Editor's note: In celebration of Golf Digest's 75th Anniversary, each month Writer-At-Large Jaime Diaz will interview key figures in the game to explore what happened when they were at the height of their powers. In a period of 20 days in 1971, Lee Trevino won the national opens of the United States, Canada and Great Britain. The feat might fall just short of being included among the storied individual seasons of 1930, 1945, 1953 and 2000, but it endures as the most productive short burst in championship history. “A hat trick unparal- lelled in the annals of golf,” was broadcaster Henry Longhurst’s description after Trevino holed out at Royal Birkdale. The triple’s impact earned Trevino honours including Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year, AP Male Athlete of the Year, ABC Wide World of Sports Athlete of the Year, PGA Player of the Year and the Hickok Belt. F For even the very best golfers, the zone happens randomly and with the under- standing that trying to enter it is the surest way not to.
until midnight. There, between tasks, he would hit a thousand practice balls a day. It was also 1970 when a fraught re- lationship with Clifford Roberts over guest tickets for the Masters escalated into Trevino skipping the tournament. Jack Nicklaus, who knew the real thing when he saw it, magnanimously chose a quiet locker room moment during an exhibition at the Breakers in March to offer advice. “First Jack told me I belonged at Au- gusta,” says Trevino. “Then he said, ‘I hope you never find out how good you are. You can win anywhere.’ I looked at him and said, ‘You think so?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I do.’” Those would be the most empower- ing words Trevino ever heard. “It meant so much to my confidence coming from him,” Trevino says. “He didn’t have to do that because it really helped me and probably didn’t help him, but that’s Jack. He always wanted your best.” Soon after, Trevino won at Tallahas- see, his first victory in 13 months, spark- ing a run that included another win at Memphis and then a loss in a four-way playoff in Charlotte. The next day, he got his first look at Merion for the US Open. “That course just fit me in every way,” Trevino says. “It’s a shotmaker’s paradise. On every hole, I knew I had the answers for what she was asking. “The fairways were tight and wind- ing, but a low driver was my straightest shot. I had mastered it at Hardy’s, bet- ting quarters trying to hit a steel pole 175 yards out in the middle of the range. At Merion everyone was afraid of the Open rough, but I could keep hitting driver. That club let me play offence when others were playing defence.” Not as consistent was Trevino’s put- ting. Hardy’s didn’t have a putting green, and Tenison Park’s hairy sur- faces made Trevino stand too far away from the ball. “The knock on me in Dal- las was ‘he can really play, but he’ll nev- er putt well enough to make it as a pro.’” As a pro, the faster and smoother greens caused Trevino to gradually ad- just his stance. “At Merion, I looked like Arnold Palmer, kind of knock-kneed with my elbows pulled in and setting
his career in which he struggled to ac- climate to his early and rapid success. To that point his journey had been improbable but also taxing. Raised in poverty by his mother and mater- nal grandfather while never knowing his father and dropping out of school before the eighth grade, Trevino was ill-prepared for the new demands and financial decisions brought on by win- ning the 1968 US Open. Although still a top player, winning once more in 1968, once in 1969, and two times in early 1970, Trevino was unsettled. Quietly, he wondered if he belonged. After a childhood defined by hours spent alone, he loved the cama- raderie and acceptance he experienced during a four-year stint in the Marines, but once he arrived on the PGA Tour, he was an outsider again, with an unortho- dox action and plenty of doubters. That insecurity drove him to take every op- portunity to cash in on success. By the second half of 1970, Trevino was over- scheduled, exhausted and frustrated, a condition exacerbated by drinking and late nights. “My life had changed so much in a short time that I was losing my disci- pline,” he says. “I had forgotten what had taken me so far in the first place, so I went back to my roots, pounding balls, moving a lot of dirt. That was my safety net. That was me.” As he turned 31 in December of 1970, Trevino put in long days in the cold at El Paso CC, recalling the immersive reg- imen he had adopted in his early 20s in Dallas when he would begin with early- morning money games at Tenison Park and then work at Hardy Greenwood’s lighted driving range a pitch-and-putt
It was different for Lee Trevino. In his charismatically kinetic prime, his natural playing style – loose, free, fast, joyful, confident, flowing – gave the strong sense of always being, at the very least, zone-adjacent. “Without ever having a name for it, that was the state I was after,” the ever lively and now 85-year-old Trevino says from a couch of his Dallas home, where a trophy for his “Triple Crown” remains his favourite. “Just seeing the target and the flight I wanted and letting my body react. I got there for most shots, but for that period in 1971 I got there and stayed there.” The height Tre-
TRIPLE-SEALED Trevino's Open was his third national championship in 20 days.
vino reached in 1971 was not by accident but a response to one of the most chal- lenging stretches of
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