He won at Augusta in 1968 after Robert De Vincenzo signed an incorrect scorecard. But to many, the victory was tainted, leaving Goalby feeling like the victim.
Bob Goalby, the 1968 Masters champion whose victory was shadowed by one of golf’s most memorable gaffes, Roberto De Vicenzo’s signing of an incorrect scorecard, died on Thursday in Belleville, Ill. He was 92.
The PGA Tour confirmed his death.
Goalby won 11 PGA Tour championships, he was a runner-up at the United States Open and the PGA Championship, and he once shot a tour-record eight consecutive birdies. He was among the founders of the Senior Tour, now called the Champions Tour. But he was remembered mostly for the bizarre events of an Easter Sunday at Augusta National in Georgia.
When Goalby walked off the 18th green with a final-round 66 and a total of 277 at the 1968 Masters, he expected to face De Vicenzo, the winner of the 1967 British Open, in a playoff. De Vicenzo, who was considered Argentina’s finest international player, had finished moments earlier with a 65 that had evidently given him 277 as well.
But De Vicenzo’s birdie 3 on the 17th hole had been marked as a par 4 by his playing partner, Tommy Aaron, who was tallying his scorecard, a common arrangement for paired golfers. De Vicenzo, disgusted by his bogey on the 18th hole, had quickly signed that card, giving him a 66 for 278, without making certain that Aaron’s markings matched his own unofficial scorecard.
When the error was discovered within minutes, Masters officials, after conferring with Bobby Jones, the patriarch of Augusta National, concluded that because De Vicenzo had signed the scorecard, the rules of golf prohibited him from correcting it.
De Vicenzo famously lamented, “What a stupid I am.”
Goalby put on the traditional Masters green jacket, but he received numerous letters from fans accusing him of being a phantom champion. Some evidently presumed that it was Goalby, rather than De Vicenzo’s playing partner, who had been keeping the Argentine’s scorecard.
“I still have a thousand letters in a box at home saying I’m the worst guy that ever lived,” Goalby told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1998. “One fellow wrote, ‘They ought to put you and Sonny Liston in cement and drop you in the ocean.’”
Goalby always considered himself a true Masters champion, and De Vicenzo, along with fellow golfers on the pro tour, did not begrudge him his victory.
“The guy you have to feel sorriest for is Goalby,” the tour golfer Frank Beard was quoted as saying by Sports Illustrated in the weeks after the Masters. “A man gets few chances in his career to win a big one. But to win one and have it tainted like this is terrible. It wasn’t as if Roberto didn’t know the rules.”
For Goalby, the taint never faded.
“I’ve always felt like a victim, as much or more than Roberto,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “None of the problems with scorecards were my fault. But I have forever been singled out as the guy who won the Masters because of some damn clerical mistake. I don’t think I ever got credit for what I did that week.”
Robert George Goalby was born on March 14, 1929, in Belleville, near St. Louis, the son of a coal miner. He was a star quarterback in high school and worked as a caddy. He won several Midwestern golf tournaments as an amateur, attended the University of Illinois, then served in the Army.
“I learned to play golf by mimicking the swings of those I caddied for,” Goalby told The Missouri Golf Post in 2016. “Very few of my buddies played golf because it was so expensive, but we all played football, baseball and basketball. I only got serious about golf after I got out of the Army and was sort of at loose ends.”
He joined the pro tour in 1952.
Goalby struggled with his tendency to hook the ball, and he showed a temper that sometimes left him talking to himself on the fairways. But he was among the leading golfers of the 1960s. He tied Doug Sanders for second place at the 1961 United States Open, one stroke behind Gene Littler, and he was second at the 1962 PGA Championship, one shot behind Gary Player.
He set a PGA Tour record for consecutive birdies in a tournament with eight at the 1961 St. Petersburg Open in Florida, a mark equaled by several others and eclipsed by Mark Calcavecchia’s nine at the 2009 Canadian Open. He played in the 1963 Ryder Cup.
Goalby was a leader of the touring pros’ rebellion of 1966-68 against the Professional Golfers’ Association of America, the national organizing body at the time not only for the tournament players but also for the numerous “golf pros” who ran pro shops and gave lessons.
The tournament players demanded full control over their scheduling and finances in a dispute that was finally resolved with the creation of the modern PGA Tour. Run by a commissioner, it has engineered a huge growth in TV revenue, purses and events along with a pension plan.
“When you look at how successful it has been, and all the money these guys play for now, so much of it came from those days,” Goalby told Golf.com when it recounted the dispute in 2018.
Goalby retired from the PGA Tour in 1971. He helped create the framework for the Senior Tour at a January 1980 meeting with Sam Snead, Gardner Dickinson, Don January, Julius Boros and Dan Sikes at PGA Tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. He was a two-time winner on the tour, its unofficial spokesman in its early years and later a member of its policy board.
He was also a golf commentator for NBC and designed golf courses near his home.
Goalby’s immediate survivors include his sons Kye, Kelly (known as Kel) and Kevin. He was an uncle of Jay Haas, a nine-time winner on the PGA Tour, and Jerry Haas, the golf coach at Wake Forest University, and a great-uncle of Bill Haas, who has won six PGA Tour events.
Goalby was a playing partner with De Vicenzo several times over the years, and he said that they remained friends but never discussed that 1968 Masters. Di Vicenzo died in Argentina in 2017 at age 94.
At the office in his Belleville home, Goalby kept a letter from Bobby Jones: “I ask you to always remember that you won the tournament under the rules of golf and by superlative play.”
And, as Goalby told The Rocky Mountain News in 1995, “When I’m introduced, they still have to say, ‘Bob Goalby, Masters champion.’”
Source: Golf - nytimes.com
