In 1983, Larry Nelson beat Tom Watson in a playoff at Oakmont Country Club to win the U.S. Open. Nelson, then a 35-year-old Vietnam veteran who had only been playing golf about a dozen years at the time, wasn’t supposed to beat the best players in the world even though he had already won a major a couple of years earlier at the PGA Championship at the Atlanta Athletic Club.
Dan Jenkins in Sports Illustrated called the ‘83 Open the “Layup Open” because of how Oakmont’s brutal rough forced players to hit 3-woods and 4-woods off the tee at many of the par-4s. Watson, who was the defending champion after winning the 1982 U.S. Open, was with Seve Ballesteros, the two players who were supposed to win golf’s hardest championship. But the U.S. Open has never cared about the name on your golf bag. At the ‘55 U.S. Open, Ben Hogan learned this lesson the hard way when he lost an 18-hole playoff to Jack Fleck, a 33-year-old journeyman from Iowa.
