The Shot of His Life

By Tom Callahan

Chipping away at history, Tom Watson takes the Open at last

"He plays a game with which I am not familiar." --Bobby Jones, describing young Jack Nicklaus

Tom Watson plays a game of golf with which Jack Nicklaus--and no one else--is familiar. These two can look at each other now and see where they are going and where they have been. In the 1977 British Open at Turnberry, Scotland, Nicklaus and Watson crossed a dark moor together and came out Watson and Nicklaus. To Jack's 68, 70, 65 and 66, Tom shot 68, 70, 65 and 65, erasing any doubts about whether his Masters victory that year was a fluke, and taking over as the best golfer in the world. Watson has been the best ever since, and he proved it in just about every way, except the one way that came to matter most to him.

Watson never could win the U.S. Open.

But last week he did.

Now it is definite that whenever and wherever men beat sticks against the ground, they will remember Tom Watson, and they will probably also recall a 16-ft. chip shot from a fluffy clump of rough by the 17th green at Pebble Beach.

When the shot miraculously dropped, Watson ran off his tension and excitement, galloping around the edge of the green with his head tossed back like a chestnut colt's. "All I saw was him running around," said Nicklaus, who had completed his own play and was watching a television monitor near the 18th green. "At first I thought he had flipped out, because I couldn't imagine anyone holing it from there." After Watson had plotted a careful par at 18, only happening to make the birdie putt for a two-shot victory, there was Nicklaus waiting at the last green. They walked off with their arms thrown around each other's shoulders. "I'm proud of you, I'm pleased for you," Nicklaus said. Asked to say what quality in Watson he most admired, Nicklaus replied: "I'd say his mental toughness. Tom's a good, tough competitor who doesn't like to lose."

Watson being a Stanford man, Pebble Beach on northern California's shiny Monterey peninsula was a natural setting of his dreams. But the Open was an annual occasion for his nightmares. In 1974 freckled Tom Sawyer-Watson, 24, from Kansas City, led the Open at Winged Foot, Mamaroneck, N.Y., at the end of three rounds but then faltered miserably.

Two weeks later Watson came back to win his first professional golf tournament, the Western Open. "My goal," he baldly announced after that one victory, "is to be the best golfer in the world." The following spring at Medinah, Ill., Watson's next Open experience was even crueler--after he established a 36-hole record for an Open, his game collapsed again--and something close to a phobia took hold.

It is said around golf that anyone who intends to win the Open is advised to do so early on. The very first tour victories of Nicklaus and Lee Trevino were Opens; Sam Snead never did win one. "I can't make it happen," Watson eventually concluded, after painful failures. "I have to let it happen." When it did, the release it brought him was something to see. "If you're there by quirk or luck," Watson says, "you're not nervous the same way you are when you are playing well and know you can win. Then you are really nervous."

No such nervousness showed at the 17th hole as Watson drew back his sand wedge, opened the face of the club and slid it under the ball. "When the ball hit the green, I said, 'That's in the hole.' I just about jumped into the Pacific Ocean."

With complete accuracy, he added:"That was the best shot of my life." He has won so much money playing golf, nearly $3 million, that for once the money involved was forgotten by every one. Some golfers are playing for something other than money. If you guaranteed some of them second place, they would not even bother to show up.

There are two like that, actually.

"I like these confrontations,"said Nicklaus, who has won four U.S. Opens and finished second four times. "I like to think that I can work hard enough at it the next few years to have a few more."

--By Tom Callahan

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.