The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (5 page)

Finally, the tournament’s position on the calendar turned out to be key. In the beginning, a benefit was that sportswriters returning northward from baseball spring training in Florida would stop off to cover the proceedings. But being played before the U.S. Open, PGA, and Western Open, the Masters became the first big event of the year. Everyone looked forward to it with anticipation for months; thus, it was discussed and talked about more than any other. For fans across the country, it marked the start of golf season.

By 1975, the Masters was the biggest event in golf and one of the most preeminent in all of sports. And the man responsible for most of its success was Clifford Roberts.

As Chairman of both the Masters Tournament and Augusta National Golf Club, Roberts’s goal was to set the tournament apart from every other sporting event. In his book
The Story of Augusta National Golf Club
, Roberts wrote, “The Masters is operated for the single purpose of benefitting the game itself.” He was extremely meticulous, and as far as he was concerned, the word “shortcut” didn’t exist. Attention was paid to every detail. At the concession stands, even the paper cups and sandwich wrappers were green in order to blend in with the surroundings if dropped. The yellow pansies in front of the clubhouse received as much care as anything else. By 1975, more than $1 million had been spent on improvements to the tournament and course.

“Mr. Roberts was a perfectionist—110 percent,” says Bob Kletcke, a Chicago native who arrived at the club as an assistant professional in 1963 and served as co-head professional from 1967–2004. “He wanted things done the right way, and that’s the reason the Masters is what it is today.”

As the 1975 Masters approached, Roberts was eighty-one years old, and the club was doing just fine now with close to 300 members and decades removed from financial uncertainty. He had announced his intention of retiring and was in the midst of choosing a successor.
“At least forty of our members are capable of running the Masters Tournament, and they could do it better than I do,” he proclaimed during the week of the tournament. The members loved golf and being involved in the twenty-four different committees that ran the tournament, including one called the Tournament Improvements Committee comprised of seven members and ten champions.

Kletcke remembers one profound statement from Roberts: “Bob, when we stop showing the world how to put on a golf tournament, we’ll cancel it.”

All of it—the nostalgia, beauty, serenity, history, hospitality, and exclusivity—created a mystique around the Masters. When you say “the Masters” to players, they don’t think of an answer, they emote one. “It was the whole feeling that came over you when you turned off of Washington Road and went onto Magnolia Lane,” says Billy Casper. Those feelings elevated the Masters to a pedestal of importance explained best by Dave Marr: “At my first Masters, I got the feeling that if I didn’t play well, I wouldn’t go to heaven.”

Everything started with that invitation. As Emily Post wrote in 1922, “Good taste or bad is revealed in everything we are, do or have.... Rules of etiquette are nothing more than sign-posts by which we are guided to the goal of good taste.”

An invitation to the Masters was a sign of what golfers would experience their first time there. The Masters had become the best-run golf tournament in the world. It was a club you wanted to be a part of, and for young players, their first invitation was a rite of passage into golfhood. It was all quite different from 1934.

“At first, you were invited to a party, a celebration of golf, of Bob Jones,” says Johnny Miller. “Augusta was just a Bing Crosby Pro-Am. It used to be just a fun event. The next thing you know, it became this major.”

IN EARLY APRIL 1975
, Vietnam still lingered on the front pages of American newspapers. U.S. Marines gathered off shore of the
country to evacuate 6,000 people from Saigon, which was about to fall. Although it had come and gone, Watergate really hadn’t passed in the psyche of the American public. The economy was sputtering. Authorities were still searching for a female fugitive with one of the country’s most famous last names: Patricia Hearst. Amid all this, one of the country’s favorite distractions became golf.

Alan Shepard famously kicked off the decade by hitting a 6-iron on the moon in 1971. The World Golf Hall of Fame opened in 1974, just a month after another golf-loving U.S. President, Gerald Ford, moved into the White House. As air travel in the 1970s became easier and more convenient, golf in places like Florida, Arizona, and Hawaii grew alongside the spread of the condominium and time-share craze. More courses were being built, and more people were playing them. By 1975, there were more than 12 million golfers in the United States with 11,370 courses—numbers nearly triple and double what they were in 1960 respectively.

In the professional game, big, corporate money was on the brink of entering, but in 1975 tournaments were fronted by A-list celebrities who were avid golfers and arguably the most famous people in America. There was the Bob Hope Desert Classic, the Dean Martin Tucson Open, the Bing Crosby Pro-Am, the Andy Williams San Diego Open, the Glen Campbell Los Angeles Open, the Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic, the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic, and the Sammy Davis Jr. Greater Hartford Open. All these tournaments contributed millions of dollars to local charities.

Those celebrities didn’t put up the sponsorship dollars like MONY, Kemper Insurance, or Eastern Airlines—three of the few title sponsors of events that year. But their high profiles did give the game pizzazz and panache and drew interest from many people who were not inclined to follow golf. In early 1975, only the rain-plagued event in Hawaii suffered a decline in attendance from the previous year. Record crowds had already flocked to a half-dozen tour stops, from 38,000 during the final day at Tucson to 47,100 on a Sunday at Greensboro.

Even though the sport could be expensive to produce on television (upwards of $500,000 at the time, approximately ten times as much as a single ballgame), golf was gaining more exposure. Only a handful of tournaments were televised in the 1960s. In 1975, there would be a record twenty-six. Television ratings were as strong as ever with the Bing Crosby tournament in February seen in more than ten million homes. Golf was front page on most sports sections around the nation.

“Those were the glory days of golf,” says Miller.

Still, there was an innocence to the game. Big-time corporate money and sponsorships had yet to flood in. It was a fight to earn good money. “We played golf to win so we had the opportunity to make a living,” said Nicklaus. “We didn’t make our living on the golf course.... I never used it as a job. I used it as a game. I always thought if I played the game well, my financial rewards would be there, but it came because I played well.”

Deane Beman saw things differently. As the new commissioner of the Tournament Players Division (TPD), which had been formed in 1968 when the touring professionals broke away from the PGA of America (it wouldn’t be called the PGA Tour until 1976), Beman foresaw the many opportunities awaiting the tour. The marriage of corporate sponsors and television was at hand. The total purses of tournaments in 1975, of which there were forty-two official events and another nine satellite stops, reached nearly $7.9 million. Due to the recession, it was a figure lower than the last two seasons, but purses would increase this year and wouldn’t slide again until 1992 because of another economic dip.

One of Beman’s initial strikes came during his first Masters week as commissioner, which had become a time for leading officials from golf organizations all over the world to make contacts and conduct business. Beman announced the fledgling Tournament Players Championship would move to March in 1976. In addition, the World Series of Golf held in September, now owned by
the TPD and PGA, would be expanded “to serve as a true world championship,” according to PGA president Henry Poe. With that event, the Tour was moving it outside the shadow of the PGA Championship, and with the other, it was trying to out-flank the Masters.

“I think this sets the stage for a major tournament,” said Beman of the TPC. “Becoming a major tournament requires a test of time. You must have the proper organization. And obviously you have to be accepted by the players, public, and the press.” His words were soaked in irony. Augusta National had done this already, and Beman was careful to add, “I don’t think anything possibly can take away from this (the Masters) championship.”

But the more important the sport became and the more important other events tried to become, the more important the Masters remained. Even as the sport increased in popularity and other entities angled for a piece of the pie, the Masters strengthened its hold within the game.

Under that backdrop, Nicklaus, Miller, and Weiskopf made their way to Augusta, Georgia, in 1975. Right behind them were a slew of talented players, each a future Hall of Famer: Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Lee Trevino, Billy Casper, Tom Watson, Hale Irwin, Raymond Floyd, Lanny Wadkins, Tom Kite, and Hubert Green. All of these men were born within twenty years of one another, combining for sixty-six major championships and 420 PGA Tour wins by the end of their careers.

“Without a doubt, I know that I was in one of the greatest—if not the greatest—eras of players that this game will ever see,” says Weiskopf. “I’m talking shot makers. I’m talking guys who were consistently there every week.”

It was quite a field that would make up the thirty-ninth Masters Tournament.

For many Americans, however, something of significance stood out when they saw all of the men listed above. None were black.
Eleven years after passage of the Civil Rights Bill and at a time by which nearly all levels of society and culture had been integrated, black athletes had achieved upper echelon status in almost every sport. In the thirty-eight previous Masters, a total of 574 different men had received invitations from all over the world. Even though Pete Brown and Charlie Sifford had won official PGA Tour tournaments, a black golfer had never been invited to compete.

That was until January 1, 1975, when a tournament secretary stuck a ten-cent stamp on an envelope addressed to 1701 Taylor Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20011. Enclosed was an invitation for Robert Lee Elder.

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MONDAY, APRIL 7

L
ee Elder had vowed to himself never to return to the Monsanto Open. Not after the abuse he received there in 1968, his rookie year on the PGA Tour, when he wasn’t even allowed in the clubhouse. “I’m tired of being called ‘nigger’ and ‘black boy’,” he said of his treatment.

But Elder was a golfer—a black golfer—and the opportunity to play couldn’t be passed up, especially for someone yet to win on the big-time circuit. So Elder went back to Pensacola, Florida, every year until April 1974 when he again thought about skipping the tournament. It was just days after another Masters had passed—another Masters without him or any black player in the field. Even after Hank Aaron, a black athlete, had become baseball’s new home run king in Atlanta on April 8, Elder still didn’t feel motivated. But his wife Rose, who served as his manager but had to stay home for business, encouraged him to go. He had played well at Pensacola Country Club and did enjoy the course, finishing tied for 6th and tied for 10th the previous two years.

So just three days after his friend Gary Player won the Masters, Elder flew down to the Florida panhandle. With just one top-ten
on the season, he opened with 67 that Thursday afternoon—his lowest round of the year. Then he shot another subpar round of 69 on Friday and a 71 on Saturday. By Sunday’s final round, Elder had made it into the last grouping, just two back—the eleventh time he’d been within two shots of the final-round lead. Here was another chance. A chance for his first win. A chance for a Masters invitation.

The odds had to be in Elder’s favor because they were against him for so much of his life.