Herbert Warren Wind's Golf Book by Wind Herbert Warren;

Author:Wind, Herbert Warren;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

I have gone into this detail about the de Vicenzo–Goalby duel for two reasons. First, golf of this surpassing quality—a 65 and a 66 under the harshest strain—deserves to be described, for, as far as I know, never before have two men, thrusting and parrying on the last round of a major championship, both scored as low. (The pace they set was so fast that a closing 69 by Devlin, a 67 by Nicklaus, and a 65 by Bert Yancey, which might normally have won for any one of them, were rendered irrelevant.) Second, I think it is important to record the golf that Goalby and de Vicenzo played, because it is almost bound to be forgotten in the cruel, depressing aftermath of that memorable afternoon. It was discovered soon after de Vicenzo had completed his round that he had signed an incorrect scorecard. Aaron, his playing partner and “marker,” had put down a 4 for de Vicenzo on the seventeenth, instead of the 3 he had made. De Vicenzo had not detected the error. Under Rule 38, Paragraph 3, of the Rules of Golf, “A score higher than actually played must stand as returned.” This changed de Vicenzo’s score for the last round from a 65 to a 66 and made his four-round total a stroke higher than Goalby’s. The tournament was over. There was no need for a playoff. The 1968 Masters champion was Bob Goalby.

I don’t think there is much to be gained from discussing the way the error was discovered, or de Vicenzo’s sportsmanship in his hour of misfortune, or Goalby’s graciousness. (De Vicenzo, despite his halting English, made a thumping good speech at the presentation ceremony, in which he blamed the scorecard error entirely on himself and went as far as to say that the pressure that Goalby had put on him perhaps accounted for his making the error. Goalby was direct and unmistakably genuine in declaring his sympathy for de Vicenzo, an old friend, and in stating that he would have much preferred to win the Masters in a playoff.) What had been a glorious day of golf and the climax of an extraordinarily exciting tournament had been turned to ashes by an arithmetical technicality. I know that the moment I heard the official announcement I was struck numb. All of a sudden, it was “Alice in Wonderland” time. The minute before, we had been talking apples, and now we weren’t even talking grapes—we were talking one-horse shays. I had felt like that once before in golf—in 1957, at Winged Foot, when, forty minutes after Jackie Pung won the United States Women’s Open Championship, a voice over the loudspeaker system informed us that she hadn’t; her winning total was correct but she had been disqualified for signing a scorecard on which her playing partner had put her down for a 5, and not a 6, on the fourth hole. (Under Rule 38, a golfer is responsible for the correctness of his score for each hole but not for the total.

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