Eight days ago, when Harold Varner III rolled in a 92-foot putt for victory in a tournament hard by the Red Sea, it might be over-egging the cake a little to say I leaped out of my chair whooping with excitement. Lee Trevino, at home in Texas suffering from a bad back, had done that when he saw Seve Ballesteros land a delicate pitch shot on a hard path and scuttle between two bunkers to end a few feet from the flagstick on the 72nd hole of the 1976 Open Championship, thus securing second place jointly with Jack Nicklaus behind Johnny Miller.
But Varner’s putt, as long as from Manchester to Mecca, certainly got my attention. What a way to win $1 million and a tournament. It also got the attention of Bubba Watson, who ran down to the green to congratulate Varner on beating him by one stroke. In the 10 or so seconds it took the ball to travel from the edge of the green to the moment it fell on its last revolution into the hole this putt became a candidate to join the list of great shots I have seen these past five decades. Here are five.
Where do I start? How about Tom Watson’s chip in on the 71st hole of the 1982 US Open? Jack Nicklaus was watching a television by the side of the 18th green up ahead. I was making my way from the 17th tee back to the press centre. I heard the roar and soon saw it replayed on television. Until this moment Nicklaus had been about to win his fifth US Open. Instead, Watson won his first.
How about Sandy Lyle’s 7-iron stroke from the first fairway bunker (there are two now) on the 18th at Augusta National in the 1988 Masters? It was hit so cleanly the ball reached the upper level of the green and spun back to leave him a 12-foot putt to win. This stroke was described by Herbert Warren Wind as the second greatest shot from a sandy lie in the game’s history, Bobby Jones’s with a mashie from a sandy waste area on to the 71st green in the 1926 Open at Royal Lytham being the best.
In those days at Augusta there was a 30-feet high viewing platform to the left of the 18th fairway. I spent many a happy hour there beneath a soft Georgia sun watching the golfers appear from my right and in due course exit to my left. It was one of the best viewing sites in golf, up there with the row reserved for journalists by the 16th tee from where you could look back up the 15th fairway, see the 16th hole and watch the players setting off up the 17th fairway. Other great viewing positions? A grassy spot on top of the dune to the left of the 12th at Royal Birkdale and a platform set near the 11th tee of the Old Course at St Andrews from where you can watch players from the seventh to the 12th. Oh yes, and the verandah of the Augusta National, a drink to hand and a peach cobbler on the plate in front of you. That’s commodious accommodation, too.
But if I live to be 100, and I might because my father died three months before his 103rd birthday, I can’t imagine seeing a better stroke than Ballesteros’s with a 3-wood from a fairway bunker on the last hole of his singles against Fuzzy Zoeller at the 1983 Ryder Cup. Ballesteros had been 3 up with six holes to play but was now all square with Zoeller and had hit his second shot (yes, his second; his first had been a smothered hook into thick rough) into a fairway bunker no more than 200 yards from the tee.
I was standing perhaps 10 yards behind Ballesteros and have said many times how when I saw him taking a wood from Nick DePaul, his caddie, the hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up. I rubbed my eyes, not believing what I was seeing. For sheer audacity this is my shot of the century. Because the bunker’s face was steep, Ballesteros had to aim his ball out of the left side of the bunker and fade it perhaps 20 yards in the air to a target 230 yards away. And he had to do all this while not taking a speck of sand from the bunker lest it interfere with his clubface. Suffice to say he did it, got his par and halved his match with Zoeller.
Now comes another Spaniard, this time Sergio García, and the shot he played from the base of a tree on the 70th hole at Medinah in the 1999 PGA Championship. Had García mis-hit his shot he might have broken the shaft of his club on the tree trunk or caused a piece of bark to fly into his eye. Instead, the ball flew out cleanly, moved from left to right in the air, as Ballesteros’s had nearly 20 years earlier, and landed on the green 190 yards away. Memorable as that was, García’s race up the fairway, jumping several times to try to see where the ball had landed, was simply unforgettable.
When Justin Leonard sank a 45-foot putt on the 17th green of his singles match against José María Olazábal in the 1999 Ryder Cup, some of his teammates invaded the green thinking that they had won the Cup that had been lost in Valderrama two years earlier.
At that moment I was not out on the course. I was sitting at my desk in what I believe is normally the ice rink at the Country Club and my phone went. It was close to deadline time. “Are you watching this John?” a voice said. “I am now” I replied, knowing I was going to have to rewrite my account of a stirring American revival to include the scenes and consequences on the 17th green.
Ben Crenshaw, the American captain, apologised later and Leonard said: “Blame me. I should not have left the green after I holed the putt. It was my fault.”
Olazábal, a singular man as well as a singular golfer, handled it with the dignity he has always displayed. “Those players should have realised the situation we (Europe) were in and I call for respect from fellow professionals to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he said. “We are not making excuses but it will be for the benefit of golf if we all manage to behave a little better at the Belfry (in the next Ryder Cup match).”
So that’s five of my memories. They are by no means all but they will do for the moment.
Top: Harold Varner III
E-Mail JOHn