You hear the question raised on wintry nights on sports talk radio shows.
You can find it being kicked around a corner tavern the week of a major
championship. Are golfers athletes? Grouped with jockeys, bowlers, and
race-car drivers, golfers seem to threaten, for some, the integrity of the term
athlete. While that argument may be waged endlessly with no satisfactory
resolution, there can be no doubt that in at least one instance one of golf’s
all-time great players was a certified athlete.
Three-time U.S. Open champion Hale Irwin authored Hall of Fame
credentials on the PGA Tour and subsequently on the Senior PGA Tour,
but before he took his golf game to the professional ranks Irwin carved a
football reputation in the tough Big Eight Conference as a two-time AllConference defensive back for the University of Colorado Buffaloes. The
same “do whatever it takes to win” attitude that typified his golf career was
imprinted on Irwin as an athlete in his youth.
Introduced to golf by his father on a sand green municipal golf course
in Baxter Springs, Kansas, Irwin also followed the sports path of every
youngster of his generation in Little League baseball. “Baseball was my best
sport, but I also had to work, and I decided I had to give up something, so
I gave up baseball.” By age fourteen, and now living in Boulder, Colorado, Irwin was good
enough to qualify for a national junior tournament in August. It was an
inauspicious national debut with rounds of 79 and 90. His last two years in
high school saw Irwin win the state high school tournament while at Boulder High School, but it was football that was his ticket to college. “Football
was a way to go to college,” says Irwin. It was also a way to hone a competitive intensity that became Irwin’s trademark on Tour. “When I was playing college football, I was undersized, under speed, under everything. I had
to do something a bit better than everyone else. I either studied more film
or read my keys better or anticipated better. I really couldn’t outphysical
anybody. I just positioned myself to play better than the next guy. I think
that helped me. I had the determination to get it done. The intensity that
I had to play at allowed me to compete with others with better skills.”
Despite his success on the gridiron, Irwin knew the NFL was not the
direction for him as an adult, but the competitor in him has never allowed
him to dismiss his chance of taking that sport to the next level. “There were
players that I played with at Colorado, and players elsewhere in the Big
Eight, that went on to success in the NFL. I felt I competed side by side
with them and against them and, I think, held my own. Could I have made
it? Down inside my soul I can come up with an honest maybe.”
It was golf that he had envisioned for his future since he wrote an eighthgrade essay charting a life for himself as a professional golfer, and winning
the 1967 NCAA Golf Championship was the accomplishment he needed
to make the turn to professional in 1968. While he left his pads and helmet behind him, he took the mind-set of the game to a sport very different from the gridiron. “It’s hard to separate that emotional, intense, physical
game of football versus the more sedate, cerebral, and less physical action
of golf. It’s more likely that a football mentality will transcend into golf
than a golf mentality will transcend into football. In my case that intensity
carried into my younger years. People saw that intensity that I played with,
and to this day that’s me, that intense competitor. I can look into the eyes
of a Jack Nicklaus or an Arnold Palmer, and that same look is there. It just
wasn’t as glorified because they didn’t play another sport.”
His first two years on the Tour were years of making cuts and posting
few top tens. “I never doubted I would succeed,” he remembered. “I just
didn’t know when I was going to make it. I just had to say OK to the
118 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
timetable.” That schedule found him breaking through for the first time
as a professional at the 1971 Heritage Classic with a one-shot win over Bob
Lunn. Two years later he solved Harbour Town Golf links for a second win,
this time by five over Jerry Heard and Grier Jones.
Twice a winner on Tour and now top ten on the money list would qualify as success on the PGA Tour, but for Irwin it fell short of what he had
set his sights on. “I was sort of a winner. But I felt for me to be what I
wanted to be, not what others thought I might be, was to be a major championship winner.” He crossed that threshold a year later.
In the history of the U.S. Open the 1974 championship at Winged Foot
has an infamous reputation. Tagged by one writer as the “Massacre at
Winged Foot,” the course was the toughest Open setup since 1955 at
Olympic. Longtime Open observer Robert Sommers noted in his book
The U.S. Open: Golf’s Ultimate Challenge, “Vandals drove a car across the
first green after the opening round, but they were so hard that no one
noticed except the men who set the cups early Friday morning.”
It was Winged Foot that elicited perhaps the most famous comment on
U.S. Open setups when Sandy Tatum responded to the question “Is the
USGA trying to embarrass the best players in the world?” by saying “No,
we’re just trying to identify them.” For Irwin, Winged Foot was an ideal
convergence of an attitude and an approach that matched the demands on
the field. “I can remember coming into that tournament that I had just
come off a finish for second in Philadelphia and went up to Winged Foot,
and the practice rounds were brutal. This was the hardest golf course that
I had ever played, not only before but since. It was everything that you
would ever want to see in a golf course and then some.
“So I thought if I can just be steady, keep my emotions under control—
because everyone is going to make bogeys this week; just don’t make as
many bogeys as the next guy. Then if you make a birdie that is a gift from
heaven, because there are so few birdie holes. So just go out there and play
your game.”
Three bogeys coming home on his opening round left him trailing Gary
Player by three, but a second-round 70 tied him with Arnold Palmer, Ray
Floyd, and Player. A patient 71 in round three left Irwin one off the pace
of Tom Watson and strangely comfortable with his position. “As the week
went on, I just kept keeping that in mind and kept playing my game, playThe Kid Who Gave Up Baseball • Hale Irwin 119
ing my game,” says Irwin. “So we started the last day, and Tom Watson was
leading, and Arnold Palmer and I are behind. Tom Watson was a young
Tom Watson, and this was the only time in my career I wasn’t too worried
about Watson. I just didn’t think his game was going to be a good fit for
the final day.
“Arnie’s career hadn’t necessarily peaked, but he was just on the other
side of that. My concern was to play my game . . . and then would somebody out of the pack come up behind us? But I realized no one could come
up from far back in the pack because this golf course was just too hard. So
I kept playing my game, made a big birdie putt at the ninth hole to take
the lead, and never surrendered it.”
It wasn’t that simple on the closing nine. After the go-ahead birdie at
the ninth he parred just one hole over the next seven. That set the stage for
his first pivotal career moment at the par-four 444-yard seventeenth. “What
epitomized my efforts that week was on that hole. I did not know what
kind of a lead I had. Leader boards were not as frequent as we now have
them. I suspected I had the lead, but I didn’t know if I had it by one or
two or what.
“I drove it into the rough on the seventeenth hole, and I just had to hack
it out of there. I was 103 yards from the pin. I hit it in there about twelve
feet or so. I felt I had to make this putt to keep the lead or at least be tied.
It was not any easy putt, but I made it, and that was just the symbol of how
I played that week. I kept grinding it out. I just had to do this shot now. I
couldn’t worry about that I had driven it in the rough, and I couldn’t worry
about eighteen, even though it’s a tough hole. I had to do something right
then. I had to keep it simple and sweet and straight in the hole.
“Then, when I got to the eighteenth tee, someone told me I had a twoshot lead, but a two-shot lead on the last hole could go very quickly. I drove
it right down the middle and hit one of the best two-irons of my life up
onto the green. Then I two-putted for the win.”
Or perhaps, more appropriately, he’d survived his first major duel with
the fates of golf. Irwin’s seven-over-par total was the second highest since
World War II, and he and runner-up Forrest Fezler, at nine over, were the
only totals less than double figures above level par. The ex–football player
had taken on one of the biggest brutes of major tournament golf history
and proved something, to himself. “It proved that I could compete at that
level,” reflects Irwin. Over the next five years he settled into a routine, winning and cashing big
paychecks. Multiple win years followed in 1975, ’76, and ’77. At Medinah
in 1975 he missed repeating as Open champion, finishing a single stroke out
of a play-off with John Mahaffey and Lou Graham. Over that time he
recorded eighty-six consecutive Tour appearances without missing a cut, one
of the longest streaks in golf history.
Open win number two, like most middle children, is the overlooked
jewel in his three-gem crown. The Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio, had a
history of denying good scores in previous Open Championships. No
player had ever broken even par for the event when played at Inverness,
and even though he threatened that record, Irwin too failed to post a red
number after seventy-two holes, finishing at even-par 284.
As had happened at Winged Foot, he struggled early at Inverness, opening with a three-over 74 to sit four off the pace. That all changed when
Irwin seized control with brilliant play in the middle rounds. A three-under
68 and a four-under 67 left him minus four for the championship—three
clear of the field. A three-hole stretch starting at the eleventh in round three
provided Irwin with the margin even a faltering finish on Sunday could
not erase. He followed up two birdies with an eagle at the 523-yard parfive thirteenth. Again it was a two-iron second shot at that hole that highlighted a stretch of four under in three holes.
Four under, and enjoying a six-shot lead with nine holes to play, Irwin
played an untidy inward nine that featured three bogeys and a double bogey
at the seventeenth, giving him a closing 75 and a two-shot margin. He
admitted afterward, “I started choking on the first tee.” But he was a twotime Open champion and again had validated for himself that he belonged
on the major championship stage. “I had had some great years between ’74
and ’79, and the second Open sort of added emphasis to that fact. It was
underlining what I thought was proof that I could still play.”
Five wins in the next four years continued the Irwin pattern of steady
grinding on the PGA Tour, but it was during that stretch that he experienced his biggest disappointment in the game. In 1984 the Open returned
to Winged Foot, and Irwin set his sights on win number three. On this
occasion he had a special incentive to win.
“My father was quite ill with prostate cancer. It was apparent he wasn’t
going to make it. The only thing I could do for him before he died was to
win. I was trying to give him one last little bit of happiness.” Three consecutive rounds in the 60s left him poised to deliver for his
dad. It was Irwin and Fuzzy Zoeller a stroke apart in the final pairing of
the day, but that was as close as Irwin would get. “I failed there. I just played
so poorly on Sunday. But I had put so much pressure on myself that there
was just no way I could win. I had just heaped this mountain of stuff on
top of me. I needed to whittle it down to something I could deal with, and
I just couldn’t do that.”
Following a win at the Memorial in 1985 Irwin was adrift professionally for the remainder of the decade. In 1986 he finished 128th on the
money list without a top ten. Over the next three seasons he remained winless and cracked the top ten only four times.
It was a slump he understood and had the patience to endure. Irwin had
made the decision during that time to venture into the golf design business. He knew the distraction of starting up a new company would be a
hindrance to his game, but it was a sacrifice he was prepared to make, perhaps knowing from his football days that even if the game would drop him
for a few losses, he could get still get up and recover.
“During that time I wasn’t focusing completely on my game and developed some bad habits. I was not paying attention to detail,” he now says.
Starting late in 1989, he decided to “try to concentrate.”
Like most great players, Irwin returned to his fundamentals in the game
and the teacher who had provided them. For Irwin that teacher could be
found in a mirror. Remarkably Irwin never ventured outside his own selfmonitoring to reverse negative trends in his game. “There wasn’t a teacher
available when I started golf years ago. I knew by virtue of playing what I
could do. I knew how I would react when I got nervous, what I did. I knew
what I could do when I felt strong. I don’t say that is necessarily the best
way to go, but for me that was probably the best thing.”
Through the first half of 1990 Irwin could see improved play, but the
winless stretch continued. Nothing suggested he would return to form as
the U.S. Open returned to Medinah in Chicago that June—nothing but
a dream.
Two weeks before the championship Irwin told his wife, Sally, of a
dream he had that he had won the Open. It may have been a wish more
than a premonition because Irwin was playing on a special exemption from
the USGA. Through most of that week it seemed his vision was merely a
pipe dream.
122 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
An opening three-under 69 got his name on the leader board but only
as an afterthought to the brilliant scoring that was going on ahead of him.
A 70 in the second round kept him in the hunt at five under par, but Tim
Simpson, at minus nine, was bidding to become the first-ever player in
U.S. Open history to reach double figures under par.
On Saturday, Irwin could find just one birdie. Offset by three bogeys,
his two-over 74 put him tied for twentieth, now four behind journeyman
leader Mike Donald as Tim Simpson eased back into the pack. On Sunday, Irwin played “U.S. Open” golf, and had a relentlessly consistent string
of outward-nine pars.
But this day was rapidly becoming a “red-numbers” affair, and Hale’s
consistency, normally the cornerpost of an Open challenge, was in reality
losing ground. In football parlance he was facing “third and long” as he
headed to the back nine.
After a par at ten, Irwin made his first move, a birdie at the 402-yard
par-four eleventh. A string of three more birdies followed, taking him to
seven under for the championship, but with the third-round leaders playing two hours behind him, it seemed that Irwin was headed merely for a
final-day notebook item.
Pars on the next four holes failed to alter that impression and brought
him to the eighteenth green facing a nearly-fifty-foot snaking putt for birdie
and serious contention for a play-off spot.
Had he been in the final group, the long bomb he holed might have
ranked as the most dramatic moment in U.S. Open history. His birdie
sent a roaring message to the leaders behind him on the course, and the
normally reserved Irwin punctuated the moment with a victory lap, highfiving his way around the green. It was the signature moment of his career,
but he still had two hours to wait to see if it meant anything at all. “Most
people remember the seventy-second hole, and that’s where the euphoria
happened. That putt that I made was just to get to what I hoped would
be a play-off. There were still hours of play behind me, but I had just
played the last eight holes of the U.S. Open in five under par. That in itself
was pretty amazing. But to birdie that last hole to possibly get into a playoff was my goal.” Donald helped him attain that goal, bogeying the sixteenth hole to slip back into a tie.
