Chasing Greatness Page 10

  Typical for a young pro in his first U.S. Open, Hensley’s game plan went right out the window. While he was still on the range, a member of the grounds crew charged up in a golf cart and anxiously yelled to him:

  “Hey, you’re on the tee!”

  “What time you got?” Hensley asked his caddie.

  “Seven twelve.”

  “Hop on; I’ll ride you up,” the grounds crewman said. Some 340 yards separated Oakmont’s practice range from the first tee.

  Startled and panicky, Hensley got in the cart while his caddie trailed behind.

  “The caddie’s running with the bag,” Hensley remembered years later, “the clubs are falling out, jingling all over the place.”

  When they finally reached the tee box, Hensley discovered that he had actually been summoned to participate in the U.S.G.A.’s traditional opening ceremony, which began roughly ten minutes before the first scheduled tee time. With that completed, the championship formally began.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the seventy-third U.S. Open,” cried out Jack Crist, the starter. “First off the tee this morning are Geoff Hensley, from Zephyrhills, Florida; Bob Gilder, an amateur from Tempe, Arizona; and Roland Stafford of Verona, Pennsylvania. Mr. Hensley has the honor.... Mr. Hensley, first tee, please.”

  Frantically, Hensley put on a glove, teed up a ball, and swung away with his driver.

  The ball sailed into the deep, dew-laden rough on the right side—dead. He double-bogeyed the hole.

  Given his jarring start, Hensley gathered himself pretty well and played the next seventeen holes in six over par, finishing with a 79. He got some extra sleep with his 11:17 a.m. tee time the next day and fired a solid 72; unfortunately, he missed the cut by a single stroke.

  Hensley was not the only golfer Oakmont exasperated that week. Days before the first round, volatile Dave Hill had played four practice holes at Oakmont, walked off the course, and withdrawn from the tournament.

  “I don’t have the equipment to play this thing,” said the thirty-six-year-old who had been performing superbly in the first half of 1973. In fact, he had scored his tenth tour victory four weeks earlier in Memphis at the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic.

  Hill was infamous for bashing U.S. Open courses, as he did in 1970 at Hazeltine in Minnesota, calling the course a “cow pasture.” Three years later, at Oakmont, he focused his criticism more on the U.S.G.A. officials.

  “In the Super Bowl, they don’t move the goalposts into the stands. In basketball, they don’t grease the floor for the play-offs. In the World Series they don’t flood the outfield. So why does the United States Golf Association have to take a course and make it impossible? That’s like digging chuckholes at the Indianapolis 500. I guess they want to embarrass pro golfers.”

  Hill withdrew Tuesday afternoon and was content to play cards at his home club outside Denver while the U.S. Open (which would have been his ninth) proceeded without him. He’d finally had enough of the U.S.G.A. “taking a good course and making it zero fun to play.”

  The only man who seemed to have less fun on a U.S. Open golf course than Hill was Australia’s Bruce Crampton. But then again, Crampton never seemed to enjoy himself, not even in the middle of the 1973 season, which was by far his finest in sixteen years on tour.

  Crampton had developed a solid resume since first being invited to play in the Masters in 1957, three years after winning the New Zealand PGA Championship at age nineteen. Between 1961 and 1971, he accumulated nine PGA tour victories, topped $100,000 in earnings for five consecutive years (starting in 1968), and in 1972 twice finished as runner-up to Jack Nicklaus when the Golden Bear won the first two legs of the Grand Slam at Augusta National and Pebble Beach.

  Once the 1973 season began, Crampton only got better, winning the Phoenix and Tucson opens on consecutive Sundays in January. And in the spring, he nearly won consecutive tournaments again, escaping the Houston Open with a one-stroke victory in May, then holding the lead after seventy-one holes the following week at the Colonial in Fort Worth. A horrific double bogey on the final hole cost Crampton his thirteenth tour win, and gave Tom Weiskopf the honor of donning the tournament’s traditional Scottish plaid jacket.

  Weiskopf’s victory—which would set off a hot streak of his own in the weeks leading up to the U.S. Open—had its ironic side. Even the quarrelsome Weiskopf found Crampton insufferable: “He’s just not any fun.”

  Several other notables on tour also couldn’t bear Crampton’s melancholy. Dow Finsterwald and Gardner Dickinson openly proclaimed they didn’t want to play with him, and on more than one occasion, even placid Julius Boros chewed him out for offensive behavior toward fans, marshals, and photographers.

  “We all have double bogeys; we all blow tournaments,” Boros said. “His kind of conduct is totally unnecessary.”

  Crampton’s three wins early in the 1973 season inevitably brought his behavior under greater scrutiny. But even though Sports Illustrated—in an article entitled “Golf’s Jekyll and Hyde”—acknowledged that Crampton was occasionally kind and thoughtful and was consciously seeking to become more polite and “affectionate,” he hadn’t yet changed many of his colleagues’ minds.

  “[You’re] asking a leopard to change its spots. That’s a tall order,” Dickinson said. “He’s winning now. It’s easy to act in a socially acceptable manner when you’re winning. I’ll reserve my judgment until he loses a few, the kind that really hurt. It happens. We all lose. Let’s see what he does then.”

  That spring, Crampton confided to a friend/physician that he was “desperately unhappy,” and admitted that though his life goals were success, health, and happiness, achieving the first two were “not worth a thing without the third.” Years later, Crampton would reveal he had been fighting a lifelong battle with depression.

  For all the pros, journalists, and fans who were repelled by Crampton’s mean streak and holier-than-thou attitude toward the rules of golf (he harbored no regrets about turning players in for minor violations), his most outspoken critic was also his complete opposite.

  Arnold Palmer hated to be paired with Crampton, and often reached “near rage” when he learned of another nasty Crampton episode. In a 1971 four-ball tournament at Laurel Valley Golf Club, not far from Palmer’s hometown of Latrobe, Crampton complained to a reporter about the behavior of the gallery, presumably Arnie’s Army.

  Palmer’s response upon hearing the quote: “Why doesn’t he quit bitching and play golf!”

  For his part, the raucous galleries were not the only reason Crampton wasn’t a fan of the King. In more than a decade of coexisting with him on the PGA tour, Crampton claimed that Palmer “never gave me the opportunity to putt out, never told me I had a nice round.”

  Although the two men did play together in the third round of April’s Byron Nelson Golf Classic, and were even seen talking and laughing together—“[I] never had such a congenial round with Arnold”—Palmer wasn’t likely to share a drink with Crampton during U.S. Open week at Oakmont. And not just because most experts considered Crampton—the tour’s second-leading money winner—more likely to contend for the title than Palmer. After the tremendous first half of his 1973 season, Crampton appeared ready to shed Golf Monthly’s recent tag as “the most successful journeyman golf professional the world has ever known.” Likewise, said Golf Magazine, “His steady play and new winning habit make him the most serious foreign contender.”

  But Crampton shot an opening-round 76. The next afternoon, a 75 left him one stroke over the cut line. At Arnie Palmer’s U.S. Open, Bruce Crampton made a quick exit.

  So did Billy Casper, Palmer’s old nemesis from the 1966 U.S. Open at Olympic. Casper’s loud claim that because of their great length, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf held a ten-stroke edge over the field—the claim that so irritated Lee Trevino—didn’t seem to ring true when neither booming hitter broke par during round one.

  “Nicklaus and Weiskopf, they can use a six-iron or seven
-iron on eighteen,” Casper noted of the 456-yard, par-four finishing hole. “The rest of us, we’re going to be hitting from much farther back. I’ll tell you, if they move the flag back on that hole, I’ll be using a four-wood.... I would say my chances are very slim here.”

  Casper’s defeatist attitude in 1973 stemmed from more than bad memories of having played Oakmont during the 1962 U.S. Open, when he missed the cut with a pair of 77s. In 1972, for the first time since 1955, the forty-one-year-old didn’t win a single event during the entire season. And though he came close a couple of times—losing a play-off in April at the Byron Nelson, and finishing fourth at the PGA—he hardly resembled the same man who, not long ago, had twice won the PGA Player of the Year award (1966, 1970) and become the first man in golf history to own five Vardon Trophies.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of traveling around the world in the last few years, and I don’t feel I’ve given myself a chance to recuperate from it. Jet lag, that sort of thing. As you get older, it tells on you a little more. You’re never at ease on the golf course; you’re stirred up from the tension; you lose your keenness to perform,” Casper said in March 1973. “Because of my travel and a lot of things I was doing, I haven’t really watched my diet. I was not only playing golf but had a lot of speaking engagements and appearances. The banquet circuit. I eat and enjoy everything now. When you’re being the guest of someone, it’s pretty hard to turn them down.”

  Having given up his famed, exotic buffalo-meat diet several years earlier, by spring 1973 Casper weighed at least thirty pounds more than during his mid- 1960s prime.

  Aboard airplanes as often as he was on the golf course, no longer in peak physical shape in his early forties, and fresh off his first season on tour without a victory, Casper appeared ill equipped to contend in the 1973 U.S. Open. And he wasn’t. He shot a 79 on Thursday, matched that horrid score on Friday, and missed the cut by eight shots. No other elite player performed so poorly at Oakmont, a course where Casper—the man many considered the greatest putter of his time—should have shone. His awful play seemed to mark a sad, final U.S. Open hurrah for the world’s then-greatest Mormon golfer.

  IN HIS ENCOUNTER WITH OAKMONT’S maddening greens, seasoned pro Charlie Sifford struggled more than anyone: He six-putted the par-four seventh (five of his putts were within five feet). The PGA tour’s first great African-American pro was already in bad shape before reaching the seventh green, however: He had double-bogeyed the first hole and triple-bogeyed the third.

  “It wasn’t the greens; it was me. I just putted like hell,” said Sifford while chomping his trademark cigar. “Dave Hill told the truth. People didn’t believe him. This golf course is too tough. You just can’t play it.”

  Several other veterans, those who had seen just about every type of nasty lie and slick green, also couldn’t do anything right on day one. Ed Merrins, the renowned teaching pro at such classic courses as Merion, Westchester, and Bel-Air, shot an 86 that featured a pair of eights. The 1964 U.S. Amateur Champion, Bill Campbell, had a similarly tough afternoon.

  Campbell arrived at Oakmont the night before the Open began—after hosting his stepdaughter’s wedding in Huntington, West Virginia—only to shoot an 84. Besides landing his tee shot in mud on the par-three sixth, the honest-to-a-fault career amateur called a penalty stroke on himself for hitting the ball twice with one stroke. (Incredibly, the next day, he would call two more penalty strokes on himself, both on the eighteenth.) If anyone could get away with missing a few practice rounds at Oakmont, it was Campbell, who had competed there in two U.S. amateurs and now three U.S. Opens. He took his awful first round in good humor.

  “I shot an 86 my first time here in 1938, so I’ve improved two strokes in thirty-five years.”

  Even a supremely gifted putter like Dave Stockton was flustered by the course setup on Thursday. He needed thirty-six strokes on the greens just to card a 77. “I’m an aggressive putter. A U.S. Open course just doesn’t fit my game,” Stockton said. “I don’t like to be made to look foolish. It’s a humbling week.”

  Oakmont—the Hades of Hulton—was living up to its nickname.

  Anyone named Snead (or Sneed) who walked off the course that afternoon was inclined to agree with Sifford and Stockton. A member of Ohio State’s golf team during the early 1960s, Ed Sneed had been overshadowed by teammates Nicklaus and Weiskopf. Sneed’s career got off to a poor start after he turned professional in 1967, but his game improved dramatically in 1973 and he scored his first tour victory later that year. Tee-to-green, Sneed played superbly during the opening round at Oakmont, as he hit sixteen of eighteen greens. But he could still manage only a 76, mainly due to mishaps on the greens.

  The first hole was typical. After driving into the wet rough (he teed off early, shortly after Hensley), Sneed was fortunate to draw a good lie, and landed his second shot only twenty feet from the flagstick. “[But] then I three-putted. I had three three-putts today, all of them on relatively good first putts.”

  Sneed had joined Nicklaus and Weiskopf in a practice round on Wednesday. With former NCAA champion Hale Irwin joining the three Buckeyes, thousands of fans crowded the fairways to see the high-profile foursome. The participants were unusually eager to play that day: A terrible rainstorm on Tuesday, which knocked down trees and the press tent, had washed away vital practice time. Since most players—including Sneed, Irwin, and Weiskopf—had never played Oakmont before, studying the course’s idiosyncrasies firsthand was essential.

  Tuesday’s afternoon downpour bothered more than just the golfers. Over eighty-three hundred fans had bought cheaper tickets and traveled to Oakmont to see their favorite pros play in a more relaxed environment. Most swarmed around Palmer’s foursome, only to be disappointed when lightning and rain chased the King off the course after he had played just a few holes.

  A uniformly older group of fans was at least as disappointed as Arnie’s Army. The indomitable Samuel Jackson Snead, at age sixty-one, had qualified for his twenty-ninth U.S. Open. Hitting the ball as long as ever, and increasingly proficient in his sidesaddle putting stroke, Sam genuinely expected to contend with players less than half his age.

  Sam had planned to practice and offer some pointers on Tuesday to his nephew, Jesse Carlyle (or J. C.) Snead, a three-time PGA tour winner, who had never seen Oakmont. J.C. was quite sour on how the U.S.G.A. “tricked up” courses for the Open, seemingly with the goal of humbling the best players in the world and occasionally making them look foolish. J.C. still had lots to learn about what the U.S.G.A. had in store for him at Oakmont, so Tuesday’s storms set back his preparations considerably.

  “Uncle Sam” was not nearly as concerned about losing practice time. While Jerry McGee and other youngsters peered out the locker room window, praying that the storms would cease, Sam—his trademark straw hat balancing on the slight bulge of his belly while exposing his bald head—lay down on a bench and slept peacefully through the loud blasts of thunder. Snead already knew Oakmont and how the U.S.G.A. would set it up for a major championship.

  Four times Snead had narrowly missed out in the National Open, and two of those failures had Oakmont ties. In addition to his collapse against Hogan on Oakmont’s back nine in 1953, Snead had squandered a late lead in the 1947 Open in St. Louis, then lost in a play-off to Lew Worsham, Oakmont’s recently appointed head professional. Twenty-six years later, Worsham was still the man in charge of Oakmont’s pro shop.

  Snead owned a Claret Jug, three Green Jackets, three PGA Championships (including the 1951 installment at Oakmont), and more PGA tournaments (eighty-two) than any man in history. He also won his seventeenth West Virginia Open in 1973, nearly four decades after winning his first in 1936. But for all his record-breaking achievements and the continuing stellar quality of his game, Snead’s string of second-place finishes in the U.S. Open—he never won the championship in twenty-eight tries—hung sadly over his head.

  “Why does the Open mean so much?” was his evasive reply to the predi
ctable questions about whether or not he could finally win one.

  “I’m playing the same fellows I beat each week. There’s just too much emphasis and prestige put on it. It’s like Mickey Mantle hitting three home runs in the last game of the World Series and winning the batting title for that. In 1950 I won twice as many tournaments as anybody else, I had [the] low average, I won the Vardon [Trophy]. [Ben] Hogan wins the Open and he’s player of the year. Sentiment is fine and Hogan did a helluva thing by coming back, but are they going to let sentiment go by the record? Heck, I beat Hogan that year in a playoff at Los Angeles. A man doesn’t just have to play well to win the Open; he has to have a hell of a lot of luck.... I guess the Open is rated so highly because it’s the daddy of them all. They’ve been playing it since the year one.”

  Snead happily put his gripes on hold in 1973; after two years of failing to qualify, he returned to the event by tying for first place in the nation’s largest sectional U.S. Open qualifier in Charlotte. Well rested and anxious to resume his lifelong quest, Snead joined two of the most flamboyant young stars in the field, twenty-three-year-old Lanny Wadkins and twenty-one-year-old Ben Crenshaw, for an early Thursday morning start.

  “Hey, Sam,” a member of the field called to him after the round, “you’re older than those two guys you played with combined!”

  “Hell,” Snead replied, “you could throw a third one in.”

  By sticking his approach to within eighteen inches on the fifth green, Snead found himself one under par early in the round. But he mangled the last three par-threes, bogeying the eighth and sixteenth and double-bogeying the shortest hole of all, the thirteenth. As usual, Snead mainly blamed his handiwork on the greens; he just couldn’t turn brilliant approach shots into birdies.

  “I missed only two fairways,” he said after shooting a 75. “And I only had one long putt. Just one putt over twenty feet. I was putting awful. Kept missing ’em to the right. I had no three-putt greens, but had thirty-three putts. Should have had a seventy.”