In answer to Bill McBride about Bobby Clampett and the British Open, here is the chapter that recounts those eventful and fateful days at Troon in the summer of 1982:
Legend has it that upon his death in 862, Saint Swithun—Bishop of Winchester, tutor of King Aethelwulf of Wessex and his illustrious son Alfred the Great, builder of churches, and worker of miracles—was buried, per his explicit wishes, in a humble grave outside the Old Minster at Winchester. Here, Swithun pronounced, the rains from the heavens might fall upon him forever. One hundred and nine years later, Bishop Ethelwold took it upon himself to give Swithun a burial more befitting a saint and on July 15, 971 had Swithun’s remains exhumed and moved to a golden shrine inside the cathedral. Miracles ensued, and thus began an annual celebration marking Swithun’s transition. Less than pleased, however seemed Swithun himself, as the relocation was marked by torrential rains that lasted forty days and inspired the legend and the rhyme that if rains fall on July 15 they will last for forty days more.
Swithun would have been the only one who enjoyed the weather during the first round of the 111th Open Championship at Royal Troon Golf Club. The bitter cold, howling winds and icy rain that felt like a thousand tiny daggers caused Arnold Palmer, winner of this championship on this golf course in 1962, to don an uncustomary and frightfully ugly red plaid hat. The King could get away with wearing any crown he pleased; it took serious stones, as the Scots would say, for a complete unknown who had never won anything of relative significance to show up for his inaugural Open sporting a tam ‘o shanter hat, white knickers, and argyle knee socks.
“It was my first time going to Scotland, my first time playing in the British Open,” recalls Clampett. “I felt it was fitting.” Modeling the most attention-grabbing get-up this side of his birthday suit, Clampett knew the press would pepper him about his attire, however he also knew that the best way to skirt questions about his garb was to deflect them with his golf.
Early in the week Clampett toured Troon with his regular practice round partner, Johnny Miller. On Tuesday they teed it up with Gary Player, and Clampett shot sixty-five. The next day he shot seventy-five. “I was really quite frustrated because I had really been working hard on my game and it just wasn’t consistent,” remembers Clampett. “One day I had it, and the next it was gone.” This did not come entirely as a surprise to Clampett, who, prior to hopping the pond, joined Doyle at a clinic in Ohio. The turnout was sparse, so the two had a lot of time to work together, and the focus was Clampett’s consistency—or lack thereof.
Royal Troon Golf Club plays pretty much straight out along the coast of the Irish Sea for nine holes then turns inland and heads back to the clubhouse. The prevailing winds are at a golfer’s back on the way out and in his face on the way in. Clampett wisely sheathed his driver for most of the front nine during the first round, instead hitting long irons off the tee at seven of the outbound holes then relying on his surgical wedge play. At the trio of opening par fours Clampett stuck three straight approach shots all within seven feet. After just missing the first, he drained the next two for birdies. Clampett picked up two more strokes at the par four seventh hole, with a sixteen-foot birdie putt, and the infamous par three “Postage Stamp,” stiffing an eight-iron to within seven feet then banging home the putt.
Making the turn and playing into the teeth of the wind Clampett played the four hundred eighty-one yard par five with driver, one-iron, wedge to ten feet then sank the putt for another birdie to go to five-under. The only blemish on his scorecard came when he bogeyed the par five sixteenth, however Clampett earned that shot back with a rare birdie at Troon’s nefarious home hole.
Forty-four golfers broke par on the front nine. Four did so on the back. To wit, Clampett’s playing partner, Scotsman Keith Lobban, went out in two-under and came in in eleven-over. In all, only thirteen players managed to better par on Thursday. Clampett’s five-under sixty-seven gave the golden boy an improbable two-shot lead and would have grabbed all the headlines had Arnold Palmer, the oldest player in the Open at age fifty-two, not gone round in one-under and earned a place on the first page of the leaderboard.
1982 OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP
FIRST ROUND COMPLETE
Bobby Clampett -5
Tom Watson -3
Nick Price -3
Bernhard Langer -2
Des Smyth -2
Ken Brown -2
Arnold Palmer -1
Johnny Miller -1
Seve Ballesteros -1
Craig Stadler -1
Massy Kuramoto -1
Jose Maria Canizares -1
In his post-round press conference, Clampett indeed fielded the inevitable questions about his wardrobe, telling reporters how much he enjoyed wearing knickers, how he liked knickers so much that he brought two pair, how comfy he felt in his knickers—at which point the press officer intervened and explained to the young Yank that in Britain “knickers” are ladies’ underpants. The lot had a good laugh then Clampett retired to the Sun Court Hotel near Troon’s sixteenth hole with his wee entourage: mother, Jacqueline, her new husband, Fletcher Jones, and Clampett’s girlfriend, Ann Mebane.
Ann talked Clampett out of wearing plus-twos on Friday (plus-twos fall two inches below the knee, as opposed to plus-fours which ride four inches below). Instead, he trotted out white slacks, a red turtleneck, and a powder blue sweater. The clothes changed and so, too, did the weather—Friday was as nice as Thursday was nasty—but the game plan and the results did not. Hitting mostly long irons off the tee then riding a hot putter, Clampett capitalized on an early tee time that saw Troon windless and defenseless. At the par four third Clampett striped a nine-iron to one foot and tapped in for birdie. He repeated the feat at the par five fourth by getting up and down from a bunker.
At the longest hole on the course, the five hundred seventy-seven yard sixth, Clampett reached the green in two and two-putted from fifty feet for another birdie. As he did the day before, Clampett carded a three at the par four seventh and, as he did the day before, Clampett played the front in four-under par. The barrage continued with birdie putts from five feet and one foot at the tenth and eleventh holes, followed by a trio of pars, concluding with a bogey-birdie-bogey-birdie finish for a course record sixty-six, which Michael McDonnell of the Daily Mail called “downright irreverent to the occasion.”
1982 OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP
SECOND ROUND COMPLETE
Bobby Clampett -11
Nick Price -6
Bernhard Langer -5
Des Smyth -5
Tom Watson -4
Sandy Lyle -4
Anyone prescient or crazy enough to place a wager on Clampett with British bookmaker Ladbrokes had to like their chances—and the thirty three-to-one odds. Contemplating Clampett’s thirty-six hole tally, just a stoke off the Open record set by Henry Cotton in 1934 at Royal St. George’s, pre-tournament four-to-one favorite Tom Watson did not look favorably on his own chances. “Bobby will be tough to beat because he is not likely to make many mistakes.” Hugh McIlvanney of the Observer had not counted the three-time Open champion out just yet: “Clampett is surely capable of being overtaken by the weaknesses that the flesh is heir to, especially if someone like Tom Watson is closing on him.”
Clampett reveled in the attention, granting unbounded interviews to anyone with a pen or a microphone, a press badge, and a question. When a reporter from the French newspaper Le Figaro posed a query, Clampett slipped easily into his mother’s native tongue and answered his questioner en Français. Asked by the BBC’s Clive Clark following the second round if he feels as relaxed as he looks, Clampett replied, “It’s kind of like a duck paddling on a pond. On top it looks like he is just floating along but underneath he is really paddling like hell. That’s the way I feel.”
The marathon media sessions were part courtesy and part necessity, as next to no one in the foreign press corps had ever heard of Homer Kelley or The Golfing Machine, and fewer still could comprehend answers like, “I consider myself extremely accurate thanks to an ability to keep the clubface square to the target line only at the point of separation so that my clubface alignment at impact-fix fits the selected degree of horizontal hinge action.”
Hugh McIlvanney of the Observer observed, “The emphasis on achieving the right mechanical effect is so extreme that anyone who mentions flair or inspiration is liable to appear as naïve as a witch doctor at a brain specialist’s convention.
“Emotion, Clampett suggests, is a damaging irreverence in golf. ‘If you get a ball in a bunker, what do you do?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘Get mad and yell at it? No, you think logically, calculate the percentages.’”
McIlvanney respected Clampett’s achievement in having, as he put it, mastered Royal Troon and embarrassed the best golfers in the world over the first two rounds, while at the same time recognizing the Jekyll and Hyde relationship between the rational analyst and the competitive animal. “[Clampett] is declaring that his ‘game strategy’ will never be consciously altered whether he is ten shots in front or ten behind,” McIlvanney wrote after Friday’s second round. “But Sunday evening was still a long way off and Clampett knew that whatever Homer Kelley, Lee Martin, and Ben Doyle have done for him over the years, he was travelling alone now. Almost certainly he realised, too, somewhere deep in his complicated nature, that simple mechanics, however brilliantly controlled, were unlikely to be enough to see him through to historic success.”
In Seattle, Homer Kelley allowed his mind to wander. His faith provided that we are all born perfect and spend our lives striving to demonstrate our perfection. The Golfing Machine promised the approach to golfing perfection, and Bobby Clampett was staging the ultimate demonstration. Forty two years, eleven months, two weeks, and three days had passed between the weird and wonderful day when Kelley shot seventy-seven in his second time golfing and the evening that Clampett, in his first Open Championship, sat five strokes clear of the greatest players on the planet in the oldest and most venerable championship in all of golf.
Kelley thought of James Cooksie, the Tacoma billiard hall owner who goaded him into golfing in the first place. Cooksie was to thank/blame for all this. He had passed forty years before, but old Cooksie must be getting a kick out of this in Heaven, looking down on his fry cook-turned-genius. Kelley would never entertain such a boast (regardless of what the golf scribes were writing); he merely sought to solve a problem. Now, against the greatest of odds and on the grandest of stages, validation was near. From Kelley’s mind to Doyle’s mouth to Clampett’s educated hands, the final dot to connect was the Claret Jug.
In Carmel Valley, Ben Doyle answered his telephone. It was Clampett calling from Scotland. “I might walk away with this tournament,” he bragged. “I’ve done it before.
The golfers who went off Saturday in the morning were greeted by inclement conditions, while the leaders were treated to bright afternoon sunshine that matched Clampett’s disposition. “The leader gave the impression that being so far ahead of such a company might nourish rather than pressurise his strange spirit,” wrote McIlvanney in the Observer. Clampett, bidding to become the youngest Open champion of the century, did not view Price as his chief rival, nor Langer or Watson or Lyle for that matter. That distinction belonged to a one hundred four-year-old: Royal Troon. Clampett aimed to keep doing what was working and see how low he could go. “If I alter it,” Clampett said of his strategy, “I am defeating myself.”
Nick Price and Bobby Clampett, playing together, looked like Starsky and Hutch, with Price sporting a snug-fitting shirt, long hair, sideburns and a disco mustache and Clampett in all burgundy offsetting his baby face and curly golden locks. Price was himself a young and untested unknown from South Africa who had won three times in four years on the European Tour but did not share Clampett’s confidence. “I’m glad I’m not leading,” Price told reporters following the second round, “because I couldn’t handle it.”
Price fulfilled his prophesy and promptly bogeyed the opening two holes. Clampett also dropped a shot at the par four first hole after launching an adrenaline-juiced three-iron off the tee that traveled over two hundred sixty yards and came to rest in a bunker after taking a bad hop, something Clampett had not seen all week. Clampett earned one back at the par five fourth, hitting driver and five-iron onto the green then two-putting for birdie. At the two hundred ten-yard par three fifth hole Clampett overcooked a six-iron that rolled onto and all the way through the green, coming to rest against the fringe forty feet from the hole. With the perfect line and the perfect pace it appeared as if the ball were pulled on an invisible string to the bottom of the cup.
It was something to behold, this golfing machine, every component primed, every variation available, imperatives and essentials allied, geometry and physics attuned. It was like a jet versus a bunch of prop planes.
1982 OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP
THIRD ROUND, THROUGH FIVE HOLES
Bobby Clampett -12
Sandy Lyle -5
Des Smyth -5
Nick Price -4
Bernhard Langer -4
Peter Oosterhuis -4
Tom Watson -3
Clampett stood on the sixth tee, the sun glinting on the silver shaft of his driver as he waggled the clubhead. He flinched and twitched his body as if he were working a key into a lock until everything clicked. Then he launched his trademark takeaway, slow and smooth, before reversing direction, building up lag, picking up speed, then snapping his wrists with violent force at impact. The day before Clampett hit driver then a metalwood to reach the par five in two, though any of hope repeating that feat was dashed when his ball came to rest in a fairway pot bunker.
Clampett figured to take his lumps and hit a sand wedge out. He did not, however, figure to hit the lip and land the ball in another pot bunker just ten yards ahead. Clampett let the club fall to the ground as he hung his head and chastised himself. Stepping into the second bunker, Clampett found his ball sitting in the middle of the sand, giving him more room to work with. Television presenter Peter Allis, the voice of golf in Great Britain, had the call.
“It’s up in a cloud of sand, but is it out? Yes it is, but only just.”
Clampett clipped the lip yet again, advancing the ball only another ten yards and leaving himself some two hundred eighty yards to the green.
“Well now, what a calamity faces Clampett.”
Wielding a metalwood, Clampett took a mighty lash that was instantly met with calls of Fore! As his ball sailed left into the crowd Clampett again let his club fall from his hands as he grasped for answers in a daze of dismay and disgust.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, it clatters through the crowd, and Clampett is in all sorts of trouble.”
Soldiering on, Clampett found his ball some fifty yards from the green in trampled rough. The good news was he had plenty of green before him, as the pin was cut on the far right.
“I shudder to think how many strokes he may drop here.”
Anywhere on the putting green, anywhere but in the black hole of a bunker that swallowed Clampett’s ball. He turned away the moment he hit it, hunching over as if he had been kicked in the groin.
“It’s right up against the face in the corner. He’ll do well to get it out.”
The lie was downright cruel. Squeezed into a contorted stance with his right foot down in the bunker and his left knee up near his chin, Clampett popped the ball up in plume of sand, leaving himself a stout twenty-odd feet from the hole.
“Still a lot to do. What an adventure.”
The putt never had a chance, rolling tentatively to a spot three feet short of the hole. Clampett ended the agony by holing out for a triple-bogey eight. The crowd applauded politely, the way fans do when a player limps off after being injured. Dragging his putter and wearing a hangdog expression, Clampett stalked off the green. In a telling show, he stopped, looked back at the hole, and stuck out his tongue.
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