Watson Was in Deep Before Making Chip

Best shot to win a U.S. Open?

Here’s a candidate: Tom Watson’s chip on the 17th at Pebble Beach, 17 years ago today.

With Jack Nicklaus finished, thinking he had wrapped this one up, Watson inspected his lie. He was in deep grass, looking steeply downhill to the cup, figuring on a break of a foot and a half.

He said to his caddie, Bruce Edwards: “I’m not going to try and get it close. I’m going to make it.”

He softly lifted the ball with a wedge, watched it land first on the fringe and even before it rolled into the cup, said to Edwards: “I told you.”

It did go in, and everyone who saw it was stunned.

Said one witness, 1981 British Open champion Bill Rogers: “If you took 100 balls and pitched them by hand from there, you couldn’t do it any better. I was in absolute shock when it went in.”

When told of Rogers’ comment, a glum Nicklaus later said: “Make it a thousand balls. You couldn’t drop a ball on the green there and stop it.”

For good measure, Watson birdied the 18th too, giving him a two-stroke win over Nicklaus. It was his first--and only--Open win.

“I had a good, clean lie and I knew all I had to do was open the blade, slice across the ball and pop it in the air,” he said.

“When it hit the fringe, I knew it was in the hole. It was the best shot, the most important shot, I ever made in my life.”

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Also on this date: In 1967, the spiraling pro basketball salary war reached new heights. NBA star Rick Barry jumped from San Francisco to the American Basketball Assn.’s Oakland team for a deal paying him $500,000 over three years. . . . In 1960, Floyd Patterson, 25, became the first boxer in history to regain the heavyweight championship when he knocked out Ingemar Johansson with a left hook in the fifth round. . . . In 1966, Billy Casper came from seven shots behind and beat Arnold Palmer in a playoff to win the U.S. Open golf title at San Francisco’s Olympic Club.