Moment of Glory

by John Feinstein

  Two years later, Irwin was voted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. Two years after that, Donald finished out of the top 125 on the money list and was reduced to partial status on tour, forced to scramble for sponsor exemptions and to get into weaker fields later in the year when the stars went home. Donald turned fifty in 2005, making him eligible for the Champions Tour. As a past Open champion, he would have been able to play wherever and whenever he wanted to play. As a near Open champion, he has to scramble each year to get into tournaments.

  Unlike a lot of players, Donald has talked candidly through the years about how different his life might have been if he had made a par putt on 18 on that Sunday or Monday in 1990.

  Donald flashed through my mind in 1998 at Royal Birkdale as I watched Mark O’Meara and Brian Watts play off for that year’s British Open title. O’Meara had been a star for years but had solidified his place in golf history that April by winning the Masters for his first major title. Watts was an Oklahoman who had spent most of his career playing in Japan because he hadn’t been able to secure a spot for himself on the PGA Tour.

  My sense was that this was Watts’s moment the same way Medinah had been Donald’s moment. He lost the playoff, but the money he made allowed him to come home and play the U.S. Tour. Watts had some success but never won a tournament, never contended again in a major, and was eventually knocked off the tour by a series of injuries.

  But the moment when I truly knew this was a book that needed to be written came during the Weir-Mattiace playoff at Augusta. By then I had been around golf long enough that I knew and liked both men. Each had pieced together solid careers. Both were very comfortable financially by that point in their lives.

  Even so, there was no doubt in my mind as they walked down the 10th fairway on that gorgeous late afternoon/early evening that their lives were about to go in entirely different directions. One would always be a Masters champion no matter what happened the rest of his life. The other would always wonder what might have been if one more putt had gone in the hole over the course of four days.

  Nerves affected them both on the playoff hole, and Weir ended up winning by making a bogey.

  My thought as I watched the two of them shake hands was that the book I would write would be about guys who got into contention at a major knowing this was a chance that might not come again—and how winning or losing changed their lives. At that moment, I had just agreed to do a book on my friend Bruce Edwards (Caddy for Life), so I tucked the idea into a corner of my brain knowing I wanted to come back to it.

  As the rest of 2003 unfolded, I knew I had been handed the keys to the book I wanted to write. Jim Furyk was hardly an unknown or a one-time wonder when he won the Open that year, but the other winners and runners-up were players who had never before contended in a major. Or, in the case of Ben Curtis, had never played in a major. Only time would tell if they were one-win wonders.

  In a very real sense this book began on the range at Bethpage on that Saturday evening in 2002 when it occurred to Butch Harmon that Tiger Woods was getting ready to fire him. The Woods-Harmon split led to the longest drought of Woods’s career and opened the door for the events that unfolded in 2003.

  Six years later, none of the winners or contenders in ’03 has won another major—unless you want to count Vijay Singh and Woods, who finished tied for second and fourth, respectively, behind Curtis at the British Open.

  What is clear after spending time with all these men is this: their lives were never the same after their Moment in 2003. And the difference between first and second is a lot wider than the gulf between first-place money and second-place money.

  On the Tuesday before the 2004 Masters, Weir hosted the annual Champions Dinner in the second-floor dining room of the Augusta National clubhouse. He sat between Byron Nelson and Arnold Palmer and listened to the two of them—and the other champions—tell stories all night.

  Len Mattiace was at the Masters that year, but he was nowhere near the Champions Dinner. He was in the process of trying to come back from surgery on both knees only four months earlier.

  The Masters was Mattiace’s fourth tournament back after the surgery. He had rehabbed for three months—five months less than Tiger Woods would take after his knee surgery in 2008—before returning to the tour. One reason he had pushed to come back so soon was that he wanted to be ready to play at Augusta.

  As it turned out, he came back too quickly. Not only did he miss the cut at the Masters, he went on to a disastrous year, playing in twenty-five tournaments but only earning $213,707, more than $1 million less than he had earned a year earlier, prior to the injury. Because he had won twice in 2002, he was still a fully exempt player in 2005, but he played even worse that year: thirty-four starts, earnings of $209,638. That sent him plummeting to 191st on the money list, which meant he was exempt in 2006 only as a past champion. In other words, he only got into tournaments after the top 125 on the money list from 2005, after all those who came through Qualifying School and the Nationwide Tour, even after those who finished between 126th and 150th on the money list.

  Because he had a reputation as a good guy, Mattiace received a number of sponsor exemptions that year from tournament directors who liked him and remembered his close call at the Masters. On tour, players often refer to this as a one-year “good guy” extension. The good-guy extension got Mattiace into twenty-two events, but his golf got worse. He earned $66,540, making just four cuts. A year later, without the extension, he played only ten events, making zero cuts and zero dollars.

  By 2008 he was playing almost as much on the Nationwide Tour as on the PGA Tour, still searching for his swing, his game, and his career.

  Mike Weir also missed the cut at the 2004 Masters, which was a disappointment but nothing more. Weir knew his spot in the Masters field and in the champions locker room was secure—for life.

  Mattiace has not been back to the Masters since 2004. In fact, he has not played in any of the major championships since the 2005 U.S. Open. The case can be made that the best day of his life playing golf produced the biggest disappointment, a memory he can’t shake even though he played brilliantly for 17 holes.

  Four days can change your life forever. And at the end, in the white-hot crucible of those final moments, one swing, one putt, one lucky or unlucky break, is often the difference between a lifetime of happy memories and telling and retelling a story that makes you smile, and a lifetime of wondering, years later, if you’ll ever be able to shake that memory.

  Sudden fame can mean radical life changes—for good and for bad. Seven years after fulfilling their lifelong dreams, the four major winners of 2003 have taken very different roads: Jim Furyk is still one of the most successful players in the world but wonders, as he turns forty in 2010, if that Open will be his only major title. Mike Weir, who was born on the same day as Furyk (Furyk is a few hours older), is still very successful but has been through some serious valleys in recent years.

  So has Ben Curtis, who struggled to deal with going from being a golfer other golfers didn’t recognize to being a major champion. He struggled for two years, found his game again in 2006, almost won the PGA in 2008, and then struggled again in 2009.

  At least the first three remain fully exempt players on the tour. Shaun Micheel ended 2009 at the PGA Tour’s Qualifying School, trying to regain his status as a fully exempt player on tour but still battling to come back after having major shoulder surgery in June 2008. He came up short of the top 25, which would have made him fully exempt again, finishing in a tie for 64th place in the 170-player field.

  “There are times I tell myself I should just walk away and do something else,” he said one night late in 2009. “I’m forty, I’m in good shape financially, so why not give it a shot?”

  He shook his head. “But then I remember how much I love golf, how much I love to compete. I’ve loved it since I was ten years old. I want to win again. I want something close to the feeling I had that day at Oak Hill.”

>   He paused. “Then again, maybe that was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. If it was, well, I guess I should consider myself lucky that it happened once.”

  They all feel that way. All four want to win again, but they know how privileged they were to win once. And if they ever forget that, they might want to spend a few moments with Len Mattiace, Stephen Leaney, Thomas Bjorn, or Chad Campbell, in whose shoes they almost stood.

  1

  One Moment in Time

  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.