Fuzzy Zoeller, a two-time major champion and one of golf’s most gregarious characters whose career was later tainted by a racially insensitive joke about Tiger Woods, has died, according to a longtime colleague. He was 74.
A cause of death was not immediately available. Brian Naugle, the tournament director of the PGA Tour’s Insperity Invitational in Houston, said Zoeller’s daughter called him Thursday with the news.
Zoeller was the most recent player to win the Masters on his first attempt, a three-man playoff at Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club in 1979. The Indiana native also famously waved a white towel at New York’s Winged Foot Golf Club in 1984, when he thought Greg Norman had beat him, only to defeat the Australian in an 18-hole playoff the next day.
It was the 1997 Masters that changed his popularity.
Woods was on his way to a watershed moment in golf with the most dominant victory in the storied tournament’s history. Zoeller had finished his round and had a drink in hand under the oak tree by the clubhouse when he was stopped by CNN and asked for his thoughts on the 21-year-old Woods.