FEATURE
By Bill Fields
I’ve been to three of the five U.S. Opens held at Shinnecock Hills, missing the first, in 1896, and the most recent, in 2018, and am scheduled to be there this June when the national championship returns to the historic course in Suffolk County. It would be quite something if Scottie Scheffler gives himself the phenomenal present of completing the career Grand Slam on his 30th birthday, but even that achievement might not dislodge the 1986 Open from the No. 1 spot on my Shinnecock memorability index.
Forty years ago, I was a young associate editor for Golf World magazine, then the weekly bible of the sport. The title didn’t reveal a big part of the job: photography. Sometimes, as had been the case with my predecessors in the role from the 1960s forward, I would report and shoot at a tournament. At the Masters, U.S. Open and PGA Championship (Golf World never sent me to The Open), I was just responsible for the pictures. Saving the magazine’s pennies, its longtime editor-in-chief, Dick Taylor, and I shared a modest motel room somewhere in the Hamptons getting the then – to my little-traveled self, anyway – outrageous rate of $169 a night, which, to my dismay, didn’t include earplugs.
My experienced boss and I were both excited to be covering the U.S. Open’s return to Shinnecock Hills after 90 years. The course – linksy and fescue-framed, different from traditional Open venues – and the location – not in a big city or its suburbs – were novel. “I’d like to welcome you to the first playing of the British Open in the United States,” USGA president Bill Williams said at a pre-championship presser.
How the event was being run – largely by USGA staff – was different too. No one seemed worried about the course; concerns about pulling off the logistics for a “remote” site reached by a two-lane highway were allayed. The stories became the weather and the golf – in that order.
To verify my recollections of that wet and wild Thursday, I did a little research.
Koch did much better than survive, shooting a 73, just three strokes higher than Bob Tway’s even-par 70. “What a miserable day,” Tway said of the cold, wet conditions when the wind gusted to 40 mph, not his miraculous score, which led after 18 holes on the strength of 10 one-putt greens.
I was surprised but happy to get through the day without one of my cameras dying because rain covers weren’t as effective as they would become. I photographed Jack Nicklaus in bright yellow sweater and bright green rain pants, looking in vain for his ball on the 10th hole, his first lost ball in decades. “You could start the ball 50, 60, 70 yards left of where it ended up,” said Nicklaus, who hit four greens in regulation and shot 77, which was better than the field average. “That’s how hard the wind was blowing.”
There was a lot of umbrella art made that day: fans huddled against the wind, straining to keep their brollies from being turned inside out; dozens of discarded, broken umbrellas in trash cans at the end of the day. The third round of the 1985 U.S. Open at Oakland Hills had been played in such unrelenting rain that my teenaged photo runner fled after nine holes, but a long hot shower has never felt better than it did Thursday night in 1986 following a long day in that grim weather which made it seem the calendar was off.
I would have been proud to have my name on Thomas Boswell’s opening paragraph in that Friday morning’s Washington Post. “They didn’t play the U.S. Open in threesomes Thursday,” he wrote. “Those were expedition parties that ventured onto Shinnecock Hills in chill, slanting rain and high gusting winds under low, angry, oatmeal skies.”
Thankfully, the weather ended up being a one-day story. The skies cleared and temperatures moderated for the next three rounds, creating a wonderful setting for a weekend of taut competition.
For a few minutes during the third round, things grew unexpectedly tense for 36-hole leader Greg Norman, who was targeted by some hecklers calling him a choker in the wake of his 72nd-hole bogey at the ’86 Masters, which kept him out of a playoff with Nicklaus, who won his sixth green jacket. The Aussie, a riveting presence in those days because of his powerfully consistent game combined with his arresting appearance, went over to the ropes to jaw with one of the abusive fans, something I’ve only witnessed a couple of times since. His lead was trimmed from three strokes to a single shot going into Sunday, with Lee Trevino and Hal Sutton his closest pursuers.
In the many years since the final round of the ’86 U.S. Open, that Shinnecock Sunday has remained my standard for a stacked leaderboard of quantity and quality. A photographer working solo, as I was that day, felt helpless at times. So many players were in contention for much of the afternoon that one needed to be lucky to be in position to capture a pivotal moment. Ten golfers – Norman, Trevino, Sutton, Tway, Payne Stewart, Mark McCumber, Ben Crenshaw, Lanny Wadkins, Chip Beck, and Raymond Floyd – had at least a share of the lead at some point, and around 4 o’clock, nine men were tied at the top.
Floyd, a man of loose waggles and a laser stare, had gotten through the difficult first round thanks to his well-honed short game, which he later appraised as having turned an 85 into a perfectly acceptable 75. That perseverance meant even more given that the previous week Floyd uncharacteristically played poorly with the lead and closed with a 77 at Westchester Country Club. His wife, Maria, forced him to confront his failure on the trip to Long Island, but the soul searching on what Floyd has called “a pretty heated ride” paid dividends.
Never that comfortable or successful on U.S. Open setups, Floyd thought Shinnecock – demanding and with a lot of personality but no gimmicks – was the best course he had ever seen. Amid the leaderboard logjam on Sunday, he believed he was in control and played that way, closing strong to shoot a 66 and defeated Wadkins and Beck by two shots. During the 1964 U.S. Open, paired with Ken Venturi on a brutal 36-hole day of heat and humidity at Congressional Country Club, Floyd picked the ball out of the cup on the 72nd hole for the exhausted champion. Twenty-two years later, at 43, five months older than Ted Ray had been in winning the 1920 U.S. Open, Floyd had his fourth major as the Open’s oldest champion up to that point (a 45-year-old Hale Irwin would set the record four years later at Medinah).
Growing up in Southern Pines, N.C., only 40 miles from where Floyd was raised, in Fayetteville, his name had been one I read frequently in the sports pages, and it was always bolded in the agate scores. Despite the local ties, I wasn’t particularly drawn to him as a young fan. While photographing Floyd with the silver trophy in the golden light, though, I felt proud of him as a fellow North Carolinian. My photo that ran on the Golf World cover wasn’t anything special, but I wondered if he might have framed and displayed it, 1/500th of a second of a U.S. Open neither of us would forget.
Bill Fields writes about his roots in the Pinehurst area and decades covering golf in his new memoir A Quick Nine Before Dark: A Life in Golf.
U.S. Open photos courtesy of USGA.
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