Authors: Gil Capps
With the 1-iron in hand, Nicklaus quickly got over the ball and began his pre-shot routine. He didn’t hit the club as far as he used to—this distance was now at the maximum of his range—but the adrenaline was pumping and he knew it. He picked out an aiming spot just in front of his ball—a trick he developed playing St. Andrews during the 1970 British Open. His eyes moved along three points. Ball. Spot. Target. Spot. Ball. Spot. Target. Ball. Spot. Target. Spot. Ball. Nicklaus cocked his head to the right, took the club straight back, completed his backswing, and took a mighty lash, sending the ball straight up in the air at the flagstick. He immediately walked after it,
admittedly thinking the ball might hop in for a double eagle as it did for Gene Sarazen forty years earlier. It landed eight feet in front of the hole, took a big bounce six feet in the air, landed again just a foot of so from the back-right hole location, and rolled twelve feet by.
Nicklaus smiled and raised both his hands, dropping the club in the process. He rubbed Peterson’s head, and a grinning Peterson patted Nicklaus’s back. “I couldn’t have hit it any better,” said Nicklaus, “That might have been the best full swing I ever took.” The shot had everyone in awe, from Scully to the patrons surrounding the 15th green, who gave Nicklaus a standing ovation as he strode down the hill and onto the green. He didn’t hit the eagle putt hard enough, missing the uphill twelve footer to the right, but a tap-in birdie tied the Golden Bear for the lead again. He was back in it.
NICKLAUS WALKED
to the final par three, the 16th. Even though players hit over a pond that cut around the left side of the green, unlike Weiskopf, Nicklaus never felt like it was a dangerous hole. He had made a two there on his way to winning his first Masters in 1963, holing a crucial twelve footer to win by one. But in 1974, one off the lead in the final round, he made a critical mistake by hooking his tee shot into the left bunker and making bogey. On this day, the hole location sat in its most difficult spot, back right on a small plateau. It was nearly impossible to end up close to the hole, which was just a few feet over a ridge and sat on a crown. There had been only three birdies in forty-two tries in the final round, and if you were long or right, a bogey-four was a near certainty.
Meanwhile, even hitting to the generously wide 15th fairway, Weiskopf stuck to his game plan by taking a 3-wood off the tee. It left him several yards behind Miller’s drive. “That wasn’t normal for Weiskopf to be hitting first every hole,” says Miller. Weiskopf could still go for the green and went for it with his 1-iron. Instead of a high fade, Weiskopf’s ball drew slightly toward the left center of the green and bounced eighteen feet over. Miller, who nearly came out
of his shoes on the tee, had already hit each of the par fives in two shots and then taken two putts for birdie. He selected his 4-wood this time and hit his second to the front right of the green.
On the 16th tee, Nicklaus chose to hit a 5-iron, but he didn’t catch it cleanly. “Get up,” Nicklaus barked as the ball approached the green. It hit just a few feet right of the water and stopped quickly and short. From there, he would face a treacherous, uphill putt of forty feet. The intended line traveled just left of a pronounced ridge. And going away from Rae’s Creek, it would be extremely slow. It was a putt no one made.
Immediately after Nicklaus, Tom Watson, who by his own measure had been hitting the ball on the final nine as well as at any point all week, pulled his tee shot well left and into the water. Unsure of whether the ball crossed the margin of the hazard by the green, he walked all the way up to the green to determine it.
Weiskopf studied his third shot. “Those are tough shots over that green,” he says. The ball sat on a tight lie, and he had little green between him and the hole seventy feet away. Weiskopf carried the ball too far, and it ran more than ten feet past the hole.
After finding out his ball never crossed land, Watson walked back to the forward teeing ground for his next shot on the 16th. This forced Miller, a fidgety and quick player, to wait on his eagle putt on the adjacent 15th green. Watson proceeded to hit his third shot in the exact same area of water. He quickly dropped another ball and hit his fifth shot in the middle of the green, the ball funneling back down the slope just outside of Nicklaus’s.
After waiting more than two minutes, Miller resumed his pre-shot routine. For the first time in the tournament, he had a putt to tie for the lead. Miller missed his eagle from a little more than twenty-five feet—it just barely went by the right edge too firm. Putting into his shadow, he would make the nervy three footer for birdie.
To keep up with Nicklaus, Weiskopf faced a similar, but shorter, putt—downhill, slightly right-to-left, twelve feet. At that moment
in time, it was the biggest putt of his career. After he struck it, there wasn’t a doubt it was going to drop. Weiskopf displayed his most demonstrative reaction of the day, raising his right leg and giving an upper cut with his arm. “I’m feeling really good, really confident,” says Weiskopf. “Just like everything came together.” He retook the lead by one with three holes to play.
From his vantage point beside the water at the 16th green, Nicklaus had a lot to take in. Right hand on hip, leaning on his putter, he had watched Miller’s eagle attempt and Weiskopf’s birdie. Moments after Weiskopf’s putt, he turned his attention to Watson’s putt from nearly the same spot as his. He observed him strike his ball up the slope and saw exactly how it turned to the left at the top of the hill. Watson tapped in for his quadruple-bogey seven. Nicklaus put down his ball, walked behind, and knelt to study the putt. A three-putt bogey was more likely than him holing this putt. Even Peterson had to tend the flagstick. Just get it close and make par.
Once Miller was in for birdie at the 15th, Nicklaus stood up after his final look. For such a lengthy putt, the line had become very clear to him, about eighteen inches of break to the left. Under these circumstances, he would gladly take two putts and move onward. Suddenly, he had the silliest feeling come over him. “I think I can make this,” he thought to himself. Due to Watson’s travails on the hole, Miller and Weiskopf were now on the tee waiting.
More than eight minutes had elapsed since he’d hit his tee shot. Nicklaus now tugged on his glove and addressed his putt. His senses were heightened. Nicklaus crouched over the ball to take a single practice stroke, still seeing the line in his mind and sensing the necessary speed of the putt. Then he righted himself and looked at the line again. He told himself, “Make it.” After four glances at the hole, Nicklaus took his George Low Sportsman Wizard 600 back and hammered the ball. He watched as it weaved its way up the slope. Peterson pulled the flagstick out of the cup. It had plenty of speed, enough to go several feet by. But within two feet of the hole,
Nicklaus raised his putter in the air with his right hand and Peterson bent his knees. With a last second turn to the left, the ball hit the back of the cup and fell in.
If making the putt had been unexpected, the celebration that followed was completely unforeseen. Peterson, clutching both the flagstick and a cigarette in his left hand, jumped up and down behind the hole. Nicklaus left all stoicism behind. Turning away from the hole, he leapt in the air as well, breaking into a trot around the front of the green, as if celebrating the winning touchdown at Ohio Stadium. “I don’t often hole forty footers on the 70th hole,” he explained. He ran right off the green and on to the 17th tee, leaving Peterson to pick the ball out of the hole. Nicklaus never looked back at the tee. There was no need. It was a cruel enough blow. The dagger had been delivered to Weiskopf again.
“It’s an impossible putt—a putt you just don’t make,” says Miller.
The past can repeat itself in strange ways. Just as he had sixteen years earlier in his first round ever at Augusta National, Nicklaus played the 14th, 15th, and 16th holes bogey–birdie–birdie. This time, those scores of 5–4–2 might propel him to a fifth victory.
Johnny Miller actually didn’t see the ball go in the hole. Upon being asked after the round if he saw the putt, Miller said, “See it? I had to walk through the bear prints.”
WHY HIM?
Why did Nicklaus make that momentous putt in front of Tom Weiskopf of all people? Why did he make it when the tournament was all but Weiskopf’s to put away? And why, of all places, did he make it on the 16th—with Weiskopf left next to play the tee shot that gave him the most discomfort of any at Augusta National?
Tom Weiskopf tried not to ask himself those questions; however, after seeing Nicklaus’s putt drop in the hole, he had one. “Good gracious, how do you make that putt?” he asks. “I can’t believe he made that putt. You could stand there the rest of your life and never make that putt. But he did. That’s why he’s Jack.”
Only ninety seconds after possibly the most important holed putt of his career, a shaken Weiskopf now had to steady himself. It was as if the 44 Long green jacket was over both arms, only to rip at the seams. As Nicklaus pranced up to the 17th tee, Weiskopf poked a broken tee into the left side of the tee box—he always used a broken tee on par threes—but the spot didn’t feel right. He scoured the ground to re-tee, moving to the right. Weiskopf took some extra time tapping the ground down behind the ball with his foot.
“LeRoy, I’m thinking of a little five. I’m going to hit a high-cut 5-iron,” he initially told his caddie Schultz. “But I had 6 in mind,” he says. Pulling the 6-iron out of the bag, he addressed it behind the ball and waggled a practice swing. Then he handed it back to Schultz and picked the 5-iron. The same club he hit left into the water in the exact same position on this hole in the final round one year earlier. The same numbered club Nicklaus just hit slightly heavy.
“Whether I lost my concentration,” says Weiskopf, his voice trailing off as if still searching years later to fully explain what happened next. “I wasn’t afraid of the shot... But it’s one of those holes I never played well.” Whether because of pressure, nerves, emotions, or Nicklaus, he made his worst swing of the day, catching the ball high up on the clubface after coming down too steep on his angle of attack. He knew it immediately, staring down blankly at the divot as soon as he’d completed his follow through. It cleared the water by only a few feet and finished short of the green, some 100 feet from the hole. “It was the right club, just a bad swing,” felt Weiskopf both then and now. “I made probably four or five bad swings the whole week,” he says, “and that was one of them.”
“That was basically Jack Nicklaus making him do that,” says Miller. “That putt he made was a nasty thing for Weiskopf to see.”
Now, Weiskopf was in an even tougher spot than Nicklaus had been moments earlier. Not only was he twice as far away, but between his ball and the hole was the ridgeline that ran through the entire green. He couldn’t get around it. If the ball had been two feet
left or two feet right, he could have. He never considered chipping it. Instead, he believed his best choice was to putt the ball to the right of the ridge and try to leave it eight feet away on the top level. After walking up to the hole twice to survey the terrain, he struck the putt on his intended line but didn’t hit it hard enough. As the ball approached the hole, it lost speed and caught the wrong side of the slope, trickling down the hill toward the water before finishing eighteen feet away. The ensuing par putt was on-line as well, but he failed to hit that hard enough, too.
“I thought Tom might have trouble playing the hole, and he did,” said Nicklaus. “I knew with Tom back on the tee watching me that he was going to have a time playing the hole after I’d made a two. It turned out I was right. It was a two-shot swing, and the tournament.”
“It didn’t deflate me,” maintains Weiskopf. “I accepted the results. I have two more holes to play. Anything can happen.” But the momentum had turned.
For the second straight year, the 70th hole of the tournament had impaired Weiskopf’s chances with a bogey four. Leading by one moments earlier, he now trailed by one.
A ONE-SHOT
lead with two holes to play meant the numbers game Nicklaus was so skilled at playing returned in his favor. “Play first to win,” he thought, “which means figuring and playing the percentages.” After getting his emotions back under control on the tee, he placed his drive in the right side of the fairway at the 17th, then hit his approach shot to the center of the green, giving him a twenty footer below the hole which he lagged to four inches. On the final hole, he continued his conservative play, hitting a 3-wood off the 18th tee that finished just in the fairway on the inside of the dogleg. The hole location was cut in its customary front-left Sunday position, just seven yards over the left-front bunker. In thirty-eight Masters, only eight champions had birdied the 72nd hole. Nicklaus aimed slightly to the right of the pin with a 6-iron, which finished
hole-high eleven feet away. Watson hung back to let Nicklaus walk up by himself. “There is no more fun than coming down the last fairway neck-and-neck,” he said.
As Nicklaus was receiving a standing ovation while striding up the incline to the 18th green, Weiskopf stepped in to a birdie putt at the 17th. He had striped his 3-wood—the first time he’d tried to hit a ball really hard all day. From there, it was an aggressive short iron to the back of the green, about fifteen feet from the hole. “It was tracking,” says Weiskopf of the relatively simple uphill putt, but he left it half-a-foot short. “I hit it too easy, and it just came up short underneath the hole and broke away.”
Incredulous to what was going on around him, Miller had made par on the 16th after hitting his tee shot twenty-five feet left of the hole. All day, he had tried to catch up—like a dog chasing a car, only for the car never to run out of gas. Two solid shots on the 17th had left him in the middle of the green in a similar spot to Nicklaus, only closer. From twelve feet away, he wasted no time in reading the line, stepping into the putt, and striking it. “It was in halfway there,” says Miller, who raised his right hand up when the ball was still four feet from falling in. He was within one shot of the lead for the first time the entire week. “Now I got a shot of adrenaline after that putt went in like I’ve never had in my life,” says Miller. “My hair was standing up on the back of my neck and my arms. It was like, oh my gosh, I might finally have a chance to catch these guys. Finally.” One hole remained to complete the greatest weekend comeback in major championship history.