Frenetic though his life has become, the last U.S. Open Winner at Medinah is hugely enjoying the material rewards and the recognition that have accompanied his seemingly timeless and tireless game
By Jeff Williams

When the putt fell over the lip, Hale Irwin bolted. His steely sense of discipline, his rigid self containment, were shed in a heartbeat by the magnitude of what he had done. With arms raised high, pumping skyward, Irwin raced off the green and ran around its roped perimeter. He slapped hands with the gallery, which was unbridled in its celebration of his achievement and unrestrained in its heaping of glory on a man who had not yet won the golf tournament.

Hale Irwin’s finest, most visible moment in golf came in the U.S. Open at the Medinah Country Club in 1990. Playing on a special invitation from the United States Golf Association, Irwin came to the 18th green on Sunday thinking he had a chance to win, but a chance that required he make an improbable 45-foot putt for birdie. Improbable, not impossible. The putt dropped, Irwin was eventually tied by Mike Donald after 72 holes, and the next day Irwin won on the 19th or first extra hole of the playoff.

It was his third U.S. Open victory, and at age 45 Irwin became the oldest player to win the championship. “You know, when you win more than one U.S. Open, it’s difficult to say that one is more special than the other,” says Irwin. “But winning at age 45, doing it by making five birdies on the back nine and a long putt on the 18th, it was probably my most dramatic victory.”

The Medinah victory, indeed all three of his Open victories, defined Hale Irwin to the world. His controlled, if unspectacular, game blended perfectly with his controlled, tough-minded competitiveness. Jack Nicklaus, as great a competitor as the game has ever seen, admires Irwin’s competitive drive.

“Hale didn’t have the greatest of tools to play the game,” says Nicklaus. “He didn’t hit the ball long. He couldn’t overpower courses. But he took what he had and perfected it. He always kept his ball in play, and he putted well under pressure. He was a tough competitor who, when he got in position to win, didn’t make many mistakes. He was a tough player to beat.”

And still is.

From 1995 through 1998, Irwin was the scourge of the PGA Senior Tour, a player so dominating that it seemed like everyone else was playing for second. In 1997 he won nine tournaments. In 1998 he won seven, including his third straight PGA Seniors Championship and his first U.S. Senior Open. His 1998 prize money of $2,861,945 was the highest on any tour in history. Despite winning his three U.S. Opens and a total of 20 PGA Tour events, despite his victory lap around the 18th green at Medinah, it took his extraordinary success as a senior to gain his full measure of accolade, to become the man to beat.

Did Hale Irwin get the full rewards of his distinguished PGA Tour career?

“Every morning I try to swallow my realistic pill along with my vitamins,” he says. “I never thought of myself as being in the position of Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus, at the top of the heap. I never felt I was deserving of that. Could I have achieved rewards [like them] off the golf course? Maybe not. Maybe my approach, my personality, wasn’t as upbeat. Maybe I didn’t have the physical presentation, the pants-hitch, the blond hair, the aura. But I think I got what I deserved.”

Ask Hale Irwin a question and you will get a straight answer. He is a man of opinion and insight, one who has not only played the game at the highest levels, but observed it shrewdly. He is just as capable of broad smiles as he is of deathly stares, but he doesn’t suffer fools, can often be impatient in playing the media game, and isn’t always politic about what he says, invariably opting for the whole truth rather than a facsimile of it. When he first started playing the Senior Tour, he was critical of the course setups.

“I liked playing golf courses where par was a good score and 69 was a great score,” says Irwin. “We were playing courses that were set up so that 69 was a good score and maybe 66 was a great score. I thought the skill level out there was such that we ought to be playing tougher set ups, because I think they define the best players.”

Life is about as good as it gets for Irwin these days. He and his wife, Sally, are building a family compound in Scottsdale, Arizona. They maintain their original home in a St. Louis suburb, one they bought in 1970. Irwin’s golf course design business is thriving on the strength of his Senior Tour success. He now has his own airplane, a BeechJet 400A with a special carrying compartment in the cabin for his golf bag. “I don’t like my clubs getting cold in the baggage compartment,” says Irwin.

In his first incarnation as a professional golfer, Hale Irwin was a respected player. He was widely viewed as a gritty competitor who got the most out of his game, a player whose modest natural ability was carried to great heights by the after-burners of his own far-reaching desire.

Irwin achieved his greatest success on the PGA Tour in that time he describes as “the run between the Opens.” From his first U.S. Open victory in 1974 at Winged Foot in New York to his second in 1979 at Inverness in Ohio, Hale Irwin won nine tournaments, a decent amount of cash, but a relatively small amount of recognition. He wore thick, black-rimmed glasses, braces on his teeth, and his share of bad pants. It wasn’t his time, you see.

The decade of the ‘70s was the time of Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Lee Trevino, Johnny Miller, and Tom Watson. These were players of legend, or just plain greatness. They had the game, they had the aura of champions. They had a way not only of winning tournaments, but of winning hearts. They grabbed the headlines, the highlight shows, the sound bites. It was their time, and Hale Irwin was along for the ride.

Now, 20 years later, it’s Hale Irwin who is leading the pack. With the games of Nicklaus and Player and Trevino succumbing to the vagaries of age, with Miller electing to stay in the television booth rather than commit full time to the Senior Tour, with Watson on the cusp of 50, Irwin’s star is burning brightest in the senior firmament. From the time Irwin crossed through that dimension from the PGA Tour to the Senior Tour, it’s been his time to step into the spotlight, his time to capture the headlines, his time to scoop up titles by the armful.

He’s doing it with the same basic, simple swing that carried him through the ‘70s. Irwin has never been a long hitter, but has always been one of the best long-iron and fairway-wood players in the game.

“I’ve never tried to really alter my swing too much, not to say that it hasn’t evolved some,” says Irwin. “I’ve always just tried to fine-tune the one I have. I’ve seen too many players try to change their swings to get better, and only get worse. There are only so many Nick Faldos who can change a lot of things and get away with it.”

Irwin is more interested in effectively visualizing his shots than worrying about swing mechanics.

“I’ve done that very well during this stretch on the Senior Tour, and that’s something I tried to do all through my career,” he says. “I certainly think it helped that I was reasonably competitive on the regular tour right up until I turned 50.”

Irwin’s contemporaries had high expectations for him when he came to the Senior Tour, and Irwin himself thought that he would be a consistent winner. But his success has been dizzying, so much so that he is busier in his 50s than he ever was in the prime of his career. In his jet he dashes from tournaments to golf courses under construction to speaking engagements to corporate outings.

“There are times when I think that the only way I can get to see him is to make an appointment,” says his wife, Sally. “He really is running all over the place. But I know that he has to take advantage of the things that have come his way, and he gets energized by being busy all the time. That’s just who he is.”

This deep well of energy, which ties directly into Irwin’s competitive drive, was nurtured at a young age. “I’ve always been very competitive, from little league baseball through college football and into golf. It’s in my blood. It’s genetic,” says Irwin.

His competitive pedigree was firmly established at the University of Colorado in the mid 1960s. Twice he was All-Big Eight defensive back for the Buffaloes, and in 1967 he was also the NCAA golf champion. The sports seem diametrically opposed, one an exercise in physical conflict, the other in physical precision. Irwin drew from football the energy he needed to compete at golf. In fact, in order to play his defensive back position, he needed that first big hit to calm himself down, to “shed the hype.”

In golf, you don’t ever want to lose that hype,” says Irwin. “I want to keep that hype. The more energized I am, the better I think. In football, the more energized you are, the more physical you can be, but you can also lose the mental processes that are important to certain positions, like defensive back or quarterback. The competitiveness of football helped me fight through the ups and downs of playing golf at a professional level.”

So competitive has Irwin been past the age of 50 that he played in the 1997 PGA Championship at Winged Foot, making the cut. He was also under consideration by Tom Kite as a captain’s pick for the Ryder Cup team that year. Kite didn’t choose him, and the Americans went on to lose at Valderrama. Irwin was not upset about not being picked, but he’s upset that the U.S. has lost two straight matches to the Europeans.

“It seems to me that we have a lot of really talented players coming on tour, they seem to have a lot of confidence, but maybe it’s a shaky confidence,” says Irwin. “I think we’ve discounted what it really means to be a great player. Maybe some of the intangibles of greatness are missing, like determination, guts. Courage is somebody going into a burning building to rescue someone. For a golfer, courage is determination and controlling the emotions. It’s the player who can deal with the ups and downs best who prevails. You have to have a levelheadedness.”

Determination and guts have been Irwin’s hallmark. He could not have won three U.S. Opens without ample portions of each. “When a player gets in trouble, one guy sees a disaster and another guy sees an opportunity,” he says. “I see opportunity all the time. I may not be able to pull it off, but I see it.”

Nowadays, Irwin is finding himself pulled between the desire to compete on the course, the desire to compete in the design business, and the desire to enjoy the fruits of his very successful labor. “I would love to go fishing or quail hunting, you bet,” says Irwin. “I do get a chance now and then. It’s a way to get away from the phone and the crowds and be myself with my family. Still, I like the business a lot. It’s the pace that gets a little overwhelming.”

The new house in Arizona is the principal project of his wife, Sally. It is a project borne not only of financial success, but of the necessity of accommodating a lifetime’s worth of family and friends, something the house back in Frontenac just can’t do.

“The greatest rewards I’ve had off the golf course are the people I’ve met,” says Irwin. “They mean more to me than any contract or business deal. I’ve played golf with President George Bush, I spent three days with him last summer at Kennebunkport. He’s a wonderful man, an extremely bright and insightful man. We hope, with this new house, that we could call up President Bush and have him come to spend some time with us, with all of his entourage. Just meeting people, many of them the best of their professions, has been a tremendous reward for me.”

Irwin was disappointed that he didn’t win the PGA Seniors Championship this past April, because it would have qualified him to play in the PGA at Medinah.

“I wanted to play there very badly, because I haven’t been back since the Open,” says Irwin. “It’s a wonderful place, and it will always hold a big spot in my heart.”