6

TALES OF TOMMY, JOHNNY, BILLY, AND DEANE

THE 1994 PGA TOUR began on January 6—Paul Azinger’s thirty-fourth birthday—at the La Costa Resort in Carlsbad, California, with the Tournament of Champions, an event that brought together—surprise—all the tournament champions from the previous year.

Only it wasn’t the Tournament of Champions anymore. It was now the Mercedes Championships, so-called because Mercedes, in agreeing to take over the title sponsorship for five years, had insisted that the Tournament of Champions part of the name be dropped so that the media would have no choice but to call the event by its corporate title.

When Commissioner Deane Beman made the deal with Mercedes he knew he would take a beating for having sold one more traditional tournament name down the river to corporate America. The PGA Tour, as reinvented in the twenty years Beman had been commissioner, was, for all intents and purposes, owned and operated by two entities: corporate America and television.

That didn’t make golf terribly different from every other sport. The only real difference was that golf had quit pretending that TV and the corporations weren’t in control years ago. What had once been the Crosby Clambake was now the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. The Bob Hope was now the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic. There was a Buick Invitational in San Diego; a Buick Classic at Westchester; a Buick Open in Grand Blanc, Michigan, and a Buick Southern Open at Callaway Gardens in Columbus, Georgia. Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill Classic was now the Nestle Invitational in Orlando, Florida.

The venerable Western Open had been, in a period of ten years, the Beatrice Western, the Centel Western, the Sprint Western, and for 1994 would be the Motorola Western. If you could name all the Western’s corporate sponsors you would win a year’s supply of peanut butter, two telephones, and a television. For that matter, the Tournament of Champions had been the MONY Tournament of Champions and the Infiniti Tournament of Champions even before Mercedes showed up.

“I didn’t invent corporate involvement in sports or in golf,” Beman liked to remind people. “I just recognized the potential it had to help us build the game.”

What Beman did was marry corporate America to television in order to get his sport on TV on a regular basis. Since the four majors—the Masters, the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA—are run by separate governing bodies, the tour does not own their TV rights. Selling a TV package for all the nonmajors wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to do.

“Imagine baseball trying to sell its TV package without the World Series or football trying to sell itself without the Super Bowl,” Beman said. “That is exactly what we’re asked to do every year.”

Golf ratings for nonmajors on TV have never been terribly high. They are consistent and they reach the kind of audience sponsors like—people with money to spend—but they have never been high enough to warrant the TV networks’ taking a chance on selling enough advertising to make money. So Deane Beman eliminated the risk factor for the networks by making the Western Open into the Beatrice-Centel-Sprint-Motorola and inviting every other corporation he could find to stick its name onto any tournament it was willing to pay for.

The way it works is this: If you want your name on a tournament and you want that tournament on network TV, you have to ante up about $1.7 million. A large chunk of that goes toward the purchase of thirty-two to thirty-six thirty-second commercials—sixteen to eighteen during your tournament and sixteen to eighteen more spread throughout the year on the rest of your network’s TV package. You then spend about another $1 million for expenses and other advertising.

With half the tournament’s spots sold to the title sponsor and a bunch more sold to the title sponsors for other tournaments, the networks found themselves in a position where they had to do very little work to sell out their advertising package. In addition, cable outlets looking for programming were willing to pay the networks for production costs, so many tournaments are now seen, not just on Saturday and Sunday, but also on cablecasts on Thursday and Friday. With corporate America paying the freight, Beman got golf on television almost nonstop. In 1994, thirty-five of the forty-one official PGA Tour events were on national television—twenty-eight on the networks, six on ESPN, and one on TBS. There were also twenty-five senior tour events on national TV and seven made-for-TV events in November and December. Not to mention the four majors and a twenty-four-hour Golf Channel planned for 1995.

That’s a whole lot of golf on TV. Beman was justifiably proud of that, even though some people worried that it was getting to be too much of a good thing. Others, also justifiably, made fun of the corporate CEOs who insisted on introducing the telecasts by staring into a teleprompter and saying things like “We are so proud to be a part of this historic event, the Shell Houston Open.” They also insisted on being “interviewed” at the end of the Sunday telecast. Without fail, regardless of who was leading or by how much, the CEO would shake his head and say, “Vern [or Jim or Mark or Andy or Bob], this has been about as exciting a week of golf as I can ever remember seeing.”

Beman shrugged off those who thought the CEOs would be well advised to stay behind the cameras. “They pay the freight, they get to make the call on that.”

Which was exactly what Beman’s critics harped on. Sure, he had greatly increased golf’s TV exposure and there was no doubt purses had gone sky-high during his tenure. But, they said, he had also sold golf’s soul and history to Mercedes and Kmart and Buick and Federal Express and just about everyone in the telephone business.

The Crosby is a favorite example for some of what’s wrong with golf sponsorships. “I don’t care what Deane Beman wants to call it, the Crosby will always be the Crosby,” said Dan Jenkins, golf’s funniest and most eloquent writer.

The Crosby had been invented long before Beman reinvented the tour. It had come into being as a week-long party—or Clambake—that Bing Crosby threw for his pals along the shores of Carmel Bay. Golf-playing celebrities got to play with the pros in professional/amateur pairings. The golf tournament was the sideshow back then; the presence of the stars in the Pro-Am the main event.

The Crosby continued to be the Crosby after the singer’s death, but in 1985, Beman and Crosby’s widow, Kathryn, got into a dispute when Beman went out and got AT&T to buy the title sponsorship. Kathryn Crosby took her husband’s name to North Carolina and created a nontour event. In 1986 the original Crosby tournament was rechristened the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. Keeping Pebble Beach in the name was a way of reminding the world that this was the tournament and the golf course with all the history and all the lore.

The celebrities kept coming and the tournament continued to flourish. In 1994, Pebble Beach was the fifth stop on the West Coast schedule, coming after La Costa, Hawaii, Tucson, and Phoenix. Or, as Beman and the tour might put it, after the Mercedes, the United Airlines, the Northern Telecom, and (whoops) Phoenix. (This space available, call 904-285-3700 and ask for Deane.)

The format at Pebble Beach is the same as it has always been. Each pro is assigned an amateur partner and they play three rounds at three different golf courses. Until 1991, the three courses were Pebble Beach, Spyglass Hill, and Cypress Point. But when the tour insisted, in the aftermath of the 1990 Shoal Creek racism controversy, that any club wishing to host a tournament have at least one minority member, Cypress Point dropped out of the rota. It was replaced by Poppy Hills, an inland course with none of the drama or romance of Cypress Point.

After three days’ play, the field is cut to the low sixty pros and the low twenty-five pro/amateur teams. They all play Pebble Beach the last day. The AT&T Crosby is the only tournament on tour in which amateurs play on the final day. This makes for some strange pairings because some Pro-Am teams qualify even though the pro hasn’t made the cut and—obviously—a number of pros make the cut without their amateur partners.

Since the last round invariably takes more than five hours to play because of the presence of the amateurs on a very difficult golf course and since the final putt must be struck by 3 P.M. local time so that CBS can be off the air by 6 P.M. on the East Coast, the final round at Pebble Beach can be, to put it mildly, a mess.

The Sunday pairings at Pebble were the least of Deane Beman’s concerns in February 1994. For years, Beman had always looked forward to the tour’s West Coast swing. He and his wife, Judy, would fly west the first week in January on the tour’s corporate jet—known as Air Beman—and set up headquarters in the large, comfortable tour-owned condo in Palm Springs. Staffers called it the Western White House. Beman would play some golf, ride his motorcyle with Judy, and occasionally make his way up and down the coast and to Hawaii and Arizona to press the flesh at each tournament. Some sponsors complained he played too much golf and often didn’t press enough flesh.

This year was a little different. Beman was fifty-five, and for the first time since he had accepted the job, he was wondering if it wasn’t time to move on. Even though he was making $2.2 million a year, he often felt underappreciated, not only by the players, who he knew often sniped at him behind his back, but by media and those always demanding sponsors. Beman looked at what he had wrought and thought he had done a hell of a job. He had turned the PGA Tour from a mom-and-pop candy store into a thriving corporation with millions of dollars in assets. And what did he get in return?

Bill Murray.

Actually, Beman had thought about quitting to take a shot at playing the senior tour long before Bill Murray and Pebble Beach came along to ruin the month of February for him.

Murray had become one of the stars of the AT&T event in recent years. The actor brought his wacky sense of humor to the golf course and just about everyone loved the act. Murray danced with marshals and he did his “Caddyshack” routine routinely—and hysterically.

Murray’s antics, Jack Lemmon’s never-ending quest to make the cut (zero for twenty-one and counting), Joe Pesci cracking one-liners through an ever-present cigar, and the presence of celebrities through out the field were what set the Pebble Beach event apart from others on the tour. Sure, there was serious golf being played, but there were also some real live laughs during the first three days. Murray leading 5,000 people in a wave to the Blimp in 1993 was going to be remembered a lot longer by most people than Brett Ogle winning the tournament.

Beman knew that and he had no quarrel with it. But in the process of promoting the 1994 tournament, CBS kept showing a 1993 shot of Murray spinning an elderly lady around in a sand trap and finally letting go of her as she fell over in the sand.

It was a funny scene and one that CBS correctly thought sent the message to viewers that this golf tournament wasn’t like all other golf tournaments. But there was a problem. The woman in question, although unhurt, had felt embarrassed by the incident and had complained about it to tour officials. Now her embarrassment was being shown over and over again. Beman couldn’t—and wouldn’t—try to stop CBS. But he felt he had to do something to rein Murray in—at least a little bit.

And so he asked the local organizers if they would talk to Murray before the tournament started and ask him if he could make his act just a little bit less outrageous. The message was supposed to be “Bill, we love you, we think you’re great for the tournament, but could you please not dump any more women in sand traps this year.”

Somewhere in the translation the part about “Bill, we love you and we think you’re great” didn’t reach Murray. The part that reached him was “Cool it.” Murray didn’t take this well. He was furious. While many of his fellow celebrities accepted complimentary spots to play in the tournament, Murray always paid the $3,500 to play even though he didn’t have to.

Who was complaining? he wanted to know. Certainly not his playing partners. Certainly not the gallery. Certainly not CBS. Beman had hoped his request to Murray would stay private. No chance. Murray played, but he blasted Beman. He called him, among other things, a Nazi and, half-jokingly, called for his resignation. He said he would not return to play in the tournament after 1994 even if he was asked. When his group reached the 18th hole at Pebble Beach on Saturday, long after the TV cameras had been turned off for the night, Murray announced to the gallery, “This is my final shot ever in this tournament.”

Lost in all the head-shaking and hand-wringing over L’Affaire Murray was the fact that a very good golf tournament was taking place. Since a lot of the big-name players skipped Hawaii and the Arizona tournaments, Pebble Beach was the first event since the Mercedes Championships in which the stars came out to play.

The leader board on Saturday night was a reflection of that fact. The leaders were Dudley Hart and Johnny Miller. Hart was not exactly a household name, but was one of the tour’s better young players. Miller was a household name, but for the past five years it had been because of his work for NBC as golf’s most outspoken commentator. His last win on tour had come in 1987, in this same tournament. One shot back was Tom Watson. Two shots behind Watson was Tom Kite.

This was time-warp stuff. Miller was forty-six, Kite and Watson forty-four. Miller had been retired for five years and played at Pebble Beach only because he had grown up on the course, had won the tournament twice, and still lived nearby. Watson hadn’t won a tournament in seven years and had spent more time the last two years answering questions about the Ryder Cup than about his golf. Kite was a different story. His career had crested after forty. He had finally won a major title in 1992 at the age of forty-two, and in 1993 he had started the year by winning back-to-back at Los Angeles and the Hope, been sidelined for three months by back problems, and then come back to play superbly in the Ryder Cup.

There was more. All three players had spent transcendent moments in their career at Pebble Beach. Miller had grown up playing the golf course and, while coming into his own as a young star, had lost a playoff here to Jack Nicklaus in 1972 when he hit a dead shank on the 16th hole during the last round.

Watson and Kite had won their U.S. Opens at Pebble, Watson making the memorable chip-in at 17 in ’82, Kite making a remarkable chip-in of his own at the seventh in ’92 while winning on a day so brutally windy that many in the field failed to break 80.

Watson and Kite and their amateur partners would tee off at 9:20 in the second-to-last group of the day, with Hart and Miller and their amateurs right behind. At most golf tournaments, the leaders don’t tee off on Sunday until close to 2 o’clock. This wasn’t most golf tournaments.

And, if you needed one last element to make the story complete, the weather Sunday turned up windy and rainy, the kind of day that had built the legend of both the Crosby and Pebble Beach. “When we come around that bend at number three and hit the water, we’ll get the full force of it,” Watson said, sounding as if he relished the thought.

Watson may be the best bad-weather golfer in history. Growing up in Kansas City, he became accustomed to playing in cold and wind and rain. Even as an adult, he was one of the few pros who didn’t find himself a warm-weather winter home. That meant a lot of practice time in less-than-perfect conditions. Throughout his career, Watson has played some of his best golf—witness his record in the British Open—under the worst conditions.

Each of the four leaders went into Sunday’s round with an entirely different attitude. Hart, who had been in position to win before but had never gotten to the finish line first, wanted to take the step from contender to winner. Kite was a little surprised to be so close to the lead because he didn’t feel comfortable with his swing. Watson was hitting the ball better than anyone. He had survived his third round at Poppy Hills, normally a bugaboo course for him, with an even par 72 and thought he had put himself in position to win. Miller was just having a good time and thought playing in the last group was a kick for someone who made his living as a television announcer.

Miller wasn’t the only television personality in the final group. His amateur partner was Bryant Gumbel, the Today Show host, who had never dreamed that he would end up in the final pairing on Sunday when he and Miller—who had worked together on NBC’s golf telecasts for two years—decided to team up.

“It just occurred to me that I’m going to be on TV tomorrow,” Gumbel said as he walked to his car Saturday afternoon.

That was a funny line coming from someone who made a career of making being on television look easy. “Yeah, but this is different,” Gumbel said. “This is golf. I’m not so hot at golf.”

Gumbel really wasn’t bad—an 11 handicap—but his trepidation was understandable. While CBS built its Saturday telecast around the celebrities, Sunday was for the pros. Gumbel wasn’t likely to get a lot of camera time—unless he made a hole in one or killed someone. Or something.

Watson’s reaction to Miller’s presence on the leader board was a bit different than Gumbel’s. “What’d he do, go see the Dalai Lama?” he asked jokingly on Saturday night. “Whatever it is, I hope he gives me some of it.”

Ironically, Miller had been driven from the game, at least in part, by the same thing that had made Watson miserable: putting. “Mine was different though,” Miller said. “Tom has trouble from six feet in. I had the reverse yips. I was fine from twelve feet and in. It was the longer putts I couldn’t handle.”

Miller also had serious leg problems. His joints were so creaky that he played only about twenty-five rounds of golf a year in retirement and almost never practiced. About the only thing that got him on the golf course at all was the chance to play with his five children.

It was already starting to rain hard when Watson and Kite reached the first tee. Kite’s amateur partner was Rudy Gatlin, the country music singer, who was a good player, a six handicapper. Watson always played with Sandy Tatum, a former president of the U.S. Golf Association and a lifelong friend. This was the first time in years that they had made the Pro-Am cut.

“Boy it’s nice to be out here together on a Sunday, isn’t it?” Watson said to Tatum as they shook hands on the first tee.

“It’s even nice to be here and get rained on,” Tatum answered.

“Rain?” Watson said, grinning. “What rain?” The rain was coming down sideways at that moment.

One of the tour’s unspoken and most unnoticed little traditions is for players to wish each other luck on the first tee. It isn’t necessarily anything so formal as a handshake or going from player to player saying “good luck.” It is more subtle than that, almost a murmured aside after the first player in the group has been introduced.

And so, when Kite had been introduced, he stood behind his ball for a moment staring down the fairway and said softly, “Tom, let’s have a good day.”

“Yes,” Watson said. “Let’s have fun.”

Neither man could possibly know what lay ahead over the next five and a half hours.

Watson’s prediction about being hit full-bore by the wind coming around the corner at number three was accurate. By then, Kite had already bogeyed number one and Watson had missed a four-foot birdie putt at number two.

It is at number three that Pebble Beach starts to become Pebble Beach. The first two holes are ordinary, inland holes. Number three begins a stretch in which the players go back and forth to the water for four holes. They then play right at the water at the tiny seventh, one of the most dramatic par-threes in golf. The next three holes are, in Watson’s words, “the three best consecutive par-four holes in the world.” They are long and difficult, almost always windy, and have the beach, the rocks, and Carmel Bay all the way down the right side.

The course turns inland at number 11 before coming back to the water at 17 and 18, which may be the two most famous finishing holes in golf.

On a day like this, scores would not be low. Anyone who could get under par would probably be in good shape. It was Watson who broke through first, birdieing the par-five sixth. Kite was already four over par for the day by then and shaking his head while saying to Gatlin over and over, “Sorry, partner.”

Watson gave back the shot he had picked up at the sixth when he blew a three-iron over the ninth green, chipped back to eight feet, and missed the par putt. It had taken them just under three hours to play nine holes. Watson, Miller, and Hart were tied for the lead.

Almost every round of golf on tour follows a distinct pattern. It begins—unless you are playing with Nick Faldo—with chatter and small talk on subjects ranging from family to appearance fees to hunting and fishing to last night’s ball game to movies. Watson and Kite spent several minutes during a delay on the third tee peppering Gatlin with questions about the country music business.

Sooner or later, the talk dies. On Thursday, it is apt to last longer than on Friday, especially if someone in the group is grinding to make the cut. Saturday tends to be more like Thursday (unless disaster strikes someone early), and Sunday almost always gets very serious by the 10th tee.

Kite had managed to stay fairly cheery in spite of his play through most of the front nine, although he admitted at one point that “it’s hard to keep smiling through all the bogeys.” Watson was still loose enough on the fifth tee to compliment the amateurs in the group ahead on their tee shots. When the wind died briefly going up six, Kite and Watson joked about how balmy it had gotten. Five minutes later, when the wind and rain slapped them in the face on the seventh tee, they both laughed and broke out the rain gear again.

Watson’s bogey at nine, combined with a glance at the scoreboard, ended the day’s chatter.

While the rest of the group waited on the 10th tee for the fairway to clear, Watson walked into the tent behind the tee and asked a volunteer if he could have two Twix bars. She handed him one. “I need two,” Watson said patiently. “Two Twix bars. Please.”

He didn’t raise his voice and he could not have been more polite. But the edge was there. You could hear it in the word “please.” There were nine holes left in the golf tournament and Watson was tied for the lead with a television announcer and a kid. He knew the tournament was his now. To win. Or to lose. It had been a very long time since Tom Watson had been in such a position so late on a Sunday.

He parred 10, then hit a monstrous drive at 11 that started to veer right. “Don’t go right!” he hissed angrily. The ball seemed to listen. It stopped in the fairway but caught the edge of a divot. Undeterred, Watson hit a pitching wedge to 15 feet and drained the putt. He was nine under par and had the lead.

Pumped, Watson absolutely airmailed the 12th green with a four-iron and made bogey. Now he and Miller were tied again. Hart had dropped back to six under. It was a two-man tournament, a duel between two men whose rivalry went back twenty-five years. “Down the stretch I kept thinking, I never beat Tom Watson, he always makes a putt somewhere to beat me,” Miller would say later.

That seemed a likely scenario when Watson made a 10-foot birdie putt at 13 while Miller was bogeying 12. Suddenly, Watson led by two and there were just five holes to play. “Nice putt,” Kite said softly on the 14th tee.

Watson smiled his thanks and said nothing. This wasn’t the time to talk. He was on a roller coaster now. Fourteen is a par-five, a potential birdie hole. Watson’s third shot, a wedge straight at the flag, just caught the bunker in front and rolled back into the sand. From there, he made another bogey.

Miller, standing in the fairway, saw Watson catch the bunker. “That’s a trick pin placement,” he said. “You can’t aim at the pin. You have to aim twelve feet left.”

Local knowledge. Advantage Miller, who parred the hole. That left them tied again, since Miller had birdied 13. They were still tied when Watson reached 16. But as he walked off the tee, with the 15th green to his left, he could see that Miller had just blown his second shot way over the green, an almost certain bogey. Watson was leading again. Three holes left.

His second shot, a gorgeous five-wood into the wind, stopped 12 feet short of the pin. Watson’s heart was going a million miles an hour. Make this, he thought, and you’re two shots up with two of your favorite holes in golf left. He took longer than usual lining the putt up. Then, just as he was about to draw the putter back, he noticed some grass on the blade and stepped away.

Again, he lined the putt up. For a split second, it looked as if he had made the birdie. The crowd screamed, then groaned. Too charged up, Watson had rolled the ball four feet by the hole. He was in the throw-up zone, right at the distance that had bedeviled him the last few years. “That first putt was a speed putt,” he said later. “I got caught up worrying about the line and forgot about the speed.”

In the tower behind 16, CBS’s Jim Nantz said, “I don’t even want to watch this.”

He knew what he was talking about. The putt never touched the hole. Bogey. Instead of leading by two, Watson was tied again.

They had to wait on 17, the long par-three that goes to a tiny finger of land with water crashing in on all sides. The wind was howling by now and, even at 2:30 in the afternoon, it was almost dark because of the scudding rain clouds overhead.

Watson stood in front of the tee during the wait, hands jammed in his back pockets, staring at the green as if trying to conjure up 1982 in his memory. When it was finally his turn to hit, he peeled off the jacket and blasted a four-iron safely over the bunkers and onto the green, but a good 35 feet right of the pin.

In 1982, Watson had been off the green, left. On that day, in one of golf’s more memorable exchanges, his caddy, Bruce Edwards, had instructed him to “knock it close.”

“Close?” Watson answered. “I’m going to knock it in.”

And so he did. Now, as Watson lined up the long birdie putt, Edwards, who had rejoined Watson in 1993 after an unhappy two-year sojourn with Greg Norman, whispered in his ear, “Let’s do something special from this side.”

Watson certainly tried. The putt actually nipped the cup, slowed down briefly, and then stopped three feet past the cup. Not a tap-in, but not in the throw-up area either. Except now, with all the pressure crashing in on him, it was more than Watson’s shaky stroke could handle. He jabbed, the ball went around the cup and stayed out. Standing on the tee watching, Miller knew he now led the golf tournament.

Torturously, Watson’s group had to wait again on the 18th tee. They could easily have watched what was happening on 17 since the green was only a few yards from the tee. Watson didn’t even turn his head.

By not watching, Watson missed one of the more tragicomic moments in golf history. Hitting first, Bryant Gumbel sent his tee shot sailing toward the green, only to see it intercepted by a seagull. The seagull and the ball both dropped like stones. The ball had apparently caught the poor gull square in the head. It was dead before it hit the ground.

Gumbel was truly shaken. So was Miller, who felt bad for his partner and for the innocent bird. He also had a bit of a club-selection problem. Since he carried a seven-wood, Miller had no three-iron in his bag. The shot was a perfect three-iron. “I had to try and hit a four-iron as hard as I could,” he said later. “Believe me, I was having trouble concentrating on that shot. When it hit the green, I’m not sure if I was more surprised or relieved.”

Miller was in almost the same spot as Watson had been. But he managed to two-putt. Watson heard the applause for the par as he walked off the 18th tee, having split the fairway with his drive.

Watson knew he had to birdie the hole to have any chance to catch Miller. Standing in the 18th fairway, he had dropped from being alone in first place on the 16th green to a four-way tie for second with Corey Pavin, Kirk Triplett, and Jeff Maggert, all of whom had finished at six under.

The 18th at Pebble Beach is not normally reachable in two except on those rare occasions when the hole is playing straight downwind. To have a chance to get home in two, a player must play his tee shot over the water and beach and rocks that parallel the hole all the way down the left-hand side and then play another long, risky shot that can also end up in the paws of the seals who like to frolic on the rocks below.

Having hit a perfect drive, Watson went for the green, although he was careful to keep the ball far enough right that, if he didn’t reach, he would end up in the front bunker. That’s where his ball landed. For Watson, up and down from most bunkers in the world is, at worst, very possible. In the TV tower Ken Venturi, who very rarely makes a demeaning comment about a player. said, “The only way he can make birdie is to hit this ball about an inch from the cup.” Any other putt, Venturi reasoned, was out of Watson’s range at this point.

Watson hit a good bunker shot, not a great one. It bounced toward the hole, then past it, stopping 8 feet away. The birdie putt was dead center but two inches short. Halfway there, it appeared to bounce, as if it had hit a spike mark. That didn’t matter. Watson made par, and par wasn’t good enough.

On a day when he had hit the ball superbly, he ended up shooting 74. He had taken 34 putts, including eight on the last three holes. He had made just two putts longer than five feet and had missed six inside 10 feet. Once upon a time, he would have made at least five of those—and thrown in a 20-footer and a 30-footer for good measure. Not anymore.

Miller, watching every move Watson made from behind him, played two conservative shots, wedged on, and two-putted for an improbable victory.

“This didn’t really happen,” he said later. “I’m not a golfer, I’m a television announcer. I’m a grandfather, for crying out loud.”

No one would have blamed Watson if he had signed his card, gone through his postmatch interview, and fled. But that isn’t Watson. He waited for Miller to finish, a blank look on his face, except for the smile he forced when Linda came up to give him a hug. Miller was so dazed and overcome by what he had done that he almost walked right past Watson on his way into the scorer’s tent.

“Johnny,” Watson said, getting his attention. “Congratulations.” Miller had tears in his eyes. Watson put an arm around him. “Now get your butt back up in the booth.”

Miller laughed. Somehow, Watson had found the right words. After leaving Miller, he made the long walk to the interview room and patiently went through the round, shot by shot, with the media. He was composed, smiling at friends, trying to sound upbeat. He had hit the ball well all day and he still believed he would win again very soon. When he tried to talk about his putting, though, the words came more slowly.

“I lived by the putter early in my career, I’m dying by it now. I keep tinkering, looking for an answer. Maybe I tinker too much.” He shook his head and said very softly, “I could have won fairly easily today if the flat stick had even been mediocre.”

Walking out the door, he forced one more smile. “Now I have to go call my kids,” he said. “The first thing Michael’s going to say to me is ‘Daddy, why did you have to three-putt?’ ”

If Watson had known the answer to that question he wouldn’t have been walking out with an empty feeling in his stomach while Miller sat in the interview room saying over and over, “This isn’t right, this is a fluke.”

The tour had launched a series of public service announcements at the start of the year with the slogan “On the PGA Tour, Anything’s Possible.”

If they had been thinking fast in Ponte Vedra that night, a new PSA would have hit the airwaves that week showing the final leader board at Pebble Beach. Anything was possible.