Chasing Greatness Page 14

  “This is my last tournament on the American tour this year, no matter what happens. It’s too tough here. I must be getting old. There are too many young kids who can beat the ball three hundred yards and putt like hell,” Charles told reporters. “I have a farm in New Zealand and another in South Africa. I plan to become a gentleman farmer. I may come back to America for two or three tournaments a year, but no more.”

  Charles’s candid disinterest in American golf reached a new low that week at Oakmont. As he brazenly told reporters, the “U.S. Open really doesn’t mean anything to a foreign player.”

  Although Charles shot a solid 71 on Thursday, he began his second round like someone with retirement on his mind. Teeing off at 8:04 a.m. with Al Geiberger and Chi Chi Rodriguez, Charles blew a three-footer for par on the first green, then missed the third green for another bogey, dropping to two over. But a brilliant short game always gave a player a chance at Oakmont, and at the next hole, Charles began one of the most remarkable scoring stretches in Oakmont’s history.

  Matching the length of those “young kids,” the thirty-seven-year-old reached the 549-yard, par-five fourth in two shots and registered an easy birdie. A perfect four-iron off the sixth tee that died three feet from the flagstick led to another birdie that returned him to even par. Two holes later, at the long par-three eighth, Charles ran his four-wood onto the green and demonstrated his putting prowess by dropping a thirty-footer for birdie.

  And he was far from finished.

  On number eleven, he split the fairway with a solid drive and, from 130 yards, stroked a nine-iron directly into the cup for an eagle.

  “It was just a lucky shot.”

  Lucky or not, Charles’s precision carried over to the 603-yard, par-five twelfth. Still a long way from the green in two, he nearly sank his next shot to score consecutive eagles. When he tapped in for birdie, he had made up six strokes over nine holes and, at four under, was back in contention.

  Although Charles’s hot streak cooled during the final holes (he bogeyed numbers fourteen and eighteen), he stood at two under par for the championship and only one behind the leader, Gary Player. Now that he was a contender halfway through a championship that “doesn’t mean anything” to him, reporters relayed Charles’s indifference toward the U.S. Open to his fellow pros.

  “I can’t believe Bob said it; that’s absolutely horse crap,” said Player, who a decade earlier had hosted Charles’s wedding in Johannesburg (Charles married a high school friend of Player’s wife). “Let me say only that if somebody offered me a million dollars in one hand and the U.S. Open title in the other, I’d take the Open title.”

  To Charles’s playing partner, Chi Chi Rodriguez, who had grown up in poverty in Puerto Rico and served in the American military, the U.S. Open Championship also meant far more than a million dollars. To him, just having a chance to win stirred patriotic fervor.

  “No matter who wins or loses,” he said, “it’s beautiful to get up in the morning, look out the window, and realize not only are you in the best country in the world, but also you’re a citizen of it. To me, that is worth more than winning 100,000 U.S. Opens.”

  Just nine days older than Player and of similar small stature, Rodriguez was also a marvel of physical fitness. Despite his size, not many on the tour hit the ball longer. And in the spring of 1973—while Player lay in bed recovering from his dual illnesses—Rodriguez flourished. He won April’s Greater Greensboro Open, followed that up with a tenth-place finish a week later at the Masters, then, two weeks afterward, took fourth place at the Tournament of Champions. By early June, he ranked seventh on the PGA money list, the highest in his career. And having placed ninth in the brutal U.S. Open the year before at Pebble Beach, Rodriguez proved that—despite a herky-jerky, whiplash swing—he possessed enough game to compete at an unyielding venue like Oakmont.

  Prior to the first round, reporters had crowded around the fast-talking Puerto Rican to hear his prediction of the favorites.

  “Nicklaus, Weiskopf, Palmer, Trevino, Player,” he immediately spat out. “With all the heat and humidity here, this is no fat man’s weather. Notice those I mentioned? Which of the ones I named is fat?”

  “What about you? You’re skinny,” a listener responded.

  “I never pick myself. Besides, in Puerto Rico, I’m a giant.”

  By the early 1970s, Rodriguez had become a hero in his native land, even though golf on the island was mainly reserved for the superrich. But the most beloved Puerto Rican athlete of all time was Roberto Clemente, the star right fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Sports fans in western Pennsylvania had come to bond with Clemente almost as closely as native Puerto Ricans. Those fans and Clemente’s countrymen also now shared the same grief.

  On New Year’s Eve, 1972, Clemente had hastily boarded a plane filled with relief supplies destined for Central America. An earthquake had brought death and suffering to thousands of impoverished Nicaraguans, and Clemente, a proud Latin American, vowed to lend his own hand in the relief effort. Badly overloaded with supplies, his plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean within minutes of takeoff. Rescue teams never found his body.

  Americans of all nationalities mourned Clemente, whose devotion as a humanitarian had cost him his life. But to those from his homeland, Clemente was more than just a great ballplayer, or a great man. He was a symbol that no matter where they came from, they too could rise out of poverty and achieve the “American dream.”

  “Every time I strike a ball, I will be thinking of Roberto Clemente,” Chi Chi said on the eve of the U.S. Open.

  An inspired Rodriguez got off to a slow start on Thursday afternoon, shooting three over par on the front side, but playing better on the back nine to shoot a respectable 75. On Friday, playing with the uninspired Bob Charles, Rodriguez carded a smooth 71 and was thrilled that he’d easily made the cut for the third consecutive June.

  But Rodriguez wasn’t the only contestant geared up for the high stakes of the U.S. Open. Regardless of what Snead or Charles had said, or the criticisms that several veterans and newcomers had levied at Oakmont and the U.S.G.A., most players considered qualifying for a U.S. Open the defining moment of their professional or amateur careers.

  “I look forward to the Open. Sure, the pressure is there, but if you’re going to measure up, you have to accept the demands of the Open. It demands things of you no other tournament does. You have to play all the shots or go home,” said Jim Colbert, a thirty-two-year-old Kansas State product who attended college on a football scholarship.

  “I’ve been playing in tournaments for the last two weeks, but my heart has been up here.”

  He also couldn’t wait for another trip to Oakmont. He’d been fortunate to play the course several years earlier because his sister, a Pittsburgh-area resident, belonged to a nearby club and arranged for him to play with a friend who belonged to Oakmont.

  Colbert certainly was not a tour superstar. In eight years, he claimed three wins and one top-ten finish in a major championship (the 1971 U.S. Open at Merion). But he had moved up in the performance rankings from fifty-ninth to twenty-third between 1971 and 1972. Early in 1973, he won the Greater Jacksonville Open in March, and took third at the Tournament of Champions in April. Still, inconsistency plagued him in the first half of the season: He finished no better than twenty-third in any other event, and missed the cut in nearly half of his nineteen tournament starts.

  A grind-it-out competitor who never lacked confidence, Colbert stitched all facets of his game together just in time for Oakmont. After dropping two strokes to par early on the front nine, he carded four birdies during a seven-hole stretch and shot 70, joining Player, Floyd, and Trevino as the only players under par.

  Colbert’s excellent play continued into the second round. With only his wife and three children, plus his sister and her three children, watching him, Colbert teed off just before nine a.m. on Friday. He birdied number two by sinking a tricky fifteen-footer, and grabbed another birdie o
n number seven thanks to a perfectly lofted nine-iron that stopped seven feet from the flagstick.

  Two holes later, on the strength of a once-in-a-lifetime shot, Colbert pulled within a single stroke of Player.

  In his bag that week, Colbert carried clubs the New York Times referred to as “Golf’s Magic Wand—Maybe.” Colbert was one of the first touring pros to experiment with graphite-shafted woods in order to hit the ball farther. Not a long hitter, he would especially need a boost to compete on par-five holes (like Oakmont’s fourth and ninth), where power players enjoyed a considerable advantage : They could easily reach the green in two shots.

  In the early days of graphite technology, most pros considered the experimental shafts too whippy, too unpredictable, too fragile, or all of the above. In their view, the tradeoff between greater distance versus less control or predictability was simply not worth it. Indeed, most power players went in the opposite direction, preferring superstiff or X shafts (at least on their drivers) to restrict the bend of the club, and thereby achieve maximum strength without sacrificing control. And this, of course, held especially true on tight U.S. Open venues, where slightly off-line shots yielded steep penalties.

  But Colbert would try anything to neutralize the advantage the longer hitters held over him. And at Oakmont, the gamble worked. Despite one sharp hook on the third hole that landed him in the Church Pews, he was driving the ball longer than usual, and down the middle. He approached number nine confident he could get home in two shots.

  Again, however, Colbert badly hooked his tee shot, which brought into play one of the Fowneses’ more terrifying hazards: the deep, narrow ditch. Ten minutes of studying his awful lie forced him to remove his ball from the ditch, take a one-stroke penalty, and drop the ball no more than two club lengths away. “I was tempted to hit the ball out of the ditch,” he said, “but Homero Blancas was playing in my threesome and it took him three swings to get a similar shot out of it.”

  Even after the drop, Colbert’s ball lay in deep, gnarly rough: virtually invisible. Still 225 yards from the green, he decided, to his caddie’s astonishment, to go for broke and hit his graphite-shafted fairway wood from the buried lie.

  Miraculously, Colbert “fractured” the shot, and his ball came to rest eighteen inches from the cup. “My three-wood came so close that it should have been a gimme.”

  “Jim made the greatest shot I’ve ever seen in my life at No. 9,” recalled Rusty Guy, Colbert’s seventeen-year-old caddie, and an Oakmont member to whom Colbert attributed much of his success that week.

  Following his miracle birdie, Colbert promptly dropped a stroke when he drove into a bunker on the tenth, only to gain it back on number eleven, where he stuck his short-iron approach to six feet. A birdie and four consecutive pars over the next five-hole stretch put Colbert at four under for the championship, just one shot behind Player.

  On the tee at the long, par-three sixteenth, Rusty Guy handed Colbert two more pieces of golf equipment not usually carried by an American touring pro: a Skyway Ball from Japan, and an iron made by Karsten Solheim, the golf guru/ engineer now in the early stages of reinventing the shape and composition of “iron” clubs.

  Colbert smacked the Japanese ball crisply with his PING one-iron, and with Oakmont’s greens holding like never before—especially on the punchbowlshaped sixteenth green—it came to rest fifteen feet from the flag. Colbert rammed in the birdie putt to pull even with Player at five under par.

  Unfortunately, an errant drive into a bunker on number eighteen cost Colbert a share of the lead. Alone in second place, one behind Player, he earned a spot in the last pairing for Saturday’s round. As spirited as ever, Colbert brushed aside questions about impending weekend nerves.

  “After I got to be starting quarterback in high school, I eloped with my girlfriend. We had to come back to tell our parents. That’s pressure.”

  ANOTHER EARLY MORNING STARTER ON Friday was Lee Trevino, who carded eight pars over eight holes. He then thrilled the crowd of several hundred onlookers as he nearly carded an eagle on the ninth; his fifty-foot putt rolled directly over the hole, and he had to settle for a birdie that dropped him to two under par.

  Trevino’s play was nothing short of brilliant; astonishingly, he hit every fairway and green over the first twenty-seven holes. At the turn, he stood just three shots off the lead. But two hours later, when he returned to Oakmont’s unofficial hub—the spot where the clubhouse, the ninth, and the eighteenth greens triangulate—Trevino fumed. Not only did he miss an eight-foot birdie opportunity at number twelve, he three-putted and became noticeably “testy” afterward.

  Having nailed every fairway that afternoon, Trevino continued his textbook golf on the home hole. From the eighteenth fairway, his approach shot landed comfortably on the green but a long distance from the hole. The large gallery, eager to see Trevino’s first birdie on the back side, crowded the green, only to be disappointed when the ball died inches from the hole. Forced to settle for a one over 72, Trevino sighed and then stuck out his tongue in frustration.

  The events on the eighteenth summed up Trevino’s round, and his entire tournament so far: perfect tee shot, adequate but slightly misjudged approach, followed by a birdie-miss that petered out on the lip. Trevino’s hometown paper, the El Paso Herald-Post, reported he “had at least five birdie putts stop short by as little as a quarter or half an inch.”

  In typical Trevino fashion, his postround antics made news. U.S.G.A. protocol paved a short path from the eighteenth green to the scorer’s tent so that players could sign their cards. From there, several players were ushered into the press tent so reporters could speak to the leaders or perennial stars. Although Trevino was both a leader and a star, he walked right past the press tent and onto the practice green. His head down, a somber look on his face, he spoke to no one, stroked putts for a full hour, then retreated hurriedly toward his motor home.

  One of America’s most popular sports figures, Trevino could not get away with skirting the press.

  “There’s nothing merry about the Super Mex when things aren’t going his way,” wrote a Richmond columnist. “After his one-over-par-72 Friday, Trevino refused to come to the press tent to be interviewed. Instead he went to the practice green, where he remained in the middle of the big green to avoid questioning. His complaints about his lack of privacy are fast becoming boring.”

  The unshakable fear that Trevino had long masked with humor and a grin-that he would soon wear out his welcome in the elite game—felt legit without his “Happy Hombre” facade.

  That evening, Trevino’s grumpiness diminished when he learned his third-round playing partner would be Jack Nicklaus. Trevino always seemed at his best when dueling with the Golden Bear. In fact, of his four major title victories, three had ended with Nicklaus the runner-up. The pairing was less encouraging to Nicklaus.

  “Trevino had beaten me in majors, not to mention the other defeats he had handed out,” Nicklaus observed about their fierce rivalry. “I had played close to my best every time, which always helps you feel a little better about yourself than when you’ve tossed a tournament away. But there could be no question by now that Lee Trevino was the player who had given me the most trouble up to this point in my career.”

  As an angry Trevino stormed off the eighteenth green early Friday afternoon, Nicklaus stepped to the first tee. His start was inauspicious: He drove into the rough, launched a six-iron over the green, and chipped poorly to score a bogey. Fifteen minutes later, he missed a very makeable birdie putt from five feet.

  Nicklaus grabbed a stroke back with a birdie on number five; a missed green on the short, par-four eleventh produced an annoying bogey, and he fell back to one over par. Six shots behind Player, Nicklaus headed to the twelfth tee. The 603-yard behemoth—once the longest hole in U.S. Open history—should have been ideal for a player of Nicklaus’s power to regain control of his round. But Nicklaus had never birdied the twelfth in six prior rounds of U.S. Open competition
(including his play-off with Palmer). And a few swings into his seventh stab at the long hole, he seemed destined to come up birdieless again.

  After a good drive, his three-wood drifted into deep rough, and when his nine-iron flew the green into a bunker, even a par appeared unlikely.

  For years, the only knock on Nicklaus was his mediocrity out of green-side bunkers.

  “The good Lord gave Nicklaus everything—and I mean everything—except a wedge,” Trevino once said. “If he had given him that, the rest of us might never have won any tournaments.”

  At least on this day, Nicklaus proved his detractors dead wrong: He blasted his ball out of the sand and into the cup for an incredible birdie four.

  “That shot was the turning point of my round,” Nicklaus said—for the second straight day.

  Buoyed by his good fortune, Nicklaus took advantage, as he promptly knocked a six-iron stiff on the thirteenth to grab another birdie. He expected to gain another stroke back on the seventeenth, where a repeat of his marvelous eagle the day before might challenge Player for the thirty-six-hole lead.

  But the U.S.G.A. had other thoughts.

  The $10,000 that Oakmont’s members spent to lengthen the hole had failed to achieve its goal on Thursday, so the next morning the U.S.G.A. took one last stab at Nicklaus-proofing the hole.

  “They had the tees so far back on seventeen that I had to watch that I didn’t hit some trees on my backswing.”

  The additional yardage worked. Still defiant and determined to have his way, Nicklaus again selected the driver and launched another majestic shot. This time, however, the ball faded a bit to the right, carried through the fairway, and stopped just short of an out-of-bounds fence that separated the course from the driving range. After nearly fulfilling Trevino’s pretournament prediction about how dangerous it was to “go for the green” on the seventeenth, Nicklaus retained his customary nonchalance and managed to save par. And, to cap his performance, he struck two fantastic shots at the home hole that left only a four-foot birdie putt, which he stroked into the center of the cup for a back-nine score of 33. His 69 moved him into a three-way tie for third place, just three behind Player. But a seemingly crestfallen Nicklaus walked into the press tent early Friday evening, annoyed that he hadn’t knocked more strokes off par.