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Out of the Woods
By Steve Rushin
Issue Date: April, 15 1998
 Your new Masters champion is a multimillionaire who loves cheap motels, endorses Rogaine and suffers so badly from male-pattern blandness that one man approached him at dinner in Augusta last week shouting, "Mark McCumber! Mark McCumber! You're Mark McCumber!"
"Sorry," the man was told. "I'm Mark O'Meara."
For the record, your new Masters champion isn't McCumber, who earned just $3,870 on the PGA Tour last year, but O'Meara, who holed a 20-foot birdie putt on the 72nd hole on Sunday evening to win his first major, in his 15th try at Augusta, at an age—41—when most men are dribbling down the front of their hospital gowns. Or so your previous Masters champion would have you believe.
"Studies show that your physical peak is at age 28, and unless you work out, you lose one percent of your motor skills each year after that," Tiger Woods said earnestly on Saturday evening. Hours later the 22-year-old Woods finished the tournament tied for eighth place, six strokes behind O'Meara, his close friend and neighbor in Orlando's ultraswish Isleworth community. Woods's three-under-par 285 left him only two strokes behind 58-year-old Jack Nicklaus and comfortably ahead of 62-year-old Gary Player, to say nothing of 66-year-old Gay Brewer, whose name may sound like a niche publication but was, in fact, near the top of the leader board for most of the tournament's opening round.
It went that way all week for all of golf's young stars. David Duval, 26, was watching TV in the Jones Cabin at 7 p.m. on Sunday, awaiting a possible playoff with O'Meara and 38-year-old Fred Couples, both of whom were also at eight under par, when O'Meara jarred his 20-footer on 18. "Novels with strange and goofy characters are what I like," says the bookish Duval, whose idea of something to read (The Fountainhead) differs from that of most pros (the sprinkler head), but the fact remains: Every player could enjoy last week's story, an epically strange and impossibly goofy four-day serial thriller from Augusta.
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Despite hitting two traps on 18 on Sunday, Fred Couples saved par.
John Iacono |
For starters, take the finish. It was as absurd and endearing a scenario as you will find in sports, which somehow keeps throwing these little life lessons at us: On Easter Sunday, in his 40th consecutive Masters, in a week in which a plaque was affixed to a drinking fountain between the 16th green and 17th tee to commemorate his achievements and send him off into the September of his years, six-time Masters champion Jack Nicklaus birdied four of his first seven holes to move within two shots of the lead. This left the other players on the leader board with no galleries and a strong desire to abandon their own matches so they could see what in god's name had gotten into Nicklaus, who hadn't won on the regular Tour since his preposterous Masters victory in 1986.
"You knew exactly where he was as he made his way around the course," said Duval after Sunday's round. "We were at number 2 and heard a roar, so we knew he stuck his shot on 6. We heard another roar, so we knew he made the putt. ..." So it went all afternoon, a sonic boomlet of Jack-induced joy going up every 20 minutes or so.
When Woods—who won last year's Masters by a record 12 strokes and was expected to do the same for years to come—was asked last week if he could imagine playing in his 40th consecutive Masters, he replied, "God, no. I can't even fathom, I guess, being that old."
But for the most part, this year's principals couldn't fathom being so young, as young as young Woods—or Duval, or Phil Mickelson, 27, or Justin Leonard, 25. The leader entering Sunday was Couples, a man with arthritis in his back and retirement in his heart. "I'll still play golf," he said of his plans to hang it up within five years. "It'll just be every Tuesday at eight o'clock at the club." Couples enjoyed a two-stroke lead over Paul Azinger, also 38, and Mickelson. "I wish I was Tiger's age," Couples said with a sigh on Saturday night, "but when he's 30, I think he's going to be spent."
Would it be any wonder? After teeing off to start the defense of his title on Thursday, Woods received a death threat via the Internet. He was, in accordance with his wishes, informed of the threat by a course official on the 13th tee. (It's a measure of how routine these threats have become that Woods promptly birdied the hole.)
Woods whiled away Saturday night shut inside his bedroom, inside his locked rental house, itself guarded by a sheriff's deputy, inside a gated community in Augusta. He had played erratically but was only five strokes off the lead.
"I don't have any desire at all to change places with Tiger," says O'Meara, who lives three blocks from Woods and has him over for lunch regularly. "I have seen the sacrifices he has had to make, and. ..." Well, let's just say a canine unit of the Augusta police department won't be required outside O'Meara's rental home next April, as it was in front of Woods's this year.
Contrast his life with that of Matt Kuchar, the 19-year-old successor to Woods as U.S. Amateur champion, a man Woods called Kid when they played together on Thursday. Kuchar literally never stopped smiling over four glorious days of even-par golf at Augusta National, whose back nine looked so familiar to him. "Man, Pop," Kuchar said to his caddie-father, Peter, as the two strolled Amen Corner last Thursday. "How many times have we been on the other side of the TV?"
O'Meara's first Masters win in 15 tries removed the mantle of greatest golfer never to win a major from his shoulders. Robert Beck |
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Like the heroine in the ultimate novel of "strange and goofy characters," Alice in Wonderland, Kuchar, a Georgia Tech sophomore, had gone through the modern-day looking glass and wound up inside his television set. On Thursday he made a 10-foot putt on 6, in full view of the gallery at 16, where Nicklaus made his iconic birdie putt in 1986. "I remember Jack Nicklaus making his putt on 16 back in '86," said Kuchar afterward, "and he lifted his putter up in the air. And for some reason, my putter just went up in the air."
Duval watched Nicklaus's 1986 triumph as it reran on the Golf Channel on the Monday of Masters week. So, for that matter, did Nicklaus, who was playing with his grandkids when he happened upon it, little knowing that he would resurrect those images later in the week. Of course, the best impression of Nicklaus by a golfer other than Nicklaus last week belonged to O'Meara, who won the Masters with his putter. In all, he took only 105 putts, 12 less than Woods did last year, when he shot a record 270 and didn't three-putt once.
O'Meara and Woods, whose oh-so-modern friendship was brokered by their mutual agency, IMG, play together often. Practicing at Bay Hill in Orlando last month, Woods outdrove O'Meara by 67 yards on one hole—they actually paced it off. "Look," said O'Meara, "you and I can't continue to play practice rounds together. You've got an eight-iron to the green, and I've got a three-wood. Where's the fairness in that?"
"You've got a putter," Woods replied.
"He was right," O'Meara said after putting on the green jacket. While Duval was three-putting 16 on Sunday for bogey, to go to eight under, O'Meara was birdieing 15, to get to seven under. O'Meara's partner, Couples, made an eagle at 15 and tied Duval for the lead, and both men would par out the round.
Despite trailing both men by a stroke O'Meara strode to the 17th tee feeling oddly at ease. "I'm going to birdie the last two holes and win," he said to his caddie, Jerry Higginbotham, who noted the faraway look in his loop's eyes. Higginbotham would later say, "He was like, stoned, man."
O'Meara did make a birdie at 17—one-putting from nine feet, left to right, downhill—to pull even with Couples and Duval. His tee shot on 18 left him 148 uphill yards from the flag. Higginbotham suggested a six-iron. "I'm gonna blitz a seven-iron," said the stoned O'Meara, who put his ball on the bottom shelf of the green, 20 feet to the right of the stick.
The gallery at 18 was too large, and O'Meara's two children were too small to see what happened next. All that Shaun, 8, and Michelle, 11, knew was that a very frightening sound went up from the crowd. Then Renay Appleby, wife of Tour player Stuart and a friend of the family's, turned to the kids and screamed, "You won! You won! You won!"
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Nothing could save Tiger Woods from falling to Mark O'Meara's deft putting. Bob Martin |
With that putt, O'Meara happily handed his share of the disputed title of Best Player Never to Have Won a Major to Colin Montgomerie, who has now unified the belt, if you will. Asked last week by the American press corps in Augusta what he would do if he won the Masters, Montgomerie replied hilariously, "What would I do if I won? Well, I could sit here like you guys with a green jacket and a fancy tie and I'd wear it all day every day, and I'd buy a place in Augusta and come here all the time...."
O'Meara's reverence in victory was genuine, and so was his glee. When the winning putt fell, Woods went ape-spit with happiness in Butler Cabin, one cabin from Duval, who was also watching on TV. Scant moments later Tiger could hardly get the green jacket on the motor-skills-impaired O'Meara, who couldn't get his right hand into the sleeve. "I'm 41 years old," O'Meara reminded Woods, who was holding the jacket too high. "I can't get my arm way up there."
The green-jacket ceremony was then repeated for the ticket holders outside Butler Cabin, on the practice green that abuts 18. As it proceeded, Higginbotham quietly presented O'Meara's wife, Alicia, with various loosely affixed mementos from his white jumpsuit: the MASTERS logo on one pocket and his caddie number, 73, on the other. Michelle then ripped her father's name off Higginbotham's back. Never in your life have you seen a golfer on a putting green so happy to get Velcroed as Mark O'Meara.
Only the night before, he reflected on his childhood in Mission Viejo, Calif., and what a wonder it is that he would ever be mistaken for a professional golfer at all—whether that golfer be Mark O'Meara or Mark McCumber or anyone else. ("Tom Lehman, too," O'Meara said. "I get that a lot.")
"I washed clubs at the country club as a kid," O'Meara said. "Not because I was poor—I wasn't poor. I was just hoping to one day play on the PGA Tour and one day win one tournament." And winning a major? "That would fulfill a dream. No doubt about it."
Even to the runners-up this Masters was, "I don't know—dreamlike, maybe?" So said Duval, who waited for O'Meara's putt to fall, and knowing that it would. "Watching the tournament on television, I had seen too many funny things happen" he said, thinking of Nicklaus in 1986 and Norman in '96.
"Playing here is something I wish everyone could experience," said Duval, whose only regret, as he watched O'Meara's ball fall into the cup, was that "I didn't get to go back out there."
He didn't get to go through the looking glass, to the other side of the TV, as so many other players already had.
Issue date: April 20, 1998
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