Global Golf Post - July 9, 2010

Almost A Special Win For The ‘Nearly Man’

The missed putt. That’s what everyone remembers. That’s what Doug Sanders can’t forget.

There went the 28-incher sliding past the cup. There went
the1970 Open Championship. There went the late Pat-Ward
Thomas, the esteemed and critical British golf writer, to his
knees, peering across the 18th green at St. Andrews and later
saying, “A subtle break he didn’t see.”
Sanders will turn 77, a bad round, a good age, a few days
after this coming Open. “I remember once going as long as five
minutes without thinking about it,” he said not too long ago.
“But I’m par with history. Whenever people think of the most
famous course in the world, they think of Doug Sanders.”
Of Sanders, who owned 400 pair of shoes, who was called the
“Peacock of Golf” for his pastel attire, who swung fast, short and
in three parts ... oh, what might have been.

“I missed the most expensive putt that ever was,” Sanders recalls. “I would give up every victory in my career to have won that title.” Oh, what was.

Jack Nicklaus won that title, beating Sanders in an 18-hole playoff still used at the time. Nicklaus won his first major in three years and then, out of character, hurled his putter toward the gray sky, the club nearly skulling Sanders on its downward flight. Which would have been appropriate for a man so cursed.

It was my second Open, and all of Britain was in thrall over Tony Jacklin, who had taken the tournament a year earlier at Royal Lytham and had won the U.S. Open a month earlier at Hazeltine.

Gorgeous weather that first day at St. Andrews and, in a
Harris Tweed sport coat purchased a few days earlier, I walked
blithely out of the press tent to watch golf, oblivious to the
words of the great Herbert Warren Wind, “Better not go with-
out an umbrella.”
Indeed, a storm came out of nowhere. Jacklin was 8 un-
der through 10 holes. Rain rivers swept across the greens.
“Jacko” sliced a 4-wood into the bushes at 14. Play was
abandoned, and through what would be labeled the “Jacklin
Rule,” the R&A, instead of a re-start, decreed golfers return the
next day to continue. Home-rough advantage, you might say.