Chasing Greatness

by Adam Lazarus

  “They said I have not won since September [1972] and I’m in a slump. You just can’t win ’em all. No one can,” he responded gruffly. “If my fleas (his fans) don’t like it, well, I guess they’ll just have to go over to Jack [Nicklaus].” Trevino’s disarming candor remained intact, even if his cheery exterior was clearly eroding.

  But Trevino’s change in public persona during early 1973 ran deeper. His fun-loving, devil-may-care reputation was mainly a facade. Trevino lived in constant fear that as quickly as he had become a star, it could all vanish in an instant.

  “No matter how he clowns it up for the gallery, deep down inside he is insecure,” Bucky Woy observed. “It’s just that he never had anything in his life and has become superdetermined to succeed.... Miss the shot, and Lee Trevino fears he might slip back into his former life as a nobody.”

  On the fairway at a VIP outing a few months after winning the U.S. Open at Oak Hill, Trevino had walked down the gallery signing autographs for fans, yelling out, “Tacos, get your red-hot tacos! Never know ... when my game will go and I’ll be out hustling in the streets again. Gotta keep my voice in practice.”

  It was no wonder, then, why Trevino feverishly chased dollar bills, not trophies. As a child of poverty and the first superstar of Mexican descent in professional golf, he carried a burden of personal and professional insecurity that he could never shake.

  But Trevino’s disdain for his detractors vanished once the tour left the West Coast in February and moved to the warmer, more familiar climes of the south-east, where his game responded to the change in playing conditions. With dramatic one-stroke victories at both Florida venues (Jackie Gleason and the Doral Open), Trevino proclaimed that “spring training now is over,” and he sprang to the top of the tour money list.

  The return of his familiar exuberant mood was short-lived, however. During a fishing trip in mid-March, Trevino overdid it trying to yank a bass into his boat, and pulled muscles in his neck and chest. For the former marine who, the previous summer, had spent a week in a Texas hospital, then days later flourished in the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, a minor muscle strain was not necessarily cause for concern. But the injury seriously hampered his performances for the next several weeks, thus rekindling his touchiness with both fans and the media.

  In late April 1973, Trevino flew to Dallas for the Byron Nelson Golf Classic. Though he had finished second to Nicklaus the week before in the Tournament of Champions, the injury and his inconsistent play troubled Trevino as he returned to his hometown. The last thing his delicate temperament needed was a slew of people wanting a piece of the local kid and looking for a handshake, a photograph, or a courtesy appearance at a local event. (Around this time, Trevino was also fending off another distraction: a much ballyhooed challenge from daredevil Evel Knievel, who claimed that the pressures faced by golfers paled in comparison to those he faced.)

  Trevino vowed to his wife to stay clear of the parties and hard drinking that were central to Texas country club hospitality, and to focus solely on his game. But the chest/shoulder/neck injury sustained a few weeks earlier—which he now told the press was the result of hitting the punching bag too hard during a spa workout—prevented him from finishing his swing. He played so poorly during the first round of the Byron Nelson that even his hometown fans deserted him: At any given tour event, Trevino’s gallery usually numbered over a thousand, but in Dallas there were less than a hundred people watching him by the end of the day.

  Whether it was the injury, the humiliating nine over 79 that he posted, or a combination of both, Trevino immediately withdrew from the tournament after signing his scorecard, claiming he needed to see a doctor. The next day, he had to be “carried” into the St. Paul Hospital emergency room, where X-rays revealed he simply had strained muscles. Nonetheless, Trevino decided to rest for two weeks before returning to the tour—against his manager’s advice—to play in the Colonial Invitational in Fort Worth in early May.

  “Man, I’ve got to play,” he said. “I can’t stand another week off, because I need the money.”

  Trevino certainly did not need the money. By gutting his way through the injury to a second-place finish three weeks later at the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic, Trevino passed the million-dollar career earnings mark. And he left Tennessee with more than just the $16,000 in prize money.

  In typical spendthrift Trevino fashion, he purchased a $30,000 Dodge motor home he believed would solve all of his personal problems. Pregnant with their third child, Claudia could not fly around the country to see her husband, and with Lee booked practically every day for tournaments and appearances, he hardly saw his family. The RV, equipped with a full kitchen, showers, toilets, stereo, and a color television to entice his daughter and four-year-old son (later that year, Trevino estimated he’d seen him “about sixty days since he’s been born”), was spun as a way for the family to enjoy much-needed quality time.

  But Trevino had other intentions for the conspicuous motor home.

  “I don’t sleep and live in this vehicle but it’s where I go after a round to relax and get away from the crowds. I guess I have lost some of my effervescence or my enthusiasm for showing it. I feel like I am hiding seven days a week. The demands on me have become so numerous that I just can’t put up with all of it. I realize the image I have made but it’s been very tough lately to maintain it.”

  In early June, Trevino drove his locker-room-on-wheels north to Pennsylvania. With the IVB Philadelphia Golf Classic scheduled the week before the Open and only a five-hour drive from Oakmont, Trevino headed to Whitemarsh Valley Country Club to sharpen his game.

  Though he made sure to joke and smile for photographers and reporters, Trevino’s patience for the burdens of celebrity continued to wear thin, despite his mobile home/hideout. After a very poor opening round in Philadelphia, he posted a strong 68 on Friday, but he could no longer conceal his mounting frustration before the enormous gallery that came to watch him. Though he occasionally bantered with the crowd, he kept to himself far more than usual, and when he jerked his drive far into the left rough on the eighth hole, he lost it. He bolted over a hill to locate his ball, leaving his caddie in his wake.

  “Where you going?” asked his caddie, to which Trevino responded for the crowd to hear, “I’m playing about eleven more holes; then I’m getting the hell out of here.”

  The people who heard Trevino’s comment held their breath for a moment-then smiled and laughed. Later, in a moment of less ambiguous disgust, Lee slammed the head of his putter into the turf.

  “I’m wasting a whole week,” he said. This time there were no laughs from the fans.

  The following afternoon, after opening his third round with four bogeys that produced a dismal 77 and left him fifteen strokes behind the leader, Trevino walked into the scorer’s tent and, without offering any excuses, announced he was withdrawing from the tournament.

  “Mentally, I wasn’t here [in Philadelphia],” he said. “I wasn’t playing good and there didn’t seem to be any point in keeping on with it.”

  The next day, Sunday, Trevino left Philadelphia and drove west toward Pittsburgh, finally to become acquainted with Oakmont Country Club. He had never seen the fabled course, and if he wanted to get his game back on track and win a remarkable third U.S. Open in six years, he would need time to prepare.

  Of course, getting out of town fast was also wise to escape the wrath of the Philadelphia press. Still, Trevino could not hide from his fans.

  “We were going on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and the guy handing out the ticket at the booth says, ‘Thanks, Lee. Good luck next week.’ And I’m in the backseat of the car.”

  The price of celebrity only mounted after Trevino arrived in Pittsburgh. The people of Pittsburgh—an unusually friendly and folksy group for a major city—immediately recognized him and acted as if they were best buddies. When he went into a small grocery store to pick up a few essentials, he was mobbed by well-wishers and never even got a chance to
shop. He constantly felt backed into a corner.

  “I can’t go into a restaurant and enjoy a dinner. I eat two meals in my motel room most every day. I’d like to go into a bar now and then with my friends and just sit down and have a quiet drink, but I can’t. Privacy is getting harder to get. I just don’t have any privacy, really.”

  To remedy that problem, Trevino sought and got permission to park his motor home in a partially secluded area near Oakmont’s driving range for the duration of the Open. Before beginning his practice round on Monday, he met with reporters and detailed the continuing headaches caused by his fans’ persistent adulation.

  He was most fond of telling reporters a story about how he sat in the back of a movie theater to escape notice, yet was still approached by the theater manager, who asked for an autograph and urgently sent the usher to fetch Trevino a Scotch on the rocks. “Look, I love to have fun, tell jokes, but then I’ll go and hide. You’ll never see me in the evening.”

  The only real privacy Trevino could find was inside the ropes on the golf course.

  After his first practice round, finally relieved to be addressing questions about golf, Trevino discussed his thoughts about Oakmont. Considering that this Open was being played in Arnold Palmer’s backyard, Trevino graciously deferred to him, even when King Arnie suggested that Trevino’s style of low, left-to-right shot making might not be optimal for low scoring at Oakmont.

  But when another aging tour legend offered his opinion about Trevino’s chances of winning the 1973 U.S. Open, the “Not-so-happy Hombre” immediately reappeared, and with attitude.

  Billy Casper, whom Trevino had admired early in his career, told the press that big hitters such as Nicklaus and Weiskopf had a ten-stroke advantage at Oakmont due to their length off the tee. Trevino, who was known more for consistency and accuracy than prodigious distance, fired back.

  “I thought that was a cute quote in the paper the other day, what Casper said.... He wasn’t talking for me. He wasn’t talking for the Mex. He was talkin’ for himself. As for me, I’m ready to win. I’m not going to run off and hide, no matter what happens on the golf course.”

  Not everyone shared Casper’s concerns. In fact, Weiskopf—the longest straight hitter in golf, said Sam Snead—regarded Oakmont as a fairly short course for a U.S. Open. And even after his poor performance in Philadelphia, the oddsmakers still regarded Trevino as a six-to-one favorite to win, second only to Nicklaus.

  But Oakmont’s most demanding test, everyone agreed, had nothing to do with the need for power. The course’s greatest challenge lay in the slickness and confounding curves of its putting surfaces.

  “This thing will be won or lost at the greens,” said Trevino. “They’ll eat you alive. But they’re not going to chase me away from this place. No, sir, I’m not going to get mad.... There is only one U.S. Open and they can’t kick me off this place, because somebody’s gonna win and it might be me.”

  THURSDAY MORNING, SPIKES ON AND dressed in black from head to toe, Trevino opened the door of his motor home and headed for the practice tee. During the opening two rounds, Trevino would be dwarfed in size and strength by the other members of his threesome, six-foot-two-inch J. C. Snead and six-foot-three-inch Jerry Heard. But the Merry Mex’s career achievements towered over both of theirs, and over all but a half dozen or so of the remaining men in the field. No one, not even Nicklaus, had won more major championships in the previous five years.

  Trevino scored a conventional par on Oakmont’s troublesome starting hole and made another easy par on the second. Cautious with a two-iron off the tee, followed by a precise five-iron from the fairway, he reached red numbers with a twelve-foot birdie on the fifth. Trevino moved to two under par at the turn with a fabulous bunker recovery to three feet on the par-five ninth.

  The momentum of that second birdie faded halfway into the back nine. He three-putted on the short eleventh to lose a stroke, but quickly gained it back with a brilliant iron on the lengthy, par-five twelfth, which he had decided to play rather creatively by hitting two consecutive six-irons following his drive. Two holes later, a missed green followed by a poor chip gave another shot back to the course.

  “[Trevino] fell victim to the easy-looking par-4 14th,” wrote a future chronicler of Oakmont’s history, Marino Parascenzo, for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “The pin was in a depressingly deceptive little swale. Coming from behind there, one inch wide meant four feet too long and Trevino was both, for a bogey 5.”

  What angered Trevino most about the two strokes he squandered was not how, but where they happened.

  “I bogeyed the two easiest holes,” he remarked, speaking about his bogeys on the eleventh and fourteenth.

  As much interest as reporters showed in Trevino’s performance, many wanted his take on how Nicklaus had negotiated the beguiling seventeenth a little earlier by driving the green for an easy eagle.

  For decades, Trevino’s approach to life had been anything but conservative. He drank, gambled, stayed out late, occasionally associated with seedy characters, and frivolously spent his income—whether it was a few dollars or a few thousand. But his risk-taking lifestyle bore no resemblance to his golf game, which was meticulous in its sobriety and advance planning.

  “I think about what I should make on a hole in every tournament,” he said at the height of his dominance in the early 1970s. “For instance, if I’ve got a par-three, two-hundred-and-twenty-yard hole I’ll hope to play the thing in one over par for four rounds. I won’t go for the pin, just the green, and I almost never gamble.”

  Oakmont was no exception. After one round he believed “[you] don’t have to make a lot of birdies to win, but you have to avoid the bogeys.”

  Predictably, Trevino found fault with Nicklaus’s game plan to attack the seventeenth green with a driver.

  “I hope he does it every day. Because if he [pushes] one he’s over on the driving range and he’s got to reload and fire away again,” Trevino proclaimed. “I won’t do it unless I’m two shots behind on Sunday and I have to make up some ground. I have a game plan and I stick to it. That’s not in my game plan.

  “I used a three-iron and I was only eighty-seven yards from the hole. I measure that hole as three hundred and sixteen yards to the front of the green. But there was no point in my gambling today with a driver,” he insisted.

  That game plan centered on a belief that the championship would be won on the greens. And after the first round, he was pleased with his one-under score of 70. Trevino faced nine forty-foot putts and two-putted each time, including a snake from seventy feet. “My round couldn’t have been better. I two-putted from here to El Paso,” he told Bill Nichols of the Cleveland Press.

  Remarkably, Trevino hit sixteen greens in regulation and missed only one fairway in round one (he had missed only one fairway during forty-five practice holes). But Trevino was still annoyed by his inability to position approach shots near the flagsticks, and by his overall timidity in playing the course.

  “I want to shoot a decent round, not blow it all. I didn’t go for the flag. I didn’t want to take a chance of knocking it over the greens,” he added. “The longer you stay in there, the more you get to know the course. I played very scared all day but tomorrow I’m going to start going for the flag.”

  Save for Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino understood course management as well as any golfer of his time. He’d played every type of course imaginable, in every type of climate: Texas, California, Florida, Panama, Japan, Britain, Singapore. Oakmont, as Palmer had said, was built loosely in the style of the Scottish links courses, and on Thursday it played hard and fast in the British tradition. A two-time British Open champion, Trevino had certainly proved he could master those speedy tracks.

  But that week in western Pennsylvania, there was only one authority on Oakmont toward whom everyone deferred: Arnold Palmer. And when reporters relayed Trevino’s comment that he intended to play much more aggressively on Friday, the King smiled.

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sp; “This is a course which requires conservative play,” he said. “Going for the pin can cause you a lot of trouble.”

  Trevino had made a meteoric career of defying the odds and showing up the “experts.” After his opening round, he walked briskly through the crowds and across the parking lot before encasing himself in his fortress motor home-lonely, but never alone.

  • 4 •

  Carnage

  Geoff Hensley wanted to make a good first impression. Making his debut in the U.S. Open, the pro from Quail Hollow Golf Club, thirty miles northeast of Tampa, was given a tall order.

  Hensley had captained the University of Cincinnati golf team in the early 1970s and, as a sophomore, became just the second Bearcat to compete in the NCAA individual championships. Two months after graduating in 1971, at the Western Amateur in Benton Harbor, Michigan, Hensley fired an opening-round 68, which tied the course record.

  In early June 1973, he took fifth at a Cincinnati sectional qualifier for the U.S. Open, and was rewarded with the daunting task of teeing off first in Thursday’s opening round.

  “I was thrilled,” Hensley remembered, “being with the best players in the world at one of the top clubs in the country.”

  That club was Oakmont, the course that Tommy Armour called “the final degree in the college of golf.” The very first hole set the tone: a 459-yard, downhill par four, widely accepted as the most challenging starting hole in all of championship golf.

  Eager to get off to a strong start, Hensley left the locker room a half hour before his tee time to warm up with a few balls at the driving range and stroke a few practice putts to get a feel for how the greens were rolling in the morning dew. He planned to calmly ascend the first tee minutes before his 7:29 a.m. start time and block everything from his mind, except striping a drive down the heart of the tight fairway.