If it was possible to go back to read the transcripts from the 1868 Open Championship, there is no doubt Old Tom, the defending champion, would be explaining to the assembled quill pushers at Prestwick that, even at the ripe old age of forty-seven, he’d never struck his guttie any better. It is the final irony of great champions. They’ve conquered the flight of the ball at roughly the same time they lose the ability to play the game. In the natural progression of things, the outgoing tide will sweep their muscularity out to sea like flotsam, or maybe jetsam. But in that twilight stretch when they are still powerful enough, it’s not swing path that betrays them but the synaptic neurons. To borrow from the movie Bull Durham, golf is a game played with fear and arrogance. In the final analysis arrogance never outlasts fear. In their prime, though, in those resolute moments when the fate of their world rested in the gentle pressure of their own grip, they were able to squeeze off shots with a stomach full of razor blades as if it meant nothing more than picking up their dry cleaning. There is something about the heart of a champion, something that isn’t distributed among us in equal measure like ten fingers and ten toes. And, whatever that thing is, it seems to demand one last summoning from the host body, a curtain call of last rights to drain the pool dry, proving to themselves they’ve used up every last smidgen of the majesty they discovered within.
There may have been more words written about Ouimet at The Country Club or Hogan or Jones at Merion—pick one—but for sheer volume, the chronicling of Nicklaus’s 1986 Masters victory takes a back seat to none of them. He was not the oldest man to win a major championship. That remains Julius Boros at forty-eight years, four months, and eighteen days in the 1968 PGA Championship at Pecan Valley GC in San Antonio. Boros did everything late. One of six children of Hungarian immigrants, he didn’t turn professional until he was twenty-nine, working instead in the accounting firm of the man who owned Rockledge CC in West Hartford, Connecticut. “One day in December of 1949, I looked out the window of my office at all the snow and decided to turn pro,” he said. Boros played in the North and South Open at Pinehurst, North Carolina, won by Sam Snead, then went down Midland Road to play a one-day pro-am at Mid-Pines CC. He won it and became the club’s professional. His first victory was the U.S. Open in 1952, a title he’d win again eleven years later in a playoff at The Country Club against Jackie Cupit and Arnold Palmer. Boros lived with a cardiac condition that led to quintuple bypass surgery in his early sixties. A heart attack killed him at seventy-four while he was sitting in a golf cart parked in the shade of his club in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In tournaments he walked the golf course with the urgency of a man window-shopping for a hat. Over the ball Herb Wind described him as someone “as relaxed as a bowl of Jell-O.” He was in constant motion, never took a practice swing, and wielded the club in a buttery back and through that looked as natural as Picasso signing his name. That such a velvety swing remained dangerous late into its competitive life surprised exactly no one.
Nicklaus, on the other hand, was a bear of a different sort. When he won the Masters at forty-six years, two months, and twenty-three days, edging out Old Tom’s 1867 Open Championship for the number-two spot on the old-guy spectrum, Nicklaus was widely believed to be pretty much washed up, even by his own reckoning. “At that point in my career, I wasn’t having much success,” he said. “I didn’t expect to win, the press didn’t expect me to win, the players didn’t expect me to win.” Yet it happened. The Masters of ’86 wasn’t the last time Nicklaus would appear on the tournament’s oversized, old-school, hand-operated leader boards, as iconic as the scoreboards in Wrigley Field or Fenway Park. In 1990, at fifty, he was paired with Nick Faldo in the next-to-last group, chasing forty-seven-year-old Raymond Floyd, who was in the process of draining his own reservoir of competitive vigor. Faldo caught Floyd and won their sudden-death playoff when Raymond hit his second shot into the pond fronting the eleventh green. “This is the most devastating thing that ever happened to me in my career,” Floyd said afterward. That’s the way it usually ends, abruptly and badly. But not for Jack. In 1990, chasing Floyd and Faldo, Nicklaus shot 74 and finished sixth. Make no mistake about it, though, his personal stockpile of excellence, the largest the game has ever known, was used up in ’86, in a week, in a day, on a back nine, that took everything he had that he hadn’t already given.
When doesn’t destiny show up with its pockets full of tiny omens? The ’86 Masters was the first Nicklaus’s mother, Helen, had attended since his inaugural trip to Augusta in 1959. It was the first time Jack’s sister, Marilyn, had been to the tournament. And on Sunday Nicklaus wore a yellow shirt in memory of a young boy, Craig Smith, the son of their church minister who died of cancer at thirteen and once told Jack he liked it when he wore yellow because the color seemed to bring him luck. Jack’s son Jackie, by then a pro himself, was on the bag just as he had been at the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach in 1982 when, had it not been for the heroics of Tom Watson, his father would have become the first man to win five National Opens. And then, of course, there were the other bits and pieces. Nicklaus had suffered business setbacks. Not enough to ruin him financially but enough to keep any chief executive officer of a mom-and-pop empire up nights. He was using a strange new black putter, the MacGregor Response ZT, with a head the size of a Polish kielbasa. He hadn’t won a major championship since his magical Jack Is Back 1980 season when he won both the U.S. Open at Baltusrol and the PGA Championship at Oak Hill. In fact, he hadn’t won anything at all since his own tournament, the Memorial, in a playoff against the big Floridian Andy Bean, a man who could bite the balata off a golf ball, two years before. He was coming off a missed cut in the Tournament Players Championship and had withdrawn from the event before that after an opening round of 74 in New Orleans. His best finish in the seven tournaments he’d played was T39. And he’d been publicly written off in a couple of throwaway lines by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Tom McCollister, who, in his pre-Masters advance, portrayed the five-time Augusta champion this way: “Nicklaus is gone, done. He just doesn’t have the game anymore. It’s rusted from lack of use. He’s 46, and nobody that old wins the Masters.” John Montgomery, a longtime Nicklaus friend who enjoyed a practical joke, was only too happy to post the article on the refrigerator of Jack and Barbara’s rented house. “I was between things in my life,” Jack has said. “I’d play some golf, 12 to 14 tournaments a year, not enough to keep me sharp but enough to be somewhat competitive. I was neither fish nor fowl. I wasn’t really a golfer.” And then, somehow, some way, he was again.
Despite having spent some time prior to the Masters with Jack Grout, his instructor since boyhood, it didn’t seem particularly promising at the outset. Nicklaus opened with a 74. His ball striking was satisfactory for the first time all year, but he couldn’t score. That’s the way it is as the end approaches. Early in the week Ken Venturi, the 1964 U.S. Open champion who was a commentator for CBS, said it was time for Jack to start thinking about when to retire. Nicklaus had a locker-room conversation about just that with his old nemesis and friend Lee Trevino, also forty-six. “It makes it difficult to cope when people think we’re as good as we were 10 years ago,” Trevino said.
The opening-round lead was held jointly at four-under-par 68 by Billy Kratzert, an Indiana boy who, when he had trouble getting his tour card in his first two tries, held down a job as a forklift operator, and Ken Green, who was playing his first round in his first Masters. Green, a good friend of Mark Calcavecchia, was something of a golfing iconoclast and all-around loose cannon. His sister, Shelley, was his caddie. He liked to wear a shamrock-green glove with matching shoes and, as the years went on, could be seen putting with a cut-down Bullseye so short a dwarf would have to kneel on the ground to use it. Twenty-three years later at age fifty-one, Green would be involved in a deadly accident on I-20 in Mississippi when his RV pitched down an embankment, demolishing its front end. His girlfriend, Jeannie Hodgin, and his brother, Billy Green, who was driving, were both killed, along with his German shepherd, Nip. Green survived but sustained numerous injuries, some resulting in the loss of the lower part of his right leg. Though he tried to play a few senior events after he recovered from the accident, the ghost pain in the limb and the disability itself proved too much.
By the end of the second round, Seve Ballesteros had moved to the top of the leader board with rounds of 71 and 68, a stroke ahead of Kratzert. Green had disappeared with a 41 on his front nine. It was just Ballesteros’s third tournament of the year in America. He’d been kicked off the PGA Tour for failing to enter the required fifteen tournaments the season before. In his customary response to anything he believed to be disrespectful, Ballesteros elevated the suspension to a personal feud between himself and Deane Beman, the short-of-stature commissioner who had won the U.S. Amateur twice and the British Amateur once and tied for second in the ’69 U.S. Open, a shot behind Orville Moody. Ballesteros said Beman was “a little man trying to be a big man.” A four-time major champion, including two Masters, Seve had been allowed by Beman to defend his title in New Orleans. The only other event he played in the United States was on a mini tour in Lake City, Florida, where he tied for twenty-second. Between New Orleans and Augusta, Ballesteros returned to Spain to be at his father’s side when cancer claimed his life in March. Rusty as he was, Ballesteros was determined to claim the tournament in memory of his father, Baldomero, and to spite his nemesis, Beman.
Nick Price, a twenty-nine-year-old Zimbabwean with a quick, compact swing capable of producing iron shots that fell out of the sky like yard darts, took advantage of Saturday’s benign conditions to set the Augusta National course record with a theretofore unimaginable 63, equaling the low score in any major. In contrast, Ballesteros struggled on the greens and managed nothing better than level par for the day. He came to the seventeenth a shot ahead but was unable to hang on to the lead, finishing bogey-bogey when he three-putted the seventeenth and drove poorly at the last. The shoddy finish left him a shot behind Australian Greg Norman and tied with Price, Bernhard Langer (the defending Masters champion), and Donnie Hammond, an American who had won the Bob Hope Desert Classic in Palm Springs that winter. Three Toms—Kite, Watson, and Nakajima—were another stroke back. Nicklaus was tied, and would be paired in the final round, with the Scot Sandy Lyle, the reigning Open champion who would win the Masters two years later, highlighted by a monumental seven-iron shot out of the first fairway bunker on the eighteenth. Jack was four shots off the lead, but between him and Norman were four major championship winners. Leapfrogging all of them seemed a big ask.
Through eight holes on Sunday, no one was even entertaining the notion that what did happen could.
Norman birdied the sixth. Ballesteros birdied the seventh to stay within a shot. On the uphill par-five eighth, Kite holed his third from 80 yards for an eagle, and Ballesteros pitched in on top of him from half that distance. Just that quick, the dark-haired and quick-striding Ballesteros, with his brother Vicente on the bag, was in the lead at eight under par and ready to take Augusta National, its back nine, and Deane Beman by the scruff of the neck to honor the memory of the farmer and oarsman from Santander he’d just buried. Standing on the ninth green, Nicklaus was now six shots behind. It would take him roughly two hours to fashion one of the greatest narratives not just in golf but in any sport, producing more teary eyes than Old Yeller along the way.
As the roars descended from the eighth green back up the hill, Nicklaus turned to the crowd seated around the ninth and said, “Okay, let’s see if we can get a roar up here.” They laughed. He smiled. It all seemed harmless enough. He was too far behind too many good players. Nicklaus holed his eleven-footer. The patrons obliged by manufacturing, almost comically, a bit of noise of their own. Nicklaus drove poorly on the tenth, hitting a spectator and failing to take advantage of the fairway’s precipitous downhill slope. Left with a four-iron to the green, he put it twenty-five feet from the hole and made that one, too. Behind him, Ballesteros bogeyed the ninth. Now, the Spaniard and the Australian were tied again. In two holes Nicklaus had gone from afterthought to three behind.
When he birdied the eleventh after a solid drive and eight-iron to twenty-two feet for his third straight birdie, Nicklaus was five under par with only two players to catch, Ballesteros and Norman. One of Augusta National’s cardinal sins in Amen Corner is going for the pin on the right side of the twelfth green, the usual Sunday placement. The educated shot is straight over the bunker, to the middle of the shallow putting surface. Anything pushed right or hit by a gust of ghostly wind swirling out of nowhere inevitably finds the grass embankment and rolls back into Rae’s Creek—with the notable exception of Fred Couples six years later, of course. Nicklaus aimed at the bunker but pulled his seven-iron left onto the back fringe. After leaving himself six feet for par, his putt hit a spike mark, deflected right, and missed. Bogey. Breathing room for Ballesteros and Norman. It had been a nice little run for Nicklaus. Great fun. But now it was over. Nothing more than a bit of spice in what looked to be a dramatic shoot-out between two of the game’s current superstars.
Norman, however, was busy succumbing to the tenth hole yet again. He pulled his drive left, nicked some pine tree branches, and dropped into the fairway three hundred yards from the green. He would double-bogey the hole, the same score he’d had two days earlier when he four-putted it. Up ahead, Kite birdied the eleventh to go to six under par, a shot behind Ballesteros.
Nicklaus was hot leaving the twelfth green. Jack was famous for being not only the most prolific winner of major championships but also the most gracious loser of them. However, giving shots away, particularly under the gun, wasn’t something he took well. Never did and never would. Getting beat was one thing. Beating himself was something altogether different. Having now pricked the balloon of hope he’d just inflated with three straight threes, Nicklaus knew there was no alternative but to release the hounds. Caution was going to get him nowhere. Not a natural right-to-left player, his tee shot on the dogleg-left thirteenth hugged the tree line. If it caught any part of a pine limb, the likely effect would be to kick the ball dead left deep into the woods, or, worse, drop it into the little creek that fronts the thirteenth green, runs down the left side of the hole, and empties into the larger Rae’s Creek. His three-wood came within inches of a branch. “Dad, that’s not good on a 24-year-old’s heart,” Jackie said. His father replied, “What about me? I’m 46.”
The tee ball cleared the elbow of the little tributary and landed in just about the only flat, well, flattish, spot on the steeply canted fairway. Nicklaus’s three-iron approach found the green, and he two-putted for a birdie to return to five under par. He was tied with Norman and Price; Jay Haas, who was already in the clubhouse; and Payne Stewart, who had just finished the other par five, the fifteenth, but would quickly drop a shot and fall out of the picture. Only Ballesteros and Kite were still ahead of Nicklaus at seven and six under par, respectively, but they had both par fives in hand. Nicklaus was thereabouts, for sure, but still very long odds.
While Nicklaus was making a delicate par at the fourteenth, chipping from the back fringe, both Ballesteros and Kite found the thirteenth fairway. Seve’s six-iron to the green stopped eight feet from the hole. He tipped his visor to the crowd standing and sitting along the entire right side of the hole and shook Vicente’s hand. When he made the putt for his second eagle of the day, Seve was certain he was power-walking off in the general direction of his third green jacket. Kite two-putted for his four on the thirteenth but still lost a shot to the Spaniard. Jack was now four strokes behind. Seve appeared in complete command, ready to hand Beman, the PGA Tour, and America, in general, the comeuppance they all so richly, in his mind, deserved. He would play the last five holes two over par.
Ballesteros’s eagles notwithstanding, the most important one of the day was yet to come. Nicklaus was standing in the fairway at the top of the hill, looking down on the fifteenth green, two hundred yards from the hole. “How far do you think a three would go here?” the father asked the son. His four-iron never left the pin. It landed just short of the hole and rolled twelve feet past. By the time Nicklaus got to the fifteenth green, Ballesteros was looking at his birdie putt on the fourteenth. The Spaniard had a twenty-footer that could have iced the tournament, but it missed on the high side. Back on the fifteenth Nicklaus stroked the eagle putt. Jackie dropped into a crouch. When it went in, he leaped in the air, putting considerably more distance between himself and the ground than Mickelson would on the eighteenth green when he won his first Masters in 2004. Back up the hill, Watson watched it all, transfixed. In the pair behind him Ballesteros and Kite heard the unmistakable roar. Suddenly, Nicklaus was tied for second with Kite.
Emotion was beginning to seep into Nicklaus’s eyes but not into his golf. The pin on the par-three sixteenth was on the left, near the pond, its customary Sunday spot. The severe slope of the green would feed anything to the right down toward it. Jack’s five-iron landed to the right of the flag and spun down at the hole, missing it by a few inches and stopping within four feet. Watching the shot in the air Jackie said, “Be the right club.” His father didn’t bother to track its flight. He hadn’t seen a drive land in years because he was so nearsighted, but from 175 yards it was more a matter of the small bowl in the section of the green where the pin was located that would obscure his view. “It is,” Nicklaus replied as he bent over to pick up the tee. Jack has called those two words the cockiest comment he ever made on a golf course. That’s probably true, though it wouldn’t have been anywhere near the first time he’d thought it. For starters, a one-iron at Pebble Beach in 1972 comes to mind. “Oops, did I say that out loud?” was probably more like it.
The noise Nicklaus was generating was literally changing the game. Tommy Nakajima waited on the fifteenth to putt until Nicklaus walked to the sixteenth green, the applause was so thunderous. Watson rushed his eagle putt on fifteen, anticipating the noise that was to come on the sixteenth green. Ballesteros and Kite could only watch and listen, looking down from the fifteenth fairway above.
Nicklaus holed the putt on the sixteenth to get within a shot of Ballesteros. I was standing between the sixteenth green and the seventeenth tee as Nicklaus and Sandy Lyle made their way from one hole to the next. Perhaps because of the valley, perhaps because of the ramrod-straight Georgia pines, perhaps because history had turned off its hearing aid, one thing was certain: no group of people, polite patron or rowdy punter, has ever made such a bone-quaking racket, not in Super Bowls or heavyweight fights or World Series Game Sevens. I have never experienced anything to equal the intimacy of that sound. It was like being inside thunder.
The roars may have gone in Ballesteros’s ears, but they exited through his hands. Kite, two behind his playing partner and one in back of Nicklaus, played first, putting his second shot on the fifteenth green. Ballesteros couldn’t decide whether to hit a four or a five. He chose the four-iron and, from a slightly downhill lie, laid a slice of Georgia turf right over the ball. It wasn’t that the shot didn’t clear the pond in front of the green; it was so fat it barely reached it. There was a mixture of gasps and cheers in the crowd, mostly cheers, it seemed. “Then everything went wrong for me,” Ballesteros said later. In truth everything had gone wrong for Seve the moment Jack clawed his way into his head. Ballesteros made bogey there and another at the seventeenth. Kite two-putted for birdie to get to minus eight but would par in. While Ballesteros was coming unraveled on the fifteenth, Nicklaus had driven it left on the seventeenth. He was struggling to keep the tears out of his eyes and trying to finish at the same time. There was golf yet to be played. His second shot from 125 yards left him a twelve-footer that Nicklaus knew would be influenced by Rae’s Creek in the last twelve inches. I was standing on the small spectator mounds to the right of the green. He made it dead in the heart to take the lead at nine under par. The whole world seemed to rush up the hill toward the old white clubhouse. Usually forbidden, I promise you, there was running at the Masters that day.
Nicklaus hit three-wood off the eighteenth tee to avoid the fairway bunkers. His five-iron approach didn’t reach the top level, leaving him a forty-footer. The pin was toward the back of the green, unusual but not unheard of for the eighteenth on Sunday. It had been back there when Ballesteros chipped in on his way to victory in 1983. Nicklaus’s first putt, one of the best he hit all day, stopped just inches shy of going in. He marked so that Lyle could finish. After putting out, the father and son left the green with their arms around each other and not a dry eye in Augusta. Ken Venturi was sitting in the TV tower on the eighteenth green with Pat Summerall, tears streaming down his face.
With Kite unable to catch Nicklaus and Ballesteros going in the opposite direction, there was only one threat left on the golf course—Greg Norman. “People were counting me out with four or five holes to go,” says Norman.
Nick Price is Zimbabwean and I’m an Australian, there aren’t going to be a whole lot of people following us. We walk to the fourteenth tee and there may be 30 people and a raccoon and a possum sitting in the tree and I turned to Nick and I said, “Let’s show these people we’re still in this tournament.” I birdied 14, 15, 16, 17. All of sudden we’ve come from four back to being tied for the lead. I remember walking down 15 when he (Nicklaus) made that putt on 17. There’s gallery there now but there was never any gallery there before so, when I saw him pick up that putter, I went, “Oh, shit.” You knew, right, you knew you had to do something because he was going to take it home from there. Jack is Jack.
Nicklaus watched the finish standing behind a couch in the Jones Cabin, too nervous to sit. Tied with him at nine under par after his four straight birdies, Norman was in the eighteenth fairway with a four-iron in his hands. It was plenty of club to get to the back tier. From an uphill lie, he came out of the shot and hung it out to the right. From the midst of the gallery sitting area, he pitched it to ten feet and missed. Nicklaus had won. In addition to everything else, it gave rise to one of Dan Jenkins’s greatest lines. Writing for Sports Illustrated, he said, “Oh well, Greg Norman always has looked like the guy you send out to kill James Bond, not Jack Nicklaus.”
Nicklaus called it the “December of my career.” It was at least the Christmas. “I’m not as good as I was 10 or 15 years ago,” he said. “I don’t play as much competitive golf as I used to, but there are still some weeks when I’m as good as I ever was.” His six Masters would equal Harry Vardon’s six Open Championships, the only two professional golfers who ever lived to have won the same major title so often.
At the end of a major-championship Sunday, the media break camp like gypsies. It had been twenty-six-year-old Jim Nantz’s first Masters for CBS. Near the cabins by the Par-3 Course, Ken Venturi pulled up beside him in his green golf cart. He told the younger man to jump in. “I’m going to predict that you may one day be the first man to call 50 Masters,” he said to Nantz, “but I will tell you this: You will never live to see a day greater than this one at Augusta.” On the other side of the clubhouse, like the witches in Macbeth, three photographers for a national sports magazine met in the parking lot to bag their film for the rush trip to New York. “Well,” said the least experienced of the three, “there goes the cover.” Getting the week’s cover shot was the brass ring. The other two shooters, old hands at golf, looked at one another in disbelief. “What are you talking about?” one asked. After all, what could compare with Jack Nicklaus charging from behind to win an eighteenth professional major championship, his twentieth if you count the two U.S. Amateurs, at the age of forty-six? “Well,” reasoned the less seasoned photographer, “Seve blew it.” That he had. The coup de grâce had been a roar.
When Nicklaus walked into the media center following the green-jacket ceremony, he looked around for Tom McCollister but didn’t see him. The Atlanta writer came into the interview room late. “Thanks, Tom,” Nicklaus said when he saw him. “Glad I could help,” McCollister replied. Guffaws bounced off the walls, making it nearly impossible to hear the rest of his reply. “Watson wants me to write about him next year,” McCollister added. On the other side of the Atlantic at the age of fifty-nine, Watson would have the chance to out–gray beard the very man he’d watched make eagle from the hill above the fifteenth green that afternoon twenty-three years earlier.
Championship golf is a young man’s game, but because it’s not fast-twitch and muscle bound, it has as many last acts as Scotland has castles. And both come in all shapes and sizes. Kenny Perry, never a major champion, nearly won a Masters at forty-eight. Floyd was forty-seven when he dumped it in the pond at the eleventh. Gene Littler was forty-seven when he lost to Lanny Wadkins in a playoff for the ’77 PGA Championship after leading for three days and then shooting 41 on Pebble Beach’s back nine on Sunday. Jimmy Demaret made runs at Augusta when he was forty-six and again at fifty-one. Old Tom Morris was top five in the Open Championship when he was sixty. Hogan was forty-seven when he nearly won the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills when three generations—Hogan, Palmer, and Nicklaus—intersected on the leader board. Seven years later Hogan had his miraculous 66 on Saturday at Augusta but followed it with 77 on Sunday. In the ’84 PGA Championship at Shoal Creek, Gary Player, forty-eight, finished just behind the winner, Lee Trevino, who was himself forty-three. Sam Snead was sixty-two when he finished third behind Trevino in the ’74 PGA. And so on and so on.
For sheer crushing disappointment, however, only Harry Vardon at Inverness in the 1920 U.S. Open can equal the angst of the aged experienced by Tom Watson at Turnberry in 2009. Seven years removed from losing to Ouimet at The Country Club, this time Vardon (now fifty) was facing a far sterner group of Americans, led by Walter Hagen. Through fifty-four holes, it was Vardon who was out in front, however, a stroke ahead of Jock Hutchison and Leo Diegel and two in front of his old traveling companion Ted Ray. Vardon went out in thirty-six and seemed in easy command. With seven holes to play he was five shots clear of the field. Just then a gale blew up off Lake Erie. Playing into the worst of it on the twelfth, it took Vardon four shots to reach the green, and he made six. He jabbed at a two-footer for par on the thirteenth and missed and three-putted the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth. It was a brutal, cruel unraveling. He played the last seven holes in seven over par and finished in a tie for second a shot behind Ray who, at forty-three, would be the oldest U.S. Open champion until Hale Irwin won in a playoff against Mike Donald at Medinah in 1990 at the age of forty-five. The fate visited on Watson in the tournament that would have tied him with Vardon as a six-time Open champion and Nicklaus as a six-time Masters champion was quicker but equally heartless.
A year shy of sixty, something mystical seemed to be happening when Watson shot the most familiar of scores in his opening round at Turnberry. His 65-65 there in 1977 beat Nicklaus’s 65-66. They lapped the field as if Secretariat and American Pharoah could somehow have come down the home stretch at Belmont Park eyeball to eyeball and fetlock to fetlock. Another 65, Watson’s opening round in 2009, left him just a stroke behind Miguel Ángel Jiménez. “There was something slightly spiritual about today,” Watson allowed. He’d hit fifteen of eighteen greens in regulation, and he was putting from just off the surface on two of the ones he missed.
It was the seventh championship Watson had played on Turnberry’s links, and he was Yoda-like, hitting fairways and avoiding bunkers. For four days Old Tom would roam the Turnberry links with his arms clasped at the small of his back, surveying the distant horizon like an admiral on the weather deck of the HMS Resurrection. He’d stride forward, leaning into the wind off the Firth of Clyde, his hands thrust deep into his pockets as if they were digging down for the warmth of old memories. He would drive the ball magnificently and right himself whenever he appeared unsteady, saved by the club that had betrayed him in his late thirties. He ran in enormous putts, so long they seemed to reach all the way back to Birkdale, Carnoustie, Muirfield, Troon, or even as far away as Pebble Beach, and he made the little ones he needed, too. All but one.
The weather for the first round was more like the Caribbean than the coast of Scotland. Turnberry would never be more accommodating. The forty-six-year-old Jiménez, a.k.a. the Mechanic, became the first ponytail to lead a major since Mel Gibson won the Revolutionary War in The Patriot. A wine connoisseur who had a practice-ground stretching routine resembling a cross between an exotic dancer on a pole and the pregame Haka of New Zealand’s All Blacks, Jiménez said he was channeling his ailing countryman Seve Ballesteros and was effusive in his praise for Watson. “He was a legend before. He was a legend today. And he will be a legend tomorrow. We have to feel proud to play with him,” said the cigar-smoking Spaniard.
If the opening round was a day at the beach, they knew they were in Scotland on Friday. What would you expect of a place whose version of Doppler radar is whether you can see the Ailsa Craig, that big, curling stone in the Firth of Clyde? (If you can’t see it, it’s raining; if you can, it’s going to rain.) It wasn’t the worst day of weather they’ve ever had on the Ayrshire coast, but it was sufficient to do what links golf is supposed to do, which is to utterly expose everyone who’s almosting it, including Tiger Woods, the world number one who, unknown to everyone, including himself, was on a collision course with a fire hydrant and an irate Nordic blonde. Woods had laid down a marker in advance of the first three majors, completing the immortal-host Slam by winning at Bay Hill (Arnold), Memorial (Jack), and Congressional (himself). At Turnberry he tried to be conservative, but his swing wouldn’t cooperate. He flared his bad shots right; played a six-hole stretch seven over par, including a lost ball; and couldn’t save himself with his short game. It added up to 71-74 and firing up the King Lear. This was the second straight major Woods left his instructor, Hank Haney, at home, and the expiration date on the relationship was in sight.
At the end of the day the two leaders, at five under par, were American Steve Marino, who played in the worst of the morning conditions and required just twenty-two putts for his eighteen holes, and Watson, who went around in the worst of the afternoon weather and shot 70 with an incoming nine of 32. It could easily have come unraveled for Watson going out. He bogeyed four straight, beginning at the fourth. As Italian sixteen-year-old Matteo Manessaro, the fifty-nine-year-old Watson, and Sergio Garcia walked down the eighth fairway, Garcia gave Watson a little pat and said, “C’mon, old man!” The old man responded. “Well, that was nice of Sergio to give me a little pep-talk there,” Watson said. “No, it was. He was making a joke of it, but I said, ‘Well, I feel like an old man.’ I played two really good shots at No. 8 and then I played two good shots at No. 9 and made a putt, turned my round around.”
Watson finished it off with a sigh and a flourish. In the eighteenth fairway he and his caddie, Neil Oxman, talked about Watson’s longtime caddie, Bruce Edwards, who had died of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, four years earlier. All three had been the best of friends. “I think Bruce is with us today,” Oxman said. Neither Oxman nor Watson could hold back tears. Watson’s last stroke of the day was a fifty-footer that went dead in the heart of the cup. He kicked his right leg, the hip with the original equipment, high and looked up at the sky. One thing was already certain, Watson was going to be low artificial hip. His left one had been operated on the previous October. He finished the day right where he started, five under. Watson had been trading text messages with Barbara Nicklaus during the week. Before the tournament started, she wished him luck. He replied, saying they were missed. Jack had waved farewell to the Open Championship from the Swilcan Bridge four years before, playing alongside Watson. After the second round she sent another text rooting him on.
The Saturday and Sunday winds were Turnberry’s most diabolical. Blowing in off the sea, eleven holes played, to varying degrees, with a treacherous crosswind, shrinking the fairways and massively expanding the threat of the bunkers and the thick fescue. After falling behind briefly on Saturday, Old Tom holed a massive putt on the sixteenth for the second consecutive day, then reached the seventeenth in two and two-putted for the birdie that put him alone at the top of the board at four under par. He was joined in red figures by Australian Matthew Goggin; Brit Ross Fisher, whose wife in London was expecting at any minute; Lee Westwood; Retief Goosen; and the balding Americans Stewart Cink and Jim Furyk. There was the hint of history in the air and the fear it might all end badly.
“It was awesome playing with Tom,” Marino said after the third round. “I told him he could be the King of Scotland. These people love him. It was super special to watch him and, you know, there’s a reason he has won five claret jugs.”
Tour pros don’t watch golf on television. Maybe a few moments of a major championship here or there. Perhaps a Ryder Cup. They’ve been there, done that, have the silver in the trophy case. But Watson’s run had even gotten Jack Nicklaus to put down his tennis racket and pick up the remote. “If Tom plays smart golf tomorrow, he’s the favorite,” Jack said. “And I don’t anticipate him playing anything but smart golf. We all have nerves, but your nerve needs to overcome your nerves. That means you have to be nervy enough to do the things you have to do to overcome nerves. That’s what competition is all about. Tom does a good job at that.” Especially at Turnberry. Who would know that better than Nicklaus?
“For some reason today I just didn’t feel real nervous out there,” Watson said after the third round. “I felt, I guess, serene. And it was a day that even though I messed up a couple of times, I didn’t let that bother me. It’s just part of the game and I made up for it coming in. I don’t know what’s going to happen but I do know one thing, I feel good about what I did today. I feel good about my game plan. And, who knows, it might happen.”
The game plan was to allow himself three bogeys and make up for them with three birdies. If he had done it, he would have won. There was one bogey too many. Over the final nine holes Sunday afternoon, the planets seemed to be jockeying into position for the fifty-nine-year-old Watson, who was turning the unthinkable into the probable before our very eyes. Playing steadily, but without the flashes of brilliance that characterized the first three days, Watson watched his pursuers fly away like a flock of marshmallow chicks. The English trio of the expectant father Fisher, twenty-one-year-old Chris Wood, and the sorrowful Westwood all fired and fell back, the worst being Westwood, who three-putted the last to miss the Watson-Cink playoff by a single shot, the same margin he missed by the previous year in the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines when Woods beat Rocco Mediate with a broken leg and a torn ACL. Goosen, who’s been struck by lightning once and the U.S. Open twice, couldn’t make a putt. Goggin, the Tasmanian Devil, hung around until three straight bogeys on the back finished him off. Even Cink, who early in the week took to his favorite form of self-expression, Twitter, to complain of having swine flu, would birdie, then bogey, birdie, then bogey. The claret jug seemed to be Watson’s for the taking.
At the last Cink hit a wonderful nine-iron that stopped twelve feet from the hole and made the putt, closing within a shot of Watson, who had birdied the par-five seventeenth to reach three under par. Watson positioned his drive perfectly off the eighteenth. All week he’d been clever about getting the ball in play. His eight-iron second was just as perfectly struck. “I hit the shot I meant to and when it was in the air I said, ‘I like it.’ And then all of a sudden it goes over the green,” he said. He elected to putt the ball from a tough lie instead of chipping it, and it screamed past the hole. It was only eight feet, but it might as well have been a thousand yards. There was no way the ghost of Harry Vardon was going to let that ball go in. Watson put a horrible stroke on it, the putt never had a chance, and all the hopes of all of Scotland couldn’t put him back together again.
Watson played so poorly in the four-hole aggregate playoff, he would have lost to a caber tosser. His legs were gone. The illusion of a man about to close out his sixth decade of life by winning a sixth Open Championship aged before everyone’s eyes; in the end, Watson looked as old as the Ailsa Craig, and Cink, an Alabama native and Georgia Tech grad known more for his barbecue recipes than his trophies, was the antihero for a day. After a double bogey at the seventeenth when he drove it in the hay, and in the face of Cink’s rock-solid birdie-birdie playoff finish, all that remained for Watson was one last funereal march up the eighteenth, a place where before he’d known only festivals.
After it was all over, the most poignant message came from Nicklaus. It was the first text message Jack had ever sent in his life after watching the first full eighteen holes of golf on television he’d ever watched in his life. He told Tom he’d hit two great shots and made the right choice from behind the green. The putt just didn’t go in. The greatest player in the game was applying the kindest salve he could—you didn’t make a mistake; you just didn’t win.
In the Masters forty-eight-year-old Kenny Perry began the year of the antistory when he finished bogey-bogey and lost. Lucas Glover edged the people’s choice, Phil Mickelson, in the U.S. Open, the major he would place second in six times. Turnberry, however, was a broken heart too far. Cink’s previous closest call in a major had come in the U.S. Open at Southern Hills in ’01. In a hurry to get out of Retief Goosen’s way on the seventy-second hole, he missed a tiddler that, when Goosen stab-pushed his, kept Cink out of that eighteen-hole playoff. It was both understandable and inexcusable at one and the same time. With the help of sports psychologist Dr. Morris Pickens, Cink devised a putting routine to go with his recent return to the standard-length putter. Pickens’s admonition for the week was “Keep playing Turnberry, keep playing Turnberry.” It proved prescient. When Cink birdied the last, it seemed it would only secure second, but he never stopped playing until he’d run out of holes and Watson, as it turned out, had run out of gas.
When Watson sat down at the interviewer’s table in the media center, he looked around and said, “This ain’t a funeral, you know.” But it was.
“It would have been a hell of a story, wouldn’t it?” Watson said.
It wasn’t to be. And, yes, it’s a great disappointment. It tears at your gut, as it always has torn at my gut. It’s not easy to take. The playoff was just one bad shot after another and Stewart did what he had to do to win. I didn’t give him much competition in the playoff. The one memory? Well, I think coming up the eighteenth hole again. Those memories are hard to forget. Coming up in the amphitheater of the crowd and having the crowd cheering you on like they do here for me. As I said, the feeling is mutual. And that warmth makes you feel human. It makes you feel so good.
This was the place, more than any other, where Watson and Nicklaus made “golf” and “rivalry” as inextricably linked as shepherds and pie, mince and tatties. Sometimes, the stories don’t end well. This time around they were there to commiserate with one another. It wasn’t the Duel in the Sun. Time, it turned out, was a lot tougher than Jack Nicklaus. Old Tom missed the early-bird special on claret jugs when he bogeyed the last hole after two wondrous shots, and Stewart Cink was as happy as Robert the Bruce to drive a stake through the heart of history.
Watson had won his five Open Championships with the late Alfie Files on the bag, but it was Oxman who was beside him when the extraordinary nearly happened at Turnberry. A cofounder of the Campaign Group, Inc., in Philadelphia, Oxman creates radio and television ads for Democratic candidates or, more often now, the multitude of sympathetic independent committees that have proliferated since the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision. Oxman once charitably described his staunchly conservative golf boss to the Philadelphia Inquirer as a “Heinz-Rockefeller Republican. . . . [O]n some issues he’s conservative, on some he’s moderate.”
Oxman began caddying part-time on the PGA Tour in 1972, Watson’s first full season after graduating from Stanford University. One was headed for stardom, the other for law school. Oxman, never much better than a bogey golfer, grew up in Philadelphia and caddied for his father, Morris, a World War II veteran everyone knew as Pip, who was the co-owner of a ladies-hat manufacturing company. Neil was seventeen when his father died, and he turned to caddying to put himself first through Villanova University and then Duquesne University Law School. He traveled the tour in a ’66 Chevelle Malibu covered in gray primer paint, having purchased the car from a double cliché—two little old ladies—for $150 and $9 in sales tax. Oxman went to law school because someone told him if he wanted to work in politics, he should.
Sometimes the art of politics and the art of golf can seem remarkably similar. “What we do is very adversarial,” Oxman says of his political life. “Somebody has an office and you’re trying to take it from them, or you have an office and someone is trying to take it from you, or it’s open and you’re both playing king of the hill. The whole thing is a struggle and a fight.”
Not all experiences are happy ones, like that July day in 2009. After a dreamlike week and a nightmare playoff, Oxman drove all night from Scotland to London for the Senior British Open the next week. It was impossible not to think about what had happened. Back at the Turnberry Hotel, Watson couldn’t sleep, either, kept awake by the howling dogs of what might have been.
“In 1984 we did Dee Huddleston who lost to Mitch McConnell by 5,184 votes out of 1,284,811. That’s over 30 years ago,” Oxman says. “We had a 20 point lead and a guy in the campaign would not let us continue to run negative ads in the last three weeks, saying this election’s over. The pollster and I couldn’t convince the guy otherwise. Mitch McConnell should never have been a United States Senator—he might have been at some point—but he should not have won that Senate race in 1984. I’m still not over it. I’m not kidding. I’m still not over ’09 and I’m still not over that.”
Oxman’s windowless Philadelphia office is on the third floor of a town house originally owned by the Breyers ice cream family. One wall is covered by pink sticky notes with election results. There’s Annie Lebovitz’s photo of John Belushi and flags from the eighteenth hole of Watson’s Senior British Open victories at Royal Aberdeen in ’05 and Turnberry in ’03, the caddie’s victory pelts. He has a portrait of General James Longstreet, a figure he half-jokingly says he was in a previous life. And there’s the picture of Nicklaus’s farewell in ’05 when Jack called his playing partners and their caddies up on the Swilcan Bridge to join him. Moments before on the seventeenth green, Nicklaus had missed a birdie putt. Knowing he was going to miss the cut, he walked to the back of the green and stood next to Oxman. “We were waiting for Luke Donald to putt and he said to me, ‘Ox, that’s my last shot ever as a real golfer. My next one is my first as a ceremonial golfer.’ He wasn’t saying it to be dramatic,” Oxman says. “He just sort of said it and I just happened to be next to him.”
Watson cried at the bridge as Nicklaus stood there, and he cried harder walking up the eighteenth alongside his old friend and old foe. Watson still chokes up when he talks about it. “The crowd gave Jack his due as the greatest player who ever lived,” Watson says. “From the first hole through the thirty-sixth hole, he got a standing ovation every stand he went by. And it was genuine, from the heart. It was a privilege to be paired with him.”
Once, when Nicklaus and Watson sat down to relive their Duel in the Sun at Turnberry for a television show, Nicklaus claimed he couldn’t remember much about it, just that he’d lost. Watson put his arm around him and jokingly said, “That’s okay, Jack. I remember every shot.” After the ’09 Open Championship ended Watson said, “This would have been a great memory. Now, it’s going to be like Jack. I’ll never remember what the hell club I hit anytime during the whole tournament.”
But no one else would ever forget.