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The Anti-Shark At the British Open, rough and rumpled Tom Lehman did what Greg Norman couldn't: hold off Nick Faldo to win a major championshipBy Rick Reilly Issue date: July 29, 1996
What you need is a big-boned Midwestern boy like 37-year-old Tom Lehman, who is never going to be the centerfold of Golf Digest but was just stubborn enough to hold off the unkillable Faldo, not to mention Fred Couples, Ernie Els and Mark McCumber, to win his first major on Sunday at preposterously sunny Royal Lytham and St. Annes near Blackpool, England.
Lehman's 67-67-64-73 for a 13-under 271 made it a week as American as MTV. This was the second straight year an American has had the scones to come to Britain and win. (Last year John Daly did it at St. Andrews.) It was also the first time an American has won at Lytham since Bobby Jones in 1926 and a year when Americans took first, second, two ties for fifth, a tie for seventh, low amateur (Tiger Woods) and low grandfather. Fifty-six-year-old Jack Nicklaus pushed the Olympics off the front of the world's sports pages with his five-under-par 66 on Friday, which put him only one measly shot out of the lead in a quest for his 19th major. "Who knows?" he said without his old bravado that night. "I might play great or I might go out the next two days and shoot 150." (He shot 77-73 for 150.) Still, for all the Yanks on the leader board, the week seemed to belong to native son Faldo, basking in a newfound popularity in Britain that somehow comes from divorcing your wife, moving to Orlando and dating a coed. Unnoticed in the Faldofest, Lehman had taken control of the tournament by late Saturday when his brilliant 64 broke the course record. Not that this was a good thing. When the words on the news that night were read -- "Lehman's got a six-shot lead over Nick Faldo with one day left to play" -- a chill came over golf. It was like reading, Unaware, Susan descended the unlit stairs to the basement. If you had been in a theater you would have tucked your knees up to your chest and tried to crawl inside your popcorn. Six shots? Over Faldo? One round to go? Yikes. Only two majors and three months ago Greg Norman held the same six-shot lead over the same unshakable Faldo with one round to go in the Masters and wound up as a smudge mark, giving up not only the six but another five and suffering the biggest and most gruesome collapse in major-championship golf history. But it's not just Norman. Faldo has made a career of sucking in leaders on Sundays like some giant Hoover attachment. He reeled in Paul Azinger to win the '87 British, Scott Hoch to win the '89 Masters, Ray Floyd for the '90 Masters, John Cook for the '92 British, Curtis Strange at the '95 Ryder Cup, then Norman. Next? "Well, if anything is going to happen," Faldo said coyly on Saturday night, "the last group is the place to be." Lehman rolled out every cliché he could find in the press tent that night, steeling himself. "I'm going to take it one hole at a time," he said. Also, "I can't worry about the other guy." But afterward, he thought hard about it. He had watched Norman that dreadful April Sunday on television ("painful," he said), and he knew what Faldo could do to the rest of his career. But he also knew that he is about as far from Norman as a man can get. Lehman never expected to be playing in a major, much less leading one. This is a man who has a deep working knowledge of the Dakotas tour, the Carolinas tour and all the worn-out fan belts and hoses in between. This is a man who was once so smelly and broke that he couldn't afford a motel to take a shower in, so he pulled his old Volvo over behind a building, stripped to his shorts and showered in a driving rainstorm instead. Lehman is a Volvo kind of guy and, in fact, drove a Volvo until this year when his wife (and former caddie), Melissa, surprised him with a new Mercedes for his birthday. "He was embarrassed about it," says Andy Martinez, his current caddie. "I almost think he would rather have stayed with his Volvo." Norman spends his leisure time wrestling eels. Lehman just tends his roses, hundreds and hundreds of roses, at his Scottsdale, Ariz., home. "That's the only thing Tom spends his time and money on," says his father, Jim, 63, who was along for the ride in England last week. "Those roses." And so maybe the biggest difference was that Norman seemed to have so much to prove that Sunday in April while Lehman had so little. When you were the Hogan tour Player of the Year at 32 years old and only six years removed from filling out a job application that would've had you renting skis to University of Minnesota students in the winter, and only one year from surgery on your colon to cut out polyps that proved to be only precancerous, you do not have a lot to prove to anybody. "I've already shown I've got enough guts and courage," Lehman was saying at dusk on Saturday night. "I mean, I want to win, but my life is not going to crumble if I collapse." Then a pause. "Of course, I guess I've got to be realistic about this. How many chances like this come along?" Lately, lots of them. He and his controlled crash-hook have been part of the final acts of at least one major each year for the last three--losing heartbreakingly to Jose Maria Olazabal at the '94 Masters, grudgingly to Corey Pavin at the Shinnecock U.S. Open last year and achingly on the final hole to Steve Jones at the Oakland Hills U.S. Open only a month ago. He was reminded of that last Friday night at Tiggy's, the restaurant of choice in Lytham-St. Annes, when he found Lee Janzen, Scott Simpson and Jones sitting at a table. "Is this table reserved only for major-championship winners?" he asked. "Yeah," one of them said. "But you can pick up the check." "That was always my greatest fear," Lehman said on Sunday. "To die and have it written on my tombstone: HERE LIES TOM LEHMAN. HE COULDN'T WIN THE BIG ONE." For a time, this looked like Lesson No. 4 in How to Lose Gracefully. Lehman woke up Sunday morning and found that his putter had gained 103 pounds overnight and had the feel of a pickax. Nothing went in on the putting green before the round and, from the start, nothing went in on the golf course. Double yikes. Worse, amid the dust and dirt and pollen convention at Royal Lytham, Lehman was also battling a crowd that was either entirely Faldo kin or near to it, screaming maniacally for Faldo wedges that came to rest within 10 feet of the pin and rooting hard, like on number 3, for Lehman's ball to get in the bunker. (It did.) "Kind of like playing the Dallas Cowboys at Texas Stadium," Lehman said. At one point, on the 7th, somebody yelled out, "Remember Augusta!" and another followed with, "Knock it in, Greg!" Lehman burned. "No disrespect to Greg," he said, "but history is history and ... they were calling me a choker. I didn't want to have a repeat performance of Augusta here. I just wanted to bury that putt [at 7], just to show 'em." (He didn't.) Still, against all odds, Faldo kept letting Lehman out of the box. He missed a six-footer on 5 for a birdie, a three-footer on 6 for a birdie, then a six-footer on 7 for a birdie. "I lost confidence in my putter after that," Faldo lamented. Of course, by then, there were so many other things for Lehman to worry about. Up ahead, Couples was slapping together a little 30 on the front nine, passing Faldo and cutting Lehman's lead from six strokes down to two as Lehman played the 6th hole. Here everybody was watching the featured pairing, and the winner might not even be in it. Then came Els, who is bound to win half a dozen majors one of these days. He could have had four of them by now but has only one (the '94 U.S. Open), and he has been no worse than 12th in his last five. This time, Els leapfrogged Couples and Faldo and for a while -- after a birdie at 15 -- he had the eventual winning score of 13 under before leaving it somewhere in a pot bunker on the way back to the clubhouse. As Els knocked his eagle approach a foot past the 15th hole, Lehman walked to the 12th green, still birdieless, still without once having had the honors. And that's when Lehman finally made a putt, a 13-footer for birdie on the par-3 12th that let him hold on to a two-shot lead and put some actual air in his lungs. Couples came apart then, putting his 30 on the front together with a 41 on the back for an even-par 71 and no effect. And when Els drove into one of the approximately four million pot bunkers at Lytham to bogey 16, it was all Lehman's to lose. He nearly did. He three-putted the 14th for a bogey and then on 15 knocked his approach into a greenside bunker that you could not fit a good-sized cat into. Lehman had to stand with one foot outside the bunker and hit, but somehow he swept his ball out so sweetly and softly that it stopped six feet from the hole, and he drained it, maybe the biggest putt of his life. That allowed him to bogey 17 and still play the 18th sweatlessly, driving into the left rough, knocking it 35 feet from the pin with a pretty eight-iron and needing only to two-putt from three feet to win $310,000. "I lagged it," he said. It went in anyway, and he pulled up a chair at the table of champions. This will be the kind of win that is popular in the locker room, the press room and the caddie room. It is hard not to like a guy who starts his British Open acceptance speech in front of 30,000 fans surrounding the 18th green with a whopping, "Wow!" Afterward, Lehman was cradling the winner's claret jug and remembering a Nowhere Tour event in Wichita, Kans.: He drove more than 800 miles, won the tournament and a check that barely covered his month's expenses, and was handed a pewter cup that broke in his trunk by the next fill-up. He looked at his newest trinket and nearly cried. "They'll never take this thing away from me." First rule of the rose gardener: The thorns always come before the blooms. Issue date: July 29, 1996
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