Thursday, September 7, 2000
Can Woods duplicate Trevino's feat?
By LORNE RUBENSTEIN
Toronto Globe and Mail
Tiger Woods's appearance in the Bell Canadian Open provides an
ideal opportunity to reconsider one of golf's best ball strikers
and shotmakers. That's Lee Trevino, the now-senior player who
won the U.S, British and Canadian Opens in 1971.
Should Woods win this week he'll have accomplished the same feat.
Yet there is one important difference. Trevino, 60, won the U.S.
Open, then the Canadian Open two weeks later and the British Open
the following week. The Royal Canadian Golf Association retroactively
awarded him the so-called Triple Crown prize, along with $25,000.
It wasn't as if Trevino came to the Canadian Open with a chance
to make the triple play, as does Woods.
But that shouldn't diminish Trevino's feat. The distinguished
writer Herbert Warren Wind said Trevino's wins over a 23-day period
probably represented the apex of his career. He went on to win
a total of six majors, and took the 1977 and 1979 Canadian Opens.
Trevino's win in the 1977 Canadian Open was particularly interesting.
He had been hit by lightning in 1975 while playing the Western
Open near Chicago. Back problems ensued, exacerbated by an injury
he suffered in June 1976 while moving a heavy potted plant at
home. That led to surgery, and Trevino had to take three months
off from competitive golf.
His win in the 1977 Canadian Open, the first one held at Glen
Abbey, was his only victory of the season. He stamped himself
as a Glen Abbey specialist, and showed that the course was made
for his fade when he won again in 1979.
But it was long before that when Trevino first came to the golf
world's attention. He had been raised in his grandfather's unheated
shack in Dallas, left school when he was 14 and worked at a driving
range and caddied at a local course.
Very few people knew about Trevino when he qualified for and finished
fifth in the 1967 U.S. Open at Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield,
N.J.
A year later Trevino won the U.S. Open, at Oak Hill in Rochester,
N.Y. He shot four rounds in the 60s and was the first golfer to
break par in every round of the U.S. Open.
The wise-cracking, fast-talking golfer was now known to everybody.
He had even been on the cover of Time Magazine. And who was on
the cover recently? One Tiger Woods.
Then came 1971, and Trevino hooked up with Jack Nicklaus at Merion
outside Philadelphia in the U.S. Open. They ended in an 18-hole
playoff, when Trevino, famously, pulled a rubber snake out of
his bag on the first tee and presented it to Nicklaus.
That lightened the mood but it was Trevino who bogeyed the first
hole when he missed the green with a 9-iron.
That was the last bogey Trevino made, as he beat Nicklaus 68-71.
He showed up at Richelieu Valley near Montreal two weeks later
for the Canadian Open and quickly became a favorite. Jim Barclay
in his book Golf in Canada: A History, mentions that Wilf Homeniuk
— long an underrated Canadian player who has for some years
been a fine teacher at Oakdale Golf and Country Club in Toronto
— said, “If the wind blows, watch out for Trevino.”
Homeniuk was right. He knew that Trevino's ability to hit the
ball low, which he had learned in the constant Texas winds, would
be useful at Richelieu Valley. Conditions were indeed windy, and
Trevino tied Art Wall after regulation play.
He holed a 15-foot birdie putt on the first extra hole to win.
Now he was champion of the U.S. and Canada — president and
prime minister of golf all wrapped up in a boisterous TexMex package.
Trevino's next tournament was the British Open at Royal Birkdale
in Southport, England. He was there or thereabouts the entire
tournament, but just about blew it all on the 17th hole the last
day. He played up to the green like a 20-handicapper — into
the rough on his drive, a slash forward only a short way, his
third back to the rough.
Trevino double-bogeyed the hole but then birdied the last to win.
That was it for what the RCGA and its Canadian Open sponsor Imperial
Tobacco decided was a Triple Crown. The PGA Tour doesn't recognize
the accomplishment, mind you. There's no mention of it in the
Tour's media guide.
But so what? Trevino knows what he did that summer of 1971. He
put on quite a show, and, to bring matters up to date, he is still
doing it. Trevino has won once on the Senior PGA Tour this year
and made more than half a million bucks.
He can still play. Come to think of it, it would have been wonderful
if Trevino were playing the Canadian Open this week. Officials
could have bent the rules for putting players together and had
Woods and Trevino in the same group. Now that would be some show.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com.)
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