TULSA, Okla. (AP) — About a month before Dave Stockton won the PGA Championship at Southern Hills, his father gave him Maxwell Maltz’s self-help classic “Psycho-Cybernetics,” and he paged through it. page highlighting various passages. .
“It wasn’t a fun read,” Stockton said. “It was like reading sandpaper.”
However, he came out with two tangible ideas that applied perfectly to golf. The first was simple: Be aggressive. The second was something athletes have advocated for decades: Visualize that you’ve already won.
“So instead of coming here and hoping I played well, hoping I made the cut, all these different things, I hit the first tee Monday morning around 7:00, because I finished at 10:45, and I visualized that I had already won the tournament,” Stockton said. “My mindset was that I had already won it and was going to go out there and enjoy it.”
He made it look so easy, too. Stockton was tied for the lead after the second round, outscoring Raymond Floyd by three after the third, and scored a two-shot victory over Arnold Palmer and Bob Murphy in the 1970 championship.
In doing so, Stockton helped shape what has become a recurring theme in Southern Hills: Perry Maxwell’s venerable layout near downtown Tulsa has crowned some of the game’s greatest players for more major championships than any other. American place, and for the most part, have been a terrible bore.
In four previous PGA Championships and three US Opens, Stockton and Tiger Woods are the only ones who didn’t have at least part of the lead after the first round. And neither was out of the lead heading into the final round.
Oklahoma native Tommy Bolt led after each round at the 1958 US Open, turning a three-shot lead over Gene Littler after the third into a four-shot victory over Gary Player at the end. He ended up being Bolt’s only major, though he also played two Ryder Cups and, like everyone else except Stockton, who won at Southern Hills, ended up in the Hall of Fame.
Hubert Green also had at least part of the lead in each round of the 1977 US Open, outscoring Lou Graham by one shot on Sunday. But that tournament is best remembered for what few knew at the time: There had been a phone call threatening to kill Green if he played the 15th hole. He bravely did it anyway on his way to his first major title. the.
On the cusp of turning 40, Floyd also went from strength to strength in the 1982 PGA Championship, finishing three times ahead of former champion Lanny Wadkins. He opened with a 63 and was never really threatened the rest of the week.
Nick Price might have had the easiest way with the field in 1994.
Sure, he was tied for the first round lead with Colin Montgomerie, but he was five shots ahead of everyone else after the second round. Price finished 11 under with a six-shot lead over Corey Pavin, becoming the first player to capture the British Open and the PGA in the same year in seven decades.
When the big leagues returned to the Southern Hills in 2001, Retief Goosen needed a Monday playoff with Mark Brooks to win the first of his two US Opens. Exciting in theory, but nobody seemed to want to win on Sunday. Goosen ran a 10-foot birdie pass on the 72nd hole, then missed a 2-foot return, leaving him tied with Brooks, who had bogeyed his last hole. And both were a clear shot from Stewart Cink, who missed his own 2-footer to join the playoffs.
There were two dominant storylines the last time the PGA Championship was at Southern Hills.
The first was heat, which approached or exceeded triple digits all four days. The other was Woods, who took control with a 63 in the second round. He led by as many as five in the third and fourth rounds before finishing ahead of a largely forgettable cast of characters that included Woody Austin, Aaron Oberholser and John Senden.
“I remember playing behind (John Daly) on the first day, which was unbelievable,” Woods recalled this week. “It was, what, 109 I think that first day? And I asked JD how many waters he drank out there. He said, ‘No, I had 13 Diet Cokes.’”
Memorable things, indeed.
However, there is reason to believe that Southern Hills will finally produce a classic this week. The field has 95 of the top 100 in the world, even after Bryson DeChambeau retired Wednesday night. The course itself has had an extensive restoration, returning it to its former glory. The forecast looks clear and pleasant for most of the week.
“It’s tough. It’s going to be very tough,” said Xander Schauffele, the Olympic gold medalist, who had two top-10 finishes in majors last year. “I think at most PGA Championships, people feel like you can shoot lower on them than most races. But I think this year is going to be a different story.”
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Source: sports.mynorthwest.com