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 unparalleled in the annals of golf,” was broadcaster Henry Longhurst’s description after Trevino holed out at Royal Birkdale. The triple’s impact earned Trevino honors 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.
For even the very best golfers, the zone happens randomly and with the understanding that trying to enter it is the surest way not to.
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 favorite. “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 Trevino reached in 1971 was not by accident but a response to one of the most challenging stretches of his career in which he struggled to acclimate to his early and rapid success. To that point, his journey had been improbable but also taxing. Raised in poverty by his mother and maternal 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 winning the 1968 U.S. 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 camaraderie 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 unorthodox action and plenty of doubters. That insecurity drove him to take every opportunity 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 discipline,” 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 1970, Trevino put in long days in the cold at El Paso C.C., recalling the immersive regimen 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 and pitch-and-putt until midnight. There, between tasks, he would hit a thousand practice balls a day.
It was also 1970 when a fraught relationship 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 Augusta,” Trevino says. “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 empowering 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 Tallahassee, his first victory in 13 months, sparking 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 U.S. 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 winding, but a low driver was my straightest shot. I had mastered it at Hardy’s, betting 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 offense when others were playing defense.”
Not as consistent was Trevino’s putting. Hardy’s didn’t have a putting green, and Tenison Park’s hairy surfaces made Trevino stand too far away from the ball. “The knock on me in Dallas was ‘he can really play, but he’ll never putt well enough to make it as a pro.’”
As a pro, the faster and smoother greens caused Trevino to gradually adjust his stance. “At Merion, I looked like Arnold Palmer, kind of knock-kneed with my elbows pulled in and setting the club with my hands. That was the closest I ever got to the ball. I don’t know why I didn’t stay there,” he says. “That week I got in a great rhythm, seeing the line quickly and taking no practice strokes. Man, the hole looked big.” It expanded after he made a 45-footer for birdie to close out his opening 70, and then with a seagoing 65-footer for birdie on the 16th on Saturday. “That one turned around everything,” he says.
When he and Nicklaus tied after 72 holes, Trevino was eager to go up against the man he now calls the GOAT in an 18-hole playoff.
“I never, ever thought I was as good as Jack, but I never feared anybody when I played them heads up,” he says. “Jack brought out the best in me. Playing against him was my chance to truly measure myself, which is something I needed at the time, so it was like I’d already won.”
I REALIZED THAT EVERYTHING HAD COME TOGETHER. I HAD BECOME THE MOST COMPLETE GOLFER I WOULD EVER BE.
In the Monday playoff, Trevino bogeyed the easy first but played the last 17 holes three under without a bogey to defeat Nicklaus 68 to 71. “I kept hitting that driver straight, and I made two 25-foot birdie putts on the back nine that were big. Jack is the strongest player mentally probably ever, but on a U.S. Open setup it’s tough to beat someone who’s always in the fairway.”
The next day at the Cleveland Open Invitational, where he would finish T-34, veteran players who had been distant came up to Trevino to sincerely congratulate him. “I had proved myself to them,” Trevino says, “and I finally felt like I belonged.”
Trevino went to Montreal and won the Canadian Open, defeating Art Wall in sudden death on the first extra hole with yet another 20-footer for birdie.
Trevino was gleeful at Royal Birkdale, where he arrived only a day before the first round, an extrovert in his glory on the brooding and beautiful linksland, talking and sometimes singing, captivating the crowd. “I wasn’t tired; I was psyched up,” he remembers. “I felt like Jack on that course. Birkdale had five par 5s, and I could reach all of them in two with the small British ball, and I realized that everything had come together. I had become the most complete golfer I would ever be.”
Trevino had a five-stroke lead with nine to play over Lu Liang-Huan but almost blew it when, with too much confidence, “I tried to knock the hell out of my tee shot” on the 71st hole and made double bogey. However, he closed with a fearless birdie to win by one, unleashing his most forceful celebration of the magical 20 days.
A. Jones
MORE: My Shot: Lee Trevino
“I had a little bit of Tiger in me when I showed everyone that emotion,” Trevino says with a smile. “I was saying, ‘OK, who’s next?’ To have played well enough to feel that way in the GOAT’s prime, maybe I’m most proud of that.”
There were no more majors to win that year, as the PGA Championship had been played in February. Remarkably, Trevino kept up his breakneck schedule, immediately returning to the U.S. to play the Western Open, where he finished T-32. The next week at Westchester, his 15th tournament in a row since skipping the Masters, he missed the cut and pronounced, “I’m beat.”
“I played too much in those days. I thought I needed to because I didn’t know how long that level of play was going to last,” Trevino says.
David Cannon
Though he would repeat the next year at The Open and win the PGA in 1974, Trevino concedes, “I was never quite the same again, the way I was in ’71.” After he was struck by lightning in 1975—which compromised his back—he managed to win the Vardon one more time in 1980 and a last-hurrah major—his sixth—at the 1984 PGA.
“I will tell you one thing,” Trevino says. “I came along at the right time. I played with all the greats. I played with Sarazen, Snead, Hogan, Jack, all the way to Tiger, and I did all right—especially in ’71.
“Hell, go ahead and take me out. The game doesn’t get any better than what it did for me.”
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com