’s check to “my good friend Father Wasson, who has an orphans’ home in Cuernavaca.”

  Trevino won one official PGA event per year for the next four seasons, and finished fourth in the 1977 British Open at Turnberry. In 1980, he won a record-tying fifth Vardon Trophy: If being struck by lightning wasn’t going to force his retirement, neither was turning forty.

  Still, despite some patching up, Trevino’s life away from the greens and fairways remained as turbulent as ever. The disintegration of several business deals, and ugly divorces from both his wife and longtime manager, Bucky Woy, left him flat broke in 1977, and then again in the early 1980s.

  “It didn’t bother me a bit,” he said two decades later. “If you’ve been poor once, being poor again is no big thing. You just look at it as a challenge.”

  He eventually got back on his feet financially, thanks to his earnings on tour and the endorsements he continued to attract. And in 1984, at age forty-four, Trevino won his second PGA Championship at Shoal Creek. His fifteen-under-par total set a PGA scoring record that would last more than a decade.

  There to greet her husband at Shoal Creek was Claudia Trevino, though not the same Claudia Trevino who had stood beside her flawed
husband throughout the 1970s. Barely a year after his divorce, Trevino married twenty-four-year-old Claudia Bove, whom he had met at a tournament years earlier when she was just a child. Trevino and “Claudia II” (as the press dubbed her) soon started a family of their own with two young children.

  “First, I never used to put anything before or above golf. I can do that now, although it’s not easy, because I can still play,” he later said.

  “To be the best at anything, you have to be a little selfish. Selfishness is the reason I didn’t know my first four children. I could have been a better dad, but I would have been an average golfer.”

  With his home life crawling toward stability, Trevino finally began to reduce his tournament appearances. He joined NBC Sports as an analyst and was often paired with Vin Scully. He still played as often as his body and new wife would allow.

  In a year better remembered for Nicklaus’s victory at the Masters, and despite playing only four events beforehand, Trevino birdied the opening hole to grab a share of the final-round lead of the 1986 U.S. Open at Winged Foot. A solid 71 to close the championship—won by his former hustling mark at Horizon Hills in El Paso, Raymond Floyd—earned Trevino his fifth top-five U.S. Open finish. He, too, could compete on equal terms at age forty-six with the world’s premier golfers.

  Born less than eight weeks apart, Nicklaus and Trevino both joined the Senior Tour in 1990. And, as had been the case at Oak Hill in 1968, Merion in 1971, Muirfield in 1972, and Tanglewood Park in 1974, it seemed that only Lee Trevino could foil Jack Nicklaus’s major championship conquests.

  In July 1990, both men appeared in their first U.S. Senior Open, held at New Jersey’s Ridgewood Country Club. In search of his third straight victory in a senior major, Nicklaus posted a Saturday 67 to take the lead with one round to play.