Next Stop: 200 Majors

Dan Jenkins looks back at the classics
with a few of his own

June 2009

/ EDITOR'S NOTE / The U.S. Open June 18-21 will be the 199th major championship that Dan Jenkins has covered and the 200th that he has attended, counting the 1941 Open at Colonial in his native Fort Worth. A photo on Jenkins' wall today from that '41 Open shows Tommy Armour, Gene Sarazen, Lawson Little and Byron Nelson, and right behind them is an 11-year-old boy. "It's me," Jenkins says. "I have a caption on the photo. Sarazen is saying, 'If that little kid behind us grows up to be a golf writer, this game is in big trouble.' "

This month we offer excerpts from Jenkins' opening remarks after a number of those majors for his readers at the Fort Worth Press, Dallas Times Herald, Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest. The book includes 94 stories, and as Dan says of the complete list, if you were to string all of them from end to end, "they would no doubt make the longest par 5 in the history of journalism, or even golf."

With that, we await his next stop: This year's U.S. Open at Bethpage. It'll be Dan's 56th Open.

1951 U.S. Open | Oakland Hills

Ben Hogan shot the greatest round of his life -- maybe of anyone's life -- a stunning three-under 67 in the final round of the U.S. Open to win it yet again, this time on the torturous layout of Oakland Hills, but mostly what he wanted to talk about afterward was why people watch golf in the first place. Goodness, don't they have something better to do?

1955 Masters

It's entirely possible that Dr. Cary Middlecoff gave up dentistry because people couldn't hold their mouths open that long.

1955 U.S. Open | Olympic

When a sportswriter for the Pittsburgh Press named Bob Drum called his wife from the U.S. Open pressroom, the con-versation went like this:
"I gotta stay over another day," Bob said.
"Why?" asked Marian Jane Drum.
"To cover the playoff."
"There's no playoff. Ben Hogan won the Open. They said so on TV. What a liar you are! You just want to stay in San Francisco and get drunk another day."
"I can get drunk in Pittsburgh."
"So come home."
"I'm telling you, I've gotta cover the playoff tomorrow between Hogan and Jack Fleck."
"Who?"
"Jack Fleck. He tied Hogan after TV went off."
"Jack Fleck? That's the dumbest name you've ever made up."

1959 U.S. Open | Winged Foot

All the people who watched Billy Casper win the U.S. Open will no doubt start eating between meals and throw away 13 of the clubs in their bag. They'll keep the putter.

It's doubtful any golfer ever played more poorly from tee to green and still managed to win a major championship.

1960 Masters

It's beginning to look like Ken Venturi can't win the Masters and Arnold Palmer can't lose it.

1960 U.S. Open | Cherry Hills

So it had come down to this, to the moment when one immortal would give the U.S. Open to another, from Ben Hogan to Arnold Palmer, with best wishes -- grudgingly.

It came down to the 71st hole of a gasping three days, down to a sad portrait of Ben Hogan with a pants leg rolled up, standing in a dark pond, holding a wedge in his hands, an instrument that had betrayed him.

1961 Masters

Gary Player of South Africa is the Masters champion because Arnold Palmer was in too big a hurry to win it again.

There's no other way to say it. The 18th hole at Augusta National might as well have been a slab of meat, the way Palmer butchered it.

1964 U.S. Open | Congressional

What an improbable thing it was that Ken Venturi won the U.S. Open, and with the second-lowest score in the history of the championship. But on a course not far from the nation's capital, they opened the coffin, and out he crawled.

1966 U.S. Open | Olympic

Nobody knows how to cook buffalo, bear and elk meat, so they probably think Billy Casper eats it raw. What they do know is that he had Arnold Palmer for dessert.

1968 U.S. Open | Oak Hill

Super Mex is what he called himself. And there he was in the middle of all that U.S. Open dignity with his spread-out caddie-hustler stance and his short, choppy public-course swing, a stumpy little guy, wearing those red socks. And here were all of these yells coming from the trees and knolls, coming from all of the Lee Trevinos of the world. "Whip the gringo," hollered Lee's Fleas, some of them $30-a-week guys like Trevino was a little more than a year ago.