Herbert Warren Wind
Chronicling events long in the rear-view mirror is a risky business. The late great Herbert Warren Wind did it so well in The New Yorker and elsewhere, writing about major tournaments finished for many weeks, if not months, that the USGA named a writing award after him.
The risk is clear: since the reader knows how the event in question turns out, the writer can’t rely on uncertainty to build narrative momentum. The really skillful writer, like Wind, has to become something of a magician in recreating the tension of the moment.
Four recent books about the pro game attempt to do just that, and they range in fascinating scope from the broad—David Barrett’s 20-tournament survey of The Greatest U.S. Opens (Tatra Press, $32)—to almost microscopic—Chris Millard’s The Shot (Back Nine Press, 34.99) about Tom Watson’s chip-in at Pebble Beach that took him to victory over Jack Nicklaus in the 1982 Open.
In between we have two books about, yes, Tiger Woods, since it seems that particular well has yet to go dry. Together We Roared (William Morrow, $30) is a sort of memoir by Steve Williams with co-author Evin Priest, about the 12-year partnership between Tiger and his caddie. The Tiger Slam by Kevin Cook (Avid Reader Press, $30) is self-evidently about the remarkable 2000-2001 stretch when Woods won four consecutive majors.
Clearly, there’s some overlap between the books—the 1982 Open is mentioned in two; the 2000 Open that ignited Tiger’s slam shows up in three volumes, so one hopes we’ve got that covered for perpetuity.
All four books succeed on their own terms, but Millard’s is the best of the bunch. At 143 pages it has the virtue of being the shortest (if thereby overpriced), as one might expect about a singular golf shot. But the book manages to pack in a lot more context, clearly.
The subtitle is “Watson, Nicklaus, Pebble Beach, and the Chip That Changed Everything.” Everything refers to Watson’s sole U.S. Open victory, his sole major win with long-time caddie Bruce Edwards on the bag, and a shifting of the way golf was being broadcast on television. Millard, in brisk and engaging prose, also tutors us about Pebble Beach and its history, both in a business and an architectural sense–particularly the unheralded redesign work by H. Chandler Egan and even more particularly the seventeenth hole.
There is eventually an entire chapter devoted to The Shot, not to mention frame by frame photos of Watson executing it and exulting after it. For those with shaky memories, the 1982 Open was, in the end, all about Nicklaus and Watson. The latter came to the seventeenth par-3 with the two tied for the lead. Watson needed a birdie on one of the two last holes to win, and when he hit a two iron long and left into gnarly rough the immediate world (including Nicklaus) assumed that Jack had won his fifth Open.
Then came the now-famous exchange, Edwards saying about the upcoming second shot, “Get it close,” and Watson replying, “Get it close? Hell, I’m going to make it!” No need of a spoiler alert to say we know how that turned out.
<<<>>>
Pebble Beach was also the springboard for the Tiger Slam, the 2000 U.S. Open. Cook, a previous winner of the Herbert Warren Wind Award for Tommy’s Honour about Tom Morris, Old and Young, subtitles this volume, “The Inside Story of the Greatest Golf Ever Played.”
Tough to argue, though some might mention Bryon Nelson’s 11 consecutive victories in 1945 or Tiger’s own streak of 281 weeks atop the World Golf Rankings. In any case, Cook takes us through each of the four tournaments, and not a little of the controversy, that constituted the Tiger Slam. Like Millard, Cook provides plenty of context for each tournament and lots of narrative drive to keep us moving through what is otherwise familiar territory.
The 2000 Open is itself often cited as the single greatest tournament achievement, as Tiger led wire to wire and leveled the rest of the field, tying the then low Open scoring record (272), finishing the last round bogey-free and setting a majors margin of victory record that still stands—15 strokes—surpassing the previous 13-stroke record of 1862 held by none other than Old Tom Morris.
Woods marched on, winning the Open Championship at the Old Course in St. Andrews by eight strokes. The PGA Championship at the Valhalla Golf Club in Kentucky was a squeaker, as Tiger was pushed to to the limit (and a three-hole playoff) by the unlikely challenger, Bob May.
Before Tiger prevailed in the 2001 Masters by two strokes, all the chatter had unfolded: Would a Tiger Masters win constitute the Grand Slam? The consensus seemed to be that no, a Grand Slam has to unfold in a single year. But when Tiger lined up all four current major trophies on his mantelpiece, it was a pretty strong retort.
<<<>>>
The Bruce Edwards-Tom Watson caddie-player partnership is surely one of the most poignant ever. But the 12-year Steve Williams-Tiger Woods pairing from 1999 to 2011 has to be the most successful. As the subtitle of the Williams-Priest book puts it, Williams was “Alongside Tiger for His Epic Twelve-Year, Thirteen-Majors Run.” That’s 13 of Tiger’s 15 major wins, not to mention 63 PGA Tour victories and more world-wide.
I call this a memoir of sorts because co-author Evin Priest did more than merely clean up transcriptions of many interviews with Williams. He also spoke with others close to the Tiger orbit—Mark O’Meara, Stuart Appleby, Chris DiMarco, Adam Scott and others, to more fully round out the world of Woods. And he made the decision to write the book in the third-person rather than first, though the narrative is mainly from Williams’s standpoint.
It works. Though we’re again not going over any new territory, we’re at least looking through a different window. And who tells stories better than a caddie? From a humorous start to an acrimonious finish (enter Adam Scott), through a post-caddying 12-year period of no communication whatsoever to a welcome reconciliation, it’s pretty much all here with no apparent punches pulled (if a little quiet on the Tiger sex scandal).
There are certainly some fun things here—how Williams would pick out a theme song for each major and play it over and over again (Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” for the first time the Open was played at Bethpage Black), the detailed statistics he would keep on every one of Tiger’s round, the elements of their friendship outside the ropes, plus a nice collection of photographs, including inscribed flags from the many major wins.
<<<>>>
Barrett’s subtitle, “High Drama at Golf’s Most Challenging Championship” hints at his criteria for picking the 20 greatest U.S. Opens. The obvious are here, including the Woods steamroller of 2000: Francis Ouimet’s classic upset of Vardon and Ray in 1913, the third leg of the Bobby Jones Impregnable Quadrilateral in 1930, Ben Hogan’s tenacious comeback in 1950 and his improbable upset by Jack Fleck in 1955, Palmer’s come-from-way-behind win in 1960, his loss to Nicklaus in 1962 (Jack’s first professional win), Johnny Miller’s final round 63 in 1973, and of course Payne Stewart’s poignant win at Pinehurst in 1999.
As ever, one can quibble. Among the missing are Ken Venturi’s near-death march in the 1964 heat at Congressional, or 2011 at Congressional, when Rory McIlroy won his first major and set 11 Open records in the process, including lowest total, 268.
What’s here will do. I’ll offer the same caveat as I did about Barrett’s year-by-year survey, The Story of the Masters: that the book shouldn’t be read cover to cover lest one’s eyes glaze over from an excess of details about early round scores and who made or missed what x-foot putt on this hole or that to move them in front or behind by x-strokes.
Barrett is not a stylist like Millard or Cook; these are solid reports rather than sparkling essays. As Barrett writes in his acknowledgments, “This was a research-driven book,” and sometimes it reads like it. But the research is impeccable, and Barrett has a nice way of anticipating questions that might arise—when Snead blows the 1939 Open we learn he never will win one, for example, and there’s a lot of that.
And as I also said about the Masters book, there’s the virtue of watching history unfold after a fashion, as the two-day tournament gives way to three and then four days, as the rules change, as the cast of characters emerge, age and finally give way to younger members. And so it goes.
This article originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the 2025 April-May issue of Golf Oklahoma magazine.
