The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (21 page)

Allen Miller had been playing with Snead and became a single on the inward nine. A 75 dropped him from tied for 2nd to a tie for 15th. Snead’s nephew J.C. was stalled by a shaky driver. He made just one birdie and one bogey for a round of 72 to get in at three under par.

Lee Trevino felt the wet conditions continued to benefit him, allowing him to control his fade and occasional hook better. Trevino birdied the tough par-four 5th, as well as the 7th and 15th holes. He didn’t make a bogey until the final hole when he hooked a 4-iron into the front bunker and couldn’t get up and down. “I’ve had great success hooking the ball with my driver. I’ve been doing it well with my woods, but not so well with my irons,” he said. His opening scores of 71–70 marked the first time he shot consecutive rounds under par at the Masters and his best start ever in the tournament.

For opening round leader Bobby Nichols, the toughest part about Friday was Thursday night. “You think about what you want to do
the next day, what may happen, what you hope doesn’t happen,” says Nichols, who had his wife Nancy and three children with him in a rental house. “It’s all anxiety, no doubt about it. It’s hard to sleep. If you do, you wake up a lot.”

Even for someone who had won eleven times, the status of being a leader in the Masters was daunting. “I was a little jittery this morning, and I three-putted the 1st hole,” he said. “After that, I had trouble getting the ball to the hole.” He seemed to right the ship after a birdie at the 7th, but a missed that two-and-a-half footer at the 8th was backbreaking. “That really shook me up because it was such an easy putt,” he said. The second nine wasn’t much better with a bogey at the 10th after two hooked shots into the trees and three-putt greens at the 12th and 13th. “I played awful,” he said. “I just put too much pressure on my putter.” Taking thirty-three putts, he shot 74.

Joining Nichols, Trevino, and Snead at three under were three other players. Pat Fitzsimons, in his first Masters after winning the Los Angeles Open in February, shot a bogey-free 68 to jump twenty-eight places up the leaderboard from a tie for 33rd to a tie for 5th. Homero Blancas, a ten-year veteran with five PGA Tour wins, also got to 141 with a 69, an unexpected score for the Houstonian who had been struggling on Tour until an impromptu swing lesson from 1968 Masters champion Bob Goalby on the range in Jacksonville three weeks earlier helped straighten out his driving.

The sixth player at 141 thought as well as he’d played, that’s the worst total he could have shot.

TOM WEISKOPF GOT
up early for his 10:26 a.m. tee time at the private house where he, his wife Jeanne, and two young children Heidi, four, and Eric, two, were staying. Weiskopf enjoyed the private lodging. They always ate in because if they went out to restaurants, Weiskopf says, “The fans would just wear you out.”

Drizzle early Friday morning gave way to sunshine by afternoon, although temperatures remained cooler than average with highs still
in the mid 60s. Balls were still stopping on greens in places they normally wouldn’t, and players were still leaving putts short that would usually run out beyond the hole. With the dampness of the course, however, officials hadn’t been able to cut the fairways as close as in previous years. The combination of longer grass with the moisture could cause balls to climb up the clubface, meaning shots were more difficult to control and could go farther than intended.

“You really couldn’t shoot at the pins, although you know the greens will hold. With the grass being wet, you can’t take the chance of knocking the ball over the green or to the right and making bogey or double bogey,” said Weiskopf.

Adjustments under different conditions were part of the game, and that’s why veterans of Augusta National such as Weiskopf had such an advantage.

Weiskopf played early in the worst conditions of the lingering rain. After birdies at the 2nd and the 6th, Weiskopf climbed into the lead by himself at five under for the tournament. But he caught two bad breaks coming in.

On the dogleg left 13th, his drive went through the fairway and landed in front of a pine cone. He tried to hit a low 2-iron up the fairway, but the ball jumped straight up and hit a tree. Then on the 15th, he hit a long drive down the fairway, but it wound up on one of a series of mounds on the right side. They may not have been hazards, but they could be penal. The mounds had been added in 1969—a move to prevent longer players (like Jack Nicklaus) from blasting it down the slope on that side and having a short second shot (Nicklaus once hit as little as an 8-iron into the green). Officials wanted to make players think off the tee and in the fairway. Even with the uneven lie, Weiskopf decided to go for it, but hit the ball fat and into the middle of the pond. Of all the shots he would hit that week, it was the one he wished he could have back.

“Making two bogeys on two reachable holes is like throwing four shots away, especially when you look at my length,” said Weiskopf.
“The thing is that I can reach these holes. I look at the course as a par 70. Two holes, the 8th and 15th, really are par fives because it’s hard to hold the 15th green. That makes it a 70.”

Weiskopf would have liked to have been holing more putts; otherwise, he was pleased with his game. He hit a 3-wood left on the 18th, but managed to get a 3-iron to the front of the green and two-putt for par. The even-par round of 72 was his sixth consecutive score of par or better at Augusta National.

After he was done, Weiskopf considered his position, which would be a six-way tie for 5th at the end of the day. He referenced Nicklaus, who teed off more than three hours after him, three times in his post-round presser and thought about him once more. He asked, “Right now, what is Jack doing out there?”

MORNING BROKE IN
the Nicklaus’s rental house that served as their home away from home. The house was shared annually by two other couples: good friends Pandel and Janice Savic and John and Nancy Montgomery. Each morning, Barbara Nicklaus cooked her husband the same meal – a cheese omelet.

This Friday was their son Steve’s twelfth birthday, but he wasn’t there. Instead, Steve was back in their North Palm Beach, Florida, house. The Nicklauses had five children, the others being: Jackie, age thirteen; Nan, a month away from turning ten; Gary, age six; and Michael, twenty-one months. “We really never took the children to the Masters,” says Barbara Nicklaus. “We all knew the word major.” The only child with them was their oldest, who was in love with golf and asked to come. Jackie had made his first trip to the Masters at age ten in 1972 and watched his dad win.

Barbara Nicklaus walked every round with her husband. She had her own route around Augusta National, and Jack always knew where she was in the gallery. It had been that way from the beginning, although she initially knew nothing about golf. They met during the first week of school as freshmen at Ohio State. They were
engaged on Christmas Eve in 1959. They were married just five weeks after the 1960 U.S. Open during the weekend of the PGA Championship, the one tournament as an amateur he couldn’t play.

Barbara held the house together. “That enabled Nicklaus to be the golfer that he was because he had that incredible support,” says Wright. “Saint Barbara,” as Weiskopf calls her.

“My dad and Jones and Jack Grout and Bob Kepler, my golf coach at Ohio State, all had an influence on how I handled myself and how I handled what success I had,” says Nicklaus. “My wife had a lot to do with that. The people I was around all gave me good advice on how to handle yourself and treat other people, which I suppose if you hit me over the head enough times with a two-by-four I’ll learn something.”

“I’d hate to think what my life would have been had I not married Barbara Bash,” he said.

The night before, Jerry Heard had been at his own rental house with his wife Nancy. While they were cooking steaks with friends, a call was placed to the club to see who Heard would be playing with. His friend came back chuckling. “What are you laughing at,” said Heard. “Who I got?” “Nicklaus” was the reply. “You gotta be kidding me,” said Heard, who had opened with a 71. “Geez, I’m just trying to have a nice little Masters here.”

Heard had a while to think about it. They didn’t go off until 1:35 p.m., the thirty-second of thirty-eight twosomes. Before they even teed off, Nicklaus had moved up the leaderboard. “I was tied for the lead and had not made a birdie yet,” said Nicklaus. “I figured if I could get something going, I would have a good chance of opening up a lead.” Nicklaus was one of those who felt the hole locations were easier on this day, but there was a little bit of wind and the wet grass could be tricky. Earlier in the day, Chi Chi Rodriguez had been asked when the rain would stop. He replied, “When Nicklaus tees it up.” On cue, the sun came out just as he started.

“You get up on the first tee, and Jiminy Christmas, everybody’s out. I remember looking down there, and it was wall to wall,” says Heard. “Jack was wonderful to play with.”

Even with a solid ball-striking round, Nicklaus’s thirty-six putts the previous day hadn’t made him happy. He knew how to putt the Augusta National greens, especially with his secret weapon in the bag: the George Low Sportsman Wizard 600 putter.

At the start of his career, Nicklaus used an old-fashioned hickory-shafted putter made for him at the famed Ben Sayers golf shop in North Berwick, Scotland, while he was there for the 1959 Walker Cup at nearby Muirfield. It won him two U.S. Amateurs and an NCAA crown, but at only thirteen ounces in weight, it was too light in Nicklaus’s hands for pro tournaments on quicker greens. In his first five starts as a professional on Tour in 1962, he didn’t take less than thirty-three putts in any round and his scoring average was a pedestrian 72.0 per round. Worse yet, he hadn’t been in contention at all.

Coming off a final-round 75 in Palm Springs, Nicklaus was frustrated as ever and ran into George Low at the Phoenix Open. Low was a former Tour player known for his large size, his humorous banter, and his nomadic existence. Within the inner circle of touring professionals, he was recognized as the world’s best putter. In the 1950s, Low contracted with Sportsman’s Golf, a company located in Melrose Park, Illinois, and founded in 1948 by four brothers named Hansberger, to design a line of Wizard putters under the Sportsman and Bristol brands. “I understand you’re struggling with your putting,” Low told Nicklaus. “You can’t putt with that old light putter.” Low escorted him into the pro shop at Phoenix Country Club, grabbed a Sportsman Wizard 600 autographed model off the rack, and stuck it in Nicklaus’s hands.

It was a blade putter, somewhat similar to the head of his Sayers stick, but with a thick flange on the back and much heavier. It had a notch on the top—Nicklaus later added a second for alignment and
painted it red. Nicklaus shot a 64 in the following pro-am. The putter just felt right in his hands: thirty-five inches long with a blade three-and-a-half-inches wide. Nicklaus finished tied for 2nd that week in Phoenix and went on to record three wins and sixteen top-tens in the remaining twenty-one starts of his rookie season on Tour.

Over the next four years, Nicklaus rode the putter to victory twenty times, including four majors, but by 1966 he sidelined the Sportsman. He first tried out a Slazenger model, a near duplicate of his Wizard with lead tape on the head for balance. He won the 1966 Masters with that putter. The Sportsman returned briefly, winning the 1966 British Open, before Nicklaus gave a Ping model a run. Then during the week of the 1967 U.S. Open, he developed an attraction for a center-shafted Bullseye putter Deane Beman was using. A friend had the same putter, although it had been painted white to reduce the sun’s glare. Nicklaus took it and shot an unheard of 62 in a practice round at Baltusrol Golf Club the next day. “White Fang,” as it was nicknamed, won him that Open but stayed in the bag for only a year and a half before the Sportsman was resurrected. Since then, it had notched five more professional majors for Nicklaus.

Nicklaus’s style was one in which he hunched over with a slightly open stance to see the line. But his putting prowess wasn’t as much technique as it was feel and mental approach.

“When Jack had a huge putt coming up, he’d be standing off to the side, very relaxed,” says Bob Murphy. “There was no tension. There was no practicing the putting stroke. It didn’t mean anything. What meant something was the mental process when he started into that putt. It was only going in.”

“He had unbelievable distance control,” says Johnny Miller. “He always left himself a tap-in if it didn’t go in.” Nicklaus never struck a careless putt, but Miller also had another theory about Nicklaus on the greens: “He was more dangerous from eighteen to twenty-five feet than he was from ten or twelve feet. I think he thought the putts that were eighteen to twenty-five feet, which is where he would hit
it a lot playing safe on iron shots, I think he felt more like this is a bonus if I make it where if you knock it eight feet you’re supposed to make it. He was lethal on longer putts. He was probably the best ever at making a twenty footer.”

Nicklaus, who always kept his golf glove on his left hand when putting—most players, including Miller and Weiskopf, took theirs off for better feel—rolled in a six-foot birdie putt on the par-three 6th followed by a seven-foot birdie putt after hitting the flagstick with his approach shot on the straightaway par-four 7th. He went out in 34.

Then he came to the 11th hole, the beginning of the most famous three-hole stretch in golf. In a
Sports Illustrated
piece in 1958, Herbert Warren Wind had labeled it “Amen Corner” because that’s where all the action had taken place that year. Wind took the name from a jazz recording “Shouting at Amen Corner” by a Chicago clarinetist named Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow. Located at the bottom of the course, the three holes presented 1,050 total yards of danger with water in play on every full shot from the fairway at the 11th to the green at the 13th. Just two hours earlier, Palmer had played the trio in two over par. “I always respected the problems you could have with the second shot at 11 and (the tee shot) at 12,” says Nicklaus of the pond left of the green on the 11th and Rae’s Creek in front of the 12th.