The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (3 page)

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Thomas Daniel Weiskopf was not an ordinary first-time invitee to the Masters, not in the mold of Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, or other youngsters. He wasn’t a wide-eyed teenager—he was twenty-five years old and married. He wasn’t an amateur—he was in his fourth year as a professional on tour. He wasn’t an after-thought—he was a favorite with, in his mind, a good chance to win. In 1968, Tom Weiskopf pulled into Augusta National for his first Masters as the leading money winner on the PGA Tour with thirty-one of his last thirty-three rounds at par or better and a victory already on his resume.

Weiskopf received his initial invitation by finishing in the top-sixteen of the previous year’s U.S. Open, just as Miller had the season before. With a 15th place finish at Baltusrol, Weiskopf was well aware that he was headed to Augusta. So it wasn’t a surprise when the invitation arrived at his English Tudor house with a large walnut tree in the front yard—a little over two miles from the address where Nicklaus received his first invitation. Weiskopf responded just as his mother and father taught him. A prompt reply in the affirmative was sent to the club.

“It’s a place that you’re familiar with even though you’ve never been there before,” says Weiskopf. “You watch it on TV, what has happened good and bad to everybody. And you just don’t forget those things.”

The course was everything he thought it would be when he experienced it for the first time during a practice round on Thursday, March 21. In the next morning’s
Augusta Chronicle
, Robert Eubanks wrote prophetically: “Tom Weiskopf, the man with the long frame and an even longer game, Thursday decided to strike up an acquaintance with the Augusta National Golf Course which promises to be a lengthy friendship.”

“It was the best hole-after-hole, shot-after-shot, risk-reward championship golf course I’d ever played,” says Weiskopf. “It
defines parkland golf.” He was struck by its beauty—some of the early blooming plants were just beginning to show their colors—and the uniqueness of each hole. His formal education of the game had taken place on the Scarlet Course at Ohio State University—an Alister MacKenzie design just like Augusta National. “There were a lot of characteristics that were duplicated in various ways,” says Weiskopf. “A lot of similarities—green contours, false fronts, false sides, big greens, bunker placement, wide fairways, big golf course. It really fit my game, there’s no doubt about that.”

Weiskopf played one of his practice rounds that week with Nicklaus, a fellow Buckeye nearly three years his senior. Bobby Jones was riding around in a golf cart on the second nine, and Nicklaus introduced them. “It’s always impressive to me when you met these icons and they know about you,” says Weiskopf. Jones asked him about Columbus, Ohio State, and the putt that gave Weiskopf his first win on the PGA Tour at the inaugural San Diego Open two months earlier. Tied for the lead coming into the 72nd hole at Torrey Pines, Weiskopf rolled in a twenty-five-foot putt for eagle on the par five for his maiden title. But Jones didn’t mention March when results hadn’t gone his way. At Doral, Weiskopf bogeyed his final two holes in the final round to finish a shot behind Gardner Dickinson. The next week at the Citrus Open in Orlando, he missed an eight-foot birdie putt on the 71st hole to finish a shot behind Dan Sikes. The stats showed seven top-three finishes in his career, but just one win.

Aware that outside the first Masters only Gene Sarazen in 1935 had won in his initial try, Weiskopf teed off in the opening round of the 1968 tournament at 10:03 a.m. paired with Canadian George Knudson. While he took advantage of the par fives with his length, making birdie on three of the four, Weiskopf struggled on the par threes, bogeying all four of them—the 4th, 6th, 12th, and 16th. He shot 74. Just as those before him, inexperience bit Weiskopf. No matter the talent, there was a reason that since the first two tournaments,
no first-time participant had won the Masters. “I probably didn’t realize the little nuances, the little things that only experience can give you until after my second year,” says Weiskopf, who shot under par the rest of the way (71–69–71) to finish in a respectable tie for 16th.

Just like for other first-timers, it was a week of celebration. He and his wife Jeanne rented a house. His mother, father, and brother came down from Ohio along with some friends. But trepidation tinged Weiskopf’s Masters week.

At the time, every American male between ages 18–25 was eligible to be drafted into the U.S. Army. If chosen by Selective Service, young men were required to go before local draft boards and submit to physicals. Each month, thousands were being conscripted into active duty to serve in Vietnam as long as they met the physical, mental, and moral standards of the board. When Jack Nicklaus, still a college student, informed his local draft board of his marriage in 1960, they told him they would never see him again. After the birth of his first child in 1961, they were right as men with families were exempt. Johnny Miller’s number had come up while at BYU, but during his physical doctors noticed a fresh scar on his left knee. Miller had suffered a torn meniscus while playing intramural football, and the stitches from his surgery had just been taken out. Both were classified 4-F: not available for any military service.

Weiskopf underwent his initial physical in 1963 shortly after leaving Ohio State. The Army classified him as 1-Y. He wasn’t given a reason why, but the classification was usually given to men who had minor physical ailments or injuries that were limiting in nature but not disabling. This meant he wasn’t available for military service but did qualify for duty in the event of war or a national emergency.

By April 1968, the situation in Vietnam was looking more dire. The Tet Offensive launched by the North Vietnamese two months earlier was taking its toll on U.S. troops in South Vietnam. Just
before the Masters, Weiskopf received the same notification that thousands of other 1-Ys would in the coming weeks. His classification had been rescinded. Weiskopf was married and six months shy of turning twenty-six years old when he would be free-and-clear of any service obligations. Instead, he was now going to be either 4-F, like Nicklaus and Miller had been, or 1-A, available immediately for military service. The Army originally scheduled his physical on the Tuesday of Masters week, but deferred it until the following month. Weiskopf would have to wait until then to find out when his next trip to Augusta would be.

BY 1975, INVITATIONS WERE
a foregone conclusion for this triumvirate. Going into the 1975 Masters, these men were the top-three players in golf—and the three most talented. They had combined to win six of the thirteen tournaments so far that year. Miller was first on the money list with $128,226, Nicklaus second with $109,242, and Weiskopf third with $91,238.

In 1959, Jack Nicklaus was a year removed from playing high school sports for the Upper Arlington High School Golden Bears. Now, Jack Nicklaus was known as the Golden Bear. His career took off following that 1959 Masters and hadn’t stopped. Now thirty-five years old and in his fourteenth year as a professional, his resume listed four Master titles, twelve major championships, fifty-six PGA Tour wins, and $2.3 million in career earnings on the PGA Tour. He could still hit it far but had long since learned how to hole clutch putts and utilize his mental strengths. These qualities had brought him fame, fortune, and universal acknowledgment as the game’s best player—until 1975.

Now challenging his position was Johnny Miller. The twenty-seven-year-old had come a long way from the scrawny, undersized teenage beanpole he was eight years earlier. Miller was the hottest player in golf with eleven PGA Tour wins in the previous fifteen months. He’d won the 1973 U.S. Open with a 63 in the final round—
the lowest round ever in a major championship. Miller had everything going for him except a Masters title.

And no golfer in the world looked better swinging a club than Tom Weiskopf. In what was still the prime of his career at age thirty-two, Weiskopf’s up-and-down struggles with obstacles of his own making, as well as those outside his control, were well known. His eleven career wins, including the 1973 British Open, didn’t match the pundits’ expectations. But in the preceding weeks, his game had risen once again with strong play and a long-overdue win. Now it was off to his favorite course, and arguably, the most famous golf tournament in the world.

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THE MASTERS

A
s during the previous two decades, Masters week in 1975 started the Sunday before…with a thud. That’s when the weighty
Sunday Chronicle-Herald
landed on doorsteps and in newspaper racks across the city. Folded inside was its annual Masters Edition supplement.

The
Augusta Chronicle
was Augusta’s morning newspaper. Its masthead proudly boasted: “The South’s Oldest Newspaper—Established 1785.” It had in fact started as the
Augusta Gazette
190 years earlier as one of the first newspapers in the country. In 1955, William S. Morris, Jr., bought outright control of the
Chronicle
and also purchased the
Augusta Herald
, the city’s afternoon paper. Soon thereafter, the two papers would combine Sunday publication.

Under Morris, the paper began producing this all-encompassing tournament preview in the Sunday edition leading into Masters week. Months went into the planning, selling, writing, design, and editing of the special sections. On April 6, 1975, it tallied forty-eight pages in four different sections for subscribers and anyone putting down thirty-five cents for a copy. Executives at the paper believed it was the largest annual special section dedicated to a sporting event in the world.

Inside, readers found stories touching on each of the seventy-six players in the field, past Masters tournaments, and the course. And there were advertisements. In the Masters Edition alone, there were 202 different display ads with another 119 in a classified directory. On the bottom right of page 10E, Wickes Lumber offered to wood panel an interior twelve-by-twelve-foot room of your house for $31.08. On 2F, Shoney’s promoted a curb-and-carry-out special: two of its Big Boy sandwiches for $1. On the bottom right of page 11G, Goodyear advertised their lube and oil change for just $4.44. And in a full page on 12F, Piggly Wiggly of Georgia used clip art images of the Statue of Liberty and a golf ball to announce: “We salute...the Masters Golf Tournament, another great example of the fruits of America’s free enterprise system. When a few men can conceive, finance, and build a dream...we all benefit from it.”

The newspaper was the one remaining connection that many Augustans had to the tournament. Sure, locals interacted with visitors as they spent money at hotels and restaurants, and there were those who still attended the tournament. But there were no more nights filled with formal balls or concerts or boxing matches. The Masters Parade and Miss Golf Pageant ended in the mid-1960s. Now, the tournament didn’t need the promotion, nor the ticket sales. The grand hotels like the Bon Air, in which the Hogans and the Nelsons and the Nicklauses stayed, had shuttered years earlier. Northerners stopped vacationing in Augusta decades ago; Florida was their destination now. Contestants rented private houses for the week (the going rate around $1,000 and up) and spent less time eating out and socializing. The Masters had become so successful that it had outgrown the city, which had given the club $10,000 to help put on the first tournament in 1934.

City officials still used the tournament to recruit businesses, but Augusta had changed as well. Downtown merchants had moved to the suburbs, and the city’s population, split almost equally between
whites and blacks, was still grappling with the remnants of segregation. Bitterness over court-ordered integration and school busing lingered, as well as wounds from a 1970 riot in which six black men were killed following the death of another black man while in police custody.