U.S. Open play-offs are usually dull affairs, characterized by past-themoment golf, and Monday’s round lived up to that tradition. A birdie by
The Kid Who Gave Up Baseball • Hale Irwin 123
Donald at the ninth to Irwin’s bogey opened a one-shot lead, and when
Irwin added a bogey at the eleventh, Donald had his opportunity to take
charge with a downhill attempt for birdie. Instead he three-putted, matching Irwin’s bogey, and remained just one ahead. “I looked at that as leaving the door wide open,” remembers Irwin, “when he could have shut it
right in my face.” Irwin bogeyed the next to give Donald the two-shot margin he had squandered just moments earlier, and Irwin was again playing
uphill for a win.
“It was getting difficult for me to believe it could still happen, but I told
myself to keep going, keep going. The mind-set is ‘keep playing’—you never
know what can happen. That’s what I kept telling myself, because a twoshot lead can be overtaken in one hole. ‘Just keep hitting the shots. Think
only of the next shot, because it’s the most important one you can play.’”
With that fortitude he found himself yet again with that trusty two-iron
in his hands in the fairway at the par-four 436-yard sixteenth. “I was 207
yards uphill into the wind, and I had to hook it around some trees. I tried
to tune out the situation. I tried to tune out the gallery. I tried to tune out
what he was going to do. I tried to really focus on what I needed to do to
get myself back in contention. It was just my turn.”
He put his approach six feet from the hole and made the vital birdie to
climb to within one. On the eighteenth tee it was Donald who blinked, a
grievous tactical error, abandoning the three-wood that he had used so tirelessly throughout the round, for his driver. The choice left him in the rough
from where fate determined the bogey that resulted in the first suddendeath play-off in U.S. Open history.
You don’t let a competitor such as Irwin off the ground once, much less
twice, and not expect to pay the price. At the first extra hole Irwin played
to within ten feet and converted the birdie to become, at age forty-five, the
oldest champion in tournament history.
“I’ve always felt that tenacity was something I’ve had. That would apply
to most things that I have tried to do. Scaling a brick wall may be impossible, but if you can find a few handholds, maybe you can still do it. You
can call it guts. You can call it confidence. You can call it experience. I’ve
never abandoned my beliefs. They may have been set aside or temporarily
misplaced, but they’ve always been there. Some things are improbable, but
I’ve never thought many things are impossible.”
124 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
With three U.S. Open triumphs, exactly twenty PGA Tour wins (the
last coming at age forty-eight back at Harbour Town), with a reputation
for unrelenting competitiveness, Irwin could legitimately lay claim to a
place among the game’s greatest ever.
One has to wonder, however, if he would have earned serious consideration if he hadn’t authored the finest appendix to a playing career in golf
history with his dominant run on the PGA Senior Tour. Although Irwin
would argue that the longevity of his game, demonstrated by his recordsetting run as a senior, should be factored into any assessment of him as a
player, there seems little argument that he forced a reexamination of his
career with his over-fifty performance. He redefined that tour with his competitive performances. He wrote or rewrote nearly every single season or
career record established on the Senior Tour.
In 1997 Irwin assembled an unprecedented level of excellence with nine
wins and eight additional top tens in nineteen events. His “worst” showing for the year was a tie for nineteenth at the Ford Senior Players Championship, and his earnings of over $2.3 million may stand forever as an
unmatchable accomplishment. His money title not only secured Player of
the Year honors on his own Tour, but despite a huge disparity in purses
between the Senior Tour and the PGA Tour, Irwin outearned Tiger Woods,
the money titleholder on the PGA Tour, by more than $250,000.
The man who said he knew it was time to walk away from football every
time he picked himself up off the ground spent a lifetime picking himself
off the very tailored grounds of professional golf.
Hale Irwin brought an athlete’s mentality to his sport and forced others
to consider his place in golf history. He may have learned how to play on
the sand green course in Baxter Springs, Kansas, but he learned how to win
on the practice fields of college football. “The uniqueness to the game of
golf is that you do it yourself. You cannot hide. Your dirty laundry is hanging out there for everybody to see. There’s not a teammate to cover for you.
Every decision, every action that you make is yours and yours alone.
“The game has its own humility. One time you think you are on top of
the game, and the next day it’s got you by the throat. But if you can get
your body working in the same motion as your mind is working, whether
in a hard game like football or something as simple as chess—that requires
a great deal of mental preparation—you don’t have to be the world’s fastest
The Kid Who Gave Up Baseball • Hale Irwin 125
human or jump high or to throw it far to be an athlete or to be an activist
in a sport or in an activity.
“You have to perform with heart and soul. What makes a person grow
is that dedication to achieving a goal that is reachable and attainable but
difficult.”
