The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (8 page)

In the U.S. Amateur later that summer at Ridgewood (New Jersey) Country Club, Strange made it to the quarterfinals where he faced Jerry Courville of Connecticut. “I was so nervous because I knew the winner was going to the Masters,” says Strange, who was fully aware that the Masters was trimming the number of players it invited from the previous year’s U.S. Amateur from the eight quarterfinalists to the four semifinalists. Strange beat Courville, 2 and 1, to ensure his trip to the land of his father’s dreams. When the invitation came, Strange wasted no time in writing his reply to Mr. Roberts. Soon thereafter, the invitation was framed by his mother Elizabeth.

The week before the 1975 Masters, Strange teed it up in his first PGA Tour event after receiving a sponsor’s exemption to the Greater Greensboro Open, just thirty miles from the Wake Forest campus. In foul weather, Strange shot 83-75 to miss the cut by eight strokes. It wasn’t all disappointing as his mind had been drifting southward. Strange went back to Winston-Salem, stuffed his clothes and clubs in his yellow Chevy Nova, and made the three-hour drive to Augusta Saturday morning. “It was all such a blur,” says Strange, age twenty at the time. “It’s hard to put into words when you’re a college kid driving by yourself. You get in the gate, you’re driving down this lane that isn’t that long, and you pull right up at the clubhouse.”

Once in the club’s parking lot, he unloaded his bags and took them into the clubhouse. A few weeks after receiving the invitation, Strange and the other six amateurs received more correspondence
from the club—a letter offering them residence in the Crow’s Nest, just as Nicklaus and Miller had experienced.

The Crow’s Nest is a thirty-by-forty-foot room on the third floor of the clubhouse where the club allows amateurs to stay during the tournament. It was a Spartan setting. Partitions and dividers separated the twin beds in the room, and there was one common bathroom. It was like a youth hostel in golf heaven. In the mornings, the boys would climb up a ladder that led to the cupola. There, they could see the surroundings out all four sides. If it was windy or rainy, they could go back to bed. If not, they would rush to go play.

“They couldn’t provide stuff for nothing for the amateurs,” says Koch, who drove up from Gainesville, Florida, and was staying in the Crow’s Nest for the second year in a row. “They were charging $1 for breakfast, $1 for lunch, and $3 for dinner. You have complete run of the clubhouse. You can order anything you want, and you’ll get a bill. The room was like $5 a day, so like $10 a day to live there.”

In his day, Jack Nicklaus took advantage of the run of the club, particularly in the dining room where he treated it like an all-you-can-eat buffet. “After four days, they clamped down on Phil Rodgers and me, and wouldn’t let us order two steaks apiece at dinner,” says Nicklaus, “but we were still allowed a double shrimp cocktail.”

Although the accommodations and decor had hardly changed from the days when Nicklaus stayed there, for college kids living in ratty apartments and dorms, the Crow’s Nest was a step up. The club welcomed them beginning on Saturday. Strange and Koch would be joined by Craig Stadler, the 1973 U.S. Amateur champion, and Jerry Pate, the 1974 U.S. Amateur champion. “It was such a special thing to get to do, we all felt like we needed to mind our p’s and q’s so we don’t screw this thing up,” says Koch.

“I got my money’s worth down there,” says Strange, not in the realm of extra steaks, but atmosphere. Most nights Strange would sneak downstairs to the library. “When the lights went off, I went
looking at books and old pictures,” he says. Like many former guests of the Crow’s Nest, Strange absconded with his own pieces of memorabilia—a white towel and an orange juice canister with the club logo, which served as his penny jar for the next three decades.

Later that Sunday, Strange was on the golf course for the first time ever at Augusta National.

FIRST TIMERS
at Augusta National were immediately struck by two things. Upon walking out the back of the clubhouse, they noticed the property’s scale and its significant elevation change. From the high point at the 1st green to the low point at the 11th green along Rae’s Creek, there was a drop of more than 150 feet. The slope was dramatic in places. Secondly, they took in the sheer beauty of the grounds and its immaculate conditioning, much of it accomplished through sheer manpower at the time. “There wasn’t a weed anywhere,” says Ben Wright. On the course, tees were cut to 7/32 of an inch. Fairways were cut to 5/16 of an inch. Greens were cut to 1/8 of an inch. There was no rough and relatively few bunkers compared to other courses with just forty-four.

In 1975, a look at the scorecard revealed that the course played to a par of 72, at 7,020 yards in length—only 320 yards longer than when it opened. The card included a numerical oddity that the yardage of each nine was the same (3,510). There were four par three holes, four par five holes, and ten par four holes.

From there, rookies had to learn the subtleties of the course that weren’t so obvious. The course didn’t play as long as the total yardage indicated, but it did play differently from the original intent. Every hole had undergone significant changes from its original design. MacKenzie, who died just two and a half months before the first Masters and never saw the completed course, wouldn’t have recognized the game.

MacKenzie and Jones originally wanted a links-style course, but the design was outdated almost as soon as it opened. Bobby Jones played his entire career with hickory-shafted clubs, and photographs show him hitting shots with them to fairway locations and green sites during construction of Augusta National. In 1924, steel shafts in clubs were legalized by the USGA, and slowly they became the shaft of choice. Steel shafts were more durable, but they also changed the way the game was played. To maximize performance of hickory shafts, swings were slower, flatter, and handsier—the players had to wait for the clubhead to catch up with their hands at impact. This sweeping action produced lower shots, usually draws, that ran more. Steel shafts allowed players to swing harder and more upright—producing higher shots that flew farther and performed more consistently.

Many of the holes at Augusta had been laid out with the ball flight of hickory-shafted clubs in mind, and Jones’s preferred ball flight off the tee happened to be a draw. That was part of the reason so many holes moved right-to-left off the tee. Nine of the fourteen par-fours and fives at Augusta favored a draw: holes 2, 5, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, and 17. Some players, like Johnny Miller, felt not one fade was required anywhere off the tee at Augusta.

“You needed to hit a draw to give yourself access to the golf course,” says Bob Murphy, who would be playing in his seventh Masters. Draws not only got the ball around the corner on those holes, but they also found speed slots on certain holes like the 2nd, 10th, and 13th where the balls could get twenty, thirty-five, even fifty
yards extra roll. That left players the advantage of hitting significantly less club going into the greens.

When he arrived for his first Masters in 1971, Jerry Heard faded the ball. “When I got there, they were asking, ‘Heardie, how you gonna play it this week, you gonna cut it or hook it?’” he says. “I said, ‘I’m going to cut it.’ So I play my first practice round, and they said, ‘Now what are you going to do?’ And I say, ‘I’m going to hook it’.”

Bobby Nichols, teeing up in his eleventh Masters in 1975, remembers someone asking Jimmy Demaret how he ever won three times at Augusta National considering Demaret predominately played a fade. Demaret replied, “Well, if I was a hooker I’d have won six.”

Off the tee, the course didn’t so much favor longer hitters as it disenfranchised the shorter ones. With all four par fives being reachable, long hitters like Dewitt Weaver, Larry Ziegler, Weiskopf, Nicklaus, and Miller had an edge. Short hitters couldn’t reach the plateaus on some of the fairways and were hitting into the hills instead of carrying them. But at Augusta, short hitters had their advantage taken away as well. Long hitters as a group are less accurate, but wayward tee shots weren’t punished as much at Augusta. Bobby Jones, a long hitter himself, wanted no long rough on the course. Because of that, missing the fairways wasn’t punished like it was at a U.S. Open.

While length could help, first timers learned it wasn’t nearly the advantage that hitting the ball high was. “It’s not the length of the course,” said the rookie Pate. “It’s the hardness of the greens.”

The greens were grassed with Tifton 328 hybrid Bermuda, a strain of warm-season grass that thrives in the South with a wide blade and deep-root structure. But Bermuda goes dormant and turns brown after the first freeze. It doesn’t begin growing again until high temperatures reach the mid 70s. So the greens were overseeded in the fall with perennial ryegrass, a cool-season grass. April was a
shoulder month, and it was always a balancing act to keep those two different grasses in harmony during a transition period. In 1975, the Bermuda was stronger as Augusta had enjoyed a warm, wet spring thus far. Sometimes that wasn’t the case. Tough winters could kill the Bermuda and come tournament time the rye could be dying out due to weather or tournament conditions, causing the greens to quicken with sparse grass coverage (and higher scores). In warm years, though, the Bermuda could be strong enough for the grain of the grass to affect putts.

Under the right conditions, the greens, with their Bermuda base and Georgia red clay, could also get extremely firm. Balls would spin, but players were usually hitting approach shots from uneven or inconsistent lies. When dry, balls could bounce as high as six feet in the air when they hit greens. In those circumstances, the course almost played like a links, just the intent of Jones and MacKenzie, who said, “Most American greens are overwatered, and it is hoped that we will not make this mistake at Augusta.”

“The approach shots to me were very difficult,” says Koch. Most of the players in the field couldn’t carry the ball to the back hole location on the 18th, or carry it over the false fronts on the 5th or 14th holes and make their ball stop. “That’s why guys like Weiskopf, Nicklaus, and a handful of others did so well,” says Koch. “The ability to hit the ball way up in the air was a huge, huge advantage back then at that golf course.”

The fairways were also overseeded, with fescue grass being used starting in 1973. The transition period could produce inconsistent conditions that favored high-ball hitters as well. “You could have fairways that were pretty thin,” says John Mahaffey, who made his second Masters start in 1975. “It would benefit a guy like a Watson or a Nicklaus who hit the ball high and picked it. They could count on the height of the ball to stop it, not the spin.”

Once on the greens, newbies had to decipher their beguiling contours. With the overseed and time of the year, the grain of the
Bermuda grass and the effect it had on pulling balls was not as prevalent. Players tried to stay aware of the lowest point on the course, the 11th green—local knowledge that Gary Koch’s caddie imparted to him during his first start in 1974. Koch, a putting maestro growing up who was called “Drain” by other players, recalls his caddie reading the break on one putt that left him flabbergasted. “I said, ‘What, are you kidding me?’ Sure enough, it did what he said,” says Koch.

Along with the breaks, speed was also a big issue. Although nowhere near as fast as they would become decades later, for standards at the time, the greens were very quick. While downhill putts would run out, uphill putts could be really slow. “I can’t overstate how intimidating those surfaces are your first couple times there,” says Strange. Under the right conditions and if on top of their games, short hitters, low-ball hitters, and faders could all win at Augusta National. But bad putters never stood a chance.

This is the course Strange and the other first timers played as much as they could while experiencing the traditions of the club and tournament. It was hard enough for seasoned professionals to follow their normal weekly routine at the Masters. For a Tour stop, they usually arrived on a Tuesday and played a pro-am on Wednesday, followed by the event. For the Masters, however, even the pros came in Sunday or Monday, played multiple rounds, and hit more balls on the range than they normally would. Young amateurs had no chance. “By Thursday, my body had figured out something was going on here,” says Koch. “This must be way more important.”

As tradition dictated, all of the amateurs were to be paired with Masters champions. It was the hospitable thing to do—having players who know the course chaperone the youngsters around. Just as Nicklaus and Miller played with Jimmy Demaret in their first Masters rounds, each of the seven amateurs would be paired with one of the twelve Masters champions in the field. Complete first-round tee times were released Wednesday, but tournament officials publicized
eight featured pairings the day before with marquee names such as Palmer, Trevino, Player, and Weiskopf.