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At the 1985 Panasoniclas Vegas Invitational, after closing the third round with a brain-cramp bogey, Curtis Strange, 30, stormed into the parking lot and made his worst swing of the day. His takeaway was perfect, but impact was a problem: flesh struck metal. "It was the darnedest thing," Strange recalls. "The hood of my car came up and hit my fist."
On Sunday, Strange blew off the doctor's orders and won the event with a fractured right hand. He shot 66.
"Oh, it might have hurt a little," he says now. "But what was I going to do? We had a tournament to play."
A fleeting moment in a Hall of Fame career, the incident resonates as vintage Early Curtis, a precocious, prematurely gray talent who played the game in a way that must seem foreign to today's pros: in a cloud of emotion, with a robopro's obsession with perfection and a cyborg's tolerance for pressure and pain.
At his peak, in the late 1980s, Strange was widely seen as the top — and testiest — player on Tour. "Fiery competitor." "Determined grinder." Cliches shadowed Strange like a Sunday gallery. His trip-wire temper, apparent in the press tent, also turned up in the tee box. During one of his two U.S. Open wins, he glared at a trigger-happy photographer and said, "Gimme a f------ break." He was caustic and cold-blooded. He could carve your heart out with a lob wedge, and use the tattered organ as an impact bag.
But as proven by the penalty he took in the parking lot, Strange saved the roughest punishment for himself.
"Was I hard on myself and a few other people? Yeah," says Strange, now 53. "But I was out there to win tournaments. I was doing what I thought I needed to do to win."
All of his hallmarks — the steely nerve, the precise shotmaking, the capacity for self-abuse — were on display in 1988 at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., where Strange won the first of his back-to-back U.S. Opens. Playing in the final group on Sunday, Strange conjured crunch-time magic with an up-and-down on 18 from a greenside bunker to salvage both par and a spot in a Monday playoff. But that night, thrashing sleepless in his cotton sheets, Strange dwelled on two front-nine bogeys and a ticklish three-putt on 17.
He'd already won plenty of cash and crowns, including the Memorial the month before, where Hale Irwin praised him as the "best player in the world." But what he wanted was a major, a prize he hadn't sniffed since the 1985 Masters, when he'd tossed away a Sunday lead by baptizing two balls in Rae's Creek.
Bernhard Langer had benefited then. At Brookline, another European, the reigning British Open champion, Nick Faldo, stood in his way.
Giddy at the prospect, tabloid writers went headline-happy, casting the Monday match as a patriotic standoff. The Boston Tee Party. On one side, the British Empire. On the other, a defender of the commonwealth, a red-blooded American, right down to his Virginia drawl.
"I was nervous, anxious, butterflies from all the build-up," Strange remembers of that sleepless night. "But I was too worried about the a--hole at the end of my own 5-iron to give much thought to all that other stuff."
The "a--hole" triumphed 71-75, whipping Faldo in the same way Faldo whipped everyone else. Relentlessly. Remorselessly, with nine one-putts and pars rescued from right field at Fenway Park. He opened with a six-foot par save on the first, staggered Faldo with a 30-footer for birdie on the 13th to stretch his lead to three, and dealt the knockout blow by hammering a 2-iron to the 18th green. After tapping in for par, he kissed his wife, Sarah, paid tearful tribute to his late father, Tom, and phoned his brother, Allan. The next year, at Oak Hill, he won the U.S. Open again.
No one had turned the trick since Ben Hogan (1950 and '51). And no one — not Jack, Arnie, Tiger — has pulled it off since. Then in 1990, at Medinah, Strange nearly nailed a trifecta, with a weekend run at his third straight title.
Golf has produced some historic pairings, but few were more impressive than the U.S. Open and Curtis Strange. "No disrespect to any of the other tournaments, but the Open was the one I always wanted," Strange says. "It's our national championship. It was the most important tournament in the world to me."
