Completed Edition
1975 PGA Championship
Jack Nicklaus won the 1975 PGA Championship on Firestone’s South Course, finishing two strokes ahead of Bruce Crampton. A Saturday par at the sixteenth helped turn a precarious position into a third round of 67.24
The Par at Firestone’s Sixteenth
Crampton had shot 63 on Friday. His rounds of 71 and 63 totaled 134, four strokes better than Nicklaus’s 70 and 68. On Saturday their positions reversed: Nicklaus shot 67 and Crampton 75. The eight-stroke swing left Nicklaus four ahead, at 205 against 209.4
At the long par-five sixteenth, Nicklaus drove into water on the left. After a penalty drop, his six-iron finished in rough behind a tree. The PGA Tour’s account describes a nine-iron from 137 yards that cleared the tree, crossed the pond and stopped about thirty feet from the hole. Nicklaus holed the putt for par.2
A final 71 was enough. Nicklaus finished at 276, Crampton at 278 and Tom Weiskopf at 279. It was Nicklaus’s fourth PGA Championship. Crampton had also been runner-up to him at Canterbury in 1973.413
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