SOUTHPORT, England – Tom Watson remembers striking a 2-iron dead flush at the 18th green in the final round of the 1983 British Open at Royal Birkdale like it was yesterday.
“The crowd, just like the Red Sea, came back together like this,” he said, clapping his hands for full effect.
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Forty-three years later, Watson re-tells the story as if it is the first time to a handful of golf writers gathered around a table in the Committee Room in Birkdale’s art-deco clubhouse, no more than a pitch shot away from the 18th green.
Watson transports us back in time to where he stood all those years ago at 9-under par, holding a one-shot lead over his closest pursuers.
“It was just like a horse race, and I was just kind of keeping even with everybody from day one, day two, day three. And on day four, Hale Irwin, Andy Bean, they were right there, we were all tied. I really hadn’t made any putts.”
That is until the 16th hole when he poured in a 25-foot birdie putt to take the lead.
Tom Watson receives the Claret Jug following his victory at the 1983 Open at Royal Birkdale.
Still, there was work to be done. Watson faced one of the most difficult finishing holes in golf, a dogleg par 4 to the right that then measured 473 yards. To make matters worse, there was a swirling wind whipping off the nearby Irish Sea.
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With a driver in his hands, he split the fairway, leaving him 213 yards into a left-to-right wind to the flagstick. And then he had to endure an interminable wait as Craig Stadler sought a ruling.
“I don’t like to wait, especially when the pressure’s on,” Watson said. “Early in my career, when the pressure’s on, one of my Achilles’ heels was going too fast. I wanted to get it over with. And I’d swing too fast, walk too fast.”
But by then Watson had learned to slow things down, a trick that would help him amass a total of eight majors, and he had learned the importance of feel when playing links golf.
“You can’t go out there with a yardage book and expect to shoot a good score,” said Watson. “You need some creativity, instinct, flexibility. Feel. You need feel.”
Tom Watson tries to escape from a precarious lie in a pot bunker during the second round of the 2013 Senior Open Championship played at Royal Birkdale Golf Club in Southport, England.
Watson already had picked 2-iron and took shadow swings. And what a piercing shot he hit at this critical moment. “I’ll take that shot to the grave,” he said that day.
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Recalling it once more, he said it flew at the flag and began to draw raising the concern of Alfie Fyles, Watson’s legendary caddie on the bag for all five of his Open titles. “And Alfie said, ‘Stop it.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll think it’ll come back and the wind brought it back, and it dropped right on the flag.”
As the ball was airborne, the gallery rushed onto the fairway and formed a wall in front of Watson, preventing him from seeing where it landed. He heard the crowd cheer but didn’t know whether it ended 40 feet from the hole or 8 feet from the hole as he tried to make his way through the crowd.
“Two bobbies are on both sides and the crowd is just swarming. And Alf got knocked down, and, you know, it was mayhem,” Watson recalled. “I looked for my ball when I came out, but I couldn’t tell how close it was, because it’s really flattened there. And what happened was what you always want to happen when you’re playing golf. Closer I walked to the green, the closer it was to the hole.”
The ball had landed a few feet from the flag, stopped 15 feet past the hole and the Claret Jug was on the verge of being his for the fifth time.
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“I’m a pretty aggressive putter. I’m thinking, let’s not get too frisky with this thing,” Watson said.
He hit the putt in the neck of the putter, a terrible stroke, he recalled with a chuckle, but it trickled close enough and he sealed victory again and earned a modicum of revenge at the same place he’d shot 80 and missed the 54-hole cut at Birkdale in 1976. That year, he was the defending champion after winning at Carnoustie in a playoff over Aussie Jack Newton in his Open debut in 1975. Watson had opened with a triple and finished with a pair of 6s to miss the Saturday cut by one.
“In the caddie euphemism, I was down the road,” Watson recalled.
Tom Watson is a five-time winner of The Open Championship but may be best remembered for the one that got away. Watson nearly became the oldest champion in major championship history at age 59, losing in a playoff to Stewart Cink in 2009.
Funny enough, he remembered that failure in 1976 with more detail than he recalled his victory celebration that night in 1983. But how could he top the ’82 celebration at Royal Troon?
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When Watson won the Open in 1982 at Royal Troon, he had dinner at the Sun Court Hotel every night with friends who were staying there. On Saturday night, the proprietor, Alastair Breckenridge, greeted him. Watson saw a jereboam of champagne, an oversized bottle sometimes referred to as a double magnum and holding the equivalent of four standard bottles, on display. Watson turned to Breckenridge and said, “Hey, Alastair, if I win tomorrow, can we crack this open?” With a promise secured, sure, enough, Watson won. He walked in that night and the diners at the restaurant gave him a round of applause. He sat down and they brought the bottle over and uncorked it. Watson drank a glass, hit the table with his fist and announced, “Set up the glasses for everybody in the restaurant!”
Watson proceeded to take the bottle and poured champagne for everyone in the restaurant. “And we didn’t even drain it,” he recalled.
He later drank some beer out of the Claret Jug but that isn’t nearly his favorite story about the famed Jug to tell. when he won the championship for the first time, the R&A presented him with the original trophy. He took it back home to Kansas City and displayed it on his office desk. One day, he was practicing his swing and accidentally knocked it off his desk and bent the lip of the trophy, which dates to 1873. “What am I going to do?” Watson recalled thinking.
He knew of a good silversmith but he noticed it wasn’t creased and decided to attempt to fix it himself. He put the iconic silver trophy in his vice and repaired it, which he confirmed was more pressure than holing the winning putt.
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“No harm, no foul as we say in basketball,” Watson said.
No conversation with Watson about the Open can exist without eventually making its way to the 2009 Open at Turnberry. That’s when he nearly matched Harry Vardon by winning the championship for a sixth time, if not for a badly timed breath of wind that led to a bogey at the home hole and eventually losing a playoff to Stewart Cink at age 59. Does he still think about what could’ve been one of the great stories not just in golf but all of sports?
“It’s over and done with,” he said. “Would, shoulda, coulda. I really can’t complain much because my second shot (at 18) was as good as I could hit the ball. There was an extra gust of wind and the ball wouldn’t stop. I tried to putt out of the grass there and make sure I got it to the hole and hit it too far and hit a lousy putt. Stewart didn’t miss a shot in the playoff.”
Watson waved goodbye to the Open from the Swilcan Bridge in 2015, missing the cut but he continues to return every year. So many Open memories flood back to Watson when he comes back to the linksland. At age 76, he’s old enough to have spanned playing against Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy and legends like fellow five-time champion Peter Thomson and South African great Bobby Locke, a four-time Open winner. On the Wednesday before the championship at Birkdale in 1976, Watson went to the practice facility late in the afternoon to fine-tune his swing and there was but one solitary figure hitting balls. The man was dressed in plus-twos, a jacket and a bonnet. Watson looked at him and thought it had to be Locke, nicknamed Old Muffin Face and renowned for his putting. He went over and introduced himself to the then-68-year-old legend and watched him hit a few balls.
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“To be able to meet him,” Watson said. “I said to him, ‘I just admire what he had done in the game.’ “
It’s a sentiment golf fans now share when they see Watson, one of the Open’s great conquering heroes, and a distinction he so richly deserves.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Tom Watson relives his legendary 1983 Open victory at Royal Birkdale
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