xxxii

WE WERE NOW six under for the Open. According to the scoreboard we passed on the way to the eleventh tee, we were sandwiched between Duval at seven under and Woods at five under. On top of that, Padraig Harrington was tied with Woods, and Mike Heinen, playing with Woods, was a stroke behind them at four under. Then I saw a scoreboard volunteer post a “2,” showing that Steve Pate had made an improbable birdie up ahead of us at the twelfth hole, which was a bitch of a par three, and was now four under as well. It was getting crowded near the top.

And if that didn’t make things interesting enough, the wind was starting to pick up.

Wind is good for sailing, but it ain’t worth a damn for golf. It makes club selection almost impossible. I know exactly how far I hit a seven-iron when things are calm. But if the wind starts blowing from any direction while my ball is in the air, all bets are off. In the wind, a golf ball can, and often does, do funny things. When the wind blows, it can make even the best players look very silly.

As we reached the eleventh tee, I noticed that the top branches of the trees lining the right side of the fairway were bending back and forth as the wind danced across them. The wind didn’t feel so strong down where we stood, but the trick was to figure out what it would do to the ball once it got above the protection of the trees. If that wasn’t bad enough, the narrow landing area in the eleventh fairway can’t be seen from the tee and therefore requires a blind tee shot. We would be hitting the ball at something we couldn’t see in wind we couldn’t predict.

I was just starting to feel sorry for myself when LaCava gave me the “glass half-full” version of things. “Thank God we cleared the water holes,” he said, referring to the oceanside stretch from seven through ten. Obviously, the wind was stronger near the ocean, so LaCava was saying that we had gotten past the worst of it and were headed inland into more benign conditions. The thought comforted me, and I momentarily forgot that we would finish our round playing the seventeenth and eighteenth holes directly alongside the ocean.

I picked out the same target for my tee shot that I had used for the previous three rounds, which happened to be the chimney of a house in the distance. I shaded my line slightly to the right to allow for the wind. Arnold Palmer once said that the best way to counteract the wind was to just hit the ball solid, and that was my only swing thought.

It worked. The ball took off on a low trajectory and headed down the right side of the fairway. Either because of a draw or the wind (it didn’t matter to me which), it gently turned back toward the middle of the fairway and finished in what I expected to be perfect position. If the ball was where I thought it was, we might have as little as a wedge to the green.

I was right.

We had no more than 110 yards or so to the flag. As he handed me the gap wedge, LaCava offered a simple instruction: “Just knock it down.”

There are times in golf when thinking and doing become one. These rare states of grace don’t last long, but they have the power to transform a remarkably difficult game into child’s play. I had somehow found my way there for the moment, and so I didn’t give the first thought to how to hit a “knockdown” wedge. I just did it, and the ball took off on a low trajectory with more spin than a Bill Clinton deposition.

By staying under the wind, the ball’s flight stayed true. We could see that it was headed straight for the flag. Over my shoulder, I heard LaCava plead, “Baby, if you’re ever gonna be right, this is the day for it.”

The golf gods answered my caddie’s simple prayer, bringing the ball down in the shadow of the flagstick. It spun back dramatically, barely missing the hole as it zipped past, and finished less than six feet below the cup. The crowd exploded.

For the first time since we teed off, Sutton’s stony demeanor softened as we walked toward the green. Offering a smile of encouragement, he patted me on the shoulder and said quietly, “Let’s make ’em proud back home.”

Getting that kind of support from one of my golfing heroes should’ve pumped me up big time, but it must have distracted me instead. I started thinking about what my friends back at the country club in Lake Charles must be saying as they were watching on television. Then I wondered whether Stewart was aware of what was happening. And then I thought about my father and hoped he was proud. Basically, I let myself think of everything but what I was supposed to be thinking about, which was the next shot.

I guess that’s why I did the unthinkable. On a day when everything was riding on every putt, I left a simple six-foot uphill birdie putt oh-so-barely short. I stood there frozen in disbelief that I had done something so stupid. The crowd’s loud groan as the ball sat there, hanging on the lip, was nothing compared to the silent cursing going on inside my head. I knew that there weren’t a lot of birdie opportunities on the back side, and I had just blown one when I really needed it. I looked back down at the ground in front of me, as if the grass at my feet would somehow explain what had happened.

That’s why I didn’t understand at first why the crowd suddenly erupted into such a loud cheer. I looked up and, when I didn’t see my ball, went into a momentary panic. For whatever reason, the first thought I had was that some dog or streaker had run off with it. Then I saw Joe LaCava walking happily to the hole and realized that it had fallen in. I had my birdie after all.

We were now seven under and tied with David Duval for the lead in the U.S. Open Championship.

Our joy was short-lived. We were now at the twelfth hole, a 200-plus-yard par three from hell. The challenge here was to land a long iron on a smallish green guarded by deep bunkers front and right and have it stay there. To make things more difficult, the twelfth green was so hard you could swear it had been poured rather than planted. To get the ball to stop on the green, we were going to have to hit it real high so it would come in at a steep angle. On top of that, we needed to cut the ball so it would land softly. With a three-or four-iron, that was no easy shot.

Of course, as Sandy Tatum might say, it wasn’t supposed to be easy. This was, after all, the U.S. Open.

I told LaCava that the shot was a three-iron, especially since I had to cut it. He shook his head and held up four fingers. I guess he figured I was pumped up from the birdie. Also, there was less trouble from the front bunker than from the rough behind the green. I knew he was right and hit the four.

I never figured it would clear the bunker. But it did, just barely, and stopped about eighteen feet from the hole. I was pleased. Anything on the green at the twelfth was a good play.

I damned near made the putt. In fact, I missed it too closely, because it caught the lip. That’s the last thing you want on U.S. Open greens. They’re fast enough as it is, but a ball that catches the sharp edges of the hole and spins out really runs away from the hole. If my putt had missed altogether, it would’ve stopped no more than three feet from the hole. However, because of the “slingshot effect,” my ball ended up a good five feet away.

The last thing I wanted to do was to give back my birdie at eleven with a bogey at twelve. My buddies back home called that a “PBFU,” which is short for “postbirdie foul-up.” (Okay, they used another word beginning with f for foul.) The putt I had left looked like the longest five feet I had ever seen. And it was a right-breaking putt, which is harder for me than a putt breaking the opposite way.

I was bent down squinting at the line when I heard LaCava say quietly in my ear, “It’s no more’n half a cup. Don’t give the hole away. I’ve got it inside left edge.”

This was a perfect time, I decided, to leave the driving to my caddie and just hit the putt where he said. One way to avoid the indecision that infected even the steadiest putting stroke was not to think about things like that and just accept the caddie’s read on faith. I figured LaCava probably read these greens better’n I did anyway.

That simplified my job. All I had to do was hit the ball on-line. Of course, with all that was riding on these last seven holes, that was easier said than done. All I could do was trust my routine, which I followed automatically.

The ball started on the correct line, just inside the left edge of the hole. About halfway to the cup, though, it hit a spike mark and bounced just slightly to the left. Now it was headed directly at the edge, and there was a chance that I would have a second straight spinout at the hole. At the last second, however, the ball took the break and caught just enough of the hole to fall in.

I could feel my heart thumping in my chest from the stress. Thank goodness Sutton had a two-footer after me to finish for his par. That gave me an extra minute or two to calm myself before we headed to the thirteenth tee.

The thirteenth hole at Pebble Beach is a 406-yard par four that requires players to thread their way past bunkers that protect the right side of the landing area from the tee and the left side of the green on the approach. The putting surface is supposed to be the slickest on the golf course, though I didn’t see how anything could be worse than the twelfth hole.

I had been hitting the three-wood here, because direction was more important than distance on the hole. You have to hit the fairway to have any chance of holding the green on your second shot. LaCava understood this as well, because he was pulling the cover off my three-wood before I said anything. While he was cleaning my ball, I happened to glance over at a scoreboard just as they were posting Duval’s score at eleven. He had made bogey and had fallen back to six under. With six holes to play, I was leading the U.S. Open all by myself.

The crowd saw what I saw and turned as one to look at me in a new light. People were starting to call out my name. “You’re the one now, Bobby!” “Make it real, Reeves!” “It’s yours to win, Bobby!”

The devil in me whispered that it was also mine to lose. I actually shook my head as if that would chase the demon away. LaCava sensed my unease and moved quickly to get me back on track. Leaning toward me, he said, “Middle of the fairway’s all we want here.”

I came out of the swing a little quickly, which opened the clubface and pushed the shot to the right. For a while, I thought I might catch the bunkers on that side, but the ball landed just inside them. It wasn’t pretty, but we were on the short grass.

Sutton played the three-wood as well, but hit his solidly and finished in the middle of the fairway about ten yards past me.

Whatever momentum I might have had from moving to the top of the leaderboard seemed to end moments later. As we were walking from the tee down the fairway, the greenside gallery broke out into a roar, and I could see a red-shirted Tiger Woods doing his patented fist-and-arm pump. Another birdie. He was now at six under par, only one behind and much too close for comfort. I knew all too well what he had done in the past on this very golf course.

By the time we reached our ball, I had reminded myself again that it was the only one I was allowed to play. Any worry over anyone else’s ball was a waste of energy. So I was ready to get back to business when Joe looked up from his yardage book and said, “Buck fifty-two to the front edge; one-sixty-four to the hole. Smooth six or hard seven, whichever feels best.”

Under the circumstances, it was easier to think of hitting something hard than smooth. I opted for the seven-iron, and LaCava acted as if that was his choice all along. Since the pin was set on the left side of the green, I set up to draw the ball to the hole.

I must have really been juiced, because the ball took off, as David Feherty would say, like “hot snot from a chrome nostril.” It sailed past the flag and rolled down the back of the green onto a closely mown chipping area. While I was glad not to be in the rough, we would be facing a delicate chip back down to the hole. Getting up and down from there was going to be tough.

While we waited for Sutton to play his approach, I started to whine a little about our bad luck. LaCava would have none of it. “I think you can chip in for birdie from there.”

I couldn’t suppress a laugh.

He acted as if he was offended. “Hey, I’m serious. All you gotta do is get it started on-line; you know it’s gonna get there.”

It was, of course, exactly the right thing to say. After Sutton hit the center of the green with his second shot, we began to walk toward the green, and my only thought was to make that chip.

When we got to the ball, I saw that it had settled about seven or eight yards past the green at the bottom of an incline. We would have to chip or pitch the ball back up (or over) the incline, and then it would run down the other side toward the hole. I felt more comfortable bumping the ball into the hill and letting it trickle over the top. There was more margin for error in that shot as opposed to a pitch, which had to land precisely in the right spot.

I took an eight-iron and played the ball back in my stance. Using a putting grip, I tried to chip the ball just past the crest of the incline. Gravity would take it to the hole from there.

I hit it a little too hard. It had entirely too much speed as it swept down the other side of the hill toward the cup. From the looks of it, I was going to be lucky if it stayed on the green. As it turned out, I was lucky alright. The ball hit the flagstick and stopped about three feet away.

I rolled my eyes, grateful for our good fortune. LaCava just laughed and said, “I can’t believe that ball stayed out of the hole.” When he pulled the flagstick, he pretended to check it to see if it was bent.

After Sutton tapped in his second putt for par (his birdie putt ran just by the low side of the hole), I stroked the three-footer squarely in the hole for a four that I was grateful to have.

As you might expect, players on both sides of us were having their own final-round adventures as well. Behind us, another gallery outburst was our first hint that David Duval had recovered the stroke he lost at eleven with a birdie of his own at twelve. Another eruption a moment later told us that Padraig Harrington had matched it. That brought Duval back to seven under and put Harrington at six under. In the meantime, big Mike Heinen eagled the par-five fourteenth ahead of us by cutting the dogleg and was back to five under after a couple of bogies had dropped him down the leaderboard. Tiger Woods, playing with Heinen, somehow buried his second shot under the lip of the front bunker, took two shots to escape, and had to make a twelve-footer to save par. It was only the third time all week that he had failed to birdie a par five. That meant that Tiger remained a stroke back at six under and, with only four holes left, was running short on birdie opportunities.

As we stood on the fourteenth tee, I could see from a nearby scoreboard where we all stood:

If there’s any tournament in which par is supposed to be a good score, it’s the U.S. Open. But from what I knew of the closing holes at Pebble Beach, not to mention the caliber of the players at the top of the leaderboard, I found it hard to believe that parring in would be enough to win, even under Open conditions. Although I was trying not to think ahead, I felt pretty certain that I needed another birdie or two.

Of course, that’s dangerous thinking in an Open, where overcooking any shot can put you in rough that’s so penal you’d swear it was grown at Alcatraz. In fact, it’s safe to say that the USGA staff selects hole locations with the deliberate intent of tempting the field into mistakes of aggression. There’s a reason that a bandito like Seve Ballesteros, who regularly stole par at other major championships by getting up and down from concession stands, bleachers, and Port-o-Lets, never once seriously threatened to win the U.S. Open. It’s the same reason that a fairways-and-greens guy like Andy North never won anything except the U.S. Open. (Okay, he won the Westchester Classic, too, but it’s the one Tour event that’s played under Open-like conditions.) The point is, you’re supposed to think about par at the Open and let others fall by the wayside with bogies.

But you have to give credit where credit is due: Tiger Woods changed all that when he lapped the field by an embarrassing margin at the 2000 Open. Since then, settling for par—even at the U.S. Open—probably ain’t gonna be good enough. No one’s gonna shoot four straight 65s or go twenty under on any course set up by the USGA, but unless Tiger becomes a Buddhist monk, the days of winning the Open at even par are probably over.

So I was thinking that I needed to make a birdie at the fourteenth hole as we set up for our tee shot. The fourteenth is a 573-yard par five that plays much shorter if you cut across the sharp dogleg that bends the hole to the right at a near ninety-degree angle. (You better clear the dogleg, though; everything inside it is out of bounds.) As a result, it’s possible to have a second shot to the green of 230 yards or so. The best play from there is to bounce the ball on the green or leave it in the front bunker. Unless you get Tiger Woods’s bad luck, you’re usually on an upslope so that the bunker shot is not particularly difficult. It’s a hole that had given up a lot of birdies already that week.

I knew the line I had to take. During one of our practice rounds, Stewart had pointed out a house on the side of a hill in the distance. It had become our mark. Seeing the house made me think again of my lost caddie, and I briefly felt a knot in my stomach. But thinking of Stewart also reminded me of his frequent advice to play the game like I did as a kid, before drinking dulled the joy I got from it.

I shook off any negative thoughts, teed the ball high to make sure I cleared the closest trees, took a big swing, and let it rip. John Daly would have been proud. I caught the ball solidly on the upswing with my driver, and it took off like a rocket directly at my target, which was some stranger’s bedroom window. A murmur of concern went through the gallery, indicating that many of them thought I had pushed my drive out of bounds to the right. They didn’t know, as I did, that the ball was safely in the fairway well on the other side of the trees.

When we arrived at my ball, a marshal there commented that the only person who had hit it farther that day was Heinen, and he had made an eagle. Joe LaCava said we were 218 to the front right bunker, 227 to the front edge of the green, and 236 to the hole. What little wind there was at this point favored us. Conditions were right to go for the green.

I settled on a five-wood. Joe wanted me to hit the three-iron so that the ball could land in front and either run on the green or into the bunker. He didn’t like the five-wood because the ball would come in at a steeper angle and maybe plug in the bunker à la Tiger Woods.

But that’s the reason I liked the five-wood: By coming in high rather than low, it was more likely to stay on the green. I just had to land it on the green instead of in the bunker. Being experienced, Joe was smart enough to know that I had to swing the club that felt right at the moment. After I told him why I wanted the five-wood, he said, “It’s the right club. Let’s hit it straight at the flag.”

I caught it a little out on the toe and figured it would miss the green short and to the right. However, like a lot of shots hit that way, the ball began to turn back to the left at the end and finished in the fringe just to the right of the front bunker. Two putts from there, and we had our birdie. We were now eight under. Sutton made a fifteen-footer for birdie, too, and moved to three under.

Once again, we had moved a shot ahead of Duval. Of course, being behind us he had yet to play fourteen. I figured he would make birdie there, too, so I wasn’t done.

I still had to go low on at least one more hole.