An inside look at the greatest shot in U.S. Open history

As he headed for the 17th tee, Tom Watson was tied for the lead in the final round of the 1982 U.S. Open. Moments earlier, Jack Nicklaus had finished uncharacteristically. His sloppy par at Pebble Beach's 18th hole capped off a three-under-par 69.

One of the great aphorisms of modern PGA Tour history is that Nicklaus never missed putts in the clutch, that if you had one putt to make and you could select anyone to play it for you, the axiomatic choice would be the Golden Bear. Not this time. On this day it was the putter that betrayed the man frequently referred to as the greatest flatstick practitioner of them all. On both 16 and 17, Nicklaus inexplicably left birdie putts short. Then, on the 72nd hole, Nicklaus faced an imminently makeable 15-foot birdie putt, one that could have put meaningful pressure on Watson. Nicklaus not only missed the putt, he ran it an unseemly four feet past, leaving himself a demanding comebacker. After holing out, Nicklaus in a bizarre confluence of frustration and relief tossed his ball into the crowd. 

Watson needed to play 17 and 18—758 yards in all—in one-under-par 7. If he did, he would make golf history, not to mention fulfill the Watson family’s vision of national championship glory. Par in, and Watson would face Nicklaus the next day in an 18-hole playoff. A wobble here or on 18 and Watson could easily be sucked into the Sneadian vortex of Open despair. (Sam Snead finished runner-up in the U.S. Open four times. As with Phil Mickelson, who has six runners-up, it was the missing championship from a career Grand Slam.)

Not surprisingly, the 17th had played as the toughest hole on Sunday. Watson watched as his playing partner, reigning Open champion Bill Rogers—who was en route to a two-over-par 74, his worst score of the week, and a tie for third place—drew a 4-wood. The tee markers were only a few paces up from the farthest possible setting; the pin tucked by the USGA’s P.J. Boatwright was as far back and left as possible. Frank Hannigan, the senior executive director of the USGA, was supplying rules commentary for ABC Sports that week and was positioned at the 17th hole on Sunday.

“It was a very hard hole, just as it had been in 1972,” said Hannigan in an interview prior to his 2014 death. It was also much harder than it played in the PGA Tour’s Crosby, in which contestants often played from the shorter tees. Hannigan estimated the difference—taking in weather, distance and pin placement at four full clubs. “It was a long iron into a small target,” said Hannigan, “and it was chilly.”

As thick as the air was with cool Pacific dampness and good old-fashioned tension, this was relatively familiar territory. This was the 137th time Nicklaus and Watson had competed in the same tournament. Nicklaus had long enjoyed the upper hand in those match-ups, with 67 top-10s to Watson’s 26, but Watson had been carving out an impressive niche against Nicklaus in the majors. This was their 35th mutual major. In the most recent 31 leading up to Pebble, Watson had an average finish of 15th. He had also won five, three of which came directly at Nicklaus’ expense. In the same preceding 31 majors Nicklaus had averaged a 10th-place finish and had won six majors, but not one of those titles came directly at Watson’s expense. When it mattered most, in the glare of major championship pressure, mano a mano, Watson was gaining on Nicklaus. In fact, in every single major that Watson had won prior to the 1982 Open, Nicklaus was in serious contention. In those five majors, the 1975 British Open, the ’77 Masters, the ’77 British Open, the ’80 British Open and the ’81 Masters, Nicklaus’ respective finishes were third, second, second, fourth and second. But for all those major successes, Watson’s recent Open failures may have been fresh in the usurper’s mind.

As Watson confronted his options on the 17th hole, David Fay, director of program management for the USGA at the time before replacing Hannigan as executive director in 1989, had completed his assignment that day as starter, and was killing time Forrest Gump-style. “I’ve got nothing to do,” he recalled, “so I walk over to the scorer’s tent at 18 to sit with Tom Meeks.” Meeks, a USGA staffer, was then compiling and checking contestants’ scorecards. In the early 1980s, in order to insure against the dreaded mistake by committee, scoring-tent duty was a one-man job. That way, if there was a mistake, P.J. Boatwright knew whom to go after.

Fay, making the most of his busman’s holiday, decided that he’d pass the U.S. Open Sunday sitting quietly behind “Tee Ball” Meeks and watching the final round on the television monitor in the tent. “So I open up the flap in the goofy little blue tent to get the view of Carmel Bay, and I settle in,” he recalled.

In comes Jack Nicklaus. “He’s in a great mood and for good reason,” says Fay. “He thinks he’s won his fifth Open. He signs his card. Doesn’t know me from Adam.”

Under gray, cool skies and with a breeze blowing right to left, Watson and Edwards calculated the shot at 209 yards. Edwards, who had now been working for Watson for nearly a decade, had not been on the bag for any of Watson’s heretofore five major championships. He wanted one as badly as his boss. As they considered the shot, the duo realized they were between clubs. It would either be a 2-iron or a 3-iron. Edwards lobbied for the 3, reasoning that the harder Watson swings, the better he tends to play. Watson, on the other hand, was concerned about the need to carry the hole’s massive left green-front bunker. The downside of the 2-iron was that when combined with a few teaspoons of U.S. Open adrenaline, it could potentially leave him long and left, which with the pin deep in the back left position, was, well, a place that Bob Rosburg might describe as dead.

Looking on from the gallery were major-worthy notables such as the unrivaled king of golf journalism, Herb Wind; the elfin golf historian, Bob Sommers; and … Rainbow Man. His actual name is Rollen Stewart, but if you were a sports fan in the 1980s, you knew him best as the guy who wore those rainbow wigs and T-shirts printed with religious references and biblical citations. On this day his shirt advised viewers, “Repent. Jesus Saves.”

Watson selected the 2-iron and made his brisk, upright swing. As the ball sailed into the gloaming, he quickly barked “Down!” Watson and Edwards could only watch as the dimpled orb, aided by a draw and urged by the wind, drifted left and scooted through the green, into the deep wiry fescue between two bunkers. Sure enough, he was long and left.

“And he’s over, into the deep stuff,” said ABC Sports commentator Jim McKay with a dismissive, downward intonation that reflected the pessimism of the moment. Aside from the nearby beach, this might be the worst possible leave at the 17th hole. Not only was he likely tangled in the deep rough, but Watson had broken the cardinal rule of U.S. Open play: Thou shalt not short-side thyself. He was only about 15 feet away from the pin and playing to a slick green that sloped away from him. It would all come down to his lie. If it was as poor as could be expected, Watson’s dream of a U.S. Open title would be dashed, and he knew it. As player and caddie headed for the green, Watson flipped the club to Edwards and said grimly, “That’s dead.”

Hannigan's reaction in the booth to Watson’s shot was somewhat more optimistic. “Remember,” he added, years later, “Watson was what Seve was around the greens, so I would have thought he had a 50-50 chance of making 3.” No mention, however, of making 2.

If Hannigan liked Watson’s chances of at least making par, sentiment almost everywhere else had shifted to Nicklaus. It made sense. If Watson was going to settle for, at best, a par at 17, and more likely a bogey, he had a world of work to do on 18 and nearly a century of odds against him: No player had ever birdied the final hole to win a U.S. Open. Nicklaus himself says that after watching Watson’s tee ball hide in the greenside rough at 17, “I thought it was over. I thought I had won the tournament.” He and about 20 million other people.

ABC was thinking the same thing. In fact, only a few minutes after Watson missed the green, Terry Jastrow, the producer of ABC Sports Golf, dispatched Jack Whitaker to interview Nicklaus in the scoring tent. Meanwhile, Fay was watching the tableau unfold before him.

“We’re all watching the telecast and we all see where Watson’s ball goes,” said Fay. “Jack’s beaming, feeling really good at that point. So Meeks is doing his numbers and stuff, and Jack Whitaker turns to Jack Nicklaus and they’re chatting, and no one is really watching the monitor, except me.”

Watson’s ball, which lay in a spot where Chandler Egan had positioned a bunker more than half a century earlier only to be overruled by the strident Pacific winds, had become the focal point of the sports universe. Jastrow, directing the telecast for ABC, demanded shots of the lie. The path to the pin and the location of the ball had become a form of true north for photographers and cameramen, who would need to locate the pellet and then assess the best angle from which to film Watson and his next shot. A herd of writers, rules officials and spectators scurried about.

As Watson, in his dark blue Fila-logoed sweater, bluish-gray slacks and coffee-colored spikes, clambered toward the green, Edwards pre-empted the gloomy conclusion at which his boss and much of the world had already arrived. “Hey, let’s see what kind of lie we have,” he said to his crestfallen employer. “We can still get it up and down.”

At the moment it must have seemed like the empty encouragement of a friend, but as the duo drew closer to the lie, Bruce glimpsed the ball. “I could see it,” he said later. “That meant it wasn’t buried completely, which gave us at least a fighting chance.” Suddenly Watson went from thinking “dead” to thinking “life support.”

Nicklaus was watching on the ABC monitor in the scoring tent. “I figured it would take a miraculous shot to even get the ball within 10 feet of the hole,” he said.

He was then interviewed live by Whitaker, who all but handed Nicklaus the trophy. Before sending the action back to Watson at 17, the typically unflappable veteran former CBS announcer, who was in his first-ever appearance on an ABC golf telecast, actually said to Nicklaus, “It’s a pleasure to be in your time.” Both the sentiment and the terminology were awkward, but they clearly reflected the sense, now permeating the ABC production staff, that Nicklaus had already won.

“We all thought he [Nicklaus] had done it,” admitted Jastrow. “He had won the Open there in ’72, and he had won the amateur there in ’61 and … he had a way of making other people fall away. He did it 18 times in professional majors, and we all thought he had done it. When Whitaker did the interview with him to the left of the 18th hole, it was more or less a winner’s interview.”

Throughout his career Watson had modeled himself after Ben Hogan; that is, he’d made a pregame routine of practicing the toughest shots that that day’s course could present. If a course had deep bunkers, he’d practice deep bunker shots. Lots of trees meant low punch shots. Pebble called uniquely for short chips from deep, possessive rough to scary-slick greens.

“I practiced that shot all the time in the practice rounds, knowing that I was hitting the ball really poorly and knowing that I was going to be faced with that particular shot,” said Watson.

Edwards, just like Nicklaus, Jastrow, Marr and the millions watching at home, knew that even in the best case, even with all Watson’s practice, even with his surprisingly decent lie, Watson would be lucky to stop the ball fewer than 10 feet past the hole. Hoping for the best, Edwards offered a piece of rooting advice, and in doing so laid the foundation for the most memorable caddie-player confab in golf history. “Get it close,” said Edwards.

Watson’s famous reply: “Get it close? Hell, I’m gonna make it!”

“I said it more out of just trying to get myself ready to play the shot than anything else, mentally play the shot,” said Watson. “And when I got up over the ball, I knew what I had to do.”

Watson knew that his only chance to hole the shot or even get it close was to hit the flagstick. If not, he, Edwards, Rogers, Nicklaus and the civilized world knew that on a downhill, triple-cut U.S. Open putting surface, this shot—Watson’s 2,889th in U.S. Open play—could easily roll into oblivion.

McKay and Marr, sensing the importance of the moment, kept their commentary simple.

McKay: “Now comes, well, possibly the decisive shot of this championship.”

Marr: “It’s a shot that he generally plays very well. Of course, the conditions now that he plays, they certainly test anyone. So we’ll just have to see. “

Watson took his stance and waggled. After a swing as smooth as it was abbreviated, the ball, a Golden Ram No. 1, came out as high and soft as standard-issue human nerves would allow. It lifted off the face of the club—a 56-degree Wilson Dyna Power sand wedge salvaged a few years earlier from a cache of castaways in David Graham’s garage. Marr eyed the ball and it’s every rotation. “It looks good. It looks good,” he said in a rising voice filled with possibility. As the ball started toward the hole, it began to take the break. Just before it collided with the pin, Watson crouched slightly and burped out hopefully, “That’s in the hole,” and as it began its freefall into golf lore, an incredulous Marr asked his audience, “Do you believe it?! Do you believe it?!”

Watson then surprised anxious photographers and cameramen by bouncing onto the green in an exultant jog. Ironically, this rather un-Watson-like expression of unguarded rapture would become the reserved champion’s signature moment. He turned and shot Edwards the game’s greatest I-told-you-so: “I told you! I told you I was gonna make it!”

While the Earth seemingly heaved, Rogers stood stunned, motionless on the edge of the green. Remarkably this was not the first time he had experienced Watson’s last-minute short-game brilliance. In fact, two years earlier, at the Byron Nelson Classic, Watson had chipped in on the 71st hole to deprive Rogers himself of a victory.

“I’ve seen him do a lot of remarkable things, but 17 [at Pebble] was shocking,” Rogers said years later in an interview for the USGA. “That birdie put me in absolute shock—I’ll remember it all my life.”

So will Nicklaus. The greatest player in the history of the game had been robbed. The man who only seconds ago seemed to have nine fingers on a fifth Open trophy had been pistol-whipped by fate. Worse yet, he learned the news not from the sage Whitaker or from his caddie (eldest son Jackie), or even a close friend, but from a tow-headed vagabond USGA staffer named David Fay. Remarkably enough, when Watson’s shot found the bottom of the hole, neither Nicklaus nor Whitaker nor Meeks was watching the monitor in the little tent by the sea. Why should they? The shot was impossible.

But Fay was watching, and when Watson’s ball tumbled into the hole, he blurted out, “Holy shit, he holed it!” His words pierced the hushed gathering.

Nicklaus spun around in a swivel chair, glared at Fay, and said flatly, “No he didn’t.”

Fay responded, “Uh, yeah, he did,” and pointed to the black-and-white monitor. “Look.”

The screen was filled with images of Watson’s balletic celebration. Nicklaus, expression drained from his face, stared at the monitor. “I can’t believe it happened again.”

Nicklaus recalls that “Jack Whitaker was interviewing me, and he was just finishing the sentence, ‘Jack, it’s been a great privilege to cover you in your time.’ I could have been the only guy to ever win a fifth U.S. Open. Then there goes the yell. As I turned around, there was the monitor, and I see Watson running across the green.”

Numerous accounts describe the stunned Nicklaus (who fainted at the first sight of all five of his newborn children) as pale. Fay concurs. “For a moment he was ashen," but, says Fay, “he quickly regrouped, and he was Jack Nicklaus again, the most gracious loser the game has ever seen.”

When McKay caught the image of a pallid Nicklaus watching an era fade, he said to his audience, “Nicklaus, watching our coverage on a monitor, now knows he can’t do a thing. A man like Jack Nicklaus doesn’t like to stand there helpless.”

Watson’s work wasn’t finished. He only had a one-shot lead, and there was an ocean’s worth of water hazard lining the entire left side of Herbert Fowlers’ par-5 18th hole. He could be forgiven for thinking about Sam Snead’s four second-place finishes in U.S. Opens. Specifically Watson, the student of Open history, could have been reminded of the 1939 Open at Philadelphia Country Club. Snead needed only to par the par-5 72nd hole in order to win, but he inexplicably tripled the hole. Snead never won an Open.

Then there was the adrenaline. It nearly cost Tiger Woods the Masters in 2005. Who doesn’t recall that crazy, heart-stopping Nike-sponsored chip-in on 16? What few recall is that with his pounding heart lodged somewhere in his esophagus, Woods proceeded to the 17th, where he promptly missed the fairway and bogeyed the last two holes.

Watson’s method for composure retention was surprisingly vanilla: Simply play the shot at hand. “I had played the hole a number of times in the Crosby. Sure, there was a little more pressure in this one,” confessed Watson, “Still, it was the same shot.” Watson opted for 3-wood, and “I hit it as solidly and as flush as I could.” About 270 yards worth of solid and flush.

A simple par at the last would win, yet Watson would close the deal in style: 3-wood, 7-iron, 9-iron, all capped off by a long birdie putt that dropped in after authoritatively ramming the back of the hole. In fact, moments after capturing the elusive National Open, when Watson called home to wish Ray Watson a most Happy Father’s Day, the old man said, “Boy, you don’t know how to lag, do you?”

The son responded, “It wouldn’t have been more than 6 inches by the hole …”

To which the delighted father responded, “Bullshit!” Watson had won his U.S. Open. Furthermore, for the fourth time in six years, he’d beaten Nicklaus in a major championship. Watson had turned back both the game’s greatest player and the inertia of his own expectations. He had become the player he’d dreamed of being. In response to Watson’s win, Fuzzy Zoeller captured the sense of personal breakthrough for Watson and what it might portend, “Tom Watson has conquered the mind.”

Watson wasn’t thinking about all that as he celebrated on the 18th green. He couldn’t have been thinking much at all when he tossed what was now among the more valuable golf balls in the world into Carmel Bay (Note: One of the balls from the historic round was kept by Edwards and is now back in Watson’s possession while the famed sand wedge now resides in a display case at The Greenbrier.)

Nicklaus greeted Watson on the 18th green, the slayer and the slayed. While the respect they felt for one another was never diminished and the friendship they share today is genuine, there was an awkward moment in which Nicklaus consciously or unconsciously assumed the role of victor and put his arm around Watson’s shoulders. Watson, in an object lesson in body language, quickly re-ordered their arms, assuming the superior, sympathetic position and offering a champion’s condolences to the vanquished.

They shook hands and Nicklaus told him, “I’m proud of you.” Moments later, at the trophy presentation, Nicklaus warmly teased his opponent, “You did it to me again, you little son of bitch,” then added, “If it takes me the rest of my life I’m gonna get you one of these times.”

It would never happen. One of the game’s greatest rivalries was spent. Few would have believed it as the sun set that day, but that duo would never finish one-two in a major again. This was the beginning of the end for Nicklaus’ career and the shining moment of Watson’s. He once summed it up this way, “That shot, that day, that moment was the highlight of my life as a golfer.”

More importantly, Watson had his U.S. Open title—the only major championship he and Bruce Edwards would ever win together—and he was now the undisputed greatest player in the world.

It was an Open-and-shut case.

A few months after his 1982 U.S. Open win, Watson returned to Pebble Beach for a celebratory dinner with friends. As the conversation bounced around, Watson quietly exited the restaurant and returned with a handful of clubs and balls. He proposed to the group a midnight excursion: a return to the 17th hole. By the light of the moon, they found the hallowed spot. As Watson tried his hand at recreating history, he skulled the ball over the green.