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Tom Weiskopf’s golf prowess has gone beyond his 16 PGA Tour wins and his only major at Royal Troon in the Open Championship. He was forthright and to the point in the TV booth and found even greater success designing golf courses.
Weiskopf died Saturday at his home in Big Sky, Montana, his wife said. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 2020. He was 79 years old.
Laurie Weiskopf said Tom worked last week at The Club at Spanish Peaks and attended a legacy club lunch where he designed a collection of his 10 favorite par-3s.
“He worked all the way through. It was amazing,” she said. “He had a big life.”
The son of an Ohio railroad worker, Weiskopf once said he fell in love with the game before he even started playing. His father took him to the 1957 US Open in Inverness and he was mesmerized watching Sam Snead make such clean contact.
Clean contact was his hallmark at Ohio State and then his touring career. At 6-foot-3 — tall for golf in that era — Weiskopf had a swing that was powerful and rhythmic. His best year was in 1973, when he won seven times around the world, including the Boarding Jug and the World Series of Golf at Firestone before it became an official tour.
He was famous as much for the majors he didn’t win as for the competition he faced — especially Jack Nicklaus, the Ohio star who preceded him and cast a huge shadow over Weiskopf throughout his career.
Weiskopf had four runner-up finishes at the Masters, the most of any player without winning the green jacket. The most memorable was in 1975, when Weiskopf and Johnny Miller stood on the 16th tee as they watched Nicklaus make a 40-foot birdie putt that led him to another victory.
He was famous for saying of Nicklaus, “Jack knew he was going to beat you. You knew Jack was going to beat you. And Jack knew you knew he was going to beat you.”
More telling was his interview with Golf Digest in 2008, when Weiskopf said, “Going head-to-head against Jack Nicklaus in a major was like trying to dry up the Pacific Ocean with a teacup. You stand on the first tee knowing that your best golf might not be good enough.”
Weiskopf was very good in so many areas and yet he often said that he did not make the most of his talent. He credits much of that to drinking, which he once said ruined his golf career. He gave up alcohol in 2007 and considers it one of his great victories.
He also said he was never keen enough on golf. His love was the outdoors, especially hunting and fishing. Weiskopf once missed the Ryder Cup in 1977 so he could go sheep hunting.
His free spirit and unfiltered thoughts were a big part of his personality. His temperament led to nicknames such as “The Towering Inferno” and “Terrible Tom”. So much of this was traced to his high standards when it came to golf.
“I couldn’t accept failure when it was my fault,” he said after winning the 2005 US Senior Open at Congress. “It was just tearing me apart.”
Weiskopf’s last PGA Tour win was the Western Open in 1982. His last full year on the PGA Tour was a year later. He played on the PGA Tour Champions and perhaps fittingly his only major win was the Senior Open by 4 shots over Nicklaus.
Weiskopf later worked in television at both CBS and ABC/ESPN.
He partnered with golf course architect Jay Moorish and their first collaboration was Troon Country Club in Scottsdale, Arizona. Dozens more golf courses followed, including Loch Lomond in Scotland and a revamp of the North Course at Torrey Pines.
A standard of his design is the drivable par 4. The inspiration came from playing the Old Course at St. Andrews, where he could drive four of the par 4, depending on the wind.
“I should have done more,” Weiskopf once told Golf Digest about his career. “But I don’t dwell on that anymore. I will say this though: if it wasn’t for the fact that I love what I do now so much [golf course design]I would probably be a very unhappy person.”
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