by Dan Jenkins
The problem for Buddy was on the lightning-fast greens. There were no tap-ins. Even a one-foot putt could break two inches. Buddy wasn’t holing anything in practice and he blamed it on Winged Foot’s severe undulations, the way the greens were shaved down, and in some cases on the “asinine golf-hating maniac sicko” who set the pins.
He said, “USGA assholes want you to try to make a putt on top of Yul Brynner’s head.”
It was mandatory in Winged Foot practice rounds to spend a little extra time on the eighteenth green trying to duplicate “the Bobby Jones putt.”
This was the twelve-foot putt for par and a 79 that Jones sank on the seventy-second hole in ’29. It saved him a tie for the U.S. Open with Al Espinosa, a journeyman touring pro. Jones drowned Espinosa in the playoff.
A couple of renowned writers and Jones watchers, Grantland Rice and O. B. Keeler, have contended in books that it was “golf’s greatest putt.” The reason is because it rescued Jones from the most desperate situation he’d ever been in. Jones needed the putt not only to tie Espinosa but to keep from shooting 80 for the first time in an Open, and to avoid his worst collapse ever in a major. He’d blown a four-stroke lead with only four holes to go by bunkering his way to a triple bogey at the fifteenth and three-putting the sixteenth for a bogey. The watchers claim that if Jones hadn’t dunked that putt at Winged Foot, the humility and embarrassment of his collapse would have made it impossible for him to win the Grand Slam a year later.
Old photos have told me exactly where the cup was set on the day of Jones’s putt. It was middle-right. Jones had pulled his second shot into the left rough and his pitch stopped on the left side of the green twelve feet short of the cup. Jones faced a slightly downhill putt that broke left to right.
I was happy that somebody in the USGA was lugging around enough sense of history to have the cup positioned near “the Jones spot” all during the practice rounds.
Buddy and Jerry and I took dead aim at it both days of practice. Three tries apiece, closest to the hole for a hundred. Nobody came close to making the putt, but I won the money each day.
“Well, fuck the USGA,” Jerry Grimes said, missing the putt one more time. “Fuck the USGA . . . fuck Winged Foot . . . and fuck that crippled sumbitch in the wheelchair.”
“That would be Bobby Jones, or Franklin D. Roosevelt?” Buddy Stark inquired.
“Don’t make a shit,” Jerry said.
“Last I heard, they were both dead,” I said.
“Not as dead as my golf game,” said Jerry.
BITCH ABOUT the course all you want, you can’t help but be pumped about the fact that you’re playing in the U.S. of Open. I say you can’t. Not unless you’re a mummy who recently busted out of a pyramid and took up golf in time to qualify for the Open.
The atmosphere alone gets me excited. Flags flying over the clubhouse and big scoreboards, hordes of golf-wise crowds on hand, press swarming around like at no other tournament, football-type grandstands rising up in prime locations, TV towers here and there, and scads of hospitality tents off somewhere in the distance forming their own neighborhood, a one-week village.
I’ll tell you one thing. I’m about half-proud of the way my ass played in the Winged Foot Open.
While I elect to give most of the credit to my sudden artistry with the lob wedge, Mitch said my stellar effort more likely had something to do with the fact that I was getting laid again.
Not having a lob wedge in your bag when you’re playing a U.S. Open course, or any course with heavy rough, deep bunkers, and fast greens, would be like a rock star going on a concert stage without drugs.
The lob wedge has more loft and less bounce than your normal wedge, and I needed it often at Winged Foot out of the high rough and bunkers around the greens, to get the ball up quick and land it soft. The thing you have to guard against with the lob wedge is scooping the ball. Or chunking it. You can do this by keeping your left wrist flat and firm through impact and letting the club do the work. “Hit against your left side,” as Mitch, the old swing guru, said.
I came out of the gate with a germfree 69, one under par, my best opening round ever in the Open. Naturally it didn’t lead. By the end of the day it wasn’t even close. There was the 66 by Knut followed by the four 67s by Rickey Padgett and the lurkers, and the five 68s by Tiger and Cheetah and the other lurkers. There was a grand final majestic total of twelve 69s in all, and I was in a tie for eleventh place.
Here I thought I’d played a good round in a major, but I read in the morning paper where there hadn’t been any wind and the pin placements had been “inviting,” so it turned out I hadn’t done shit.
But my second straight germfree 69 on Friday was considered only one shot shy of magnificent. A stiff breeze whipped in and out, the pins were hidden, and some of the 67s, 68s, and 69s went so far Dixie they even missed the cut.
This greatly pleased the USGA and Winged Foot’s members. They’d been shocked and the same thing as pissed off by the flood of low scores shot on Thursday.
Knut’s 134 total kept him in the lead, but my 138 hoisted me into a tie for fourth and sent me to the interview area in the press tent. Which was where—and I don’t even remember how it came up—I let drop the news that I was staying at the Plaza Hotel, commuting to the Open, and investigating some of Manhattan’s pleasures in the evenings.
Slow news day, evidently. I was greeted in Dimitri’s limo on Saturday morning with a headline on the back page of the New York Post that screamed:
BROADWAY BOBBY JOE!
And a big black headline on the back page of the Daily News that hollered:
GIVE HIS REGARDS TO WINGED FOOT!
It was even mentioned down deep in the New York Times story that a touring professional named Robert Joseph Grooves of Fort Worth, Texas, was curiously doing a “backward commute” to the Open championship.
I saved the newspapers for my mother’s scrapbooks. I might also confess that I didn’t mind the instant new nickname “Broadway” that Buddy and Jerry and Mitch each hung on me and were never going to let me forget. “Spin” had never done it for me anyhow.
All kinds of unexpected things happened in Saturday’s third round.
Your serious golf fans might say that the most unexpected thing of all was that my satchel didn’t fly open, meaning Robert Joseph Grooves didn’t go brain-dead and shoot straight up.
It was a tough round. Start late in the day and you find your share of spike marks on the greens, the fans are a little more restless, and you have more time to think about stuff, like should you become more aggressive or play more conservatively to protect where you are. That kind of mental shit.
What I did was, I ignored my brain and turned myself over to my golf clubs. I played one shot at a time and managed to steer-job my way into enough fairways and save enough pars with my trusty lob wedge and putter to escape with a dig-deep 72, two over par. My 210 total at 54 holes was good enough after all the smoke cleared to leave me in a tie for fifth.
Knut Thorssun, Cheetah Farmer, Tiger Woods, Rickey Padgett, and Vance Clinter, a lurker, all squabbled over the lead most of the day Saturday. When everything unraveled, Cheetah led at 206. Tiger and Rickey were at 207. The lurker was at 209. And Knut, embarrassed and steaming, was tied with me.
There was a good reason for Knut to be hot—he blew to a five-over 75. In his press interview he blamed a stomach ailment for his poor play on the back nine, but the real reasons came out later, I learned, as he stomped around in the privacy of the contestants’ locker room.
I was listening to Knut along with his IMG agent, Killer Tom McBride, the only agent with enough stroke to be in there. McBride sipped a Perrier and I drank a beer while we watched Knut slam things around and holler about the “she-bitches” who’d caused him all the problems on the course.
It turned out that one of Knut’s traveling bimbos, Tanya something, had passed a note to him at the tenth tee. The note informed Knut that she deserved more out of their re
lationship. Like a bigger condo for herself in West Palm and a job in his organization for her father—otherwise Knut might be reading about himself—and her—in the National Enquirer.
“This is a crazy woman she-bitch!” Knut yelled. “She is wanting to be blackmailing me. Me! The Nukester! Tommy, you must be taking care of this she-bitch for me.”
Killer Tom McBride said, “Tanya is a terribly fine-looking woman.”
“Yes,” said Knut, “but does this give her the right to turn into a she-bitch and try to ruin me?”
“I’ll speak to Tanya,” the agent said. “I’m sure we can work out a solution . . . something that won’t be financially irresponsible on our part. She’s a terribly fine-looking woman.”
The other she-bitch was Knut’s wife, Cynthia. She was at home in Palm Beach and called him long-distance on his cellphone while he was standing in the fifteenth fairway waiting to hit his second shot. She wanted to tell him the latest thing his sons—Sven and Matti, the unruly little shits—had done. Sven and Matti were going around knocking on doors all over the neighborhood and asking the people who lived there for money, and threatening to set their houses on fire if the people didn’t give them any money. Knut had said to Cynthia, You’re calling to tell me this while I’m playing in the Open? Can’t you handle this yourself? Cynthia told him she had given up trying to handle the rotten little pricks, and she was personally taking great pleasure in springing this news on him while he was in the middle of a U.S. Open fairway. Knut had asked where the hell Renata was, and why wasn’t Renata in charge of things? And Cynthia had said that Renata had taken the weekend off to go to Key Biscayne and fuck tennis pros and Miami Dolphins.
“I am surrounded by she-bitches,” Knut said. “You cannot ask a man to play his best golf when he is surrounded by she-bitches.”
I asked Knut if he’d thought about a divorce.
He said, “We have discussed it, but Cynthia says she will only agree to a divorce if I take the boys. What would I do with them?”
“No problem,” I said. “Divorce Cynthia, marry Renata. Renata can take care of the kids—when she’s not off fucking—and when she is, she can hire a babysitter.”
Knut turned to Killer Tom McBride with a look that seemed to ask what the agent thought about my suggestion.
“Expensive,” the agent said, “but it’s got legs.”
33
SAY THE NAME OF S. G. (SHUG) Hardisty to any of your knowledgeable golf fans today and there’s a good chance they’ll know who you’re talking about. The man’s name has gone down in infamy, or deeper. Shug is the USGA dolt who gave Knut that favorable ruling at Winged Foot.
Only six of us had a reasonable chance to win the Open in the last round. Six of us within four shots of one another. Everybody else was eating dust.
The last day pairings and start times:
1:47—Bobby Joe Grooves & Knut Thorssun.
1:56—Tiger Woods & Vance Clinter.
2:05—Cheetah Farmer & Rickey Padgett.
The first guy to go to Downtown Tap City was the lurker, Vance Clinter. Being paired with Tiger didn’t help him—they had most of the gallery. Clinter doubled the first hole, doubled the second, bogeyed the third, tried to become invisible, and soared on to an 82, crawling back into his lurker’s cave.
Tiger was the next to go, much to the surprise of everyone. The greens ate him up. He three-putted six times before he reached the tenth, the great par three. There, he five-putted for the triple bogey six. This was a shocking thing. Outrageous. Tiger not only reads greens better than anybody ever, his putts hug the ground like nobody else’s, and they start looking for the cup the second they come off the face of the putter. He played pretty well from there to the clubhouse to finish with his unbelievable 79.
A grizzled historian like me could have told Tiger not to be embarrassed by the round. He was in good company. Ben Hogan had once skidded to a 79 on the last day of the Masters when he’d been the 54-hole leader, and Sam Snead had once slipped to an 81 when in the same position in a U.S. Open.
It was a sadistic layout in the last round, as Open courses usually are. The fairways look about two feet wide, the rough looks like you can lose your shoes in it, and the greens putt like a marble floor. You can find yourself in nerve-wracking situations where you feel like you want to vomit before you take the club back.
Early on it was easy to tell that the course was going to whip up on all of us. Rash of bogeys on the leaderboards. No red numbers. We were all over par after twelve holes, some more than others. It was a fistfight to save a par. I remember thinking that one or two over, a 281 or 282 total, might be good enough to take it.
Cheetah was losing it off the tee, Rickey was losing it with his irons, Knut was losing it in the bunkers, and I was losing it in my mind.
For one thing, you have to think you’re supposed to win the U.S. Open—that you deserve to win—in order to win it. And I’ve never been mean enough, or dumb enough, let’s say, to think that way. I’ve always been convinced that the only way I’d ever win a major would be if all the other contenders fainted or got assassinated.
History, of course, has told us that the Open and the other majors have produced some extremely unlikely winners over the years—total unknowns in some cases—but they were just lucky sumbitches is all I can say about it.
I have to be honest and admit that I wasn’t even trying to win the Open. I was just trying to get to the house without getting hurt and grab me enough Ryder Cup points to nail down a spot on our team.
You could say that might be the reason why I didn’t win the Open. Or you could give me and Mitch and my lob wedge credit for digging out those pars over the last four holes—each one a long, tough Mother Goose—and shooting that gut-wrenching 74 that brought me in at 284 and nabbed fourth place for me.
The round enabled me to swoop 140 beautiful Ryder Cup points—almost as many as I’d receive for winning a regular Tour event—and collect a young $217,000.
I honestly didn’t give any thought to the prize money until Mitch, the wily old accountant, said, “Broadway, my man, we done stepped in a pile of smackeroons.”
AS IT often is, the Open was decided on the last three holes.
Cheetah Farmer felt the heat and bogeyed two of the holes when he three-putted sixteen and eighteen. Cheetah and his arrogant, crew-cut daddy blamed spike marks for the disappointing 76 that gave Cheetah a total of 282.
Rickey Padgett felt the same heat and doubled the seventeenth and only managed to steal a bogey five at eighteen by no-braining a forty-foot putt into the cup. He’d sliced his drive, pulled his second shot, chopped a pitch, and flubbed another pitch. Rickey’s 76 put him in at 283.
Cheetah and Rickey did all those things while knowing that 281 had become the score to beat. Knut Thorssun’s 281.
But what they didn’t know—and I did—was that a USGA rules official, the one and only S. G. (Shug) Hardisty, had more than likely won the Open for Knut back on the sixteenth hole.
That’s where Hardisty, who owns a meat market in real life back in his hometown of Toledo, gave Knut the free drop out of the rough from behind the TV camera forklift. And out of what I guarantee you was a horrible lie that had double bogey written all over it.
Knut was one over, working on a 71, hoping to get to the cabin at 281, but he wasn’t leading at the time. Cheetah and Rickey were behind us and had yet to encounter their difficulties on the closing holes.
Knut had pulled his second at the sixteenth far to the left of the green and into the rough behind the forklift. His ball was buried a foot deep in the thick grass. You could barely see it.
For the history books I’m happy to relate the conversation that took place between the three of us—Knut, myself, and the USGA dunce. It went like this:
Knut: “I believe I am entitled to relief.”
Myself: “From what?”
Knut: “The machine there. It is an immovable obstruction.”
Dunce:
“I’m not sure what it is. Big old thing, though.”
Knut: “It is an immovable obstruction. It is blocking my shot. The rules clearly state that a player is allowed a free drop from an immovable obstruction. I have seen this situation before.”
Myself: “I’m sure you’d be real happy to get a drop out of this lie. That’s a forklift, for Christ sake. For a TV camera. It’s not an ‘immovable obstruction.’ It’s got wheels on it! The network can move it. You have to play the ball where it is, Nukester.”
Dunce: “I don’t know. It looks immovable. Big old thing.”
Myself: “You think it grew here, Shug? Tom Brokaw planted it—NBC’s idea of a fucking tree?”
Dunce: “It looks to me like it would be a lot of trouble to move. I’m going to call it an immovable obstruction . . . allow relief.”
Knut: “I should drop over here, do you agree?”
Dunce: “Yes, that will be fine.”
Myself: “I don’t fucking believe this shit.”
Knut was permitted to lift his ball out of the deep rough, move around the forklift, and take a free drop on a nice firm patch of ground. From there he was able to pitch onto the green and save his par. Thanks to S. G. (Shug) Hardisty’s ruling, he’d turned a six or seven into a four.
This inspired Knut to par the last two holes and win the Open sitting in the clubhouse.
THIEF STEALS U.S. OPEN!
That would have been my headline, but America’s newspapers were more generous.
34
THE OPEN CHAMPION AND I celebrated in different ways that Sunday night. Tell me Knut went back to his Westchester hotel and comparative-shopped the blowjobs of two light hooks he met in a hospitality tent. I, on the other hand, overjoyed that I’d made the Ryder Cup team, went back to Manhattan Island to seek out food.
