A Golfer's Life (32 page)

After using a 1-iron to hit the narrow crescent of fairway, I pulled out a 2-iron and hit the ball just about as hard as I possibly could. The ball struck the front portion of the green and rolled up to within twenty feet of the hole. I stood over my ball for a moment and then struck the putt firmly, rattling it into the back of the cup for an eagle three.

That was the shot in the arm I needed. Because of the severely dry and warm conditions preceding the tournament, I’d been anxious about the fairways and greens holding shots, but suddenly in the cold and wind that was no longer a concern. I hit booming drives (several over three hundred yards) to the heart of the fairway on almost every tee shot in the final thirty-six, and my approach shots were crisp, accurate, and confident. Only my putting needed a bit of tweaking, and I got that from a source near and dear as I strode off the par-3 17th, no doubt scowling because I’d just missed a makable birdie putt.

Winnie slipped to my side and quietly said, “Bob and I have decided that you are moving your head when you putt.”

“Oh,
really
?” I replied, smiling broadly at my new traveling golf coach.

“That’s right.” She shrugged as if to say:
That’s our opinion. Take it or leave it
.

I did consider what she told me, went straight to the practice green afterward, and worked on holding my head still as Pap had always taught me.

Something seemed to work. In the third round Friday morning, I had nine one-putt greens and cruised in with a 67, opening a five-shot lead over Kel Nagle. The irony, of course, is that a week that had begun so chilly and with so little promise ended in warm sunshine highlighting probably the finest finish of my career. My drives found every fairway, and the great galleries at Troon encouraged and rewarded me with enthusiastic applause for each good shot, feeding my confidence and pumping me up. I’ll never forget how they swarmed around me as I came up the 18th hole, held perfectly still as I made my approach shot to the final green, then swarmed ahead again to encircle the green. Winnie later commented to me that she thought they were going to charge right into the stately Troon clubhouse itself!

My goodness, what a feeling. I still get chills remembering that final walk through the crowds.

A few minutes later, I tapped in for a final-round 69, a six-stroke victory, and a 276 total that eclipsed the old Open mark by two strokes. Almost as important to me, I’d successfully defended the championship—the first American player to do that since Walter Hagen in the 1920s.

As I remarked to the British press afterward, I’d never—and I meant
never
—played better tournament golf. They responded by using up most of their stock of superlatives, heralding my final two circuits of Lady Troon as the finest finish in the history of the event. I remember that a correspondent for the
London Observer
wrote that I might well be the greatest player of all time. This was the first time anybody had written that, and that statement gave me tremendous satisfaction and a deep thrill.

I was thirty-two years old, standing proudly with my golf coach–wife in the weak sunshine at Troon, clutching the oldest trophy in the game, clearly at the top of my career.
I had no way of knowing then that, despite lots of glowing predictions of Open championships to come, Winnie’s postcard to Susie Bowman would prove a bit prophetic: I’d won not only my last British Open victory but also my next-to-last major golf title. My “magic” touch would never happen there again.

How can you know these things? The answer is, of course, you can’t. If you’re smart, you simply live and enjoy the moment. And at that moment all I knew and really cared about was that I’d accomplished something I’d set my heart on doing—winning the British Open and then winning it again. In every way conceivable, the moment marked one of the true highlights of my life.

I
n all, over three decades, I made twenty-three trips to the British Open. My best finish in the twenty Opens since Troon was seventh at Turnberry in 1977. My first weak performance came in 1963 at Royal Lytham and St. Anne’s in England, where we won the Ryder Cup in 1961 and I played pretty well. In the Open, though, I got off to a bad start with 76 and went on to a twenty-sixth-place finish. The British fans weren’t any more disappointed than I was.

Most everybody naturally assumed I would return to St. Andrews in 1964. But, for the reasons I’ve already talked about, I was physically and mentally exhausted and just didn’t think my showing would be a good one. Considering that I won the Masters that April, if I’d managed to win the U.S. Open a few weeks before at Congressional, I suppose I might have indeed gone to the Old Grey Toon, with the Grand Slam still a possibility. But that didn’t happen, so I stayed home and rested.

In a sense, though, I was there. Certainly in spirit. A few weeks before the British Open, Tony Lema called me to say
he thought he might go over to see if he could qualify. He’d never made the trip, and I heartily encouraged him to do so, telling him I would arrange to have Tip Anderson serve as his caddie. I loved Lema’s spirit and his natural flair for the dramatic—hence his nickname “Champagne Tony.” I even gave him my favorite putter to use, and it must have worked some magic. With Tip as his guide, Tony went around the Old Course in 279, beating Jack Nicklaus to capture the greatest victory of his career. Just two years later, he and his wife died tragically in that plane crash near Chicago, and the golf world lost one of its most promising rising stars. I lost a cherished friend.

I was very disappointed with my performance when I went back to defend at Birkdale in 1965. The playing conditions were the opposite of what they had been when I won. The fairways were dry and hard, and I struggled to keep shots out of the rough all week, finishing a disappointing sixteenth. The next year I went on to Muirfield for the first time. I really liked the course, and Winnie especially liked the cozy hotel and other accommodations we found there in quaint Gullane, but for one reason or another the magic eluded me again and I finished eighth.

It was about then, as I said earlier, that I began to really have trouble with my putting. I putted not so much to win—as not to lose. That’s a major difference, I see now, between the ability to contend, and to merely play, in a major golf championship. Over the next few years, I enjoyed other venues like Turnberry and Royal St. George’s, in Sandwich, England, where I won the British PGA Championship in 1975, and the golf fans and press of Britain never failed to greet Winnie and me with anything less than the warmth they’d always shown us.

Which brings us to 1990. I was very enthusiastic about returning to St. Andrews, thinking that it would probably be
my last shot at an Open championship. We flew directly from Latrobe to St. Andrews and checked in at Russacks Hotel by the 18th hole, just as we had done thirty years earlier. Tip was there to caddie for me once again, and I played and putted reasonably well during the first two rounds, reaching the halfway point at 144.

That score almost always makes the cut at the Open, and I felt good about my chances of playing through the weekend. So, apparently, did a number of other people, including Renton Laidlaw of BBC Television, who informed his audience that I would surely be around for the finish. Unfortunately, the winds abruptly died, the sun shone, and scores began to drop. I just missed making the cut.

M
aybe that’s why I went back again to St. Andrews five years later, in 1995. Quite honestly, I hadn’t expected the Open to return to St. Andrews that soon, my game wasn’t all that bad, and I still had hopes of making that cut. I’d also made up my mind to formally announce that this would be my farewell to the British Open, fittingly at the place where it all began for me thirty-five years earlier.

People were so extraordinarily nice to us that week. Everywhere we went it was easy to see that the appreciative British fans were as moved as we were by the fare-thee-well nature of the journey. Winnie and I greeted lots of old friends, had some big laughs, and shed more than a few tears.

On Friday afternoon of the second round, when it was obvious to everybody—including me—that I wouldn’t make the cut, I walked toward the famous little stone bridge over the Swilcan Burn on the 18th hole. Photographers were calling out to me. They knew what the moment meant, and they wanted me to pause and give them a wave. So, at the top of the arched bridge, I turned, framed by the stern visage of the
Royal and Ancient clubhouse, lifted off my visor, and gave the gallery a long farewell wave with it.

If you look closely at the photograph, which has become one of my favorites, you can see that I appear from my expression to be deeply pained and powerfully happy, as if I’m anxious to move off the stage and let others shine, but reluctant to finally go.

In fact, that’s exactly how I felt. Memories were flooding my brain, and emotions were washing over me like you can’t imagine. In the instant it took for the camera’s shutter to flip open and close to capture that memorable photograph, I was also thinking how it all seemed to pass in the blink of an eye. True enough, my British Open magic was dimmed, but the magic of the British Open was as strong as it had ever been for me.

With that, I turned and walked up to the green and finished my Open career.

A
t my age, any man can look back at his career and his life and have a few regrets. I suppose it’s the extremely competitive world we live in that forces us to sometimes examine our lives in terms of what we don’t have or haven’t accomplished instead of looking at what we do have or have accomplished. I’ll admit to being as competitive as anyone, so I guess it’s natural that I share this inclination. Assessing my golf career this way is a prime example of looking at a glass as half empty or half full, the difference some say between being an optimist and being a pessimist. While I certainly consider myself an optimist, I have to admit to succumbing at times to the temptation to share the view held by many—that without the final jewel in my crown, the PGA Championship, my success on the golf course is somehow incomplete. In fact, for years I’ve held in reserve a spot for a PGA medal in a display case that holds awards from my major tournament victories.

I prefer to think that my career is neither half empty nor half full because of my repeated failure to win the PGA Championship. I’d certainly agree that it’s less than full, and freely admit that I would have dearly loved to win the fourth major of the modern Grand Slam, a kind of golfer’s Holy
Grail that I pursued so hotly between 1960 and 1964. But whatever did or didn’t come my way, I’m extremely proud of my effort and cherish many of the moments when I was in the hunt.

If it sounds like I have ambivalent feelings about my PGA experiences, that’s because I do. My feelings about my performance in the PGA Championship—and the sponsoring organization itself—are complicated. At the risk of flogging a dead horse—the press has richly chronicled and analyzed these matters for decades now—I’d like to add some reflections on my “near misses” and upon the evolution of the organization itself. I hope they’ll set the record straight.

To begin with, let me say that almost since the day I decided to become a professional tournament player in 1954, I quietly chafed under a host of what I considered to be unfair restrictions placed on players by the Professional Golfers’ Association of America. The first of these restrictions was the six-month “apprenticeship” requirement that wouldn’t permit a Tour rookie to accept any official tournament winnings. This was an unnecessary hardship imposed when he really needed a paycheck
most
in order to keep going. Another was the maddening five-year mandatory waiting period before a player was eligible to participate in the PGA Championship. I never agreed with the logic behind those rules. Could you imagine if those same restrictions were imposed on, let’s say, baseball players? How would players and fans react if Ken Griffey, Jr., or any other player couldn’t perform in the playoffs unless he’d been in the league for five years? Imagine the howls of protest over that. Yet the PGA got away with it.

At least as deeply frustrating to me was winning the 1958 Masters and nine other tournaments prior to that but being denied the opportunity to collect Ryder Cup points for my play. Those points undoubtedly would have placed me on the
1959 team that played at Eldorado Country Club in Palm Springs, where Winnie and I had a host of friends and would eventually have a winter home ourselves. This injustice stuck in my craw, I must admit, for
years
. Purely for a point of comparison, if such a restrictive clause existed today, players of such world-class caliber as Tiger Woods and Justin Leonard wouldn’t have made the Ryder Cup squad that went to Valderrama in 1997.

As early as my first few weeks out on tour, in fact, I heard older and more established players grumbling about the “controlling” nature and undue restrictiveness of the governing PGA. They complained about how unfair it seemed to them that, just as tournament golf was beginning to experience a dramatic growth in popularity, an organization whose primary mandate was to look after the interests of thousands of teaching club professionals was dictating to touring professionals what they could or could not do with their careers, under guidelines and rules that seemed, to say the least, antiquated and inefficient.

Perhaps the seeds of my own discontent with the organization were sown farther back, deep in my own childhood, when my father, as devoted a club professional as ever taught a Vardon grip or fussed over the care of a golf course, was rudely denied membership in that organization under an outdated policy that prevented “cripples” from being granted PGA membership. That snub made Pap seethe with anger, as it should have, and when I started winning tournaments and gaining clout with PGA officials, that was among the first rules I went after with a vengeance. Eventually, I’m happy to say, my lobbying paid off and the offending clause (along with several outdated rules, such as the infamous “Caucasian only” clause) was excised from the organization’s constitutional bylaws.