Thought for the Day
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see
Go Gently, Tom Weiskopf
In recent months the world of pro golf has, for obvious reasons, been dominated by LIV, the breakaway tour backed by Saudi Arabian money. One regrettable side-effect of this is that the passing of Tom Weiskopf, who died on August 20, has not received the attention it deserves.
Weiskopf was one of the smoothest, sweetest swingers of a golf club there has ever been and to watch him in full flow was to see an artist at work. ‘Honey poured over molasses’ does not quite summarise the velvety efficiency with which he launched a golf ball but it will have to do for the moment. No, on second thoughts I’ll leave it to Jim Murray, one of the most insightful men ever to write about golf. He said of Weiskopf: ‘His swing was made in heaven, part velvet, part silk, like a royal robe, so sweet you could pour it over ice cream.’
Unfortunately, there were two significant factors in Tom’s life which dictated that his free-flowing brilliance brought him just one major championship – The Open of 1973 at Royal Troon. The first factor was completely outwith his control but the other was very much a product of his own, sometimes tortured, psyche.
The first was that he lived and played in the age of golf’s supreme major champion, even worse, though, is that he became the first golfer to be dubbed ‘the next Jack Nicklaus.’ That is a burden no-one should have to carry and for Weiskopf it was a straitjacket from which he could never escape.
Late in his career he said: ‘I didn’t handle the Nicklaus situation well. I got tired of hearing and reading about him all the time, and especially always being compared to him. I could hit the ball as far as he could, sometimes a little farther. I could hit my irons as well as he could. But I had a different makeup or personality, and I took the comparing thing very personally; that was a big part of it. I wasn’t him, or even trying to be like him.’
The second factor to limit his achievements was his constant striving for perfection, an abhorrence of hitting a bad shot and inability, once he’d hit one, to put it behind him and move on. An essential skill for all pro golfers is the ability to play ugly – that is, to minimise costly mistakes and plough on through a bad run of holes or poor round while eliminating the really disastrous. For a perfectionist like Weiskopf, who could hit just about any shot to order, falling short of his own, extraordinarily exacting standards, drove him mad. So much so that he quickly earned the nickname The Towering Inferno. He was never able to accept, as Nicklaus himself did with equanimity, that during a round he might hit four shots exactly as intended.
It was something he was to reflect on towards the end of his playing career, with the words: ‘The most persistent feelings I have about my career are guilt and remorse. Sometimes they almost overwhelm me. I’m proud I won 15 times on tour and the 1973 British Open. I should have won twice that many, easy. I wasted my potential. I didn’t utilise the talent God gave me.’
To have a superb swing and an abundance of golfing ability, without the temperament to capitalise on them, must be a form of exquisite torture, and Tom had all three in abundance.
Once retired he turned, as so many do, to golf course design and he leaves a portfolio of over 40 courses, many of which regularly feature in lists of the worlds’ best. You may be familiar with Loch Lomond, which staged the Scottish Open between 2001-2010 and which is one of the most enjoyable I have ever played, being a worthy test for Europe’s elite golfers, yet thoroughly playable to handicap hackers like me. It’s a difficult balance to achieve.
Mark you, the course nearly killed Tom. One early morning on a site inspection he wandered too close to a boggy area and started to sink. After struggling for some minutes he realised that he was just making things worse and decided to stay as still as possible and wait for help. It took a few hours to arrive, by which time Tom was up to his armpits in very cold marsh.
Despite the fact that it tried to kill him, he considered Loch Lomond to be ‘my lasting memorial to golf.’
For me, his memorial is the memory of that wonderfully beautiful swing.
Quotes of the Week
I couldn’t stand mediocrity. I knew how good I was, what I was capable of doing, and couldn’t accept a mistake.
I can laugh at myself in some ways, but not when it comes to hitting bad shots. What’s so funny about a shank?
Tom Weiskopf