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Book Excerpt

Next Stop: 200 Majors

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

1970 U.S. Open | Hazeltine: All week long the one-liners dropped like bogeys out there in Minnesota farm country, so it was welcome to the 1970 Henny Youngman U.S. Open. Take this course, please.

1970 British Open | St. Andrews: Amid the intoxicating old ruins of the town of St. Andrews, and on the golf course that held the first cleat, history and tradition were flogged and caned all week by a cast of modern hustlers and legends in a musty thing called the British Open. While Tony Jacklin shot the heather off the land, and Lee Trevino verbally shot down a prime minister, Jack Nicklaus played himself into immortality, and the lord of nightlife, Sir Douglas Sanders, played himself into the hearts of all those who savor the three-piece, phone-booth golf swing.

1972 U.S. Open | Pebble Beach

Jack Nicklaus hit a shot at Pebble's 17th that made him look like a fighter who didn't want to win on points -- he wanted a knockout. His 1-iron knifed into the gale, cleared the ghastly bunker fronting the green, crashed down right at the flagstick and sat there, two inches from the cup.

It was the damnedest 1-iron in golf history.

1972 British Open | Muirfield: He stood against the sandhill, one foot halfway up the rise, a glove hand braced on his knee, his head hung in despair. He lingered in this pose with what seemed like all of Scotland surrounding him, with the North Sea gleaming in the background, and with the quiet broken only by the awkward, silly far-away sound of bagpipes rehearsing for the victory ceremony. This was Jack Nicklaus on the next-to-last hole of the British Open after another putt had refused to fall. It was Nicklaus in the moment when he knew, after a furious comeback, that he had lost this championship and that his march toward a Grand Slam was over.

1973 U.S. Open | Oakmont

There's no better way to become an overnight, instant, presto, matinee idol in golf than to put yourself somewhere back in the Allegheny hills -- about 12 coal mines and six roadhouses behind everybody trying to win the Open, including a modest cast of Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Julius Boros and Tom Weiskopf -- and come cruising along with your blond mane flapping in the breeze, and knock them all sideways.

Meet Johnny Miller, the proud owner of a record 63 at Oakmont, the young man who demolished the notorious golf course and the elite group of people who contended in Sunday's final round.

"Johnny Miller?" Weiskopf said, laughing. "I didn't even know Miller made the cut."

1975 Masters: Yeah, but Manny, we want Redfordfor all three leading men. OK, maybe somebody else for Weiskopf, but Redford's got to play the two blond guys, Nicklaus and Miller. We call it "The Greatest Golf Tournament Ever Played." So people argue. Who'll know? One blond guy makes a putt from here to Encino, and the other two guys miss putts on the 18th from so close the cup looks bigger than Coldwater Canyon. Now the blond guy who wins, Nicklaus, who is already the best there ever was, he marries his 1-iron and takes his putter for a mistress. Cut and print. Ciao, baby.

1977 British Open | Turnberry: Go ahead and mark it as the end of Western civilization and a special era in professional golf -- the Jack Nicklaus era -- if you're absolutely certain that Jack has been chased into his sunset years by the steel and nerve and ball-striking talent of Tom Watson. Nicklaus did not say he had been expecting someone to come along one of these years. But the look seemed to indicate he had finally met him.

1979 Masters: When the Masters finally ended in its first sudden-death playoff down in Amen Corner amid the blazing dogwood and azalea, the winner was just about the last man on anyone's mind, and certainly the last man in the field alphabetically: Fuzzy Zoeller. Most people were preoccupied with watching Ed Sneed slit his wrists.

1980 U.S. Open | Baltusrol: It was a wondrous moment in golf. Harry Vardon was inventing the grip again. Arnold Palmer was hitching up his trousers again. Bobby Jones was impregnably quadrilateraling again. Ben Hogan was smoking a cigarette again. But this was Jack Nicklaus, age 40, winning his fourth U.S. Open, and doing it with such verve that Baltusrol lay in utter destruction behind him.

1982 U.S. Open | Pebble Beach: From where Tom Watson stood on the 71st hole of the U.S. Open -- in the clawing rough, on a downslope, looking at a glassy green -- you don't simply chip the ball into the cup for a birdie deuce to beat Jack Nicklaus, who is already in with a score good enough to win. First, you throw up.

Excerpted with permission from Jenkins at the Majors: Sixty Years of the World's Best Golf Writing, from Hogan to Tiger, copyright ©2009 by D&J Ventures & Inc., 432 pages, $26.95. Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of random house.