Whenever television cameras peer down from a blimp swimming through the air like a floating dolphin above Pebble Beach capturing the scenery of the Monterey Peninsula, some network wag will invariable trot out the old line attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson describing this stretch of majestic coastline as “the most felicitous meeting of land and sea in creation.” Stevenson must have made up his mind fast.
The author of adventures like Treasure Island and Kidnapped shipped out of Scotland on the Devonia in August 1879 in hot pursuit of a married woman, Fanny Osbourne, whose husband was a crackerjack philanderer himself. After arriving in New York and journeying across North America by rail, Stevenson caught up with Fanny in Monterey, the capital of Alta California before the Mexican-American War. The tiny town with its heavy Spanish and Mexican influence had three streets with wooden walkways and, according to the haggard and nearly penniless writer, a “population . . . about that of a dissenting chapel on a wet Sunday in a strong church neighborhood.” He was not greeted warmly by Fanny, who had yet to actually set her divorce from her debauched husband into motion. So, the sickly, impoverished, and love-stricken Stevenson took a horse and pack and headed off into the unfamiliar pine-covered hills above Carmel, where he became delirious and nearly died before being rescued by a couple of goat ranchers, one a seventy-two-year-old Mexican War veteran and the other an Indian named Tom. Nursed back to what passed for health in a man who always appeared, if not on death’s door, to have a foot on its welcome mat, Stevenson moved into Monterey and took a job writing for the Monterey Californian, the state’s first newspaper, earning the munificent sum of two dollars a week. Fanny left Monterey for Oakland by mid-October, and Stevenson followed her by the end of December, so the quote that is the Monterey Peninsula tradition like no other was penned by a freelance vagabond and quasi-vagrant Scottish émigré who spent less than three months there, some of it hallucinating and the rest of it wandering the beaches looking at bleached whale bones. How utterly Left Coast.
In 1982 the U.S. Open was returning to Pebble Beach’s felicitous meeting of land and sea ten years after it hosted its first National Open, won spectacularly by the best player in golf at the time, maybe of all time, Jack Nicklaus. By ’72 Nicklaus had already won two U.S. Opens, two Open Championships, two Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) Championships, and four Masters, including his most recent wire-to-wire victory that April, the first Masters following the death of Augusta National founder Bobby Jones and the first Masters reprieve for Jack Whitaker, the television announcer who had been banished from the CBS broadcast team for likening Augusta’s spectators (the club refers to them as patrons) to a mob. More on him later. On the all-time list of winners of professional major championships, in ’72 Nicklaus was one behind Jones’s rival Walter Hagen, and if you included his U.S. Amateur titles for the purposes of comparing him with Jones (and that was the mark that meant everything to him), Nicklaus was one behind there, too. In short, he was the man to beat and had been for the better part of ten years. The only golfers with career résumés more glittering than his were dead.
Nicklaus was thirty-two then, confidently in his prime as golf’s force majeure. After his opening round of 71, he led or shared the lead every day. On Sunday the wind blew so hard off the Pacific Ocean that a sailing regatta of small boats off Carmel Bay had to be canceled, and no one was able to shoot in the 60s. As a side note, Tom Watson was playing in his first U.S. Open and shot a 76 that day. So difficult were the conditions, his four-over par score passed thirty players. Arnold Palmer, Nicklaus’s first professional rival who hadn’t won a major championship in eight years, crept up on Jack’s lead, but when Arnold failed to make an eight-foot birdie putt on the par-five fourteenth that would have tied him with Nicklaus, he went sideways, following it up with bogeys on the next two holes to drop away. After Nicklaus made a three on the par-four fifteenth, he put an exclamation point on the championship when his one-iron into the harsh wind on the seventeenth took one bounce, hit the flagstick, and stopped inches from the cup. Even more astounding than the dramatic shot itself was that, at the top of his swing, Nicklaus’s club had gotten a little too far inside the line and slightly closed. Sensing it was out of position, he made an adjustment in the milliseconds of the downswing, resulting in the near-perfect strike. Nicklaus’s one-iron was the first of the transcendent feats the seventeenth would witness.
Ten years later Jack was no longer the man to beat, even by his own estimation. That man was Thomas Sturges Watson. After a horrific, for him, 1979 season, Nicklaus had rededicated himself. “That’s the first year I hadn’t won a golf tournament,” said Nicklaus.
I got away from it. From the time I finished in the first part of August until January, I touched a club three times. So, when I went back to Jack Grout [his teacher] in the first of January, I said, okay, J. Grout, I’ve been away from it a long time. My bad habits are gone. Let’s start over. We started with grip, stance, posture, everything. That was a real revamp. I went from being very upright to moving my hands probably a foot behind me, which changed my whole angle of attack. I was so bad that I needed to get away from it to get rid of the bad habits so I could go back fresh and have the energy and desire to go do it. That’s what I did. Competition always motivated me. I love the game of golf, but the game of golf was my vehicle to the competition. In ’79, I lost my vehicle. I had to get energized and away from it so I could go back and get my vehicle back. Once I won in ’80, I’ll have to say that I didn’t have a lot of motivation after that for a while. I really liked to play golf, but I knew the game wasn’t quite at the level it was.
If his poor showing in ’79 was the motivation that spurred Nicklaus to his major victories of 1980 in the U.S. Open at Baltusrol and the PGA Championship at Oak Hill, his determination to take on the finest player of the next generation, Watson, kept him at it. In his autobiography, Nicklaus writes, “If Arnold Palmer hadn’t been there when I turned pro, or Johnny Miller or Lee Trevino or Tom Watson hadn’t come along and whipped me as often as they did, I’m certain my record would have been a shadow of what I’m proud to have achieved.” Had Watson not kept Nicklaus’s fires at the very least smoldering, would Jack have won the 1986 Masters at the age of forty-six? And had it not been for the presence of the greatest collector of major golf titles the game has ever known to measure himself against, would Watson have won five British Opens and hung around long enough to nearly win a sixth at the age of fifty-nine? It was no coincidence that, as they aged, the two rivals became the best of friends, deeply appreciative of the greatness each was able to draw out of the other.
Nicklaus had announced his dominance in 1962 when he won the U.S. Open in a playoff against the game’s reigning king, Arnold Palmer, at Oakmont when he was just twenty-two years old. While Palmer always wondered what might have been had he been able to hold off the young Ohioan’s ascendance for a year or two or three, forced him to taste disappointment instead of success, it didn’t happen that way. Nicklaus unapologetically stepped right to the head of the line. Tiger Woods would do exactly the same thing thirty-five years later. For most players who eventually succeed in the biggest moments, however, there is a learning curve, and the curve has a warning sign that says, “Choking Ahead.” It certainly was that way for Watson.
Growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, Watson’s father, Ray, knew everything there was to know about the U.S. Open. He could recite all the winners back to 1895 and how they got there. An insurance salesman who was a good-enough player to have been the club champion at Kansas City Country Club (CC), an A. W. Tillinghast–designed course built in 1925 for a club originally founded in the 1890s on land owned by a businessman who made a fortune outfitting settlers departing on the Oregon Trail, the elder Watson and his friends called young Tom “Flytrap,” after Flytrap Finnegan, a wisecracking caddie in a Depression Era comic strip, Toonerville Folks, a.k.a. The Toonerville Trolley. The name stuck not because the gap-toothed boy was glib. It was just the opposite. He was deadly determined on a golf course, as serious as his father was about the primacy of the National Open.
As a student at Stanford University, Tom would drive down U.S. 101 from Palo Alto to the Monterey Peninsula on Saturdays to play Pebble Beach, leaving at five in the morning so he could be there by six thirty, stopping only for a dozen bite-size glazed donuts and a carton of milk for breakfast. He became friends with the starter, who would put him off before the first tee time, and when he got to the last four holes Watson would pretend he needed four pars to win the U.S. Open. “Never did it,” he recalled.
Watson played in the ’72 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, his first major, and tied for twenty-ninth. Two years later in the ’74 U.S. Open at Winged Foot and again in the ’75 championship at Medinah, Watson put himself in position to win the national title he coveted most but backed away both times. After losing the fifty-four-hole lead at Winged Foot, he was approached in the locker room of the Tudor-style clubhouse by Byron Nelson, a five-time major champion who was then working for CBS, and the two forged a lifetime friendship that would help Watson control both his swing and his nerve. It wasn’t until ’75 in the British Open at Carnoustie, Watson’s first Open Championship, that he broke through in a major, beating Jack Newton, a gifted and fun-loving Australian, in a playoff. Eight years later Newton would suffer horrific injuries, losing an arm and an eye and suffering severe internal trauma, when he walked into the spinning propeller of a Cessna at Sydney Airport after spending the day watching an Australian Rules football match between Sydney and Melbourne.
That Watson bounced back so quickly in ’75 from his disappointment at Medinah to win at Carnoustie was the first sign he’d learned to perform under the most intense pressure. But it wasn’t until he went head-to-head against Nicklaus, and bested the best, that Watson’s competitive soul was vindicated. The first of their battles was in the ’77 Masters when it came down to the two of them at the end, with Watson making a birdie on the seventeenth. The roar forced Nicklaus into a mental error, choosing an easy six-iron instead of a hard seven and hitting his approach to the eighteenth fat. It was a mistake Nicklaus never really got over, mostly because his mind was better under pressure than probably any golfer who ever picked up a club with the possible exception of his idol, Jones. Physical mistakes were one thing. Everyone hits bad shots. But this? It was just the sort of miscalculation he could never forgive himself. Their second head-to-head confrontation was at Turnberry the same year, when the two champions went eyeball-to-eyeball for two days, leaving the rest of the Open Championship field, literally, in their dust. On that weekend on the Firth of Clyde, Nicklaus shot 65-66, while Watson turned in 65-65. So superb was their golf, Nicklaus was ten shots better than third place. Watson had now won three major championships, two staring straight into the blue eyes of one of the greatest champions who ever lived. No one would ever again question his resolve. In 1981 Watson won his second Masters, beating Johnny Miller and Nicklaus, again, by two shots.
“We had some pretty good contests, yes we did,” says Watson.
And we wanted to beat each other. I wanted to beat Jack Nicklaus because Jack Nicklaus was the best in the game. I wasn’t afraid of him but I certainly had tremendous respect for him. Trying to play and beat the best at the game, that’s what I was out there to do. He was the best there was. Any time you played in a tournament, if neither of you won, you always compared yourself to Jack. Did I beat Jack that week or did he beat me? First and foremost, you’re there to win a golf tournament but if it happens to be against the best, that’s the ideal situation you want to be in. The more you beat heads against each other, the more you get to know each other even better. You have stories to tell each other, share with each other. Nobody owned Jack. I was fortunate to beat him in some pretty exciting contests. But you look at Jack’s record, he ran circles around my record. When all is said and done, you look at the record. He beat me more than I beat him.
But not in 1982.
The Pebble Beach Golf Links opened in 1919, forty years after Robert Louis Stevenson’s ride-by. It was designed largely by Jack Neville, as good an amateur as the state of California had to offer at the time but a complete novice when it came to routing and building golf courses. He’d been picked for the job by Samuel F. B. Morse, a Yale man who recognized an opportunity when he saw it, and instead of disposing of land on the Monterey Peninsula owned by his employer, a division of the Southern Pacific Railroad, as he had been hired to do, he formed his own business, the Del Monte Properties Company, and acquired it himself. Positioning eight holes on the cliffs that look out over the ocean was the single act of genius that gave Pebble Beach a cachet enjoyed by few courses anywhere in the world and, among major championship venues, rivaled in its rough beauty only, perhaps, by Turnberry, where Watson and Nicklaus had already faced off.
In the building of Pebble Beach, one majestic hole got away, an error rectified nearly eighty years later. One of Morse’s first acts in 1915 was to sell off a five-acre tract looking out across Stillwater Cove. When Neville set about laying out his golf course, he had to build around William Beatty’s spectacular parcel. His solution was to transition from the fourth green perched on the cliff above Stillwater Cove to the par-five sixth hole that plays directly toward the Pacific Ocean, with Stillwater Cove now positioned to the right of the landing area, by means of a blind, uphill one-shotter, the old par-three fifth. It was the mud in the eye of one of the most glorious stretches of golf holes ever created. The Beatty land changed hands in 1944, and in 1995 the estate of the then current owner, Mimi Jenkins, sold the land back to the Pebble Beach Company for $8.75 million. Jack Nicklaus was hired to construct the current par-three fifth on the cliff above the cove, undoubtedly the single most expensive golf hole ever built, which opened in the fall of 1998.
In 1981 Nicklaus had experienced another winless season, thanks in some measure to the recognition he was no longer the player he had once been and, one supposes, also to Watson’s play thwarting him in the Masters that April. Both Watson and Nicklaus, however, had been winners on the PGA Tour before the U.S. Open made its reappearance at Pebble Beach in June 1982. Nicklaus had won the Colonial National Invitation at Colonial CC in Fort Worth, Texas, Ben Hogan’s old club, while Watson had won two tournaments in playoffs, the first against Johnny Miller, who was still some years away from his second career as an NBC commentator, at Riviera CC in Los Angeles and the second at the Harbour Town Golf Links, a South Carolina low-country golf course on Hilton Head Island that Nicklaus had a small hand in designing in conjunction with Pete Dye, who actually did the work.
The week of the U.S. Open in 1982, the weather was typically cold and dreary, with low, thick clouds hanging over Pebble Beach. This “June Gloom,” as it’s called, is the product of a temperature inversion that takes place when the cold water pulled south from British Columbia by the California Current mixes with the summer’s inland heat. It’s a condition diagnosed by Mark Twain: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” except, of course, Twain never said it. The cold and damp part up and down Northern California’s coastline is, however, completely accurate. Fireplaces, mostly gas but some wood burning, are to the Monterey Peninsula what peat fires are to classic Irish pubs. In nearby Carmel one of the best-known hangouts was the Hog’s Breath, a bar and restaurant down a narrow walkway off San Carlos Street with a large courtyard filled with gas fireplaces and fairy-tale white lights strung in the tree branches above. About the only way you knew the place existed was because the entrance was marked at the street with a gas lamp. It didn’t hurt business that the owner was movie star and director Clint Eastwood, also a frequent patron. Eastwood, who had done a stretch as Carmel’s mayor, would become part of an investment group that purchased Pebble Beach in 1999.
The old saying is that you can’t win a golf tournament on Thursday, but you can surely lose it, much as Watson had done in the Masters that April when, as the defending champion, he opened with a 77 and still finished three strokes out of the eventual playoff. At Pebble Beach Watson could have lost the U.S. Open before he got to the weekend. During his early career his problems under pressure were often mistakenly attributed to how quick his swing was. The tempo of a golf swing, though, is as individualistic as a thumbprint. What is most important is that it always be the same, and Watson’s was always fast, regardless of the situation. It wouldn’t be until 1994 that he would discover what he came to think of as his personal holy grail, that his shoulder plane was too steep on the downswing. After he adjusted it he never again struggled for long with his ball striking. In 1982, however, the driver, in particular, could give him fits, and it did on Thursday and Friday. There was another characteristic to his game then, too. It was called the “Watson Par.” Through a combination of superb midrange putting and a magical assortment of shots around the green, with the lone exception of Spaniard Seve Ballesteros, no one in golf was Watson’s equal at keeping disaster at arm’s length.
“I was hitting it awful,” Watson has said. “I gave myself no chance to win the tournament at the beginning of the week.” On Thursday he was three over par with four holes to play and made three birdies coming in, including the seventeenth and eighteenth to finish at even (par was seventy-two in those days), two shots behind the leaders, Bill Rogers, who had won the Open Championship the year before at Royal St. George’s, and Bruce Devlin, a forty-four-year-old Australian better known for his commentary on NBC than he was for his eight victories in the 1960s and ’70s on the PGA Tour. Watson’s ability to stave off disaster was put to the test again in the second round. “I shot a 77 and scored 72,” he said afterward.
He had driven the ball so poorly for two days that, by his own account, he had “gotten away with murder.” At even par Watson was five shots behind Devlin, who seemed unlikely to stand up, but only one behind the two players who had won a major championship, Rogers and Andy North, who captured the U.S. Open at Cherry Hills CC in Denver four years earlier but had done nothing at all since. North, by the way, would win the U.S. Open again, walking with a soaking-wet white towel draped over his head in bitter cold and drenching rain at Oakland Hills CC near Detroit. Because he won only three events in his career, two of them National Opens, North is often overlooked as a top-rank player. That’s a mistake. A close friend of Watson (Tom named him as a vice captain for the 2014 Ryder Cup), North’s career was plagued by injuries, but when healthy, the tall, lanky player from Madison, Wisconsin, was both steely and formidable.
Going into the weekend, Watson was surely more concerned with his poor driving than the players ahead of him, but he was also tied with Nicklaus, and Jack never escaped anyone’s notice. Softened by some overnight rain, Saturday was the best scoring of the week. On the range after Friday’s round Watson found something in his golf swing (he thought it had gotten a bit too upright) and began hitting the ball more crisply. Commonly acknowledged as one of the finest links golfers ever, Watson’s success in winning the claret jug five times during his career was more than just a pure affinity for a style of golf that can be played along the ground. A well-struck shot is always less impacted by wind than the poorly hit one, and when Tom Watson was on, few players ever hit the ball more squarely in the center of the clubface than he did. He began doing just that on the weekend at Pebble Beach.
With the benign conditions Watson fashioned a four-under-par 68 to tie Rogers at the top of the leader board. Devlin, as many had expected, had gone in the other direction with a 75, but he was still tied for second with Scott Simpson, who would keep Watson from a second U.S. Open title five years later at the Olympic Club in San Francisco. They were tied with George Burns and David Graham. The last two had battled down the stretch in the National Open at Merion Golf Club (GC) outside Philadelphia one year earlier, with Graham winning, thanks partially to Burns’s poor finish but mostly because Graham, a hard-nosed Australian who had known more of life’s rough than its smooth, turned in one of the finest final rounds ever played in a U.S. Open. Nicklaus was a shot further back, tied with Calvin Peete, one of the few black players on the U.S. tour. Peete was known for three things, the diamond chips in his front tooth, his crooked left arm (he’d fractured the elbow in three places in a childhood accident), and the fact that he could hit a half dozen drives off any tee and when you got to the balls, invariably in the middle of the fairway, it seemed like you could cover them with a handkerchief. Peete took up the game at twenty-six when he was in Rochester, New York, selling goods out of the back of his car to migrant farmworkers. The diamonds were his calling card.
Killing time on a Sunday morning when you’re going to try to win a national championship in the afternoon is never easy. Watson spent it with his two-year-old daughter, Meg, and the Sunday papers, reading about a 7.2 earthquake in El Salvador, while his Kansas City Royals were losing to the Seattle Mariners back on the sports pages. Nicklaus and Peete teed off together just past noon on the cool, overcast day. Nicklaus had family with him, too. His twenty-year-old son, Jack II, who was a student at the University of North Carolina, was carrying the golf bag. He’d done it before, as early as the ’76 British Open at Royal Birkdale, but it was still a novelty. He would be there again in ’86 when his father won the Masters at the age of forty-six.
Jackie is considerably taller than his father (even before Jack’s collapsing vertebrae turned him into the incredible shrinking man as he aged), and when the two lined up putts together, the photographers credentialed by various news outlets covering the U.S. Open couldn’t get enough of the picture. Even after four days, when Jackie would lean over Jack, crouched behind his ball on the putting green, sizing up the line, first one photographer would snap a frame, then another, and then, as if they were all afraid this particular picture would be somehow different from all the others they’d taken that week, they would all hit the button. Cameras weren’t the digital computers of today with a soft click engineered into them just so the person pushing the button will know when the picture has been made. No, 35-millimeter-film cameras back then made an audible thwack as the mirror flipped out of the way to allow light to pass through the shutter, so when the Nicklauses would survey a putt, it sounded like the rhythm section of a Rio samba school. It got so even Jack and Jackie laughed at it. Until things got serious, that is.
Watson was out last with Rogers, but it wasn’t long before they had Nicklaus ringing in their ears. The book on Pebble Beach has always been pretty simple, depending on the weather, of course. The opening stretch, through the tiny downhill seventh, is where a player makes his score. After that, whatever strokes you’ve managed to bank serve as a cushion all the way to the finish. If the Masters doesn’t begin until the back nine on Sunday, Pebble Beach doesn’t start until the eighth tee. Nicklaus didn’t have the best of beginnings, missing the green at the first for bogey and then failing to birdie the second, a par five (played as a par four now) reachable in two shots. Then, as he often seemed to be able to will himself to do on the Sunday of a championship, Nicklaus produced his best golf of the week. He made putts of just under and then just over twenty feet on the third and fourth holes for birdies and on the blind, uphill fifth hit a six-iron two feet from the hole. On the sixth Nicklaus drove to the bottom of the hill and then hit a towering one-iron on the blind second shot, lofting it over the one-hundred-foot climb from the fairway to the green and two-putting for yet another birdie. From a similar spot in the rough eighteen years later, Tiger Woods would reach the green with a seven-iron. Nicklaus’s sand wedge on the 110-yard seventh left him an eleven-foot putt for his fifth birdie in a row. When he made it he was tied for the lead with Rogers, two holes and four twosomes behind him. Then, as often happens at Pebble Beach, he began to give shots back. He bogeyed the eighth when he missed the green and chipped poorly and three-putted the eleventh.
Behind him Watson was playing even-par stuff, despite a mistake on the tiny seventh. Pebble Beach’s Poa annua greens are devilish things, and missing short putts on them is never much of a shock. The surfaces get bumpy as the day goes on, and putts have to be struck firmly to hold their line. Watson’s two-footer at the seventh hit the left edge and sailed on. His reaction to the miss explained as much about his character as Nicklaus’s soaring one-iron did about his game. Watson told himself, “I’m one of best putters in the world. Why should I let one missed putt convince me otherwise?” The notion was reinforced when he holed a crucial seven-footer at the eighth for a par.
The club that had been his nemesis for the first two days was one of Watson’s best weapons on Sunday. He was driving the ball enormous distances and hitting all the fairways. His length appeared even more impressive than it actually was because he was paired with Rogers, who, a fader of the ball and never particularly long, wasn’t at the top of his game. Taller than Watson and thinner, Rogers had the anxious demeanor of a nervous Boy Scout caught out after curfew. Brilliant the year before at Royal St. George’s, in the aftermath of his Open Championship victory Rogers had traveled the world too much, played too often for appearance money, and lost his appetite for the game at the highest level. His desire to be home in Texarkana, Texas, and his skills were moving in opposite directions. Meanwhile, Watson was driving it like thunder. On the tenth he was a full forty yards by Rogers.
It was the first of the holes that ultimately decided the championship and the first of what Rogers, who became the spectator with the best view in the house after his bogeys at the ninth, tenth, and twelfth, called Watson’s Three Miracles. From a perfect spot in the fairway, Watson lost his seven-iron approach right of the green. Luckily for him, the ball hung up in deep grass on the side of the cliff. A little bit farther right and it would have ended up on the beach with the joggers and the dog walkers strolling to and from Carmel. Nicklaus, cruising along in ’72, had put his drive on the same hole on the beach and made a double-bogey six that could have cost him dearly but didn’t. Watson avoided his own disaster, popping the ball onto the fringe of the green and making a twenty-footer to stay even par for the day and four under, a stroke ahead of Nicklaus.
On the next hole Watson again drove it miles beyond Rogers and then put his pitching wedge on the green, leaving himself a twenty-foot sidehill slider. He made it to take a two-shot lead over Nicklaus again but gave it right back on the twelfth. A difficult downhill par three under the best of circumstances, the twelfth green is wide but shallow, and holding it can be a chore. Watson missed it in the right bunker and didn’t get up and down. The lead was a single stroke again.
Nicklaus was far from finished. A roar from his gallery cut through the heavy air and the Monterey pines when he made another birdie up ahead at the fifteenth, tying him with Watson again at four under. The dogleg-right par-five fourteenth is the longest of Pebble Beach’s long holes. The green is tiny, sitting behind a deep, steep-faced bunker. The bit of green visible from the fairway to the right of the bunker is all false front. The left side is protected by an overhanging oak tree, and anything that misses left trundles even farther left down the hill, where the only things that thrive are double and triple bogeys. Watson’s wedge shot to the fourteenth carried to the back-right portion of the green, much deeper than he wanted but a safe play that left him as far from the front-left pin as it was possible to get and still be on the fringe of the green. “Humans three-putt from there,” said Rogers.
This was the second of the Three Miracles. Watson holed the putt, something in the range of forty feet, dead in the heart. A shot in front once again, he wagged his finger at the cup as he walked toward the hole, the harbinger of a gesture he would make a few minutes later to his friend and caddie, Bruce Edwards. Nicklaus had chances from inside twenty feet for birdie on each of the last three holes but couldn’t get any of them to drop. He was asked about taking three-wood off the eighteenth tee rather than challenging the hole, but without a trailing wind and with the pin hidden behind the large bunker in the front right of the green, he’d done what he always had under pressure (except for the eighteenth at Augusta in ’77) and stuck to his plan. It was in Watson’s hands now.
After a safe par at the fifteenth, Watson missed his only fairway of the day at the sixteenth. Two bunkers are positioned exactly at the crook in the dogleg-right hole. From there the fairway turns right and runs downhill, then comes back up slightly to the green. Before the first U.S. Open in ’72, Jack Neville had suggested the bunkers over time were proving less of a hazard than he intended. In preparation for the Open’s return in ’82, Frank “Sandy” Tatum, a San Francisco attorney, former president of the United States Golf Association (USGA), a Stanford alum who won the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Tournament individual title when he was there, and, last but surely not least, a close friend and mentor to Watson, took Neville’s suggestion to heart and deepened the second bunker, adding a couple feet of sod to the face. Watson found it.
His only missed tee shot of the day couldn’t have come at a worse time. There was no option but to come out sideways. He did and played a pitching wedge that barely held the green, once again finding himself about as far away from the hole as it was possible to get. The severe back-to-front slope of the green made it an even bigger challenge than the putt he’d holed on the fourteenth. Watson cold-bloodedly lagged it to within inches and went to the seventeenth tied once again with Nicklaus, who was posting his number on the eighteenth.
Pebble Beach’s seventeenth has an hourglass-shaped green positioned kitty-corner to the tee so that the front right of the hourglass can be two clubs less than the back left of it. A ridge in the neck of the hourglass makes it imperative to get on the right portion of the green. Watson picked a two-iron for the shot at the left pin and overcooked it, turning the ball perilously toward Stillwater Cove. The ball missed the green, settling between two bunkers on the left, in the deep grass that had been grown up especially for the U.S. Open as both a hazard and a highlight of Pebble Beach’s wild seaside mien. As soon as he hit it, Watson yelled, “Down!” Had the course been groomed as it usually was for the PGA Tour’s event hosted for so many years by Bing Crosby, the shot likely would have kicked left onto the rocks and into the cove. Instead, he would be faced with what he immediately assumed would be an unlikely up and down. Ahead at the eighteenth, as Nicklaus tended to his card, he certainly thought it was. It looked very much as though Watson was about to make back-to-back bogeys to give away the championship he coveted more than any other. Watson believed then, as he does now, that no American player’s résumé, no matter how glittering, could be considered complete without winning his own national championship.
“Well, that’s dead,” he said to his longtime caddie, flipping the club to him as they left the tee box. Bruce Edwards began working for Watson in 1973 at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital Classic when he was just seventeen, and with the exception of one brief stint with Greg Norman, he stayed on Watson’s bag until he succumbed to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2004. Their last appearance together was in the 2003 U.S. Open at Olympia Fields, where Watson produced an opening round 65 that shared the lead. It was as if the round had been a gift just for Bruce, who was, by then, suffering so badly from the disease he could hardly form a word. At various points in their relationship, Watson was keen for Edwards to get a college degree (he’d gone only through high school, graduating from Marianapolis Preparatory School in Connecticut before hooking up with Watson), but Edwards, invariably a glass-half-full kind of character, was happy with the job he had. If Eastwood’s hangout in Carmel was his own Hog’s Breath, Edwards fancied Jack London’s more caddie-friendly milieu. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that, coming off the tee right after Watson had delivered the shot that was going to cost him the championship, Edwards simply said, “Let’s get this up and down.” Rogers would have a chance to witness Miracle No. 3.
When Watson missed the green at the seventeenth, Whitaker, now employed by ABC instead of CBS, was dispatched to interview Nicklaus, who seemed destined to win his fifth U.S. Open Championship, one more than Willie Anderson, Bobby Jones, or Ben Hogan. At the scoring tent by the eighteenth green, Nicklaus beamed, confident he was going to have at least a spot in a playoff, if not an outright victory. When he finished the interview, he turned back to his scorecard.
By the time they got thirty or so yards from the green, both Edwards and Watson knew they had reason for hope. They could see the top of the ball. Had it settled to the bottom, Watson surely would have been dead. Now, there was a chance. “Get it close,” Edwards told him. “Get it close?” Watson replied. “I’m gonna sink it.” He opened the face of his sand iron, a Wilson model he’d liberated from David Graham’s workshop, and flipped the ball onto the downslope. Watson crouched slightly as he watched it roll, hit the pin with force, and disappear. When it dropped he exploded, running to his left, then wheeling around and pointing at Edwards as if to say, “I told you so,” when no words could ever have been heard above the screaming crowd.
That cheer, loud enough to make dogs bark at Point Lobos, forced Nicklaus, pencil in hand, to look up from his card and swing around in his chair. He thought perhaps Watson had gotten it close. Then he saw on the television monitor exactly how close. He sagged visibly but recovered just as fast. “I can’t believe it,” Nicklaus said. He might just as well have been saying it to Bobby or Ben or Willie as to anyone in the scoring tent.
Watson played the par-five eighteenth like a man with a one-shot lead. It was three-wood off the tee, a seven-iron lay up, and a nine-iron on. When the twenty-footer went in for a closing birdie, it gave him a two-shot victory and a reason to reach his arms to the sky before embracing the caddie and friend he would lose too soon. Nicklaus met Watson as he came off the eighteenth green. “You little son of a bitch,” he said. “You’re something else. I’m proud of you.” And he was, too. No champion ever took more pride in the contest than Nicklaus. “Regardless of the outcome, the actual doing of it had been tremendous fun,” he had written of their duel at Turnberry. This was more of the same.
Beneath Pebble Beach’s gray skies with its nooks and crannies kept cozy with gas fires and the noise of the crowd still echoing up and down Robert Louis Stevenson’s coastline, it was hard to imagine golf changing. How could it be any better than this? But the year before at the Michelob-Houston Open, a journeyman professional from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ron Streck, had become the first player to win on the PGA Tour with a metal wood, beating Hale Irwin and Jerry Pate by three shots. Golf was about to embark on a technological revolution, while the USGA and the Royal and Ancient (R&A) looked the other way.
One thing didn’t change, however. Playing with wooden clubs, steel shafts, and forged irons, two of the game’s all-time great champions, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson, took each other’s measure one final time. For more than thirty years nothing in golf could compare with the two of them head-to-head.