IT WAS ONE OF those perfect early-spring Sunday evenings that are as traditional at the Masters as the azaleas, the magnolias, and the green jackets. It was shortly past 7 o’clock on April 13, 2003, and the sun was beginning to slide into the western sky, causing just a hint of coolness in the air as dusk slowly began to close in.
Two men walked off the 10th tee of the Augusta National Golf Club, hearing the cheers and shouts of the thousands who lined each side of the fairway, all of them pressing forward to get as close a look as possible at the next Masters champion.
Mike Weir was a month shy of his thirty-third birthday. He was Canadian, and even though, like most Canadian kids, he had grown up as a huge hockey fan, his hometown of Sarnia, Ontario, is less than an hour from Detroit, and his team was the Red Wings, not the Montreal Canadiens or the Toronto Maple Leafs.
He was in his seventh full year on the PGA Tour and had carved out a solid, lucrative living. He had opened the 2003 season by winning the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, the fourth win of his career, and had followed it up a few weeks later with a victory at the Nissan Open in Los Angeles.
Len Mattiace was thirty-five and had been on tour two years longer than Weir. He was coming off what had been by far the best year of his professional career. In 2002, he had won in Los Angeles and in Memphis, his first two victories on tour, and had made well over $2 million in prize money.
This, though, was a moment unlike any other in the lives of Weir and Mattiace. They had started out playing golf because they loved the game, and they had kept playing it because they had talent. Golf had been responsible for Weir’s scholarship to Brigham Young and Mattiace’s scholarship to Wake Forest. Each had been good enough in college to think that it was possible to make a living playing golf and had successfully pursued that dream.
Having played golf for money throughout their adult lives, they were now playing for far more than that. They were playing for history, and they were playing for a legacy.
“It’s the first line of any story that’s written about you for the rest of your life,” Weir would say years later. “ ‘Masters champion’ becomes part of your name.”
For all the success they’d had, both knew that there was no guarantee they would ever be this close to a major championship again. This had been one of those weeks when Tiger Woods was a factor only briefly, and they knew that was more exception than rule. Woods was such an intimidating figure in the game that after he had gotten up and down from a bunker on the final hole of his second round to make the 36-hole cut right on the cut number, Mark Chaney, who caddied for Jeff Sluman, put his arm around Brennan Little, Weir’s longtime friend and caddy, and said, “Too bad, Butchie [Little’s nickname], you almost had him.”
At that moment, Woods trailed Weir by 11 shots.
But Woods was long gone, having finished in a tie for 15th place, when Weir rolled in a six-foot par putt on the 18th green to force a sudden-death playoff with Mattiace. Forty minutes earlier, Mattiace had stood on the 18th tee with a two-shot lead, having pieced together a remarkable eight-under-par final round until that moment. Whether it was nerves or just turning human at the wrong time, Mattiace had pushed his drive on 18 into trees and pine straw to the right of the fairway and had made bogey from there to shoot 65.
Three holes behind Mattiace, playing in the last group with third-round leader Jeff Maggert, Weir knew he had to birdie the par-five 15th hole and then not make any mistakes on the last three holes to at least force a playoff. He did exactly that, slamming his par putt into the back of the hole on 18, while Mattiace stood a few yards away on the putting green, warming up for the playoff he thought was likely to come.
And so, once Weir had signed his scorecard to make it official that he and Mattiace had both finished four rounds at seven-under-par 281 (two shots clear of Phil Mickelson and three shots ahead of fourth-place finisher Jim Furyk), the two men headed to the 10th tee.
The Masters is the only major championship that breaks a tie with a sudden-death playoff. Both the British Open and the PGA Championship use aggregate-score playoffs—the British is four holes, the PGA three—so the championship can be decided on Sunday but not in sudden death, the notion being that three or four holes is a fairer test than a single hole, where one break, good or bad, can decide the winner. The United States Open still holds an 18-hole Monday playoff, which was the norm for all majors until the Masters went to sudden death in 1979.
The five previous sudden-death playoffs at the Masters had all been decided on the 11th hole. In 1979, Fuzzy Zoeller, Tom Watson, and Ed Sneed all parred the 10th hole before Zoeller birdied the 11th hole to win. Three years later, Craig Stadler beat Dan Pohl to win his only major title. In 1987, Seve Ballesteros was eliminated when he bogeyed the 10th. Larry Mize then beat Greg Norman on the 11th when he chipped in from 112 feet away, arguably the most dramatic shot in golf history. In 1989, after Scott Hoch had missed a three-foot par putt that would have clinched the win on the 10th hole, Nick Faldo birdied the 11th to beat him. And a year later, Faldo beat Raymond Floyd when Floyd’s second shot found Rae’s Creek, which runs down the left side of number 11.
Weir versus Mattiace was the first playoff at Augusta since Faldo’s victory over Floyd. If either man had thought about it standing on the 10th tee, he might have realized that each playoff in the five sudden-death affairs at the Masters had been a seminal moment in the life of almost every man who had taken part.
Zoeller’s victory had launched him into stardom and made him a wealthy man. Five years later, he added a U.S. Open title to his résumé, and even thirty years later—despite an embarrassing misstep involving Tiger Woods in 1997—he remained one of the most popular players on the Champions Tour, as the PGA Tour now euphemistically calls its senior tour for players over fifty.
Ed Sneed, who bogeyed the last three holes to blow a three-shot lead and allow Zoeller and Watson to tie him, won only once more on the PGA Tour and never again came close to contending in a major championship. The only member of the trio whose life wasn’t altered dramatically was Watson, who had already won three majors, including the 1977 Masters, and went on to win five more.
Stadler’s 1982 win was the signature moment in an otherwise solid career, an event that distinguished him from men like Hoch and, for that matter, Pohl, who finished third in two other majors and won the Vardon Trophy in 1987 for the lowest stroke average on tour but is considered merely a good player, not a major champion.
Ballesteros was the Watson of the 1987 playoff. He had already won four majors, including two Masters, and he bounced back from the disappointment of not winning a third green jacket to win the British Open for a third time in 1988.
Mize and Norman remain linked forever in golfing lore, thanks to Mize’s chip-in. Norman is the only man in history to have lost playoffs in all four major championships. He had lost to Zoeller in 1984 at Winged Foot in the U.S. Open, and would lose to Mark Calcavecchia in the 1989 British Open and to Paul Azinger in 1993 at the PGA.
But no defeat in his life was more stunning than this one. He was safely on the 11th green in two, about 25 feet below the hole, when Mize lined up his chip from the right side of the green. From where Mize stood, getting up and down for par would clearly be a challenge. If he failed to do that, a two-putt by Norman would make him the Masters champion.
Instead, Mize, who was twenty-eight at the time with one PGA Tour victory to his name, chipped in, leading to a dance that has been replayed over and over through the years. Shocked, Norman missed his lengthy birdie putt to give Mize the victory.
Norman never won the Masters—he famously blew a six-shot lead on the final day in 1996—and his 2009 appearance at age fifty-four was probably his last, barring some sort of miracle. Mize plays every year as a past champion and has a secure spot in the upstairs champions locker room in the clubhouse, his green jacket hanging in his locker every April when he arrives. He never won another playoff—losing three times in three attempts—but it hardly mattered.
To this day, when someone in golf misses a critical short putt, people invoke the name Scott Hoch. Not only did he miss from a little more than three feet with the Masters title at stake in his 1989 playoff with Nick Faldo, he missed by a lot. The putt was a dead pull the instant it left his putter. It never touched the hole, and his putt coming back for bogey—which he made—was at least as long. To this day, if you miss a short putt, someone will say you “Hoched it.”
Faldo, who won with a long birdie putt one hole later for his first Masters, went on to win three times at Augusta and won six major championships before he retired to the TV booth. Hoch won eleven PGA Tour titles and is still a very successful Champions Tour player, but he is remembered most for one missed putt, not for any of the ones he made to win in places like Las Vegas and Greensboro.
The playoff a year later involved two Hall of Famers, Faldo and Floyd. Floyd had already won four majors and at age forty-seven was trying to become the second-oldest player in history to win a major title. After Floyd’s second shot at the 11th went into the water, giving Faldo the win, he actually had another chance to win two years later, but he came up two shots short of Fred Couples.
In 2003, Weir was playing in his fourth Masters, and although he had made the cut in each of the previous three, he had never finished higher than a tie for 24th place. He had played in fifteen majors during his career, contending once at the 1999 PGA Championship when he played with Woods in the last group on Sunday and shot 80 to finish in a tie for 10th place.
“My game just wasn’t ready for everything I had to deal with that day,” he said. “Playing in the last group, playing with Tiger—all of it. I learned from it, but it certainly wasn’t a fun way to learn.”
Now, four years later, he felt ready. He had felt that way all week, even when he had fallen out of the lead after a 75 on Saturday; even when Mattiace had gone past him on Sunday afternoon.
Mattiace had less experience than Weir on the four Sundays that matter most in golf. He had played in the Masters as an amateur in 1988, qualifying because he was a member of the U.S. Walker Cup team that year, and in those days the entire ten-man squad was invited to play in the Masters. He had not made it back to Augusta as a pro until his 18th-place finish on the 2002 tour money list qualified him for the 2003 tournament. In all, he had played in ten previous majors, his best finish, also a tie for 24th, in 1997 at the U.S. Open.
“I guess it would be fair to say I came out of nowhere,” he said, laughing, a few years later. “But I had been playing the best golf of my life.”
Weir actually had an off year in 2002, dropping to 78th on the money list—after finishing 23rd, 6th, and 11th the three previous years—while failing to win a tournament for the first time since 1998. But, after reworking his game during the off-season, he had come out flying at the start of 2003, winning twice and contending, it seemed, on an almost weekly basis.
Now, though, he and Mattiace had reached a moment every golfer dreams about but can’t possibly imagine until it actually arrives. One of them was about to add two words to his name: “Masters champion.” The other was going to be left to wonder if he would ever have another chance like this one, if he would ever play this well at the right moment and not just come close but win.
That evening, one of them was going to walk away with a green jacket, an endless string of new endorsement opportunities, and a piece of history. The other would receive a hefty check ($648,000), congratulations for his play, and condolences for the missed opportunity.
Both men hit good drives on the 10th, not showing any of the nerves that might be expected given what was at stake. The 10th hole is not one of Augusta National’s more famous holes. It has none of the romance of “Amen Corner,” so dubbed by the great Herbert Warren Wind because players pray that they can get through that three-hole stretch—11, 12, 13—without seeing their hopes of winning the tournament drown in Rae’s Creek. It isn’t as memorable as the par-five 15th, the classic risk-reward hole: short enough to reach in two but eminently dangerous because of water in front and in back of the green. It isn’t as slick as the uphill ninth hole, with its treacherous tilted back-to-front green; or as pretty as the par-three 16th, where both Woods and Jack Nicklaus have had, arguably, their most dramatic moments; or as memorable as the 18th, where so much history has occurred.
But less than an hour before sunset on a lovely spring evening, the 10th is a spectacular setting for the sort of drama that was about to unfold. The hole plays straight downhill, dropping almost 100 feet in elevation from tee to green, bending to the left just beyond the landing area, which leads to a tree-surrounded bowl at the green. There’s a huge bunker in front of the green and another one to the right.
There are two things TV simply cannot do justice to at Augusta: the severe nature of the hills on the golf course, and the soaring trees that abound everywhere. Nowhere is this more true than on the 10th hole, with trees running all the way down the left, more trees behind the green, and trees pushed back from the fairway on the right that extend to the right side of the 18th fairway.
Weir and Mattiace marched down the hill to where their golf balls had come to rest on the fairway. It was 7:10 in the evening. Both men knew that the next few minutes would drastically alter the rest of their lives—one way or another.