Authors: Gil Capps
“I’m not going to let it get the best of me. I’m disappointed as I possibly can be. There’s only one winner in a golf tournament. Nobody remembers who finished second. And I’m going to try to forget it. I tried the best I could.”
After speaking with the press and cleaning out his locker, Weiskopf left the course early that evening. “Oh brutal,” says Weiskopf of that night. The consolations began right away. “It
started walking in the locker room. It started with my caddie LeRoy. It started with my friends. It’s a tough game. It takes no prisoners. There were a lot of people I didn’t even know who were sad for me or John or both of us.
“I never cried, but I remember Jeanne just couldn’t stop crying for the whole night. Sometimes it’s tougher on people who are pulling for you.”
The support continued once he returned home to Columbus. “There were some unbelievable letters that I still have, from former players and friends,” says Weiskopf. He read every correspondence, even the ones from people he didn’t know. And he responded to each of them. “Something my mother beat into me,” says Weiskopf.
The silver medal he received for being runner-up would get locked away in a safe, along with the three others. Roberts even joked that a special second-place trophy should be made for him. With all the people who reached out to him, there was one person Weiskopf doesn’t remember ever hearing from: Jack Nicklaus. What could he say?
FOLLOWING THE
closing ceremony and press obligations, Nicklaus stayed at the club for a traditional dinner Roberts hosted for each winner the night of his triumph. For the intimate occasion, he, Barbara, and Jackie joined Roberts and a handful of members.
At 9:07 p.m., the club received a phone call from the White House. Nicklaus won majors during the terms of six different presidents, but only on two occasions did one call. The first was President Richard Nixon following the 1972 U.S. Open. The other was President Gerald Ford on the line this evening. President Ford talked with Nicklaus for five minutes, congratulating him on his victory. It’s debatable how much of the tournament Ford had seen since he’d been playing a round of golf himself that afternoon at Burning Tree Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland—about a twenty-minute drive from the White House. Nicklaus liked Ford, whom he played with
twice in the previous nine months, first at the World Golf Hall of Fame induction and then a month-and-a-half earlier during the pro-am for the Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic when Nicklaus blocked out the distractions of playing a five-and-a-half hour round with Ford, Gleason, and Bob Hope in front of 40,000 people to shoot a 63. The Nicklaus’s first golden retriever, Lady, was even a gift of the Ford’s.
Upon leaving that evening, it was Roberts’s turn to present Nicklaus with a surprise.
“That was the night that Cliff Roberts gave me a gift,” he says. In his car, Roberts placed a case of 1952 Lafite Rothschild and two bottles of 1945 Lafite Rothschild. It was the Jack Nicklaus of wine. “He said one for each of your future Grand Slams with the 52 and a bottle each of the 45s for each Grand Slam. Needless to say I didn’t drink any of the 45s. We did drink a couple of the 52s, but I didn’t drink them necessarily to commemorate the majors, but that was his phraseology.”
Once back at his rental house, Nicklaus went to bed.
With a smile. And a wink.
T
he next morning, nearly an inch of rain pelted down on Augusta. The conditions were not lost on Clifford Roberts. If Miller and/or Weiskopf had made their birdie putts on the 72nd hole, an 18-hole playoff would have been scheduled for Monday. Whether it would have been played was doubtful. Conducting another full round of golf was the playoff format in all four major championships at the time. Roberts wondered if an 18-hole playoff would have come close to matching the exciting climax on the 72nd hole Sunday afternoon. Was it worth the time and money of everyone involved—especially television—to come back for another day? Roberts pondered these questions, and the following February, he announced a change. There would be no more 18-hole playoffs. Instead, the Masters would be the first major to institute a sudden-death format, which would commence immediately following the conclusion of the final round. Even in triumph, officials looked for improvement.
Instead of a playoff, the tournament was basking in the glow of its magnificent finish. The best course, designed by the best architect, that hosted the best tournament had been won by the best
golfer in the best finish. The superlatives flowed from every corner of the print world.
“Even a person who would not know a drive from a bunker could not fail to feel the suspense,” wrote
The Economist
.
“The grand and glorious old Masters golf tournament, which has a way of producing dramatics so freely, has never seen a day like yesterday,” wrote Ron Green in the
Charlotte News
.
“(It) will become the measuring stick for golfing drama,” claimed Hubert Mizell in the
St. Petersburg Times
.
“There has never been a better finish than this in the history of golf,” said the esteemed golf writer Herbert Warren Wind.
“It possibly could have been the greatest Masters, or any tournament, ever played,” wrote Robert Eubanks on the front page of the
Augusta Chronicle
.
Back in the CBS offices in New York City, executives anxiously awaited the national household ratings from the Nielsen Company to be delivered four days later. The weather on Sunday had been good across most of the country, cool but sunny along the East Coast. Good weather meant more people enjoying outside activities, resulting sometimes in lower figures. That wasn’t the case this time. The two-hour broadcast earned an 11.9 rating (35 share)—at the time, the highest in Masters history. Even by 2013, it remained the third-highest behind a 14.1 in 1997 and a 13.3 in 2001.
In the United States, an estimated 15 million people had witnessed the two hours of drama that Frank Chirkinian considered his masterpiece. Chirkinian, who died in 2011, felt it was the best broadcast moment in which he’d ever been involved.
The centerpiece of the show had been an exchange between Ben Wright at the 15th hole and Henry Longhurst at the 16th. There was irony that two men who were from the same county in England and members of the same club, Aspley Guise & Woburn Sands Golf Club in Milton Keynes, played such leading roles. Wright had always looked up to Longhurst, who mentored him
and had suggested to BBC management in 1967 that he be promoted from radio to TV. Until that Sunday, the two had never played off one another in such a seamless way as if each was writing the other’s lines.
The by-play ensued after Weiskopf ran in his birdie putt on the 15th. “Oh. What a tremendous putt by Tom Weiskopf,” said Wright, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as Chirkinian went to an image of Nicklaus on the 16th. “And that is going to be evil music ringing in Nicklaus’s ears.”
Barely a minute later Nicklaus struck his putt at the 16th. “Now up the hill...,” rumbled Longhurst with his gravelly voice. “Uh-oh, did you ever seen one like that? I think that’s one of the greatest putts I’ve ever seen in my life.”
As Nicklaus jogged off the green, Chirkinian cut to a camera showing the final twosome. “Back on the tee,” Longhurst continued, “Weiskopf has to take it this time having dished it out on the hole before. I never saw such a putt in my life.”
“I shall never forget that exchange with Longhurst,” says Wright, who would work twenty more Masters. Longhurst passed away from cancer in 1978. “People ask me what was the most exciting thing you ever did,” says Wright, “and I say, well, maybe ’86 because of the circumstances. But for sheer, unadulterated excitement in that three of the best players ever to play the game came down the stretch with each one of them having a chance to win, ’75 has to be it.”
Vin Scully would be remembered for what he didn’t say. After setting the scene for Miller and Weiskopf—with Chirkinian mixing in shots of Nicklaus staring out of the scoring tent, something he’d done throughout the day—Scully said, “So it is that simple, the roll of the putt.” He then took the microphone attached to his headset and flipped it above his forehead to, as he says, “make sure I wouldn’t step on the moment which I thought was absolutely supreme. Best thing I ever did was shut up,” he says. “I don’t have a trademark, but if I did, I think it would be laying out.”
Scully would call seven more Masters, all the while still keeping his day job with the Dodgers, before moving networks to NBC in 1983. None of them resonate like his first. “Ask me about all the others, and I probably couldn’t remember,” he says. For Scully, the roars coming from the base of the bowl still echo, as well as the silence when the final pair stood on the 72nd green. Nicklaus’s shots at the 15th and 16th holes are vividly etched in his memory. There’s even a print of Nicklaus’s putt at the 16th hanging in his home in southern California. “It seems like it was from forever,” he says. “I will never forget that.”
The images composed by Chirkinian, associate producer Chuck Will, and the rest of the crew had an effect even they couldn’t have imagined. Their show proved golf could be fast-paced. Golf could be exciting. Golf could be cool. The broadcast was Emmy nominated for Outstanding Live Sports Special for that year (beaten out by Carlton Fisk’s home run in Game 6 of the World Series), and Scully was nominated for Outstanding Sports Personality (he would earn the academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award twenty years later).
Still, it wasn’t an hour after the broadcast when Roberts entered the television compound, suggesting a new camera position for the 16th hole in 1976. Chirkinian’s fascination with the place reached even higher plateaus. The following year, he moved to Augusta. But the actors and the scene would never be as compelling as that Sunday afternoon in 1975.
Over the years when Will and Chirkinian traveled together, Chirkinian would nap on planes. When he awoke Will, hoping he was in a good mood, would often ask: “I hope you were dreaming of the ’75 Masters.” Chirkinian would reply: “Dreaming you guys wouldn’t mess it up.”
IN CLIFF ROBERTS’S
eyes, it had to have been the best Masters, but publicly no one would ever know. “The club’s philosophy was every Masters was the greatest tournament,” says Bob Kletcke.
“There was never any talk of this is the greatest Masters of them all or this was the worst. They were all on equal level.”
Later, Roberts came close to revealing his opinion in his introduction to the official 1975 Masters film. “It’s been forty-one years since the Masters Tournament was inaugurated,” he spoke in a slow, deliberate delivery. “Many patrons of the game seem to think the 1975 Masters was the best ever. It’s not for us, however, to make such a distinction.... I’ll cheerfully admit, however, that having Nicklaus, Weiskopf, and Johnny Miller arriving at the 18th green separated by a single putt was something a bit special.”
The winner of the 1975 Masters was, in fact, the Masters itself.
“The ’75 Masters did a lot to enhance its importance,” says Wright. “It was so exciting that it started to elevate golf to a major sport, rather than a minor one.”
“It was the first tournament I ever watched,” says Brandel Chamblee, who’d taken up the game just a month earlier. Afterward, the twelve-year-old ran out to the backyard and tore up his father’s grass by copying the three players’ swings until sundown. “It was maybe the greatest moment in the history of golf,” he says.
Roberts passed away in September 1977, taking his own life below the par three course. After his death, future chairmen continued to balance the tournament’s traditions with the need for refinement and progress. On the course, grasses on the greens were changed, holes were lengthened, more trees were planted, and even a cut of rough was added. Everything grew: televised hours, credentialed press, fan interest, sponsors, purses, etc. Even so, nothing diluted the stature of the tournament.
The Masters had become the biggest ship in the harbor of golf. The majors Jack Nicklaus coveted so much kept increasing in importance. And when the tide rose, the Masters ship remained floating above everything else. “The Masters is pretty magical, the stuff that people pull off there,” says Miller. In 1976, the U.S. Open would finally be played in the Southeast, at Jones’s home club, the Atlanta
Athletic Club. Five years after his death, Jones’s dream would be realized. But the USGA was forty-two years too late. The other tournament in Georgia had already eclipsed it.
The club no longer had to address the question of when a black player would compete in the Masters, although the issues of race (and gender) at Augusta National and in golf continued to arise. Just days later, Lee Elder returned to Pensacola, the place where his Masters journey had begun twelve months earlier. In defense of his title, he finished a respectable tie for 10th. Elder would win three more times on the PGA Tour and play in another five Masters, his best finish a tie for 17th four years later. On Tour, his best year came in 1978 when he defeated Lee Trevino in a playoff at Milwaukee and birdied the final hole at Hartford to win by one. In 1979, he became the first black golfer to play on the U.S. Ryder Cup team.
In the dozen years following the 1975 Masters, Calvin Peete and Jim Thorpe were the only other black players to earn invitations to the tournament. For many reasons, the number of black golfers on Tour didn’t rise; it declined. On December 30, 1975—eight-and-a-half months following the tournament—a black father and Thai mother welcomed a new infant into the world 2,060 miles away. Nineteen years later, a Masters invitation would be addressed to him, the next player who would truly challenge Jack Nicklaus’s marks in the record book: Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, 6704 Teakwood Street, Cypress, California 90630.