“The finish was disappointing,” Micheel said. “It wasn’t so much that I gave up the lead as the fact that I just didn’t play those holes very well, and I didn’t feel like there was any reason or any excuse not to. It was hot and I was tired but so was everyone else out there. Still, I walked off the golf course thinking I was tied for the lead, and Mike [Weir] was the only player within three shots of us. I knew, even though Chad had shot the 65, that going really low on the last round of the PGA on this golf course would be tough, so there really weren’t that many players in a position to catch us. My feeling was if somebody did that, well, good for them. My job was to keep playing well and just let the chips fall.”
One person who felt that Micheel had done his job well that day was Andrade. “He was a better player than I expected,” Andrade said. “A very good ball striker, and he did a great job getting it up and down when he had to. I know he was disappointed the way he finished, but those last two holes were so tough that a bogey was almost like a par.”
The irony in Micheel and Campbell being in the last group on Sunday went beyond the fact that neither had won a tournament yet. They were often mistaken for each other because they looked very much alike, though Campbell was taller and huskier than Micheel.
“When Chad was playing well in the spring, I had people come up to me and say, ‘Nice playing last week,’ on a couple of occasions, when I hadn’t played well or hadn’t played at all,” Micheel said, laughing, after the round was over.
He went straight from the interview room back to the range and hit balls until dark. It was after nine o’clock by the time he and Stephanie made it back to their room. Once again they ordered room service. “I got the same guy on the phone every night,” Micheel said. “He was very nice, but I’m sure he must have thought we were weirdos or something, never going out to dinner.”
In fact, since Micheel had been asked where he had been eating and had answered “room service” and had told the story about his friend who answered the phone, several media outlets tracked the guy down the following day to get him to talk about his new friend who was tied for the lead in the PGA. He reported that Mr. Micheel was a very nice guy. Film at eleven.
Saturday night wasn’t a lot different from Friday, except that Micheel didn’t have to tour Rochester looking for a drugstore. Much like Ben Curtis a month earlier, a lot of his focus as he went to bed that night was on the first shot he would hit the next afternoon.
“I knew I was going to be nervous standing on that tee,” Micheel said. “But I knew Chad would be nervous too. He hadn’t won a tournament either. In fact, the only person who was close to us who had any experience contending in a major was Mike [Weir], although I guess Ernie [Els] was only five shots back. Still, he was going to have to go low to catch us, unless Chad and I both blew up. I just had this idea that if I could get that first shot in the fairway, my nerves would clear and would turn into adrenaline instead. That was what had happened Saturday. I knew I’d be more nervous on Sunday, which made the first tee shot that much more important.”
Micheel had actually killed time on Saturday by watching the classic golf movie Caddy Shack. On Sunday, with a 3:05 tee time, he and Stephanie left for the golf course a little earlier, and again the TV crews were there waiting for them. CBS actually showed them walking through the parking lot in slow-mo. “It was a long walk,” Micheel said, laughing. “We were the last ones to get there, so we had to park at the far end of the lot.”
While Micheel and Campbell went through their warm-up paces, Stephanie chatted briefly with Pam Campbell, who had flown in the night before to be with her husband on what might be a life-changing day.
Because the two players leading the tournament were virtual unknowns, CBS played up two major themes in the hour before the final tee time. First, someone making a move from behind: perhaps Weir, maybe Els or Vijay Singh (six shots back) or Phil Mickelson (seven back). When Mickelson drained a 45-foot birdie putt on number one, Jim Nantz immediately compared it to the 80-footer he had made at Augusta on number two back in April and wondered if this would launch a Mickelson rally. Bogeys at number three and number four quickly quelled that talk, and Mickelson limped home with a 75. His only move was backward.
CBS’s second theme was history. Certainly Oak Hill and Rochester had both. Rochester had been the home of many famous Americans, including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and George Eastman (the founder of Eastman Kodak). It had also been home to Walter Hagen, the first truly great golf pro. The Haig had won five PGA Championships among his eleven major titles.
There was more: Lee Trevino, a Texan like Campbell, had burst onto the golf scene by winning the U.S. Open at Oak Hill in 1968. Cary Middlecoff, from Memphis like Micheel, had won the Open at Oak Hill in 1956, beating Ben Hogan, another Texan, by one shot. Hogan had called Oak Hill’s first hole the most difficult opening hole he had ever played. He had bogeyed it on the final day in ’56, although most people remembered the two and a half foot putt he had missed on 17 as the difference.
While CBS killed time waiting for the leaders to tee off with a tribute to Hagen and the obligatory preround interviews with the leaders, Tiger Woods was doing his very best to get out of town—no matter its history—as fast as he possibly could. He was, truth be told, simply playing out the string on Sunday, having never even sniffed contention the entire week.
“The first couple of days, you sort of kept waiting for his name to pop onto a leaderboard,” Micheel said. “By Saturday night, it was pretty apparent it wasn’t going to happen.”
No one knew that better than Woods. He started the final day at nine over par with the usual talk swirling: “If he could shoot 61 and get to even par and the leaders went backward…”
And if cows had wings, they could fly.
Woods’s game was a mess. His swing was, to put it politely, a work in progress. He had no confidence in his putting. His game was so far out of kilter that the best thing he could say about the weekend after he had birdied the 18th hole was “I’m finished.”
To his credit, he kept his sense of humor. When he finally made a birdie on the 16th hole—only his sixth of the entire week—he did a fake fist pump. The two birdies on the last three holes allowed him to finish with a 73, meaning he had shot 74–72–73–73 for the week, 12 over par. That put him in a tie for 39th place, by far his worst finish as a pro in a major. He had never before finished outside the top 30.
“I made eighteen bogeys—exactly one quarter of my holes,” Woods said, shaking his head when it was finally over. “Basically I spent the entire week making 10-footers for par, or, if I didn’t make them, making bogey. That was pretty much the story.”
One statistic the CBS people dug out was telling. In 2000, the year he had won three of four majors en route to his “Tiger Slam,” which he wrapped up at the 2001 Masters, Woods had played his sixteen rounds in the four majors in a staggering 53 under par. In his six previous years as a pro, he had been over par for the year in the four majors just once: 1998, when he was going through Major Swing Change Number One and had failed to win a major. That year he was a combined seven over par in the majors. In 2003, in the midst of Swing Change Number Two, he was 18 over par in the four majors.
Woods was off the golf course, done with his interviews, and in the process of putting Oak Hill and Rochester in his rearview (airplane) mirror long before Micheel and Campbell walked onto the first tee. Other than Mickelson, just one player among those chasing had birdied the first hole—Tim Clark, another player without a tour win, who had stuffed a seven-iron to within two feet. Singh and Weir had both made bogey, and Els had made par only because his wayward drive kicked off a tree into the fairway.
Micheel could feel his heart pounding as he and Stephanie walked hand-in-hand to the tee, Stephanie peeling off to join the gallery, as he stepped inside the ropes. Campbell was up first, and his drive found the right rough. It wasn’t an awful shot, but Micheel knew any shot that made it to t
he thick stuff about five yards off the fairway was trouble. He also knew once he saw Campbell’s ball in the air that he wasn’t the only person feeling Sunday nerves at a major for the first time.
Micheel stood behind his ball while he was being introduced, and when his name was announced he took a deep breath, almost like a swimmer about to enter the pool. Like most of the players, Micheel used a three-wood off the first tee. The hole is a 460-yard dogleg left. It plays shorter if you can cut the corner, but there was risk involved in that, as Weir had discovered when his tee shot ended up in the trees.
The wind had changed overnight. A cold front had blown in, dropping the temperature into the seventies, with wind gusts up to twenty miles per hour. Everyone seemed to think that a blustery day favored Campbell, who had grown up playing in the winds of west Texas. The early advantage, though, went to Micheel, whose three-wood found the left side of the fairway, leaving him with a good angle to a back right pin.
“That was a big relief, finding that fairway, because it got a lot of my nerves out right away,” Micheel said. “After I hit that shot, it was like, ‘Okay, let’s just go play golf.’ All the waiting and the talking was over. Now it was time to just go and do my job as best I possibly could.”
15
The Master of Oak Hill
AS IT TURNED OUT, Chad Campbell’s lie in the rough was so poor that he had to punch out to the fairway and still had 118 yards left to the flag for his third shot. He hit a nice wedge shot in to about 10 feet. Shaun Micheel hit an eight-iron for his second but came up a good 30 feet short.
Micheel wasn’t thrilled with the shot but realized he was still off to a reasonably good start. When his birdie putt dove into the middle of the hole, he was off to a great start. Campbell missed his par putt, and in one hole Micheel had grabbed a two-shot lead. Up ahead, Tim Clark had made a second birdie at number two to get to two under, but no one else in the field was in red numbers.
In fact, the experienced players all seemed to be going the wrong way. Most surprising was Mike Weir, who had become a popular overnight pick given who was ahead of him and his Sunday play at the Masters. He began the day with five straight bogeys. By the time he finally righted himself and made a couple of birdies, it was too little, too late to make any kind of serious run.
“I hit a bad tee shot at number one and couldn’t seem to get things turned around for the next hour,” Weir said later. “It was a day you had to be patient, because it was a very tough golf course in the wind, and I just didn’t get it done. It was disappointing because I thought I had a real opportunity.”
So did Ernie Els, who made two early bogeys but then bounced back to birdie eight and nine and get to even par. But he bogeyed 10 and 12—both times from the middle of the fairway—and that about ended his chances.
As it turned out, none of the stars ever got close. The only name player to shoot the kind of subpar round the CBS announcers were practically pleading for was Jay Haas, who shot 69. But Haas had started the day seven shots back, and his sterling round simply moved him into a tie for fifth with Els, who managed a 71.
By the midway point of the round, CBS had pretty much given up on any Tiger 61s or Phil 65s or Ernie or Vijay 67s and was pumping the fact that one of four players was going to win his first major: Micheel, Campbell, Clark, or Czechoslovakian Alex Cejka, a veteran of the European Tour who the year before had decided to try his luck on the PGA Tour and had made it through Q-School at age thirty-two.
Given that the previous four majors, starting with the 2002 PGA, had been won by first-time major winners—Rich Beem, Weir, Jim Furyk, and Ben Curtis—that wasn’t a unique situation. What made the story unusual was the combined number of PGA Tour wins for the four contenders: zero. Not one of them had ever won on the tour. Clark was the youngest at twenty-seven; Micheel the oldest at thirty-four.
The hot players early on remained Clark and Micheel. Clark birdied three of the first four holes to draw even with Campbell at three under. Micheel gave back his birdie at number two when he found the right rough and had to punch out, even though he hit an iron off the tee. That led to a bogey. He settled down to par the third and fourth and the difficult fifth. All players in contention on a Sunday at Oak Hill breathe a sigh of relief when the fifth hole is behind them.
The fifth may be the golf course’s most famous hole. It has a creek running down the right side of the fairway, and in 1989, seemingly in control of the U.S. Open on Sunday, Tom Kite had found that creek, which led to a triple-bogey seven that knocked him out of the lead and allowed Curtis Strange to win his second straight Open.
Micheel was thrilled to make a par there and run to the sixth tee, where he promptly hit a near-perfect six-iron to within four feet to set up his second birdie. Campbell also hit six-iron but missed the green left, chipped to 12 feet, and missed the par putt. Micheel was now back to five under and was leading Clark by two and Campbell by three. A few holes ahead, Cejka had made the turn in one-under-par 34 to get to even par for the championship.
Once again, Micheel’s two-shot lead was short-lived. His next two drives were ugly. He found the deep rough on the right at the seventh, leading to a bogey and the trees on the left at the eighth, which also led to a bogey.
CBS’s Lanny Wadkins observed that the two quick swings on the tee had “come out of nowhere,” but Micheel hadn’t driven the ball all that well on Saturday, finding five of fourteen fairways. On seven and eight, though, he had no play except to pitch out and make certain he didn’t turn a bogey into a big number. Campbell also bogeyed the seventh and appeared to be heading south. As the two men walked to the ninth tee, Micheel and Clark were tied at three under, with Campbell—three over on the day—two shots back.
Clark shot 32 on the front nine and was playing the best golf of the day. He was a South African who had gone to college at North Carolina State and had made it to the tour in 2001 after finishing third on the Nationwide Tour money list in 2000. His rookie season had lasted three tournaments because of a wrist injury, but he had come back in 2002 to make more than $632,000 and finish 107th on the money list. He was a little guy—5 foot 7 and 150 pounds—who was known for consistently hitting fairways and greens, although he was not a big hitter. When he was putting well, he was extremely dangerous, because he did not miss many greens.
If you were going to place a bet on the four players in contention at that moment, Clark would have looked awfully good. On a tough windy golf course, he had made four birdies and one bogey on the front nine and was consistently finding the fairway off the tee. But as he prepared to hit his tee shot on the 10th, Wadkins—a past PGA champion himself—noticed something.
“He’s changed his preshot routine,” Wadkins said. “I think this is the first sign we’ve seen all day of nerves from Tim Clark.”
Almost on cue, Clark’s drive sailed right and found a fairway bunker. It was better off there than in the rough, and Clark managed to get his second shot just on the green, although it was a good 100 feet from the flagstick. His putt from there went eight feet past the hole.
“This putt will tell us a lot about his nerves,” Wadkins said, as Clark lined up the par putt. Clark had used a long putter from his college days with mixed success, and this putt never touched the hole. Bogey.
Meanwhile, Micheel had caught the kind of break a player needs to win a major championship. His drive at the ninth started left and was trying to fade back to the fairway. It hit in the high rough and, instead of burying, took a big hop and scooted onto the fairway. Even from there, making par wasn’t easy. From 136 yards, Micheel hit a dead pull way left of the flag with a nine-iron, and his 60-foot birdie putt rolled 12 feet below the hole. Just when it looked like he was going to make a third straight bogey, he drilled the putt for par.
Clark then made another mistake. After a brilliant five-wood to 15 feet on the 237-yard par-three 12th, he three-putted. Once again a CBS announcer was prescient. As Clark stood, seemingly forever, over his three-foot par
putt, Peter Oosterhuis said, “He almost stands over these too long.”
Yup. Clark yipped the putt left, and Micheel’s lead was two again. When Clark made a third straight bogey, and Micheel parred 11 and 12, Micheel seemed to be in control once again, now leading Campbell by two and Clark and Cejka by three.
There is, however, no such thing as a safe lead on the back nine at a major on Sunday, unless you are Tiger Woods and are up by five. Or ten. Clark and Campbell both birdied the par-five 13th, and Micheel did not. Now, with five holes to go, they were lined up this way—Micheel: three under; Campbell: two under; Clark: one under; Cejka: even par.
The CBS guys wondered if Cejka could post even par if that might not be good enough to win. Micheel changed that thinking with perhaps his best shot of the week at the 14th. The hole is one of those Donald Ross masterpieces, a tiny 323-yard par-four that may tempt players into trying to drive the green but is fraught with danger if a mistake is made off the tee.
Campbell, up first after his first birdie of the day, took a driver and pushed it just enough to find a bunker right of the green. Not a bad spot to be in, especially compared with some others. Micheel, refusing to try to run out the clock (impossible in golf, obviously), also took a driver. He hit a gorgeous fade that stopped on the right corner of the green, 45 feet from the hole. Nonetheless, he had a crack at an eagle or a two-putt birdie.
“That shot pumped me up a lot,” Micheel said later. “I hadn’t been driving the ball that well for a while, and I knew I was taking a chance when I pulled the driver, but I thought it was the time to take a chance.”
Moment of Glory Page 26
