It would be his last U.S. Open title, but he won another PGA Tour event
that year, and then six years later, in 1992, at the age of forty-nine, he was
86 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
second in the Masters and won the Doral Ryder Open. At age fifty he tied
for seventh in the U.S. Open and at fifty-one tied for tenth in the Masters.
In 1989 he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. He left the
PGA Tour and joined the Senior PGA Tour without the thing he wanted
most by that time, a British Open title. With wins in the three U.S. majors,
a British title would have moved him into the company of Jack Nicklaus,
Gary Player, Ben Hogan, and Gene Sarazen as the only golfers to have won
the four major championships (a rare feat since accomplished only by Tiger
Woods). He had made a serious assault on that championship in the fiveyear span from 1976 through 1981, with a second, third, fourth, and
eighth, but never challenged again and eventually gave up trying as the
years mounted up.
On the Senior PGA Tour, Floyd was a terror. Sixteen days after turning
fifty, he won the GTE North Classic and donated the winner’s check of
$67,500 to the Hurricane Andrew Relief Fund, which benefited families
whose homes had been destroyed by the Florida storm. He played only
seven seniors’ events that year but won three of them. He played fourteen
the next year, splitting time with the regular tour, and won two more. After
he won his thirteenth Senior PGA Tour title in 1996, which was the Ford
Senior Players Championship, his third senior major, hip and back problems curtailed practice, and a reluctance to get up and go to the next town
took their toll. Floyd went three years without a win. He had those problems corrected, then tweaked his game. In 2000 he saw some good things
start to happen, including a fourth place in the U.S. Senior Open. And
then the man who never let the calendar tell him when he could and could
not win won again. At age fifty-seven he came from six strokes back with
eighteen holes to play to win the Ford Senior Players Championship in
Dearborn, Michigan. That made him the oldest man ever to win a senior
major. Floyd shot a closing 66, holing a twenty-footer for birdie on the
last green to win by a shot. Whether “the Stare” was there could not be
detected. He was wearing dark glasses. But the result suggested that it was.
It was his fourth senior major, but he dismissed the notion that it was
as significant as those he had won on the PGA Tour. “It’s not even in the
same ballpark,” he said. “The other tour is what it’s all about, winning
majors. This is nice, and it’s a mulligan, if you would, or life after, but it’s
not like winning a major on the other tour.”
Perfect Balance • Raymond Floyd 87
The British Open would be played the next week, but Floyd wasn’t
going. Time, which had meant so little to him, had finally subdued him.
“I can’t compete on that Tour,” he said. “That’s like some sprinter running against Michael Johnson. Those kids are longer, stronger. I’m not that
hungry.”
Anymore.
