45 Years After Winning U.S. Open, Jack Fleck Finds 'Lil' Bit A Heaven'.

Unknown Who Beat Hogan Now Runs Golf Course in Arkansas

THOSE WHO KNOW JACK

Fleck merely as the answer to a world-class trivia question define the man by a single victory.

A full 45 years after that triumph, the 78-year-old defines himself more by two subsequent, devastating losses. The dichotomy says a lot about what's ultimately important to Jack Fleck.

In 1955, the unknown 33-year-old Iowan smote the legendary Ben Hogan to win the U.S. Open, an upset so monumental that to this day the name Fleck invariably is invoked when any no- name threatens to overcome an established star in the final round of a major tournament. The circumstances of that amazing win elevated Fleck beyond the run-of-the-mill upsetter.

Fleck was a PGA Tour rookie, only a few months removed from his regular job managing two municipal courses in Iowa. Hogan was a near god, having shocked disbelievers by returning from a near-fatal car wreck five years earlier to contend for a record fifth US. Open title.

And Fleck's victory wasn't a one-shot wonder. Birdieing two of the last four holes -- numbers 33 and 36 in the grueling two-round Saturday final -- bought Fleck only an opportunity to come back Sunday and beat the greatest golfer who had ever lived over 18 holes, head to head.

Against odds, Jack Fleck played David to Hogan's Goliath, just as convincingly; and he's been talking about that, and little else, ever since. At least publicly. But sports glory alone doesn't define Jack Fleck.

Today, as owner-operator of the Lil' Bit A Heaven golf course near Mount Magazine in western Arkansas, Fleck's predominant feeling is pain. He has just suffered the second of his life's losses by becoming a widower for the second time.

When he lost Lynn back in 1971, it was of her own doing -- her third try at suicide was successful. Lynn's death sent Jack reeling across the West, directionless for months, unsure whether he'd ever right himself.

"I just sort of hid out and wept a lot. I roamed. I visited friends. I visited my brothers and sisters. I did carpenter work and cabinet work. I went to Glacier National Park;" he said.

Jack Fleck did about everything but think about golf or the life he had led on the PGA Tour.

When his second wife, Mariann, died March 8, it was Jack who had to make the call, reluctantly giving doctors permission to pull the plug on life support after a final, devastating stroke had lefr no hope.

Mariann hadn't been well since the mid-1990s, when her first stroke derailed Jack's hopes of milking a little more our of his waning days as a part-time touring golf professional. He left Florida and his comeback regimen of yoga, weights and golf and came home to Arkansas to look after Mariann and his new golf course.

The road from his muni courses in Iowa to the U.S. Open at the Olympic Club in San Francisco didn't pass through Magazine, Ark., but it came closer than you might think. Fleck, was chasing glory on the PGA tour for the first time, finally confident after a decade that his brother-in-law and hired hands could keep the flags flying true at the 36 holes he oversaw in Iowa. From the prestigious Colonial in Fort Worth, on to Kansas City and then to scenic Hot Springs, Fleck toiled rather unsuccessfully on tour before heading west for the U.S. Open and glory.

But Arkansas stayed on his mind. When Mariann decided in 1981 that she wanted to establish a health retreat, Jack remembered the inexpensive land waiting in the wilds of Arkansas. When he went to tame the acreage the Flecks bought in the shadow of Mount Magazine, "all you could see was the top of big pine trees," he said.

"It was covered with thicket and underbrush. It was a wild and woolly piece of property."

Jack told himself that if the health retreat never got off the ground, "maybe we could use the land for a golf course as a last resort."

All that would have to wait, however, because golf popped up out of nowhere to get in the way of the Flecks' plans. Jack had won a tiny tournament with a big name, the PGA Seniors' Championship, in 1979. Back then it was merely an isolated "legends" event that attracted little attention and offered little prize money. But when momentum built and a full-time tour was created for the 50-and-older set, Fleck had little choice but to put the health retreat plans on hold and go out to earn a living the best way he knew how. He managed just one win across the 1980s before the exemption he'd been given for past glories ran out in 1991 and Fleck found himself on the outside looking in, eligible to play only a handful of events a year. In 15 years, he'd won just $457,000.

What an odd' place and an odd feeling for a man who had been the toast of the town, of the whole golf-loving country, back in 1955, back when baseball and boxing were pro golf's major rivals for the public's. attention, when pro football and pro basketball were not yet the powerhouses they would become.

Fleck wishes now he'd won two or three tournaments before he conquered the U.S. Open. He might have been better prepared for the hubbub that followed. Not that there was anything in his humble Corn Belt upbringing that could have prepared him to be guest of honor at Toots Shore's club in New York, that could have prepared him for what he sums up simply as "more towns, parties and press."

"It wasn't my life," he said of that post-Open havoc. "I was just used to work. I pounded balls. I just hit balls all the time."

Not that finding himself in the spotlight shocked Jack Fleck. Even against Ben Hogan. Even in the role of Nobody in a two-man, 18-hole passion play. After Fleck qualified for the Open, an all-comers event that makes it ripe for stories like Fleck's -- and the one Kevin Costner told decades later in "Tin Cup" --he came back to practice at the Iowa public courses he ran.

What happened next starts a story that Fleck said he'd told only once before, last June on the Golf Channel.

"I was regripping my clubs and lacquering my persimmon woods real early one morning," Fleck said. "And an elderly gentlemen who played there all the time came in and said, 'Jack, you're doing wonderful.' I said, 'Ralph, I haven't come close to winning a tournament.' And he said, 'Jack, haven't you prayed?.' I said, 'No, Ralph, you don't pray for winning a golf tournament. You pray when somebody's sick or something, but you don't pray to win a golf tournament.'

"He walked around the shop for three or four minutes and came back and said, 'OK, Jack. I want you to pray for the power and the strength to compete.' Now that hit me. That's not asking for money or trophies or that kind of stuff. That's just asking for the power to compete.

Forty-five years later, Fleck remembers every shot of his U.S. Open. He'll happily walk you through his first-round 76 and his second-round 69 that put him in contention going into the grueling 36-hole Saturday final. He likes to pick up that story on the 10th hole of the second Saturday round.

"I was in the last twosome with Gene Littler, and Hogan was on the 18th," he said.

In those days the field was not ordered so that the leading groups would be the last to play.

"I heard all this screaming. This marshal I'd gotten to know asked me, 'You want to know what that roar was all about?' Back then they didn't have leaderboards everywhere, just up by the 18th green. He got on his Army walkie-talkie and told me, 'Hogan's in with [a four-round total of 4-over-par] 287. Jack, all you have to do is make one more birdie to tie.'"

But Fleck instead bogeyed 14, and when he walked off the hole he had an eerie feeling.

"The crowd wasn't moving. They didn't run to get good position on the next hole. The thought just kept running through my mind: 'They aren't moving. They think I'm all through.' Then I hit up to about seven or eight feet [on No. 15], made the putt and the crowd went wild."

Fleck parred 16 and left his par putt on the brutally long 17th on the edge of the cup. The next part of the story is worth telling from both sides. Hogan reportedly was in the clubhouse, sipping a scotch and water, getting reports on Fleck's progress. Told Fleck needed a birdie on 18 to tie, the great man sat tight.

Fleck remembers "looking down and seeing people jammed in the natural amphitheater around the green. The sun was setting. There were a few streaks right above the green. I remember thinking, 'If this isn't heaven, I don't know what is.' I hit a three-wood, and then a seven-iron to about 6 1/2 feet. I have friends who were sitting way up on top looking down. They tell me, 'It was so quiet when you hit that putt. We could tell by the crack off the putter that you made it.'"

Story has it that Hogan cursed softly upon receiving the news, saying, "I wish he'd made a 2 or a 4" so that he wouldn't have to face Sunday's 18-hole playoff.

As for Fleck, the specter of a play off with the king of golf didn't faze him, at least no more than the previous 36 holes had.

Here's why:

"Before the Saturday morning 36, I was shaving and right our of the mirror came a voice that said, 'Jack, you're going to win the U.S. Open.' I get goose bumps right now talking about it. But it happened again: 'Jack, you're going to win the U.S. Open.' Preachers since have asked me if I was hallucinating. But it happened."

He then tells corroborating stories of good happenstance throughout his balls micraculously found, bounces that went his way.

The 18th-hole birdie putt drained, the comeback complete, the unknown Iowan went back to his hotel room, to stare again into the mirror that had produced the voice. And on the night before the biggest 18 holes of his life, Jack Fleck slept 9 1/2 hours.

It takes 20 minutes or so for Fleck to walk a listener through each shot of the playoff, a tight match that saw Fleck birdie the eighth, ninth and 10th before Hogan sliced his advantage to one stroke going into the final hole. That's where the Hoolywood script slapped the hero in the face: Hogan slipped on the sandy tee box and dead-pulled his tee shot left into the deepest tough the U.S. Open perhaps' has ever known. Safe in the fairway, Fleck watched as Hogan "popped a little blip and there was this big pile of hay. Then. he did it again."

Finally, Hogan holed a 35-foot putt for double-bogey, Fleck parred, and that was that. The greatest upser in history had ended with an anti-climax. And Fleck was $6,000 richer.

Having whipped a legend fair and square, Fleck wishes the story of how the playoff unfolded hadn't gotten so discombobulated over the years. An oft-repeated tale describes Fleck apologizing to Hogan for poor play on the third hole and Hogan reassuring the no-name golfer that everything was fine, thereby calming Fleck's nerves and propelling him to victory.

Never happened, Fleck. said, calling it "the greatest lie in the history of golf."

One subplot that has been lost in some of the retellings is that Fleck and Hogan were bound by the clubs they used -- the earliest Ben Hogan models. Fleck remembers Hogan telling the factory workers to let Fleck go in and get fitted for a set of Hogans. Fleck received the bulk of the irons one week and the woods the next, and after being in contention in the Hot Springs Open after two rounds, he switched from his MacGregors to the new Hogans.

Ironically, the set wasn't fully complete until the week of the U.S. Open, when Hogan himself delivered the wedges to Fleck in San Francisco.

Few have asked much about what has happened to Jack Fleck since that glorious weekend at the Olympic Club. His name popped back onto the radar screen when he won the 1960 Phoenix Open and the 1961 Bakersfield Open, but when Fleck slipped off the tour in 1971 after Lynn's death, few noticed. Nor did his return, or his low-profile Senior Tour years, kick up much more to talk about.

As the sun set on Lil' Bit A Heaven, casting long shadows in the clubhouse adorned with amazing memorabilia -- Fleck with Dwight Eisenhower, Fleck with Joe Dimaggio, Fleck striding down the fairway with Hogan, goose-bumpy stuff -- Jack Fleck laughed, likely for the first time in weeks.

"I guess it's done me some good to talk ab6ut all this," he said, already pointing toward another Legends of Golf event that would take him to St. Augustine, Fla., compliments of this sponsor or that. "I've been doing nothing but cry most of the day."

And how does a 78-year-old, freshly widowed U.S. Open champion get excited about playing a few more rounds of golf?

"People used to ask me, 'Why do you play so much? And I tell them that I started late. Gene Littler is 10 years younger than me and he's got 10,000 rounds on me. I've got to get busy."

'Lil' Bit A Heaven' Is a Course Like No Other

AFTER JACK FLECK'S Exemption on the PGA Senior Tour expired and the number of tournaments he could play dwindled, he headed home to Arkansas to complete what he had started more than 10 years ago.

He'd known that if his wife's plan to build a health retreat didn't pan out, he could always carve a golf course out of the beautiful land he and Mariann had bought in the shadow of Mount Magazine in western Arkansas.

But when he started assessing the land he had available, it became clear that he was going to have to get creative. The resulting 18-hole layout, with nine two-pin greens and only two primary shared fairways, is like no other -- offering the challenges of undulating, bent-grass greens, water and sand traps in a design that was much less expensive to build and costs less to maintain and operate. (See illustration on next page.)

Not that it was simple to go from drawing board to finished course. Torrential rains washed the first fairway grass seeding away and blew out the dam that captured the water that rolled off Mount Magazine, water that would be used year-round to irrigate the course.

Next, the promise of the country paving the miles of road that connects Lil' Bit A Heaven to state Highway 10 disappeared when Fleck learned he must have 60 employees to qualify for the assistance. He was about 57 short -- he, his son, Craig, and a part-time helper take care of all the maintenance, mowing and other chores that never end at a golf course.

"I'm not getting rich," Fleck said. In fact, Lil' Bit A Heaven "is not a moneymaker at all right now."

Play at his course increased every year until 1999. Fleck says a glut of courses has made to tougher on everyone trying to operate an independent course.

Most golfers are walk-up customers, but "we do have a small membership," Fleck said. He and Craig have brainstormed ways to increase traffic and have instituted specials that give a foursome an 18-hole green fee and use of a cart for a mere $10 a head on weekdays, $15 on weekends.

And Fleck still plays a few legends events, reaches lessons ($75 a half-hour) and takes his show on the road, primarily to corporate events.

"I give a little instruction, put on a clinic, play one or two holes with everybody, then show a little video of 1955 and talk at dinner," Fleck said.

Anyone interested in arranging to have Fleck for the next corporate get-together, taking a lesson or shooting a brisk 18 at Lil' Bit A Heaven -- even anyone who just wants to shoot the breeze with the man who upset Hogan -- can call [phone].