RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

In 1973, Johnny Miller, the golfer, committed a terrible crime. He shot a 63 in the final round of a U.S. Open to win by a shot.

Now, to the doyens of all golf, the United States Golf Assn., this was an unpardonable sin on a par with voting Communist, painting mustaches on the Mona Lisa, eating with your hat on.

Drastic action was called for. Order had to be restored. Punishment was in order.

So the USGA took the venue for the next year’s Open, Winged Foot, and carved it into a proper Hall of Horrors so no other golfer would be able to demonstrate such callous disregard for the hallowed traditions of the game.

What did they do to Winged Foot in 1974? Well, let me begin with Jack Nicklaus, who is probably Numero Uno among all who have ever played the game.

Nicklaus had won three U.S. Opens and 11 majors and about 50 tournaments in all when he teed it up at Winged Foot.

Nicklaus was probably one of the 10 best putters who ever lived. But as he lined up a 25-foot putt on the first green of the opening round that year, he looked like you and me. He putted that 25-footer. And he ended up 25 feet past the hole.

That was really all we had to know about Winged Foot that year. They had made those greens like spun glass. When Jack Nicklaus rolls a putt 25 feet past the cup, you know what you’re in for.

It wasn’t a tournament, it was a death

march. Hale Irwin didn’t win it, he survived it. The fairways were littered with the bones of competitors who didn’t.

The course was lengthened, the greens were shaved. The fourth hole was 25 yards longer and the 18th was 25 yards longer than they had been when the Open had last been played there (in 1959, when Billy Casper had won). It was demonic. “Who was the architect--the Marquis de Sade?” the writer, Bob Drum, demanded as we got our first look at the unputtable undulations.

The USGA needn’t have worried about anyone shooting a 63 over this tapestry of terror. The average score for the first round was 77.

Now, that might be OK for the Truck Drivers’ Local member-guest. But these were, certifiably, the greatest players in the world. Winged Foot leveled them to the stature of guys whose foursomes you’d want to get into and bets you’d want to take at Montalvo Municipal.

The cut was a lusty 153--13 over par.

There were 104 (count ‘em!) scores in the 80s. And 26 guys couldn’t break 80 at all. Even of the guys who made the cut, 13 had rounds in the 80s, and 41 guys couldn’t break 300.

Five former Open champions (Tony Jacklin, Gene Littler, Casper, Lee Trevino, Ken Venturi) missed the cut. One player, Bill Erfurth, shot 32 over par, which meant, effectively, that he had bogeyed every hole but two in each of his two rounds.

The carnage was so total, Dick Schaap was to write a book titled “Massacre at Winged Foot.”

It was such a miasma of missed putts, buried lies and non-negotiable sand traps (the USGA cut in enough new traps to make some holes look like the outskirts of Casablanca) that Johnny Miller, he of the 63, stood in a trap on the seventh hole and three times his explosion shot hit the lip and trickled back down to his feet. He took a quadruple bogey.

Somewhere in the clubhouse lounge, you surmised the USGA types were smiling broadly.

Miller made the cut (narrowly) but not only couldn’t fashion another 63, he could barely make a 74 (76-75-74-77--302).

Now, ordinarily, your reporter here is a big fan of double bogeys. A 63 offends me almost as much as it does the USGA. But even I began to feel the pangs of pity. I used to walk the fairways of an Open in those days hoping to stumble upon a player having to hit left-handed out of a tree trunk or faced with an unplayable lie in a clump of poison ivy, but I began to feel like Florence Nightingale abroad in a No-Man’s Land of the dead and dying.

I came upon Nicklaus on one of these forays as he was throwing a little 76 at the course one afternoon and he spotted me and stopped. “How can you stand to watch this--I can hardly stand to play it!” he said, shaking his head. Nicklaus had 136 putts over the four days, the most of anyone in the tournament.

But it had its moments. In the middle of all those bogeys, there was this young player from Missouri who looked as if he had just stepped out of the pages of Mark Twain. It was here Tom Watson (who looked more like Tom Sawyer) first served notice he was to be reckoned with. Two weeks later, at the Western Open, he was to win his first tournament.

He could also have won at Winged Foot. Tom had to claw his way into the Open that year via sectional qualifying, but he led the Open after three rounds with a 213 to Irwin’s 214. But Watson faltered to a nine-over 79 on the last day, troubled with a few smother-hooks and putts that lipped out while Irwin kept the wheels on for a creditable 73. He beat Watson by five and Forrest Fezler by two.

Fezler might have won, but, on two holes, with a sand trap between him and the green, he hit the ball short and into the trap, leaving this kind of mistake shot known to the press as “fezzling” or a “fezzle.”

A golf tournament is never one golfer against another. Your foe is the course. Hale Irwin got the cup. But Winged Foot won the tournament.

The 63 had been avenged. Incredibly, there were two more 63s on Open scoreboards--Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf shot 63s at Baltusrol in 1980--but the USGA took that in stride. The Open the next year--at Merion--was not as punitive and not one of the players surviving the cut shot in the 80s.

And, in 1984, when the Open returned to Winged Foot, only four players couldn’t break 300. Instead of seven over par, Fuzzy Zoeller and Greg Norman were four under, Zoeller winning in a playoff.

Winged Foot is still nobody’s palooka. It still may have the unkindest cut of all this week at the PGA. But the golfers will not all feel as if they have been tied to a stake and the sticks at their feet set ablaze. Or as if they should leave word with their loved ones what to do with the remains as they tee it up. Winged Foot ’74 was the Titanic of tournaments. The ultimate victory of nature over man on the golf course.