Moment of Glory

by John Feinstein

  This time, the result was even worse. The ball again rolled back into the bunker, but it plugged. “I can’t believe it,” Strange said. “He took almost no time over that shot. This is unbelievable.”

  Across the green, Love was still leaning on his putter trying to look casual, but his heart was going a million miles an hour. “On the one hand, I felt terrible for Thomas. He had played so well. It seemed like it was his tournament, his championship to win. I felt a little bit sick watching those two shots, and I was completely baffled by what he was doing. Then it occurred to me that if I made my putt, I could be tied for the lead in spite of my terrible start. That got my attention.”

  Bjorn finally got his third bunker shot—by far the toughest one he’d had—out of the bunker and onto the green, the ball stopping four feet past the hole. From there he managed to make the putt for double bogey to drop back to one under. Love then left his birdie putt short, making Strange distraught. “Come on, Davis,” he said on air. “You cannot leave that putt short. You have to give it a chance at this point in the day.”

  At that point in the day, there were, suddenly, five players with a chance to win the Claret Jug. Bjorn and Curtis were one under par. Woods and Singh—both on 17—were at even par, as was Love. Everything had changed in the blink of two poorly thought-out swings by Bjorn.

  Curtis knew none of this as he prepared to play his third shot at 18. Moments earlier, just before Bjorn stepped into the bunker at 16, Curtis had received a huge ovation from the crowd as he walked between the massive, now-packed grandstands. “He’s not going to win,” Strange said as the cheers rained down. “But this is a moment he’ll remember the rest of his life.”

  Curtis’s ball had stopped in the back fringe, and he opted to chip it from there. “It wasn’t that hard a shot,” he said. “I thought, ‘Why not try to make it, because if I do, I might still have an outside shot to win?’ ” He caught a little too much of the ball, and it skittered about 12 feet past the hole. As Curtis stood waiting for Price to putt, his glance happened to fall upon the clock behind the green.

  “Hey, Andy,” he said to Sutton. “Take a look at that.”

  Sutton looked and then smiled. The clock said 5:15, the precise time the two men had walked onto the completely empty green just a week earlier, hoping for this very result.

  “Here we were,” Curtis said. “I just had to make that putt for par. I actually took four or five deep breaths before I putted. I really wanted to make the putt, and I just felt like a lot was at stake and that I had to find a way to get it in the hole.”

  It had been a while since he had made a putt that wasn’t a tap-in, but this one was dead center the minute he hit it. As soon as it dropped in the hole, Curtis was shaking his fist, delighted to have made par because he figured he had clinched a top-four finish, a spot in the Masters, and probably his tour card for 2004.

  “As I went to pick my ball up out of the cup, I heard someone in the crowd yell, ‘You’re tied for the lead!’ ” Curtis said. “Nothing had changed on the scoreboard, but I knew there were people listening on the radio to the BBC feed. I wasn’t sure if it was true or if I had heard wrong. But as soon as I walked into the scoring trailer, I found out it was true.”

  Woods and Singh, walking on the 17th green, had also seen what had happened because there was a scoreboard nearby. Each had suddenly gone from three shots out of the lead to one shot out of the lead. At that moment, neither knew that Curtis had parred the 18th, meaning that both of them would need a birdie to tie him. In fact, each would say later that it had occurred to them that two pars—since both were even par at the moment—might very well land them in a playoff since Bjorn still had two tough holes to play and had to be shaken by what had happened at 16.

  Woods would later lament the fact that, given a second chance to win the tournament, he hadn’t been able to take advantage. “When we walked on the 17th and saw the scoreboard, I was surprised, obviously,” he said. “I told myself, ‘Just make par here, and you’ve got a real chance to win.’ ”

  Woods’s second shot had come up short of the green. Like Curtis on his second shot, Woods was done in by the “sucker pin,” leaving his chip about 10 feet short. When the putt for par slid just below the hole, the look on Woods’s face made it clear that he had blown his chance to steal the tournament late. Singh, on the other hand, made his 10-footer for par to keep his hopes alive. It was impossible to miss the irony: Singh, who might very well have doubled the major titles he had won if he had putted even reasonably well, making a clutch putt. Woods, arguably the greatest clutch putter in history, was unable to make any putts on the final day of a major when he most needed to make them.

  While they walked to 18, Woods’s body language revealing how disgusted he was, Bjorn was walking to his ball in the right rough back on 17. He had taken driver off the tee, no doubt hoping to use his anger to launch a big drive. Instead, he had pushed it and had a gnarly lie in the rough.

  Sitting in the scoring trailer, Curtis watched Woods miss his putt and then saw Bjorn’s drive. He could feel his heart pounding.

  “When I walked off the green, I still wasn’t sure if what the guy had said about Bjorn was true,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘Well, if you make top four, you’ll make the Masters and the PGA and probably clinch your card. That’s a pretty good effort for a first major.’

  “I saw Candace as I was walking in. She was in tears, just completely drained by the whole thing. When I got inside, they confirmed Bjorn’s double bogey, and my heart started racing. All of a sudden, winning was a real thing. I knew it would be tough for Vijay or Tiger to make a birdie on the 18th and that Bjorn had two very tough holes to play.”

  Bjorn hit a reasonably good shot from the rough, punching the ball out to just short of the green. His pitch shot from there was right on line and actually hit the hole. But it was going too fast and rolled six feet past the cup. Bjorn had been putting confidently all day—in fact, he’d made a tricky four-footer at 16 to make the double bogey. But now he was shaken by what had happened.

  “You could see it in the way he was walking,” Love said. “All day, he’d been really confident, kind of firing the ball when he stood over it, stepping up to putts with a lot of confidence, not really taking that much time. But the last two holes, you could tell he was shaken up. You could almost hear him thinking, ‘What did I just do?’ ”

  Bjorn’s par putt looked for a brief instant as if it would go in. But it swerved left just before it got to the hole and stopped an inch to the left of the cup. Curtis was now in the lead by one over Bjorn and Singh.

  He decided at that point that he simply couldn’t watch anymore.

  “I asked them [the Royal and Ancient officials in the scoring trailer] what would happen if there was a playoff,” Curtis said. “I wondered if there was any break, and they told me no, that as soon as the last guy had signed his card, anyone in the playoff would be carted out to the 15th tee. [The playoff would be four holes.]

  “I decided to go out to the range and hit some balls, in part to stay loose but also to keep my mind off what was going on. I remembered that when guys thought they were going to be in a playoff, I’d see them hitting balls on the range. I remembered what had happened to Kenny Perry at the PGA in ’96. The only thing I knew for sure was that I really didn’t want to watch. I had some fruit, drank a couple of Gatorades, and asked them to take me to the range. By the time I got out there, it felt like everything was spinning. I was a lot more nervous at that moment than I’d been on the golf course.”

  He wanted Candace to go with him to the range, but she had been taken to a separate trailer to watch the last groups finish. In a technical sense, Curtis’s round wasn’t over since he might have to play off, so, other than a brief hug, he really wasn’t allowed contact with the outside world other than his caddy.

  “There really wasn’t any choice,” Candace said later. “They just said, ‘Go here, go there, sit here.’ I wasn’t in an
y shape to argue with anyone. A lot of people were coming at me to try to interview me while he was on the range. I was a newbie. I had no idea what was going on or how to handle it.”

  Few things are eerier than a driving range late on Sunday afternoon at a golf tournament. There were a couple of security guards there and a couple of camera crews hanging back just in case they needed to get a shot of the new Open champion, but that was about it. There wasn’t another player or caddy in sight.

  Woods and Singh were playing 18. The only way Woods could tie would be to hole out from the fairway—or, more accurately, from the rough, since both he and Singh, like almost everyone else, had missed the fairway from the tee. Woods hit one of the better shots of the day, finding the green, but coming up about 20 feet short of the hole. He was officially eliminated.

  Singh had caught a perfect lie and had 161 yards to the hole. But he popped the shot up, and it landed in the front bunker, meaning he would have to hole out to tie. He actually hit a superb shot, the ball spinning just to the right of the flag, stopping inside two feet. It was a great up and down, but it wasn’t good enough.

  Curtis was busy hitting wedge shots on the range when he heard the “just missed” sigh after Singh’s bunker shot. Sutton had walked over to an equipment trailer on the side of the range where there was a TV set and was standing in the doorway doing play-by-play as Curtis tried to remain calm and focus on his golf swing, which was completely impossible.

  “Singh missed from the bunker,” Sutton called out. “Bjorn is the only one left now.”

  Love had also bogeyed 17—meaning that among the five contenders, only Singh had parred the hole—so he was in the same situation as Woods, needing to hole out his second shot on 18 to tie. Bjorn needed a birdie.

  Love’s second shot landed on the front of the green but was nowhere near the hole. Now, officially, there was only one player left who could tie Curtis. Bjorn had found the right rough with his drive but had a good lie and was 168 yards from the hole. The swirling winds and the pressure and the hole location—front left, behind the bunker that Singh had found—were making everyone’s second shot difficult.

  Bjorn had a good angle to the hole, but his shot checked up just short of the green. He was about 30 feet from the flag and needed to hole out from there to force a playoff. As Bjorn was hitting his second shot, Curtis had walked over to the trailer and leaned over Sutton’s shoulder for a moment. When he saw the ball land, he returned to the range.

  “I couldn’t look,” he said. “My stomach was a mess. I felt as if the shock of the whole thing was starting to set in.”

  He picked up his wedge again and thought about trying to hit a few more shots. But there was no point. Instead, he just stood there and listened to Sutton.

  “He’s going to chip it,” Sutton said, as Bjorn took out his wedge and studied the shot.

  “He’s over the ball now…”

  Curtis was completely frozen as he waited. He heard the crowd go “Ooh” and then thought he heard the “Aah” that usually accompanies a close miss.

  Then he heard Sutton’s voice. It was very measured and calm. “Ben,” he said, “you’ve just won the Open championship.”

  Bjorn had hit a wonderful shot, the ball heading straight at the flag before slipping to the right at the last possible moment. The 12 inches remaining were the difference between a playoff and Curtis being the champion.

  Curtis didn’t have even a second to let what Sutton had said sink in, because the camera crews—led by the BBC and ABC—were now coming at him. What he really wanted to do at that moment was hug Candace, or at least Sutton. But Candace was back behind the 18th green, and Sutton was several yards away.

  “It was a little bit weird,” he said, laughing. “I was thinking, ‘Should I hug one of the camera guys? Should I kiss the camera?’ I wanted to do something, but there was no one around that I knew.”

  Candace, at least, had Ben’s cousins to hug when Bjorn’s shot missed the hole. Even so, she also regretted not being with Ben at that moment of victory. “I just wanted to be with him right then,” she said. “That’s probably my only regret about that entire week, that we weren’t together when he realized he’d won.”

  They took Curtis back to the scoring area, fans clapping for him as the cart went by. Candace was waiting, tears streaming down her face. “When I hugged her, that’s when I completely lost it,” he said. “It really was surreal.”

  There was no sign of Woods, who had signed his card after finishing tied with Love for fourth place and left, but Love stopped to offer congratulations as he came out of the trailer, as did Singh, who as co-runner-up had to stay for the awards ceremony. Bjorn was still inside the scoring trailer, apparently trying to gather himself before coming out for the ceremony.

  Curtis was being bombarded with questions, most of them the same: how in the world did you pull this off? He had shot a two-under-par 69, making him the only player in the last four groups who had broken 70 on the day. Singh had shot 70, Woods 71, Bjorn and Love 72, Perry and Price 73, and Sergio Garcia 74. With the exception of Price, all had won or seriously contended in majors in the past. Curtis had outplayed them all.

  The players were taken to the back of the green while the officials gathered for the awards ceremony. As Curtis stood with Candace waiting for his name to be called, he felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked up and saw Bjorn, still apparently in shock.

  “Great playing,” he said. “Congratulations.”

  “All I could think to say was, ‘Thanks,’ ” Curtis said. “By then I’d heard what had happened at 16, and I really didn’t know what to say to him. I thought it was pretty classy for him to come find me like that.”

  When they gave Curtis the Claret Jug, he handled the victory speech like an old pro, except when his voice caught as he tried to thank his family watching back home at the golf club.

  “I thought about my grandfather right then,” he said. “My only regret was that he didn’t live to see that moment.”

  The rest of the evening was a nonstop whirlwind. As ABC was going off the air, it showed a replay of Bjorn missing the last chip and Curtis reacting to the news that he was the Open champion.

  “That happened at 6:06 p.m.,” Curtis Strange said. “That young man has no idea how his life changed at that moment.”

  Strange was right. Ben Curtis had no idea how much his life had changed. It would not take him long, though, to find out.

  THE SIGHT OF BEN CURTIS holding the Claret Jug stunned most of the golf world.

  It was one thing for a relative unknown to win a major. Golf fans had known who Mike Weir was before the Masters, but the average sports fan, the kind who tuned in to golf only when Tiger Woods was in contention, had no idea who Weir was. Jim Furyk was certainly well known before winning the U.S. Open, but his name often appeared next to Phil Mickelson’s at the top of the Best Player to Have Never Won a Major list.

  It also was not completely unheard of for a player to win his first tournament at a major, though it was rare. Eight players had done it in the game’s history, the most recent having been John Daly at the 1991 PGA.

  But this was at a completely different level. There was now a new list in golf: all the players who had won majors in their first appearance in one: Francis Ouimet and Ben Curtis.

  Even those who knew Curtis were stunned by his victory. Zach Johnson, who had made it to Q-School finals in 2002 but had not made the PGA Tour, was playing on that Sunday in the Nationwide Tour event in Richmond, Virginia. As he came off the ninth green, not seriously in contention, but having a good week, he spotted his wife, Kim, standing behind the green.

  Johnson had been following his old Hooters Tour buddy throughout the week and had been hoping he could hang on against all the big stars and pull off a top-five finish on Sunday. Kim had gone into the clubhouse to see how Curtis was doing.

  Walking off the green, Johnson said to his wife, “How’d Ben do?”

  “He won,�
�� she said.

  Johnson stared at his wife in disbelief for a moment. “He won? He won the British Open?”

  She nodded. “Yes. He won.”

  Johnson was completely shocked. “It literally knocked me to my knees,” he said. “I mean, I always knew Ben was talented; I could see that playing with him on the Hooters. But talented is one thing, winning a major in your first year on tour is another. I almost couldn’t believe it.

  “But when I realized it was true, that it had happened, I felt inspired. I just thought, ‘If Ben can do that, why can’t I win this tournament?’ I played great on the back nine, thinking about Ben, and got myself into a playoff.”

  He lost the playoff, but even so the point had been made. Believe in yourself—as Curtis clearly had done—and just about anything can happen.

  While the golf world and the nongolf world were trying to figure out how Ben Curtis had held off Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh, Davis Love III, Kenny Perry, and Sergio Garcia, not to mention Thomas Bjorn, Ben Curtis was beginning to live out Curtis Strange’s prediction.

  And there was one other remarkable twist to an already remarkable story. Unlike Mike Weir and Jim Furyk, Curtis had not been born on May 12, 1970. His birthday is May 26, 1977. But Andrew Coltart, the European Tour player whom caddy Andy Sutton would have normally worked for during the British Open, had been born on—you guessed it—May 12, 1970.

  Ben and Candace got very little sleep before driving to London to catch their plane home. When they landed in Cleveland, there was a horde of media waiting, in addition to friends and family.

  “I guess it wasn’t too tough for anyone to figure out when we were landing,” he said. “There’s one flight a day from London to Cleveland.”

  There wasn’t much rest for the weary over the next few days. After spending one night at home, Ben and Candace flew to New York to make the media rounds. There were the usual interviews with ESPN TV and radio, the Paula Zahn Now show on CNN, interviews with Fox and MSNBC, and various radio interviews around the country that neither Ben nor Candace can remember.