20

THE NEW KING

ALL YEAR LONG, everyone on tour had been talking about how hot it was going to be in Tulsa in August. Mike Carrick, the president of the caddies association, had written a letter to the PGA of America pleading with it to suspend its “no shorts” rule for caddies during the PGA championship. The request—naturally—was turned down. Nick Faldo had brought a dozen of the thinnest white shirts he could find and specially made extra thin, extra light pants.

Nick Price had planned to play at both Memphis and the Buick to prepare for the PGA. But after finishing fourth at Memphis, he changed his mind. He was still exhausted from the British Open and the post-tournament exhilaration; knowing how hot it would be at Southern Hills, he decided a week off was better preparation than another week grinding away on the road. “I’m fried,” he told the Buick people. “Please forgive me, but I just have to be rested for next week.”

He arrived in Tulsa on Monday afternoon, went to the house that he was renting about a mile from the golf course, and went straight from there to the club to hit some balls. He and Jeff Medlen found a quiet spot on the back end of the range and began to work. After about thirty minutes, Price looked at Medlen and said, “I feel so good and so relaxed, it’s unbelievable.”

If the other 155 players preparing for the fourth major had heard that, they might have decided not to bother killing themselves in the heat. These days, Nick Price feeling good usually meant that everyone else was going to go home Sunday night feeling bad.

For many years, the PGA Tournament has been the wayward stepchild among the four majors. Timing has a lot to do with it. There just aren’t very many places you can take a golf tournament in the United States in mid-August without running into brutal heat. Perhaps if a permanent home was established in Michigan or Minnesota, you might have a fighting chance, but the PGA of America likes to move the tournament around to great golf courses the same way the USGA moves the Open around.

There is also the question of who plays in the PGA. Once upon a time the PGA was the governing body of professional golf in the United States. But as the tour grew, the pros began to feel the need for an organization set up strictly to deal with their needs, not the needs of club pros. After all, the two jobs could hardly be more different. A club pro spends twelve to fourteen hours a day servicing other people’s golf games. A touring pro spends his days being serviced so that he can work on his golf game.

In 1968, the touring pros broke off from the PGA and established the PGA Tour. People still confuse the two entities, referring to the PGA Tour simply as the PGA. If you want to upset someone who works for the tour, just ask him what it’s like working for the PGA. Then duck.

The PGA Tour and the PGA of America have co-existed peacefully, if at times uncomfortably, since the split. There is a PGA member on the PGA Tour policy board, and almost all tour players are members of the PGA, partly as a courtesy, partly because you must be a PGA member to play on the Ryder Cup team and also because it allows them to have insurance coverage should they be involved in an accident (like hitting a spectator) during a tournament.

The PGA’s two big events are the PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup. It always galled tour commissioner Deane Beman that the PGA made the money it did on the Ryder Cup when it was dependent on tour members to make up the team. The players don’t mind that as much as they mind the fact that until 1995, the PGA Tournament still reserved forty spots in its field for club pros.

“How can you call it a major tournament with that field?” Peter Jacobsen asked the week before the 1994 tournament. Jacobsen, who has twice finished third in the PGA, was upset because he was seven spots out of making the field. It upset him, just as it annually upset players who didn’t get in, that he wasn’t going to be playing while forty club pros, none of whom could begin to compete with him on a regular basis, would be playing.

Jacobsen was right. He was also wrong. By letting club pros into the field, the PGA sacrificed depth. The tournament did not have the 156 best professionals in the world; it had the 116 best and forty club pros, and that meant that some good, deserving players—like Jacobsen, among others—got left out of the field. For 1995, the PGA of America relented and dropped the number of club pros to twenty.

Major championships are built on tradition. It is Masters tradition that several amateurs be invited to play and that all past champions hold lifetime exemptions. With a field of fewer than ninety players, a number of them amateurs and older champions who have no chance to seriously compete, it has the weakest field of the four majors. Both the U.S. Open and the British Open save a large chunk of their spots for players who get into the tournament through open qualifying—anyone with a two-handicap or better, amateur or professional, can enter the qualifying field just by paying the entry fee. The U.S. Open had close to 5,000 players seeking about a hundred slots in 1994. That means someone like Billy Andrade, fortieth on the U.S. money list in 1993, didn’t get into either tournament in 1994. Qualifying is a crap shoot and, without fail, some deserving players don’t survive. And the PGA, which is an organization for club pros, run by club pros, allows a group of them to compete in its championship each year.

Each major has a different tradition that in some way waters down its field. But those traditions are also part of their charm.

The PGA had bottomed out, really, at Shoal Creek in 1990. That was the year that Hall Thompson, the founder and president of the Birmingham, Alabama, club, which was hosting the tournament for the second time in six years, said publicly that the club would not accept black members. “That’s just not done in Birmingham,” Thompson had told an interviewer when asked what might happen if a black was proposed for membership in his club. A firestorm followed, and there was talk that the tournament might be moved to another site. Shoal Creek finally agreed to admit a black member (talk about blatant tokenism), and the PGA Tour, PGA of America, and USGA all established guidelines for clubs hosting events that required minority membership.

It was not exactly a feather in the cap of the white males who run golf that they finally got around to making this demand in the wake of a public humiliation. They also made no requirement of clubs (like Augusta National) in terms of female membership. And some clubs chose to give up tournaments rather than follow the new guidelines. Among them were Cypress Point, part of the three-course AT&T Pro-Am rota, and Butler National, the longtime home of the Western Open.

There was very little talk about golf during the PGA at Shoal Creek, and no one really noticed or cared very much about Wayne Grady’s victory. Since then, though, the PGA’s luck had changed, starting with John Daly’s startling, Cinderella victory at Crooked Stick in Indianapolis in 1991. By the time Daly’s last putt went into the hole on Sunday afternoon, everyone in the country seemed to know the story of the Bunyanesque character who had gotten into the field as the ninth alternate and could hit the ball nine miles.

Daly’s emergence as a folk hero, even with all his ensuing problems, did nothing to diminish the effect his victory had on a tournament that desperately needed a charisma boost. Nick Price’s victory a year later wasn’t as dramatic, but it was certainly popular and the shootout at Inverness in 1993 that had ended with Paul Azinger beating Greg Norman in a playoff that Nick Faldo just missed gave the tournament another boost.

Now, Azinger’s dramatic comeback as the defending champion gave the PGA a story line even before it began. Azinger had been right about the importance of playing in the Buick. He flew into Tulsa late Saturday afternoon and went out to play nine holes before sundown. He and his caddy, Mark Jiminez, had almost the entire golf course to themselves and Azinger reveled in the privacy.

By the time Monday came around and he had to start dealing with all the tugs on his time, he felt settled in and relaxed, ready to play a golf tournament rather than experience the kind of catharsis that the Buick had been. He knew he was a long way from playing well and there was some stiffness in his shoulder—understandable after all it had been through—but at least he was beginning to feel like a golfer again rather than a martyr or a victim.

The person feeling most like a victim during the practice days was, of all people, Jack Nicklaus. The subject causing Nicklaus difficulty (this was, after all, the tournament that had given golf Shoal Creek) was race—specifically, comments Nicklaus had made a month earlier when asked the nagging question about the lack of black players on the PGA Tour.

In 1994, there were two blacks on tour: Vijay Singh, who was from Fiji, and Jim Thorpe, who was from Buffalo. At forty-five, Thorpe was the last in a line of very good black players who had started playing the tour in the 1960s. Men like Charlie Sifford, Pete Brown, Lee Elder, Jim Dent, Calvin Peete, and Thorpe had played the tour successfully. Elder had become the first black to play in the Masters in 1975, and Peete had followed him there and had won a total of twelve tournaments, including the Players and the Tournament of Champions. Both Elder and Peete had played on the Ryder Cup team.

But no one had come along to replace them as they grew older. There were dozens of theories on why this had occurred: the dearth of caddy programs around the country; lack of role models; lack of access to most country clubs; and the fact that a majority of the black population lived in cities and were nowhere near 99 percent of the existing golf facilities.

There wasn’t a single black player on either the PGA Tour or the Nike Tour between the ages of twenty and forty. Already, Tiger Woods, the eighteen-year-old who would become the youngest player to win the U.S. Amateur later in August, was being burdened by huge expectations. He was the Great Black Hope.

The tour was aware of all this and was taking steps to change things. Several years earlier, Finchem had told the policy board that he believed lack of minority participation was a tremendous problem for the sport and needed to be addressed. Since then, the tour had started a minority internship program that had brought several bright young people into the game—although not as players. The tour also ran junior clinics at most tour stops and brought minority youngsters to the clinics. Earlier in the year, looking for role models anyplace he could find them, Finchem had persuaded Michael Jordan to host the tour-produced weekly TV show Inside the PGA Tour. Jordan, Charles Barkley, and other black athletes who played golf for fun were offered spots in Pro-Ams on tour anytime they wanted them.

That was a start, but it certainly wasn’t a solution. Thorpe had summed the whole thing up best when he told a story about convincing a golf club maker to give him three hundred sets of clubs to give away to minority youngsters in the Buffalo area. A year later, he had found takers for only thirty of the three hundred sets. Black kids wanted to play basketball, football, baseball. Even tennis had the memory of Arthur Ashe and excellent female players like Lori McNeil and Zina Garrison to use as role models. Golf had Jim Thorpe, a twenty-seven-year gap, and Tiger Woods.

Nicklaus had gone to Vancouver, B.C., to spend a day at the site of a new golf course he was designing. During what is normally a routine press conference, he was asked by one of the local reporters about the dearth of black players in golf. Nicklaus answered that he thought it had a lot to do with environment, that most black kids grow up in a city environment, that they are routinely introduced to basketball and football and—less so now than in the past—baseball, but not introduced to golf. White kids, most of whom grow up in the suburbs, were introduced to golf and tennis in addition to the traditional team sports.

At some point, Nicklaus said something about black muscles and white muscles. He believes that what he said was, “Black kids and white kids grow up using different muscles because of their different environments.” He was quoted as saying “Black kids and white kids have different muscles and as a result develop differently.”

Those quotes are very different. The interview is not on tape, so neither Nicklaus nor the reporter can prove definitively who is right and who is wrong. “If I said what I was quoted as saying, then I would have to say I was wrong,” he said. “But I honestly don’t think that’s what I said, and it certainly wasn’t what I intended to say. The guy asked me the question about twenty different ways, so I can’t swear to you that I didn’t misspeak, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t.”

Regardless, the story began to spread—slowly at first, then building momentum. Once it got picked up in the national media, the good ship Nicklaus began taking on water fast.

In his early years on tour, Nicklaus had developed a thick skin while playing the role of black hat to Palmer’s white hat. He was called cruel names because of his weight and made fun of because he was so deliberate over every single shot. As he lost weight and gained stature, he graduated from bad guy to popular star to icon. His victory at the 1986 Masters had sealed that status, the Augusta throngs going about as berserk as Augusta throngs are allowed to go.

He would never be as popular as Palmer with the fans, the media, or the other players. But he had come a long way. Even players who looked at him as aloof and arrogant were awed by what he had achieved. After all, if you added up all the majors won by Ballesteros, Faldo, Norman, Price, and Strange they didn’t equal Nicklaus. Palmer and Watson combined fell short of Nicklaus. You simply couldn’t touch his record. And, for the most part, the media liked him. He might get snappish occasionally, but he was always honest and almost never ducked a question.

Now, though, he was under attack. And, it was for a crime he didn’t believe he had committed. “Regardless of who or what you believe about that press conference, check my record,” he said. “I am not the person they’re saying I am.”

In fact, when he had built his golf club at Muirfield Village outside Columbus, Nicklaus had made certain to include blacks, Jews, and women in the membership from the very beginning. He and Chi-Chi Rodriguez had done fund-raising work for minority programs that had raised several million dollars in recent years.

The case could be made that Nicklaus—like almost all the great players of the last thirty years—had not used his platform as a public figure often enough to protest racist and sexist practices in country clubs and golf organizations throughout the country. Watson, whose wife and children are Jewish, was an exception. He had resigned from Kansas City Country Club when the club refused membership to tax genius Henry Block, who is Jewish. Sexist practices are still routinely accepted in golf. At the PGA champions dinner in 1994, the men still sat in one room, the women in another. No one complained.

“We can all do more, I don’t question that,” Nicklaus said. “But when I turned pro, there were quite a few good black players on tour. The first round of golf I played as a professional one of my playing partners was Charlie Sifford. I was a twenty-one-year-old kid and, from what I could see, Charlie Sifford had the same access to tournaments that I did.”

Could Nicklaus be more outspoken? Yes. Was he a racist? No. Was he anywhere close to being the least sensitive player in the locker room on the subject of race? Not even in the ballpark. Had he probably oversimplified the problem in the Vancouver press conference, regardless of how the words came out of his mouth? Yes. Did he deserve to be crucified? No.

Nonetheless, he was feeling like a martyr by the time he arrived in Tulsa. The flight from Palm Beach was spent discussing strategy for dealing with the inevitable questions that were going to come up, especially at a tournament that had been touched by racial controversy in the past.

The final decision was, basically, to punt. Nicklaus would not accept an invitation to come into the media tent for a pretournament interview, and if (when) he was asked about the subject in the locker room, his answer would be no comment. A brief statement was drafted, and Andy O’Brien, whose father, Larry, had been Nicklaus’s right-hand man forever, was authorized to hand it out to anyone who asked about the controversy.

The statement said: “I have never knowingly or willingly made a statement or action that is racist. God created all of us equally. We are then influenced by our environment. That is all I have said. If confusion regarding my feelings has caused any offense, I hope my clarification here will remind everyone of my personal convictions, which are as strong today as they have been throughout my life.”

Nicklaus hoped that would calm the waters. To some extent, it did, although he was criticized in some quarters for refusing to answer questions. It was the climax of a frustrating year for Nicklaus. It had started with high hopes when he won the senior division of the Mercedes (aka Tournament of Champions) Championships but then went straight downhill. The only cut he had made on the regular tour had been at the U.S. Open. Even there, after his stirring 69–70 start left him three shots out of the lead, he had faded into the pack with a 77 on Saturday. And now this.

He played in a daze Thursday, hitting shots that would have embarrassed him as a twelve-year-old. Jeff Sluman, one of his playing partners that day, had never seen Nicklaus so lifeless, so totally lacking in energy or fire. “I just can’t stop thinking about all the things people are saying about me,” Nicklaus said to Sluman. “It’s devastating.”

Nicklaus felt so awful during the round that he actually considered signing his card at the end of the day and withdrawing. The only time he had ever withdrawn from a tournament was with an injury. He was injured now—wounded was more like it—but not in a manner that made withdrawing excusable.

When he walked onto the 18th green, they gave him a long, warm ovation. The heat wasn’t as bad as had been expected, but that meant that it was “only” 93 degrees and muggy. It had been a long day. Nicklaus waved a tired hand in thanks. His ball was just over the green and he had hit 77 shots. He needed to get up and down to break 80. He took his time, chipped the ball to four feet, and then, after a long look, drained the putt. Even in an embarrassing round of 79, he had found something to play for on the 18th hole. “I just didn’t want that snowman [8] on my card,” he said later.

He didn’t withdraw. He knew that was wrong, and he came back the next day and shot a respectable 71, missing the cut by six shots. His wife, Barbara, couldn’t ever remember seeing him so down, so beaten up by an experience. “He just can’t let go of it,” she said. “He’s never been through anything like this before.”

Through it all, the bashings and the 79, Nicklaus didn’t lose his sense of humor. He and Barbara were renting a house on the Southern Hills property, and Barbara had promised the people who owned the house that they could bring their neighbors over to meet Jack and have their pictures taken with them on Thursday evening.

When he came out of the house to greet them all, someone said, “Mr. Nicklaus, we hope you come back real soon, no matter how tough a day you had today.”

“That’s nice of you,” Nicklaus said. “You just tell me who here can beat 79 so I’ll know who to get shots from.”

He would be fifty-five in January and 1994 had been a disaster for him. He had always said he wouldn’t keep playing if he didn’t think he could compete. “And that’s still true,” he said. “But I don’t think I’m there yet. I think I need to be in better shape than I am, especially below the waist. I’m going to work on the same conditioning program Greg Norman’s been on. If that doesn’t work, well, then I have to think about quitting.”

He wouldn’t ever just play the senior tour, where he was still competitive, because, he said, to him golf was still about winning major championships. That was still his goal. At fifty-five.

“I’ve been told before that I’m crazy to think I can win another major,” he said. “The first time was at the start of 1980 when I turned forty.”

That was the year he won his fourth U.S. Open and his fifth PGA. It was also six years before he won his sixth Masters.

In all likelihood, Nicklaus won’t win another major. But if you know anything about golf, you know that you never say never where (choose a title) the Golden Bear/the Great Man/Carnac/Jack William Nicklaus is concerned.

The pretournament stories were Nicklaus, the heat, Nick Price’s quest for back-to-back major titles, and whether or not Greg Norman, who had done everything else you could do, would win a major title in 1994.

And the pending American shutout. Never, not once, not a single time (is that enough redundancy?) had a year passed since the first Masters was played in 1935 without an American winning at least one of the four majors. In fact, never before had a year reached the PGA without an American winning at least one title. But with José María Olazabal, Ernie Els, and Nick Price holding the keys to majors one, two, and three, and with Price the clear favorite in number four, the question again came up: What has happened to American golf?

“We are definitely in a cycle where most of the world’s best players are foreigners,” Tom Watson said. “I still think we have the most depth, but they have the stars.”

There was also no doubting the fact that the prolonged absences of Azinger, Mickelson, and Couples—arguably the three best American players in the game—during much of 1994 had made a difference. But, even before their absence, foreign players had dominated the Masters (one U.S. victory since 1987) and the British Open (one U.S. victory since 1983). The U.S. Open had stayed in American hands until this year, and the PGA had been a mixed bag in the 1990s with two American champions and two foreign champions.

To the media, this was a big story. To the players, it wasn’t that big a deal. After all, the theory that players on the European Tour were tougher under pressure than PGA Tour players didn’t hold up when you considered the fact that Price and Norman had played on the PGA Tour most of their careers. And Nick Faldo and Seve Ballesteros had come to prominence during periods when they were playing the U.S. Tour frequently.

“It’s all cyclical,” Curtis Strange said. “And you know what, it really doesn’t matter. When I go out to play, if it isn’t Ryder Cup, I’m not playing for the U.S. and I’m not playing country against country, I’m playing for me.” He flashed a grin. “If it’s Nick Price against John Daly coming down the stretch on Sunday, who do you think I’m going to be pulling for? Who do you think most of the guys in the locker room will be pulling for?”

Everyone knew the answer was Price, in part because of his popularity, in part because Daly was still in the doghouse for his “everyone’s on drugs” comments.

Things had almost gotten ugly at Memphis during the Tuesday shootout in which both Daly and Strange were participants. After checking with Daly, the master of ceremonies, Jack Sheehan, made a big show of placing a large rock on the tee just before he introduced Daly, saying, “And now, climbing out from under his rock…”

Strange, who had not been consulted, was not amused. He turned to several tour officials on the tee and asked, “You guys know anything about this?” Absolutely not, they said. After he had hit his own tee shot and the group started down the first fairway, Strange went after Sheehan.

“What was that supposed to be?” he demanded.

“Well, John and his guys thought it would be kind of funny…” Sheehan said.

“John and his guys? What about me? Do you think I thought it was funny?”

What bothered Strange was the notion that his comments about Daly might become a subject for schtick rather than debate. Most players he had run into since then had complimented him for what he had said. Daly had not said a word to him, which was fine with Strange.

“I don’t need to talk to him,” he said. “If he wants to apologize to everyone for what he did, that’s fine. But until then, I really don’t see why anyone would want to talk to the guy. If he doesn’t like me, that’s fine too. He won’t be the first.”

Like a lot of players, Strange was hoping the PGA would provide a fitting climax to his year. He had played well—better than any year since 1989—but was hoping for one more big splash. The same was true of Tom Kite, who had a second, a third, and seven top-ten finishes in all, but hadn’t won. Since breaking out of his slump at the Memorial, John Cook had five top-ten finishes in six tournaments. And then there was Norman. He had finished in the top ten nine times in thirteen tournaments and in the top twenty in twelve of thirteen. He had not missed a cut since the 1993 U.S. Open.

That was the kind of consistency that only a few players in history had ever produced. But his record in the majors in 1994 was T-18 at the Masters, T-6 at the U.S. Open, and T-11 at the British. Only Watson, among nonwinners, had a better record for the year. But for Norman, it was disappointing.

“If I win here, I’ve had a great year,” he said after his practice round on Tuesday. “I wanted to make changes in my life, on and off the golf course, and I’ve done it. I’ve set up a new business, which has been great for me. I’ve worked very hard to be consistent week in and week out, and I’ve done that. I’ve tried to make a point of spending more time with my kids now that they’re a little older, and I’ve done that. But the year’s not over yet.”

The last sentence was code for “I haven’t won a major, and if I don’t win here, my pal Nick Price is going to finish the year as the unquestioned number one player in the world.”

If Norman couldn’t be number one, his first choice to hold the title would be Price. Their friendship was genuine, not just a public relations ploy. But Norman didn’t like playing second fiddle to anybody and, right now, Price had leapfrogged past him. In 1993, even though Price had won the player-of-the-year award, there was considerable doubt as to who was number one since Norman, not Price, had won a major and Norman was still ahead of Price in the Sony Rankings which ranked players worldwide based on performance around the globe.

Of course the Sony Rankings had to be taken with a large grain of salt. They were run by IMG, which was able to skew the rankings by putting extra emphasis on tournaments it managed and by inviting players it represented to those tournaments. But, since they were the only international rankings available, people did pay some attention to them.

Even now, as the PGA began, Norman was still ranked ahead of Price on the Sony Rankings—which only proved how fallible they were. Price had won nine tournaments worldwide in eighteen months; Norman, four. “Right now Nicky’s number one, no matter what any ranking says,” Norman said. “It’s up to me to change that.”

That was going to be a daunting task. Price had started the year unsure about a number of things, most notably his ability to match his performance of the year before. He knew that doing it once didn’t make you a great player, and he also knew that not winning a major meant there was a large asterisk next to his player-of-the-year title.

When he won the Honda in only his second tournament of the year, that did two things: built his confidence, which was good, and redoubled the attention and demands coming his way, which was bad.

Price had watched with interest when Norman decided to break away from IMG and form his own company. Price had been with IMG throughout his pro career and had, for the most part, been happy with its work. Now, though, he needed more attention than he had received from IMG in the past, and its structure simply wasn’t set up for that.

“I’m the type person that if someone calls me about a business deal or with a request of some kind I like to deal with it promptly,” he said. “At IMG, if I tell someone to call, it may be two days before they have a chance to call back. That’s not because they’re irresponsible, it’s because they’re so big and they have so many clients. I was uncomfortable with that structure and that’s why I started thinking about leaving.” That and the fact that he was making so much money it would cost less to hire his own staff than pay IMG’s 20 to 25 percent commission on business deals.

March and April crystallized his decision. At the Players, he was so snowed by requests and demands that he spent a total of ninety minutes on the practice tee before he played his first round. “That was disgusting,” he said. He missed the cut there, finished a disappointing thirty-fifth at the Masters, and then missed back-to-back cuts at Houston and Atlanta, the latter by one shot, when he and Medlen miscalculated the number and thought they needed birdie at the 18th. Price went for the green when he didn’t have to, knocked the ball in the water, made bogey, missed the cut by one, and went home furious.

He wasn’t so far off his game that he wondered what was going on, but he was just far enough off that he was convinced that lack of practice time and concentration were killing him. He had missed only one cut in 1993; now, in April, he had missed three in 1994.

Several months earlier, John Bredenkamp, a close friend from Zimbabwe, had told him he was planning to start a sports-marketing firm in London. Price had known Bredenkamp, who had made millions in the tobacco business, for twenty-six years. When he decided he needed more attention than he was getting from IMG, he called Bredenkamp. By the time he played in the Byron Nelson, the week after Atlanta, the decision had been made: he would leave IMG (he had a clause in his contract allowing him to leave if he gave thirty day’s notice) and put his business in the hands of a new company. Two people would be hired to move to Florida and take over the day-to-day handling of any and all requests he received.

Perhaps it was coincidence, but two weeks after making his decision—in his next tournament—Price won the Colonial.

He played a practice round there with Norman, who noticed that he was holding his left shoulder a little higher when he putted than he had been the year before during his hot streak. Price made an effort to drop the shoulder a little and—bingo!—putts started dropping again.

When Price putts well, he is difficult to beat. Throughout his career he had always been a great striker of the ball but never a consistent putter. The Nick Price of the mid-to late 1980s was not that different than the Davis Love of the mid-1990s. If the putts are dropping, watch out.

Both his ball striking and his putting were way off at the U.S. Open and that was a letdown. Price couldn’t help but wonder a little bit if he was going to be one of those players who was great week in and week out on tour but couldn’t turn it up the extra notch at the majors. Fortunately he had the 1992 PGA win so he didn’t have to deal with the best-player-never-to-have-won-a-major label.

He bounced back after the Open to defend his title at the Western Open before his breakthrough week at Turnberry. The last of his doubts was finally put to rest there. Now, with his new business setup in place, with winning the British Open no longer an unfulfilled obsession, with a new mallet-headed putter he felt comfortable with, and with a much-needed rest week behind him, Price knew he was ready to make a run at a second major. No one had won two majors in the same year since Nick Faldo had won the Masters and the British Open in 1990.

By the end of the day Thursday, it was apparent that Price was going to have a shot to match Watson. His 67 put him in a tie for the lead with Colin Montgomerie. No one had done much to damage Southern Hills, a golf course all the players had great respect for. There were no tricks to Southern Hills, just a lot of different-looking holes that forced you to use every club in your bag. The heat was oppressive, but not as overwhelming as it had been at Oakmont. Every time it seemed ready to become completely impossible, a breeze would come whispering through the trees, giving just enough relief to make the conditions bearable.

Paul Azinger’s dream of making a miracle comeback died quickly when he shot 40 on the front nine Thursday morning. He had to work to shoot 35 on the back nine for a respectable 75. He improved the next day with a 73, but that wasn’t enough, the cut coming at 145. As with any golfer coming back from a long layoff, Azinger struggled around the greens. He didn’t make very many putts, and he couldn’t get the ball close to the hole the way he did when he was sharp.

“I missed the game more than I thought I did,” he said. “I missed hitting wedges knee-high to a grasshopper that ended up three feet from the hole, I missed that feeling when you hit a seven-iron so pure you can’t even hear the ball. I haven’t had that feeling much yet, but I know it’s going to come back. I can wait. I know now the worst is over, I know in my heart the cancer’s gone. It’s been an unbelievable experience—good and bad—but the important thing is that it’s over.”

It was the golf tournament that was over on Friday. At least in realistic terms. Having shot 67 on Thursday to tie for the lead, Price grabbed the tournament by the throat with a five-under-par 65. The 31 he shot on the back nine was a clinic of shotmaking and putting. He didn’t miss a single green, and he was so dialed in on the greens that every putt seemed to hit the back of the hole. On the 13th, a butterfly landed on his ball just as he drew the putter back for a 15-foot birdie try. Price didn’t flinch. He followed through and the putt rolled straight into the cup.

“It was too late to stop,” he said with a huge smile, walking off the green. “I was committed.”

He was committed to leaving the entire field in his wake. By the time Price was finished, he had a five-shot lead—unheard of after two rounds in a major championship.

Price had never felt more comfortable during a tournament week. He knew his swing was good and he was making his putts. His business questions had been answered. Each day, he went to the press room, talked about how dangerous everyone lurking behind him was, hit balls for an hour in the heat, and went back to his rented house to soak in the backyard swimming pool.

“I don’t even want to think about what may happen on the weekend,” he said on Friday evening in mid-soak. “In a sense, I’ve put pressure on myself now because if I don’t win with this lead I’ll have to wonder what I did wrong. But I’m mature enough now to know that no lead is safe.”

He smiled. “If I do win, though, I know I’m ready for whatever comes with that victory. I’m prepared. Because right now, I’m already thinking that next year I’ll be better organized at the start of this year than I was last year and I can really get after things.”

As is always the case at any tournament, especially a major, there were story lines that had nothing to do with who was going to win. Bruce Fleisher shot the same 75 as Azinger on Thursday, and it looked as if he would be slamming his trunk on Friday one more time. Since he had knocked himself out of the Players with his final-hole bogey, Fleisher had fallen into a horrendous slump, missing ten of twelve cuts. The biggest paycheck he had cashed since early March had been $4,569 for finishing twenty-sixth in the rain-shortened Deposit Guaranty. His earnings for the year entering the PGA were $73,672. The possibility of a return to Q-School—at the age of forty-six—was becoming more and more real with each passing week.

“I think about it all the time,” he said. “You can’t help but think about it. I dread the idea of going back but I have to face facts. It may happen.”

Fleisher actually walked away from his Thursday 75 feeling pretty good about the round. He had started out very nervous, knowing this was a week when he had a chance to make up some serious ground because of the size of the purse. He was spraying the ball all over the place before settling down on the back nine. “I could have shot eighty-five,” he said, “but I got out with seventy-five. That left me feeling better than I had in a while.”

It is funny how different a scrambling 75 can be from a bunch-of-missed-putts 75. Fleisher shot a 75 that gave him a confidence boost. It showed the next day when he shot 68, his lowest score since the first round of the Honda Classic (thirty-four rounds earlier) and made the cut by two shots. That put him in a position where a good weekend could make up for a lot of lost weeks.

For eleven holes Saturday, Fleisher did exactly what he had to do. He kept grinding out pars, no easy task at Southern Hills, and he birdied the 11th, hitting an eight-iron to seven feet after having to back off several times because a workman was pounding a hammer on the side of a house several yards away from the tee. When no one could get the workman’s attention, Fleisher shrugged and hit his shot anyway. Walking off the tee, he turned around and jokingly shouted, “You just keep pounding like that all day if you want to.”

The birdie put him one under for the day and only two over for the tournament. He was close to getting into contention for a good-sized check. But at the 12th he pulled a five-iron second shot way left of the green and missed a five-foot par putt. Okay, still even par for the day. Then, at 14, his 15-foot birdie putt looked dead center but rimmed out. A marshal standing a few feet away said, “I don’t believe that!”

“Neither do I,” Fleisher said.

He looked tired, worn out by the heat and the pressure. At 16 and 17 he missed the fairway badly with his driver, producing bogeys. He scrambled out a par from a bunker at 18. That left him with 72, not awful, but not good enough to move up in the standings on a day when it looked like he might shoot another 68 and pass a lot of people.

“There are times when you want to hide when it gets going bad,” he said. “Today was typical. I get to a point where I start to feel confident and then one bad shot [the five-iron at the 12th] throws me off and I can’t get it back. I don’t know why that happens—if I did, it wouldn’t happen. But it does, week after week.

“I’ve still got time left, but I know the clock is ticking. I ain’t done yet though. I’ve still got some game left in me.”

On Sunday, Fleisher shot 75 and finished tied for sixty-first. He made $2,800 for his efforts. He knew he needed to make a lot more than that. Soon.

Jeff Sluman had no Q-School worries. He had already made $166,000 for the year coming into the PGA, and even if he hadn’t, he was exempt through 1998 because of his victory in this tournament in 1988.

This was an especially nostalgic week for Sluman. The tournament had originally been scheduled to be played at Oak Tree, the same course where he had won the title six years earlier, but financial problems there had forced the club to give up the host role. That was why everyone was at Southern Hills.

It was still Oklahoma and it was still the PGA, and even though he had missed the cut at Memphis, Sluman arrived feeling confident. All year long he had been improving slowly but surely. It hadn’t been easy by any means. At the Masters, he had put in an exhausting week working with his teacher, Craig Harmon, and had been convinced on Sunday that they had turned a corner. He had gone from being virtually unable to drive the ball in the fairway on Thursday to feeling confident over almost every shot on Sunday.

He shot 73 that day, but felt as if he had hit the ball much better than that. He certainly hit it better at one hole—the 17th. There, he hit a perfect drive down the right side and walked over the crest of the hill expecting to see his ball all the way at the bottom, leaving him a short iron to the green. Instead, the ball was just over the hill, a good 50 yards shy of where he had thought it would finish.

One of the observers—men assigned by the tournament to observe play (in other words, watch with an ideal view)—was standing nearby. “Did you see what happened to this ball?” Sluman asked.

“It hit something,” the observer said.

“Hit something?” Sluman was baffled. There was nothing around for the ball to hit except grass. “What could it have hit?”

The observer looked a little embarrassed. “Well, you see, I’d set up my chair here and it bounced and hit the chair leg and stopped.”

Sluman felt himself reddening. The observer was supposed to be hugging the ropes, not lolling around near the fairway. As politely as he could manage, he explained that to him.

“Yes, yes,” the observer said. “I understand.”

“Apparently not,” Sluman said, walking away, still angry.

He was left with an almost impossible downhill lie a long way from the green. He chopped the ball close to the green, but his pitch rolled too far and he made an aggravating bogey.

When his birdie putt on 18 hung on the lip and didn’t drop, Sluman was uncharacteristically furious. He was convinced that the extra shot would cost him a spot in the top twenty-four—significant since the top twenty-four finishers at the Masters receive automatic invitations to the following year’s tournament.

His thinking proved correct. He finished tied for twenty-fifth, one shot away from a five-way tie for twentieth. “I should have told him what I really thought,” he said after signing his card. “Come to think of it, no I shouldn’t have. Then I wouldn’t have been back here again no matter what.”

He took care of any questions about the 1995 Masters at the U.S. Open when he finished tied for ninth, since the top sixteen at the Open qualify for the Masters. More important, he played golf the way he had played it before 1993. He jumped into contention with a 69 on Friday that left him five shots behind the leaders and was still only five shots behind on Saturday when he ran out of gas in the heat and bogeyed 17 and 18. That was upsetting, and not making any birdie putts the next day was disappointing, but he hit the ball consistently well for four days.

“I never had to worry about it going sideways,” he said. “I feel as if someone has passed a hand over me and said, ‘You’re cured, you can hit the ball well again.’ ”

It hadn’t been magic though, it had been hours and hours on the range. Sluman has built his life on patience. He was patient when he stayed short all those years because of the medication he was taking. He was patient as he bounced from one college to another because no one believed he could play golf on the college level. And he was patient when nothing happened for him his first three years on tour.

Now he was being patient again, knowing he had the game to compete with the big boys but that getting back to that level consistently wouldn’t happen overnight.

That patience was evident again at the Western (most notably when the program for the Pro-Am in his adopted hometown listed him as “Jim” Sluman) when he found himself one shot out of the lead on the back nine on Sunday only to have his swing fall apart down the stretch. He still finished tied for sixth (his best finish since a fifth at Hartford in 1992), but it was a letdown because he had been in position to win for the first time in what seemed like forever. Even so, he knew he was headed in the right direction, and he wasn’t going to let a couple of bad shots late on Sunday knock him down.

He came to the PGA believing that a tough golf course in a major championship was perfect for him. And, just as at the Open, he was in contention (for second, since only one person was really in contention for first) through most of the tournament. He shot 70 the first day, struggled a little on the second with a 72, then roared back to shoot 66 on Saturday. That put him at 208, only three shots behind Jay Haas, who was alone in second place—three shots behind Price.

His tee time on Sunday was 1:40 P.M. He and Ben Crenshaw had only three groups behind them when they teed off. This was where Sluman wanted to be, where he felt he belonged, playing late on Sunday at a major championship. The day turned out to be a disappointment, he shot 75 to drop back to a tie for twenty-fifth, but Sluman knew the struggles of 1993 and early 1994 were behind him. He was a contender again. He would win again and he would be a factor on tour in the future. Like everyone who goes through a slump, he had wondered if that would happen. Now he knew.

“And someday,” he said, “I’m going to figure out a way to do something about Rwanda and Haiti. “I love this life and what I’m doing, but I wish I was doing more.”

Someday, he probably will. Some golfers are obsessed with their games. Sluman knows there are more important things to worry about.

Tom Watson wasn’t obsessing about his game after the British Open, but he did have trouble bouncing back from what had happened to him there on Sunday.

“It really hurt,” he said. “A lot. As badly as anything I can remember in my career. I guess I just got to the point where I was sick and tired of being hurt like that. I started feeling sorry for myself. I can’t stand feeling that way.”

He went home, took in a few Kansas City Royals games (while there were still games to take in), and played in an exhibition in Canada. He missed short putts on the first two holes at Southern Hills on Thursday, but somehow bounced back to shoot 69. He was still in contention in the B-Flight (non–Nick Price) going into Sunday at 208, but a 71—with 34 putts—knocked him down to a tie for ninth place. Still, it wasn’t a 74 and it meant he had finished 13th–6th–11th–9th in the four majors in 1994. It could have been a whole lot better, but for someone who had already been a Ryder Cup captain, someone who would be forty-five in September, it was pretty good golf.

And, when the PGA was over, Watson conceded he needed to do some thinking over the winter about his putting. He had hit the ball superbly for two years and didn’t have a win to show for it. “I didn’t putt very well here either,” he said, sitting in front of his locker. “Yesterday, I shot sixty-seven with thirty-two putts. What could I shoot in some of these rounds if I got back to just being an average putter?”

He would go home and experiment with cross-handed putting and even with a long putter. He wasn’t willing to say he would show up on tour in January with a cross-handed stroke or a long putter (he didn’t), but he wasn’t ruling it out. Not anymore. Not when he knew what his putter had cost him in 1994.

Price tried to give the masses hope during the third round Saturday. He had his one mortal day of the week, missing greens all over the place and rarely putting himself in position to make birdie. For a while, it seemed as if every time you looked up, Price was in another bunker.

Even though he had told himself on Friday night not to change his game plan at all, he couldn’t help himself. With a five-shot lead, he couldn’t help but play conservatively and that isn’t his game. His lead actually shrank briefly to one shot when Jay Haas made a run, but just as he did, Haas made a triple bogey (his second of the tournament) to drop back. Price, having gotten up and down from six different bunkers, finally split the fairway with a driver at the 17th and threw his arms up in mock celebration since it seemed as if it had been days since he had found a fairway. He made a birdie on that hole, and when the day was over, after all the trials and tribulations and trips to the beach, he had shot an even-par 70.

This was the round that in the past would have ruined Price’s chances. This was the day he would have shot 75 and lost his lead and not been able to rebound on Sunday. Now he kept things under control, got to the house in 70, and still had a three-shot margin on Haas, four on the Gritty Little Bruin and Phil Mickelson, and five on John Cook and Greg Norman.

Price readily admitted that it was Norman who most concerned him going into Sunday. “He’s the guy who has the best chance to go out there and really go low, put up a sixty-three or a sixty-four,” he said. “I’ll be watching him all day.”

He was on the practice green when Norman started out as if he was going to make Price look like a seer. He birdied the first two holes, and at the third, a hole where almost everyone hit an iron off the tee, he took out a driver and smashed the ball straight down the middle. Norman was pumped. He had started five shots back, only one less than he had been at the British going into the last round, but instead of having nineteen players ahead of him, he had only four. And he honestly believed the only one he really had to worry about if he could piece together one of his charges was Price.

In the CBS truck, Chirkinian and crew were doing everything but shouting at Norman to make his move because they knew that a Price blowaway would have people clicking the tournament off all over America. Norman missed a 12-foot birdie putt at the third; Price parred the first. Norman missed a 6-foot birdie chance at four; Price parred number two.

Norman was stalled, but there was still plenty of time left. A three-stroke margin with fourteen holes left for the challenger and sixteen left for the leader meant there was all sorts of time for things to happen.

Norman and Cook walked up the hill from the fourth green to the fifth tee, the huge gallery urging them on. Cook was one under for the day and four shots back, so he too had a chance. The fifth is a par-five, 614 yards long, unreachable in two. But two good shots will put you in a strong position to make birdie.

Norman, in a white shirt, black pants, and his trademark black GWS hat, stood over his drive even longer than usual. He had heard a number of “You-da-mans” the first few holes, something he had become oblivious to. Now, though, he heard one more. Only this one came on his downswing.

Norman flinched just a tiny bit and his ball flew just a tiny bit off line into the right rough. Furious—and rightfully so—he stood for several seconds glaring at the fool who had yelled.

“What in the world is your problem?” Cook said to the young man, almost as upset as Norman.

As the two players walked down the fairway, Norman was still clearly upset with what had happened. There was no margin for error, not when you were chasing Nick Price, and now, through no fault of his own, he faced a fairly difficult second shot.

He needed to regain his composure quickly. Only he couldn’t. Still clearly fuming, he pushed his second shot and it clipped a tree and came to rest in a grove of trees. He had no shot to the green and no choice but to pitch out onto the fairway. His fourth shot, which should have been his third, ended up 18 feet right of the cup. The putt was dead center, only it came up two rolls short.

Bogey. Cook had made his birdie to get to five under. Norman was now back to four. And, as the two men walked off the green, the scoreboard showed that Price had just birdied the third. Norman was five back again. Only now, he had only thirteen holes to play. The charge, as it turned out, was over.

As he walked off the sixth tee, Tony Navarro could see his shoulders sagging. “That was a good swing, Greg,” he said to his boss, referring to the tee shot he had just hit.

“I haven’t really made a bad swing yet, have I?” Norman said. “I still can’t believe that three-iron clipped that tree. Can you?”

Unbelievable or not, it had happened and it had quashed any momentum Norman might have gathered. He never did get to six under; the only pursuer who did was Mickelson. Just as he did, Price birdied the fifth, so even then his margin was still four shots.

It was never less than four shots the rest of the day. CBS had a runaway on its hands. Norman’s quick start had, as it turned out, helped Price. It had gotten him focused right from the start and reminded him that he needed to play aggressively. He did just that, shooting 32 on the outward nine. By the time he made the turn, his margin on the field was six shots. When Norman and Cook walked onto the 10th green and saw that Price had reached 11 under, they looked at each other with the same thought: we’re all playing for second.

Norman couldn’t help but feel saddened to have played as well as he had all year long and still come up empty in the majors. He and Cook ended up tied for fourth with Faldo, one shot behind Mickelson and two behind Pavin. All the contenders played well. For Pavin and Mickelson, their finishes were their best ever in a major. Cook felt good to have played as well as he had both in the PGA and for three straight months. His confidence was back. But, like everyone else, he knew that Price was playing a different game than the rest of them.

“There was one tournament between three under and six under and then there was Nick,” Cook said standing behind the 18th. “We should have stuck an extra club in his bag. Then we might have had a chance.” He shook his head. “No, come to think of it, that wouldn’t have helped either. The most it could cost him is four [penalty] shots.”

Cook was right. Price’s final margin was six, and it could have been more. He even admitted that he knew it was over before it was actually over. “When I made the birdie at sixteen, I turned to Squeek and said, ‘You know I can double-bogey the last two holes and still win,’ ” he said. “I felt pretty good about my chances at that point.”

As if to prove that he was human, he did bogey the 18th, but all that did was keep him from equaling the largest margin of victory in the tournament’s history. He hugged Medlen and Sue just as he had done at the British Open, but the feeling was entirely different. There was no catharsis, no dramatic moment that moved him from contender to champion. He was the boss for all four days, never seriously challenged and, any false modesty aside, the clear-cut king of the game of golf. He had now won three of the last nine major championships and had done what the great players do: proven that when he is at his best no one in the world can keep up with him. As Price held the Wanamaker Trophy in his arms for the second time in three years, Leadbetter turned to Medlen and said, “You know, he’s not quite in a zone yet, but he’s getting close.”

Medlen shook his head. “If this isn’t a zone, the next place he’s going is Deep Space Nine.”

Having erased the one doubt that nagged him at the end of 1993—his record in the majors—could Price now rest on his laurels?

“I certainly hope not,” he said. “I want to reach a point where I’m thought of as a truly great player. I think one way to do that is to win all four majors. Only four players [Nicklaus, Sarazen, Players, and Hogan] have done that. I know it will be very hard for me to win Augusta and the U.S. Open, but that’s what I really want to do. I think I’ll be hungrier now than I’ve ever been.”

Price had done the hardest thing there is to do in the game of golf: he had controlled the game rather than having it control him.

“Out here, you’re always trying to get control of something that’s uncontrollable,” he said. “On the front nine today, from the first tee on, I felt like I was in control. That’s such an unbelievable feeling.”

He was relaxed now, unwinding, enjoying what he had done. “You know, I have this memory of being on the range at Bay Hill last year,” he said. “I was working, working, working, and I look over and there’s Arnold with three different sets of irons, looking for the right ones. He was just having the time of his life.

“The key to success in this game is finding a way to enjoy it no matter how you’re playing. Arnold’s done that better than anyone. He’s sixty-four and he still loves it every single day.

“I know I’m not going to play this way forever, maybe I won’t even play this way next year, next month, or next week. But I’ve played the game long enough now that I think I’ve learned to enjoy it whether I’m first or twentieth.”

He laughed. “Of course, I enjoy first a lot more. But if you can still love golf on the days when it controls you, then you’ve got it made. Because there are going to be a lot more days like that than days like this.”

Every one of them knows that. They all know the game will knock them down over and over again no matter how many championships they win. The best of them—from Palmer at sixty-four to Tiger Woods at eighteen—figure out somewhere along the line that all the aggravation, all the anguish, all the lonely hours, all the blood, sweat, and tears, is, somehow, all worth it in the end even though the game will always own you rather than you owning it.

No game is more imprecise, more elusive. The greatest players alive wake up most mornings having no idea whether the day will produce a 65 or a 75. If they have a gut feeling, it will be wrong nine times out of ten.

Jeff Sluman, who has known the highest of the highs and, far more often, the lowest of the lows, offers the most eloquent description there is of life as a professional golfer.

“I hate this game,” he says. “And I can’t wait till tomorrow to play it again.”