BOLT from the PAST : Flashes of an Open champion, 43 years after Southern Hills

Golf Digest, June, 2001 by Tom Callahan

In 1918, at the age of 211/42, Thomas Henry Bolt crossed the Red River in a covered wagon, moving from Haworth, Okla., to Paris, Tex. So Tommy Bolt truly is 85. It isn't a typographical error. It's a perfect 8 and a perfect 5. And, like an Oklahoma freight train, 43 years have whistled by since Terrible-Tempered Tempestuous Tommy (Thunder) Bolt won his Open at Southern Hills.

"I'm gonna live to be, oh, 95, 100, something like that," he says to the sky. "I'm gonna try."

He is sitting on a golf course veranda in Florida, his latest home after Louisiana and Arkansas, still wearing the white linen cap that he, Hogan, Mangrum, Venturi and a very few others could ever pull off. He still has the carpenter's knuckles and the sergeant's command. He is still trim enough to get away with loud ensembles and he still has the face of a Choctaw Indian and a shanty Irishman having themselves a hell of a fight.

His stories still resound with thunderclaps:

" . . . You don't think I was hot? I didn't change my shoes until I got to Baltusrol . . . "

That could be a sampler on his wall: I Didn't Change My Shoes Until I Got To Baltusrol.

The members at Black Diamond Ranch, a dramatic course carved, like Tommy, out of a quarry, regard him as a statue that moves. Between nines, they swing past the veranda just to touch him, to relate their own adventures and, nearly as often, their own experiments with nitro-glycerin ("When you throw a club," Bolt advises, playing along, "always make sure you throw it down the fairway"). Some of the amateurs are in need of a Band-Aid, and he obligingly fixes their grips the way Hogan fixed his, the way he fixed Tiger's.

"I saw Tiger Woods at Riviera in '93," Bolt says. "I won at Riviera. I love Riviera. Tiger was just 17, but I'd heard of him. He had kind of a Mule Train swing--you know, a bullwhip flip at the top. I put his left hand on top of the club, like Ben showed me. Then I stood and watched him for a while, marveled at him. But I thought to myself, 'As hard as this kid goes at it, how long can he possibly last? Man. Seventeen years old.' "

Bolt didn't step out on tour himself until he was 34. Some life had to be lived first. His self-consciousness about his age explains why most of the record books have him at 83. "At 21 or 22, I could really play," he says, "but I didn't have any money to prove it. You had to work in those days. Then there was the Army."

After the war in Italy, "there were those days of riding the buses, staying at the YMCAs, eating at the cafeterias, shooting 65s in the final rounds and winning $170," referred to now as "the good old days." As much as Riviera, he loved them, too.

The toast of Tulsa

Despite his late start, Bolt won a dozen PGA tournaments before coming to Southern Hills in Tulsa, where he made his history in 1958, where the Open is about to return for only the third time, and where in a way he may still have something at stake. We'll see.

"To me, the Open is everything, always has been," he says. "When we were kids, caddieing, it was the U.S. Open that we played for. The National Open is what we called it. That was everybody's dream."

It was hot in Tulsa in June of '58, 95 or so every day, and when it's really hot in Tulsa, and there's just a lazy breeze, the whole town smells of petroleum. But Tommy was hot himself, and oiled up already, when he arrived. A few weeks earlier, he had come to the last hole at the Colonial a stroke ahead of Hogan. "Ben had just made a deuce and was going to show me how to turn the corner at 18. He duck-hooked that baby. I was never so happy in all my life."

If Tommy could have made a four-footer at Dallas the week before Southern Hills--If Tommy could have made a putt is a recurring lament--he might have beaten Sam Snead to that title, too. But two practice rounds with Snead in Tulsa seemed to wash the disappointment away. Terrible Tommy Bolt was actually serene. Meanwhile, Sam would miss an Open cut for the first time in his life.

"I birdied the first hole of the tournament," Bolt says, "looked around and said, 'I wonder who's gonna finish second?' "

With a one-over-par 71, he shared the Thursday lead with Julius Boros and Dick Metz. ("Dick Metz was a good player. He's the guy who punched old Fred Corcoran in the nose that time. Some ruling or something.") Friday morning, The Tulsa World reported that Boros was 38, Metz 50 and Bolt 49. "The top of my head came off," said Tommy, who'd have them know he was 39. (In fact, he was 42.) The reporter apologized, saying it must have just been a typographical error. Bolt's response has echoed through press rooms ever since. "Typographical error, hell," he said. "It was a perfect 4 and a perfect 9." But that was all that would be heard from Vesuvius.

As Bolt says, "The fairways were narrower than ever, the rough was unbelievable, and I can't tell you how many strokes I sacrificed pitching out sideways with sand wedges, trying to keep from making 7s. But I was just so elated with myself. I was happy. It was like, all of a sudden, I had no enemies. I didn't dislike anybody in the world. I was at peace. I felt so good about everything that I really had no chance to lose."