Word: par
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...merest formality, the coup de gráce, and then everyone could adjourn to the clubhouse for the popping of the corks. There stood "Champagne Tony" Lema at last week's Cleveland Open, 15 under par, with just a one-foot putt between him and $20,000-and everybody knows that golf pros do not miss one-foot putts. But there was a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. Ever so casually, Tony stepped up to the ball. Ever so casually, he pushed it right around the hole...
...with Arnold Palmer, a beer man. Sudden death is hardly the word. Suicide is a better term: out of 19 playoffs in his career, Palmer has won twelve. But Tony is a brinkman too; it makes the bubbly taste all the better. On the first hole, a 398-yard par-four, he watched Palmer smack his drive over a creek all the way to the base of the elevated green. Briefly, Lema fingered the "safe" club-a No. 4 iron. Then he reached for a driver too. "I might as well go out in style," he sighed...
...fairway by a deep, grass-choked ravine. "That," said one pro, "is where elephants go to die." In short, the Congressional is a brutal course, even for Palmer, Nicklaus, or Tony Lema, who had just won two tournaments in a row. But when Palmer fired the only sub-par round of the first day, a two-under 68, one sportswriter boldly announced that "Arnold Palmer has 198 holes to go on the Grand Slam of golf...
Plodding Along. Palmer did not do badly the next day, either: a one-under-par 69. But that was only good for second place, a stroke off the pace set by a curly-haired Californian named Tommy Jacobs, 29. Only twice all afternoon did Jacobs stray from the fairway; only twice did he fail to reach a green in par figures; and he did not miss a single putt under 12 ft. Jacobs' six-under-par 64 tied for the lowest score ever recorded in a U.S. Open. In all the excitement, who was going to notice Ken Venturi...
With 15 holes to go, Lema was 12 under par, seven strokes ahead of burly Mike Souchak. A sudden thundershower made the pros dive for their umbrellas -and almost literally Tony landed on his nose. He lost a stroke at the sixth hole, another at the eighth, two more on the 480-yd. ninth when he bombed his drive under the branches of a lowhanging pine tree (see cut) and barely managed to salvage a bogey. ("I just crawled in there on my hands and knees, said a quick prayer, and backhanded the ball," said Tony.) But the real disaster...