I shot 77-81 and as most people expected, I guess, missed the cut. In the pressroom afterward, as I mopped my brow with a small towel, I was asked to reflect on my long and illustrious Open career. The proper words were difficult to find. I wanted to express so much about the wonderful way I had been treated by fans and the USGA and what playing in the National Open had always meant to me. I began by talking about the tournament’s great traditions and my own beginnings at Oakmont in 1953, moved on from there to say a few words about how grateful I was to have won at Cherry Hills and to have had a crack at winning probably seven or eight other times, then finally … I lost it.
I apologized and bowed my head, too choked up to go on.
As I got up to leave, the members of the press accorded me a great honor, something I had never seen or heard of them doing before. One by one, they stood and applauded—and kept applauding. It’s traditional for writers to give the Open winner a standing ovation when he enters the pressroom after his victorious final round.
This time they gave me a standing ovation after my final Open round.
It was like having one of Doc’s magic mulligans, after all.
CHAPTER TEN
The Claret Jug
Troon, Scotland
July, 1962
Dear Suze and Ken,
Having a nice time. Weather lovely but chilled a bit like late October. Much golf, little else. Course is not in particularly good shape and Arnie is putting awful. Nice to see our old friends but the magic is wearing off, I think. Glad to get back.
Love,
Winnie
Our Latrobe neighbor Susie Bowman brought this postcard Winnie sent her from Troon over to the house the other evening. We sat around the kitchen table and had a nice laugh about it. She’d found it while cleaning out some drawers and thought we might want to see it. I think maybe Winnie was the most amused of all, because of the fact that she loved going to the British Open, and the end of the note implies that the “magic” of the tournament was wearing a bit thin—or maybe it was my magic she meant.
“I definitely wrote that at the beginning of the week,” she decided with a wry smile, “because the week ended pretty well, all things considered.”
Indeed it did. In 1962 I won my second consecutive Claret Jug, the name of the venerable trophy presented by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club to the winner of the British Open. Champions keep the actual trophy for a year but are offered a smaller replica of the Claret Jug. Mine still sits in my Latrobe office.
Winnie had good reason to feel a little down and worried at the beginning of the week, though. The course, thanks to a lengthy drought, was in pretty poor shape. The wind was chilly and my putting was even colder, all factors that undoubtedly affected my mood and probably made me a little tough to live with. Remember, too, that just a few weeks before I’d lost to Jack Nicklaus in a playoff in front of the hometown folks at Oakmont. That was still gnawing at me.
What Winnie’s note doesn’t begin to reflect, though, is the great depth of affection and growing admiration she and I both felt for the British people and their beloved linksland golf courses, not to mention their reverence for the traditions of the game. It’s no exaggeration to say we were having a love affair with British golf fans and their venerable Open.
But it’s a love story that really began two years prior to that, in 1960, just after I won the U.S. Open at Cherry Hills.
As it happened, we had almost no time to digest and savor the miracle that had taken place in Denver. Less than thirty-six hours later, Bob Drum, Winnie, and I met Pap and Harry Saxman (Pap’s boss, Latrobe Country Club’s president, and a close family friend) in New York for our TWA flight to Dublin, Ireland, and Portmarnock Golf Club, where Sam Snead and I were scheduled to represent America in the Canada Cup, the forerunner of the World Cup, against teams from thirty different nations. From there we would push on to St. Andrews, Scotland, where I would play in my first British Open.
To tell the truth, I knew little about Britain’s linksland golf courses, aside from the fact that there the game began and the conditions were said to be considerably rougher than the courses we played in the States. I knew—or had been told—that fairways often resembled pastures and greens could be difficult to read. Also, the wind and weather were almost always dominant factors that greatly influenced play. Sam Snead had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with British golf. As his train was arriving in St. Andrews in 1946, and after sleeping on a bench in war-torn London en route to the tournament, he glanced at the Old Course and remarked that it looked like an abandoned golf course. His comment outraged a proper Scottish gent who overheard it. During the tournament, which he ultimately won, his first caddie had to be dismissed for being drunk as a skunk, while his replacement had a penchant for whistling through Sam’s backswing. Needless to say, Sam, who wasn’t shy about expressing an opinion, wasn’t overly enamored of the place. Though he pocketed 150 pounds sterling for winning the Claret Jug, he bitterly complained to anybody who would listen that the trip cost him almost double that in expenses. Furthermore, he created quite a stir by announcing that he had no intention of coming back to defend his title. He later added insult to injury by saying that, perhaps thinking of his first night in Britain and the deepening rift between himself and golf’s homeland fans, playing golf outside the United States “was like sleeping in the rough.”
Other American players at the time shared Sam’s attitude. Though they didn’t feel as strongly about it as Sam, they were hesitant to make the pilgrimage to the British Open. It was expensive and time-consuming, and there was no guarantee you would make a penny for your efforts. Under the existing rules of the tournament, everyone, including the defending champion, had to go through two qualifying rounds. There were no automatic exemptions for top American players—even winners of our Open or the Masters. This fact alone kept most of the game’s established and emerging stars home in America during the British Open week, and it had certainly been a major factor in the slow deterioration of the British Open’s prestige.
But ever since I’d robbed Winnie of a Walker Cup honeymoon, I’d had it in my mind to go play the British Open championship, if for no other reason than that Bob Jones had felt such powerful kinship with the people of St. Andrews and the oldest major golf tournament in the world. Actually, come to think of it, my desire to go play the Open in Britain went back much further than that—to my days as a schoolboy golfer, when I followed newspaper accounts of the British Open and read exciting biographies of top American players like Jones and Walter Hagen, who not only played there but won there.
Somewhere on my first flight over there, during our extended cocktail hour, Bob Drum and I got to talking about Jones’s great Grand Slam. Drum remarked to me that it was a shame that the growth of the professional game, among other things, effectively ended the Grand Slam concept as it had been known in Jones’s day (the Grand Slam then comprised the U.S. and British Amateur Championships and both major Opens).
“Well,” I said casually over my drink, “why don’t we create a new Grand Slam?”
Drum gave me one of his famous contrarian glares that made him look like a cross between an annoyed college dean and a sleeping bear someone had foolishly kicked awake.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he muttered, though probably a little more colorfully than that.
I explained what I was thinking. “What would be wrong with a professional Grand Slam involving the Masters, both Open championships, and the PGA Championship?”
He chewed on that for a few seconds, then sipped his drink and snorted. Usually, a Drum snort meant he thought your idea was so utterly ridiculous he sometimes wondered why he wasted his time sharing oxygen space with you. This time his snort meant he thought, Well, kid, maybe you’ve got something there.
Because his newspaper didn’t want to foot the expenses, Drum was accompanying me to Britain on his vacation time, and for some mysterious reason a foolish editor at his pap
er even told him not to bother to file a story. The irony of that, of course, is that when it appeared that not only was I contending for the lead in the Open but also might win it, his bosses were begging him for a dispatch from the frontline. Drum was a wily old cuss, though. I believe he made them really grovel for a while, running up their phone bill to boot, before he gave in and agreed to go back on the clock and write something about my first trip to the British Open.
I’m not entirely certain he was the first to write about the idea of a modern Grand Slam, though. That’s because when we stopped at Portmarnock en route, I’m certain he spread the idea of the new professional Grand Slam among his colleagues in the British press. So one of them was probably the first to actually write about the concept. Still, it was Bob who effectively first planted the seed that later grew.
I was immediately impressed by the rough links I discovered at Portmarnock and by the knowledgeable and interested crowds that roamed by the thousands up and down those windblown Irish dunes. Strange as it may sound, the style of golf was more like the kind of golf I’d played as a boy, when the courses were mostly ungroomed and fairly simple in design and nature, and I found that the reserved nature of the galleries—which annoyed some Americans and made them feel unwelcome—was actually a bonus for me. There was no shouting or carrying on, only polite sustained applause when you earned it by making a superior shot. They clearly loved the game for the game’s sake and were a tough crowd to please, so pleasing them became a motivating factor for me.
Sam and I were the eventual winners, but a couple other things stick out in my memory of that week. To begin with, this was where I began my strong relationship with the wonderful British golf press, making a host of new acquaintances I would come to regard as good friends: men such as Pat Ward-Thomas of the Manchester Guardian, Leonard Crawley of the Daily Telegraph, Peter Ryde of the Times, and Henry Longhurst of the Sunday Times. The elegance of their reporting was exceeded perhaps only by their passion for the purity of the game. Their deep respect for the game’s traditions set a wonderful stage for reporting on the tournaments, and they were a tremendous influence on both Winnie and me.
Pat Ward-Thomas became a particular favorite. Consider this well-turned snippet from his frontline dispatch in Country Life magazine, detailing our first interview one evening after I’d shot a miserable 75 and left Sam holding the bag at Portmarnock:
I was impressed by his manner, reserved, agreeable and polite, and yet forthright with the directness of a man who knows his own mind. On the evening of the third day at Portmarnock I had to talk with him on a radio programme, only a few minutes after he had finished his worst round. He was disappointed, and not a little angry with himself, because Snead that afternoon had played a magnificent round of 67 and Palmer’s 75 meant that the American lead was far less than it should have been. Yet he said nothing more than he had played badly: there was no word of excuse or complaint, simply a contained impatience with his own imperfections. There was a quiet coldness about him that expressed determination and self-control more effectively than anything he might have said. Here I thought is a man capable of fashioning destiny and of being unafraid when it beckoned.
While I was busy “coldly” trying to fashion destiny and impress the Canada Cup crowds, Winnie was being squired all about Dublin by the elegant Chris Dunphy, an American blue blood who more or less ran Seminole Golf Club in those days and traveled in the higher echelons of British and American society. (It was Chris who eventually introduced us to the Duke of Windsor and his wife, Wallis. The Duke and I became pretty chummy, though his wife struck me as a bit flighty.) While I was trying my best to figure out the mysteries of linksland putting, Winnie was happily gallivanting through Dublin’s famous linen shops and woolen mills with Dora Carr, Irish amateur star Joe Carr’s wonderfully hospitable wife, and taking afternoon tea at Teddy O’Sullivan’s Gresham Hotel with Chris Dunphy.
My first glimpse of St. Andrews one afternoon the following week wasn’t exactly the religious experience I’d hoped for. To tell the truth, the sight of the Old Course links didn’t exactly overwhelm me with fear. In fact, I thought it was probably as easy a golf course as I’d ever seen. Of course, this is exactly what most Americans think the first time they lay eyes on the place.
After my first practice round on the Old Course, I felt certain that my initial impression was correct—that the course wasn’t all that difficult and could be mastered fairly easily if you avoided the gorse and stayed out of the fearsome pot bunkers. The wind off the Firth of Forth was usually frisky, but my tee shots were typically low-boring affairs that stayed below the currents that tortured higher ball-strikers and rolled a long way when they landed on the firm, wind-cured turf. This meant that, under certain circumstances, I could come close to if not actually drive several of the par-4 holes. I liked this quality about linksland golf quite a lot.
As I discovered, though, it’s only after successive rounds at the Old Course that you begin to realize the subtle brilliance and high degree of difficulty the most famous golf course on earth throws at you. Bob Jones wasn’t particularly impressed by the course his first time around it, either, but he eventually became such a devoted student of the course that he compared it then to a “wise old lady, whimsically tolerant of my impatience, but ready to reveal the secrets of her complex being, if I would only take trouble to study and learn.”
I couldn’t put it any better than that. Study and learn. That’s exactly what you have to do to try to prevent the Old Course from beating you.
Luckily, I had a good tutor to guide me through my lessons. Tony Wheeler, Wilson’s representative in Britain, introduced me to a young, gangly, chain-smoking former St. Andrews junior champion named Tip Anderson, who knew his mind and the mysterious ways of the Old Course.
I suppose you could say Tip was your classic Scotsman—as stubborn as he was smart, not likely to suffer fools who didn’t heed his advice. Despite our two strong personalities, we got along well from the start, though he wasn’t the least bit hesitant to convey his disapproval if I overruled his opinion on a shot. Sometimes we must have sounded like an old married couple squabbling gently in the fairway or rough. At times, I confess, I’d get so annoyed with his hard-headedness I’d look at him in exasperation and remark, “Hey, Tip, I play this game myself. I think I know what I’m doing.”
He would give me that deeply pitying look of his, perhaps shake his head, and look at the horizon as if to say, “Well, lad. There’s no’ much I can do to help you now, if you won’t mind ol’ Tip.”
While I was busy qualifying for the Open on the adjacent New Course, firing 142 to easily make it into the tournament, trying my best to learn the eccentricities of the huge undulating greens and quirky bounces of links golf, Winnie was busy discovering the rustic charms of British hotel life just across Links Road on the second floor of Russacks Hotel. Figuring that midafternoon was an excellent time to slip down to the communal bathroom on our floor and have a nice hot, private soak in the tub, she was nearly flattened by a large semi-naked gent with a handlebar mustache who came barreling out of the bathroom. He apologized brusquely, but by then it was too late. Poor Winnie fled back to our room and shut the door in horror, refusing to risk another tub bath for the balance of the week.
I opened the 100th British Open with a round of 70 and followed that with a 71. This was something of a disappointment but not the end of the world. Kel Nagle was two behind leader Roberto de Vicenzo at that point, and Peter Thomson, who had won the tournament four times in the 1950s, was back with me at 141. The British Open traditionally started on Wednesday and finished with two rounds on Friday—so professionals could be back in their shops for the weekend. A few years later, the fourth round was moved to Saturday, and it wasn’t until my business agent Mark McCormack convinced the Royal and Ancient in 1980 that American television would pay a lot more money to have the event spread over the weekend that the final rounds were moved to Saturday and Sunday.<
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After a third-round 70 enabled me to pick up five strokes on Roberto in the Friday morning round, I walked off the course to have a sandwich with Pap, Harry Saxman, and Winnie, feeling confident that the afternoon round might bode extremely well for me. Thanks to Tip, I’d managed to avoid the steep-walled bunkers and was playing better than my score indicated. I could feel myself getting into the right frame of mind to mount a charge the same way I’d done it at Denver a few weeks earlier.
Unfortunately, the golf gods had other things in mind. Just about the time we settled over our lunches, the skies above the links blackened and the rains blew in off the Firth of Forth. I mean it rained. It rained like I’d never seen it rain before, coming in wild gusts and torrents. Watching it pour, I remember assuring Winnie and Pap that a British Open had never been canceled because of inclement weather—nor had one ever finished on a Saturday, to that point. I was chomping at the bit to get back out there and catch the leaders. Aussie Kel Nagle had overtaken Roberto to lead with 207. I was at 211, four strokes back, but I felt the championship was well within my striking range.
I was deeply disappointed when I got to the first tee, dressed for the tumult and primed to play, and found that the afternoon round had been postponed, and furthermore was now scheduled to be completed—for the first time ever—on Saturday.
For what it’s worth, I always thought, and still feel, that the postponement hurt my chances of winning that first British Open I’d played in. For the most part, because of my inexperience on linksland courses, I played conservatively—and that wasn’t my style—which may also have cost me a bit. But in fairness it was really the infamous 17th or Road Hole that doused my hopes of completing the third leg of our newly created modern Grand Slam. The legendary 475-yard hole gave me fits all week. The first two days I reached it in regulation only to three-putt both times; and the same thing occurred in the Friday morning round before the historic washout.
A Golfer's Life Page 23
