Around the World in 144 Holes

A novel Pinehurst tournament began 50 years ago today

Fifty years ago today, Nov. 8, 1973, readers of The News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C., woke up to read this from sportswriter Roy Brown.

PINEHURST — The richest, largest, longest, most mind-boggling golf tournament in the history of the game opens Thursday at Pinehurst Country Club, with the absence of several top players tainting the spectacular event.

Half a century later, the 1973 World Open stands out as a novelty of modern professional golf. It was the first PGA Tour event to be held on Pinehurst No. 2 Course since the last North and South Open in 1951, and Pinehurst’s new owners, Diamondhead Corporation, wanted to make a splash by staging something out of the ordinary.

A $500,000 purse with $100,000 to the winner was up for grabs, but players were going to have to work hard for the record money—144 holes over two weeks.

It wasn’t exactly a belly flop, but the inaugural World Open made headlines for who wasn’t there. As a golf-loving ninth grader, before I went off to school on the morning of the first round, I read Alfred Hamilton’s report in The Greensboro Daily News, which a carrier tossed in our driveway each day. He wrote that the tournament “begins in chilly weather and under a cloud of absent players.”

Yes, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Johnny Miller and Tom Weiskopf took a pass. And given their respect places in the game at that time—winners of three of the four major championships in 1973, among other achievements—that made for a lot of dark in the sky.

Still, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Sam Snead and talented rookie pro Ben Crenshaw were on hand. So were other young talents such as Eddie Pearce and Tom Watson.

For locals like me in the Pinehurst area, the tournament was a big deal even if some of the biggest names weren’t playing (although 22 countries were represented, giving some credence to the title.) The World Open started with a huge, 240-man field. Pros were all over town, including at the little nine-hole course and driving range where I spent so much of my time. Some sweet swingers with their names on their bags were hitting $1.25 buckets of stripers like the rest of us. The place was buzzing.

As if to fit the script, a golfer who was far from being a household name, Gibby Gilbert, made headlines for his stunning first round, a nine-under 62 on No. 2 (the 8^th was being played as a par 4, the 16^th a par 5). Gilbert’s game had been in shambles earlier that season, but recent lessons from Jack Grout had obviously helped.

Starting on No. 10, a chip-in eagle on the 16^th hole boosted Gilbert to a 32 on his first nine, then the fireworks really started. He birdied five consecutive holes starting at the difficult second, all but one on putts of 20 feet or longer. He offset a bogey on the seventh with a birdie on the par-3 ninth after hitting his tee shot to two feet. The 62 broke the course record of 65 held by Ben Hogan and Johnny Palmer.

The 62 gave Gilbert a five-stroke lead, and he maintained that advantage through 72 holes over Al Geiberger and Tom Watson. But he wasn’t alone for long in the course-record department.

After a pause on Monday and Tuesday, the second half of the World Open began on Wednesday. Watson was the story of the fifth round, matching Gilbert’s 62 with an eagle-birdie-birdie-birdie-birdie finish. “You can only describe it as unbelievable,” the 24-year-old said of his amazing conclusion that was keyed by holing an 8-iron approach on No. 14. “After that,” Watson said, “I played in kind of a daze.”

Watson was not yet a good closer, though, as his subsequent rounds of 76, 76 and 77 indicated. His first of 39 PGA Tour victories would come the following summer at the Western Open. The battle for the hundred grand turned into a contest between 42-year-old Miller Barber and a man half his age, Crenshaw. The young Texan, coming off a stellar amateur career and a maiden pro victory, had trailed by 18 strokes after 90 holes but put a large dent in that deficit with a 64 in a difficult wind during round six that Watson appraised as better than his 62 because of the conditions.

Coming down the stretch in the final round against Barber, Crenshaw trailed by one going to the par-5 16^th but tried to get too much out of his tee shot and missed it wildly to the left and bogeyed. With Herman Mitchell alongside—later the longtime, well-known caddie for Trevino—Barber birdied the 17^th to build what would be his winning margin of three strokes. Leonard Thompson, native of Laurinburg, just 30 miles south of Pinehurst and who won the Donald Ross Junior on No. 2 in 1963 and ’64, was third, five back, with Watson tying for fourth place.

“Nobody knows better than I do what I long road I have ahead of me,” Crenshaw told Ron Green of the Charlotte News that week. “I realize I have the potential to be a good player, but I’m going to have to work at it.”

The elongated World Open became a normal, 72-hole affair the next September, when Johnny Miller beat Nicklaus, Frank Beard and Bob Murphy in a playoff. The PGA Tour would stop in Pinehurst every year through 1982, and it had a run of star winners with Nicklaus, Raymond Floyd and Hale Irwin followed by Watson’s two straight to close out the 1970s.

The first World Open might not have been a fall classic, but it marked the beginning of big-time golf’s return to an American mecca of the sport. And it presaged a memorable fortnight of golf, the back-to-back U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open in 2014 on the No. 2 Course, a twin bill that is scheduled again for 2029.