Moment of Glory

by John Feinstein

  “I expected Olympia Fields to be a more typical Open course. High rough, narrow fairways. But it really wasn’t that way at all. It wasn’t easy. There was rough, and you could see if the greens got fast, and they put the pins in certain spots where it could get hard. But I found it very playable right from the start. I was hitting irons off a lot of tees and still in good shape coming into the greens. It wasn’t like every hole was a 500-yard par-four. I was comfortable playing there both days.”

  He played on Sunday with six-time major champion Nick Faldo. Both noted that the two hardest par-fours on the course—the ninth and the 18th—were playing dead into the wind. “I hit driver, three-iron to number 18 that day,” Leaney said. “Everyone at the club told us that the wind usually played just the opposite of what it was playing that day. I figured if that was the case during the tournament, you’d be hitting more like eight-iron into the green if you hit a good drive.”

  Having played 18 holes on both Saturday and Sunday, Leaney took it relatively easy on the three official practice days, playing only nine holes each day. Such a move isn’t that unusual for players leading to a major, especially if they arrive early and play on the weekend before the golf course gets crowded.

  “I was still hitting the ball really well when I played on Saturday and Sunday,” Leaney said. “I mean, I was flushing it. I felt like I knew the golf course, and I didn’t want to tire myself out fighting the crowds on the practice days.”

  When players bring up “fighting crowds on practice days” at a major, they aren’t talking about fans. They mean the other players on the golf course. This is especially true at a U.S. Open, where a majority of the players are unfamiliar with the golf course and are practicing putts from different spots on almost every hole and trying to get a feel for the greens.

  Furyk almost always arrived early at majors sites for just that reason—he didn’t want to get stuck playing a six-hour round on Tuesday or Wednesday and be exhausted by the time he teed it up on Thursday. Leaney’s early arrival was mostly happenstance: the schedule put him in Chicago early, and he took advantage. Thus, he didn’t have to fight the crowds.

  “I felt good about the way I was hitting the ball, but I didn’t go out Thursday with any particular expectations,” he said. “My hope was to play well, make the cut, and go from there. In the back of my mind was the notion that if I had a good week, I might make enough money to have a chance to play a few more tournaments in the U.S. and make enough money to get on the tour without going back to Q-School.”

  One of the ways for an international player to get to the U.S. Tour is by making enough money on sponsor exemptions or through majors or World Golf Championship events (like the Match Play) to get what is called “special temporary membership.” To get that, a player must make as much money in U.S. tournaments as the 150th ranked player on the previous year’s money list had made. In 2002, Tom Scherrer had made $356,657 to finish 150th on the money list. Leaney had played in three official tour events leading into the Open—the Match Play, Bay Hill, and the Memorial—and had earned just under $200,000. That meant he needed to make about $160,000 at the Open to be an exempt player for the rest of 2003. If he then earned enough to finish in the top 125 for the year, he would be a full-fledged tour player for 2004.

  “I really didn’t want to seriously think in those terms,” he said. “It was all too complicated. I just went out the first morning and focused on playing well. Friday afternoon, I did the same thing. At the end of the day, I was in great position. I had achieved my first goal—making the cut. That was nice. But that’s all it was—nice. I hadn’t really done a thing yet, and I understood that.”

  Everyone understood that. One hole can feel like a lifetime in major championship golf—ask Jean Van de Velde (1999 British Open) or, for that matter, Jeff Maggert. Thirty-six holes was more like an eternity.

  9

  Always on Father’s Day

  STEPHEN LEANEY WAS BACK at his hotel getting ready to go out to dinner on Friday night when his phone rang. His caddy, Justin Boyle, was in the hospital. He’d had chest pains soon after the second round at Olympia Fields ended and had gone there for tests. The doctors didn’t think he was having a heart attack, but he had “murmurs” in his heart. They wanted him to stay at least through the weekend so they could monitor him.

  That would make caddying on Saturday and Sunday difficult.

  Leaney was concerned, even though Boyle assured him he was okay. The more immediate problem was finding someone to caddy for him in the middle of the U.S. Open.

  It had already been a tough year for Leaney in terms of caddies. Player-caddy relationships are a lot like marriages. They are volatile, emotional, and often end in divorce. Frequently there are reconciliations once a player or caddy moves on to someone new and realizes the old relationship wasn’t as bad as he thought.

  A month prior to the Open, Leaney had been in London, preparing to play in the European PGA Championships at Wentworth, when Steve Rawlinson walked into the locker room on Wednesday evening as Leaney was getting ready to leave. Rawlinson had caddied for him for two years but said he needed to tell Leaney something before the tournament began: Colin Montgomerie had offered him a job, and he had accepted it.

  Leaney was stunned, and angry, at both men. “I was pissed at Steve for not giving me some warning that he was thinking about it,” he said. “I thought he would at least say, ‘Monty has offered me this; do you want to match it?’ or something along those lines. He didn’t. But I was really pissed at Monty for not coming to me before he talked to Steve. That’s usually standard procedure when you’re going to talk to someone who is working for another player. I wouldn’t have tried to stand in his way if he wanted to go, but it was a matter of courtesy, player to player. Obviously Monty was a bigger name than me and was making more money, so I understood Steve’s thinking. I certainly wouldn’t have said no to either one of them if asked. I just resented not being asked.”

  Rawlinson told Leaney that he would work for him that week—since the tournament began the next day—before moving on to Montgomerie. Leaney told him not to bother.

  “I didn’t want to spend the whole week walking around feeling pissed at my caddy,” he said. “You’re supposed to be a team. He’d quit the team. I needed to move on right away.”

  He found a local caddy to work for him that week and began asking around to see who might be available long term. The answer was Boyle, an experienced Australian caddy who had worked for Greg Norman and Seve Ballesteros. The new partnership had gone well. Now, sitting in a tie for third place midway through the U.S. Open, Leaney was again looking for a caddy.

  Finding an emergency caddy early in a tournament week is not usually that difficult. There are always caddies hanging around outside the clubhouse who don’t have a bag for the week. Some are kids, looking for a break, but many are veterans who have just split with a player or who work for a player who is hurt or is simply not playing that week. Players can afford to take weeks off during the year; most caddies cannot.

  But this wasn’t Tuesday or Wednesday; it was Friday. The caddies who didn’t have bags for the week had taken off. Leaney was thinking he was going to have to call the USGA and ask for help finding a local caddy, when he remembered that Matt Goggin, one of his Australian friends who had been an alternate but had not gotten into the field on Thursday morning, had decided to stay to watch the tournament. He wondered if his caddy, Alistair Howell, had stayed too.

  “I knew that Alistair had been staying with Matt, so I called him,” he said. “Sure enough, they were both still there. Alistair hadn’t walked [to measure for yardage] the whole golf course, but he had walked 10 holes. I figured at that point I was fortunate to get an experienced caddy, even if it was someone I only really knew away from the golf course, not on the golf course.”

  As with any close relationship—player and caddy generally spend about six to seven hours a day together for six days at every tournament—kno
wing one another is often a key to success. A good, experienced caddy knows when to soothe a player, when to yell at him, and how to tell him he’s got the right club in his hands. It can often be as subtle as tone of voice.

  “I think that’s right” can come out sounding doubtful or certain.

  Leaney and Howell would be flying blind on a golf course Howell hadn’t really seen from inside the ropes. But the good news was that Leaney, having played a total of 99 holes there in a week—two 18-hole practice rounds, three nine-hole practice rounds, and 36 holes in the championship—probably didn’t need as much help as he might have under other circumstances.

  “I have to admit that it didn’t help me sleep Friday night,” Leaney said, laughing. “I was already dealing with how much was at stake and trying not to think about any of that. Now I also had to worry about working with a new caddy the next day. It’s a good thing I had such a late tee time because I didn’t sleep especially well.”

  Jim Furyk slept fine that night. He had been in contention at majors before, and he had no concerns about his caddy. In ten years on the tour, Furyk had worked with two caddies. The first was Steve Duplantis, known to everyone on tour as “the kid,” because he looked and often acted like one. Duplantis was bright, engaging, and a very good caddy. But he also enjoyed going out at night, and that often led to late arrivals at the golf course.

  Because Furyk liked him and because he was a good caddy, Duplantis had received numerous last chances. When he didn’t show up at all one morning at Bay Hill in March 1999 (he later said he couldn’t get there because of an accident on I-4; unfortunately, every other player and caddy in the field did make it to the golf course that morning), Furyk felt he had no choice and fired him.

  As luck would have it, Mike Cowen was out of work at that moment. Cowen—known to all as “Fluff” because of his bushy hair and even bushier mustache—was one of the tour’s most respected caddies. He had worked with Peter Jacobsen for seventeen years and had then gone to work for Tiger Woods when he first came on tour.

  That was another case of a player not consulting with another player before offering a caddy a job. Jacobsen had offered to let Cowen work for Woods when Woods first came on tour in 1996 because Jacobsen was recovering from an injury. Woods was so happy with Cowen that he offered him a full-time job. It was Cowen who called Jacobsen to tell him he’d been offered the job.

  “How could I tell him no?” Jacobsen said. “I mean, he was being offered the chance to make huge money working for the game’s next great player, and I was forty-two with a questionable playing future. I just wish Tiger had picked up the phone and called me. I put it down to a rookie mistake.”

  Cowen was on the bag when Woods won the Masters by 12 shots in 1997 and became something of a celebrity himself, being as recognizable as he was and because he had an outgoing, friendly personality. Unfortunately, there is only one star on Team Woods, and it is not the caddy. Woods fired Fluff early in 1999 and hired Steve Williams, an excellent caddy who no one would ever mistake for being friendly to anyone except his boss.

  After letting DuPlantis go, Furyk asked Cowen to come work for him, and by the 2003 Open, the two men had been together for more than four years.

  WHILE FURYK AND VIJAY Singh were both highly respected players ranked in the top 10 in the world, theirs was not the pairing that was going to get the most TV time, at least at the start of the day, on NBC. There were four players three shots back, including Eduardo Romero and Fredrik Jacobson—both respected international players—Nick Price, and, of course, Tiger Woods.

  At forty-six, Price was no longer the star he had been when he was the number one player in the world in 1993 and 1994, but he was still a threat, especially in a major. He had won two PGA Championships and a British Open and had 18 PGA Tour wins in all, the most recent at the 2002 Colonial.

  And then there was Woods. His 66 on Friday had changed the way the tournament felt—the way it always did when he was on a leaderboard. Thursday had, without doubt, been about Watson and Edwards, and, even though Watson was still only four shots out of the lead at 137, there weren’t many people who thought he was going to seriously contend on Sunday.

  Tommy Roy, NBC’s executive producer, knew that having Woods teeing off among the leaders was a boon to his telecast and his ratings. “It’s no knock at all on the other guys,” he said. “It’s just a fact that people like to see Tiger. I’ve had people tell me they’d rather watch Tiger stand next to his golf bag waiting to hit than watch someone else actually hitting a shot.”

  The son of a golf pro, Roy dreamed of playing on tour himself, until a fluke injury turned him in the direction of a television career, so he appreciated the grinders and the guys for whom the game came a lot harder than it did for Woods. As a golfer and fan himself, he’d have been delighted to see how Jonathan Byrd and Stephen Leaney fared playing in the second-to-last group of the third round at the U.S. Open. As a TV producer and director, he knew he didn’t have a dozen viewers who felt that way.

  “We actually had a very good tournament shaping up going into Saturday,” Roy said. “The leaders were very good, very established players. You had guys like Price and Mickelson still in contention. You still had Bruce and Watson, and, of course, Tiger was right there.”

  In TV fantasy world, Saturday would have been the day Woods made a big move on the leaders, rolling in birdies while the crowds roared and he pumped his fist repeatedly. But Woods was still struggling with his swing changes and establishing himself with Hank Haney, his new teacher, even though there had been no official announcement of the new arrangement.

  Right from the start, Woods was in trouble that day. He was spraying tee shots all over the place and wasn’t close to threatening to make a birdie on the front nine, even at the two par-fives. He managed to par the first four holes, but then bogeyed the fifth and the ninth. The look of frustration on his face made it clear what kind of day he was having, even if one didn’t know that he was on his way to shooting a five-over-par 75.

  Looking at the leaderboard, Furyk could see that Woods was going backward. He was surprised but knew he didn’t have time to focus on it. The player who had made a big move on the front nine was Price, who had birdied five of the first six holes and had actually taken the lead at nine under par soon after Furyk and Singh began their round. That lead was a bit deceptive though. The first two days had made it clear that Olympia Fields played like two different golf courses: the first six holes were for going low; the last 12 were for hanging on.

  Price had birdied both par-fives (one and six), two relatively short par-fours (two and three), and Olympia Fields’s shortest par-three (the fourth at 164 yards). After six, there really are very few birdie holes left on the golf course. There are no par-fives, and the remaining par-threes are all over 200 yards long. Price came back to the pack quickly on that stretch of holes, playing the seventh hole through the 17th hole (the monstrous 247-yard par-three) in five over par. A brilliant second shot to within a foot at the 18th allowed him to finish with a birdie and a one-under-par 69.

  Furyk wasn’t shaken by Price’s early birdie skein. He knew there were birdies to be made on those first six holes. He and Singh both played well on the front nine. Singh had taken a quick lead by birdieing the par-five opening hole, but Furyk answered with a 35-foot birdie putt at the fifth. They both birdied the par-five sixth hole before Furyk took the lead for the first time when he birdied the difficult 495-yard ninth, hitting a wedge on his second shot (the hole was playing straight downwind) to within two feet.

  At that moment, it was beginning to look like a two-man tournament even with 27 holes still to play. Furyk was at 10 under par, Singh was at nine under. Price had gone backward, and Woods was reeling, having bogeyed the 10th and the 13th to trail Furyk by 10. If Furyk was being honest at that moment, he would concede that Woods trailing him by 10 didn’t suck.

  The only other contender hanging close was Leaney, who was quietly plugging away, ne
w caddy and all, and was only two strokes behind Furyk as the leaders made the turn. Jonathan Byrd was hanging in, even par for the day, but that left him five shots behind Furyk and four behind Singh.

  “It was way too soon to think that it was just Vijay and me and that it was going to be match play,” Furyk said. “But I was certainly aware of what the leaderboard looked like. I also knew that if it did come down to Vijay and me on Sunday that I’d be dealing with a guy who had a lot of experience and who knew how to handle himself on Sunday at a major. But that was way down the road. At that moment, my only thought was that I had to keep hitting good shots and scoring because there was no reason to think that [Singh] was going to go backward.”

  Except that he did.

  The toughest stretch at Olympia Fields is the beginning of the back nine: five straight par-fours, none of them easy. Neither Furyk nor Singh made a birdie during this stretch, and each made a bogey: Furyk at 10, Singh at 13. That still left them a stroke apart as they came to the closing holes.

  Furyk hit a gorgeous five-iron to 10 feet at the par-three 15th and made a birdie to get back to 10 under and stretch the lead to two. He played the last three holes reasonably well: missing a short par putt at 17 (his only truly bad putt of the day) to make his second bogey of the round, then coming right back to birdie the 18th. In all, he had made five birdies and two bogeys for a very solid 67.

  In the meantime, the usually steady Singh came apart on the final three holes. He finished bogey-bogey-bogey, a stunning change that turned a two-shot deficit with three holes to play into a five-shot deficit. That finish meant that Furyk and Singh would not be paired in the final group on Sunday, which everyone had expected until the last forty-five minutes of the afternoon.