Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (14 page)

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Authors: Adam Lazarus

Tags: #Palmer; Arnold;, #Golfers, #Golf, #Golf - General, #Pennsylvania, #Sports & Recreation, #Sports, #United States, #Oakmont (Allegheny County), #Golf courses, #1929-, #History

BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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Although the two men did play together in the third round of April’s Byron Nelson Golf Classic, and were even seen talking and laughing together—“[I] never had such a congenial round with Arnold”—Palmer wasn’t likely to share a drink with Crampton during U.S. Open week at Oakmont. And not just because most experts considered Crampton—the tour’s second-leading money winner—more likely to contend for the title than Palmer. After the tremendous first half of his 1973 season, Crampton appeared ready to shed
Golf Monthly’s
recent tag as “the most successful journeyman golf professional the world has ever known.” Likewise, said
Golf Magazine,
“His steady play and new winning habit make him the most serious foreign contender.”
But Crampton shot an opening-round 76. The next afternoon, a 75 left him one stroke over the cut line. At Arnie Palmer’s U.S. Open, Bruce Crampton made a quick exit.
So did Billy Casper, Palmer’s old nemesis from the 1966 U.S. Open at Olympic. Casper’s loud claim that because of their great length, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf held a ten-stroke edge over the field—the claim that so irritated Lee Trevino—didn’t seem to ring true when neither booming hitter broke par during round one.
“Nicklaus and Weiskopf, they can use a six-iron or seven-iron on eighteen,” Casper noted of the 456-yard, par-four finishing hole. “The rest of us, we’re going to be hitting from much farther back. I’ll tell you, if they move the flag back on that hole, I’ll be using a four-wood.... I would say my chances are very slim here.”
Casper’s defeatist attitude in 1973 stemmed from more than bad memories of having played Oakmont during the 1962 U.S. Open, when he missed the cut with a pair of 77s. In 1972, for the first time since 1955, the forty-one-year-old didn’t win a single event during the entire season. And though he came close a couple of times—losing a play-off in April at the Byron Nelson, and finishing fourth at the PGA—he hardly resembled the same man who, not long ago, had twice won the PGA Player of the Year award (1966, 1970) and become the first man in golf history to own five Vardon Trophies.
“I’ve been doing a lot of traveling around the world in the last few years, and I don’t feel I’ve given myself a chance to recuperate from it. Jet lag, that sort of thing. As you get older, it tells on you a little more. You’re never at ease on the golf course; you’re stirred up from the tension; you lose your keenness to perform,” Casper said in March 1973. “Because of my travel and a lot of things I was doing, I haven’t really watched my diet. I was not only playing golf but had a lot of speaking engagements and appearances. The banquet circuit. I eat and enjoy everything now. When you’re being the guest of someone, it’s pretty hard to turn them down.”
Having given up his famed, exotic buffalo-meat diet several years earlier, by spring 1973 Casper weighed at least thirty pounds more than during his mid- 1960s prime.
Aboard airplanes as often as he was on the golf course, no longer in peak physical shape in his early forties, and fresh off his first season on tour without a victory, Casper appeared ill equipped to contend in the 1973 U.S. Open. And he wasn’t. He shot a 79 on Thursday, matched that horrid score on Friday, and missed the cut by eight shots. No other elite player performed so poorly at Oakmont, a course where Casper—the man many considered the greatest putter of his time—should have shone. His awful play seemed to mark a sad, final U.S. Open hurrah for the world’s then-greatest Mormon golfer.
 
IN HIS ENCOUNTER WITH OAKMONT’S maddening greens, seasoned pro Charlie Sifford struggled more than anyone: He six-putted the par-four seventh (five of his putts were within five feet). The PGA tour’s first great African-American pro was already in bad shape before reaching the seventh green, however: He had double-bogeyed the first hole and triple-bogeyed the third.
“It wasn’t the greens; it was me. I just putted like hell,” said Sifford while chomping his trademark cigar. “Dave Hill told the truth. People didn’t believe him. This golf course is too tough. You just can’t play it.”
Several other veterans, those who had seen just about every type of nasty lie and slick green, also couldn’t do anything right on day one. Ed Merrins, the renowned teaching pro at such classic courses as Merion, Westchester, and Bel-Air, shot an 86 that featured a pair of eights. The 1964 U.S. Amateur Champion, Bill Campbell, had a similarly tough afternoon.
Campbell arrived at Oakmont the night before the Open began—after hosting his stepdaughter’s wedding in Huntington, West Virginia—only to shoot an 84. Besides landing his tee shot in mud on the par-three sixth, the honest-to-a-fault career amateur called a penalty stroke on himself for hitting the ball twice with one stroke. (Incredibly, the next day, he would call two more penalty strokes on himself, both on the eighteenth.) If anyone could get away with missing a few practice rounds at Oakmont, it was Campbell, who had competed there in two U.S. amateurs and now three U.S. Opens. He took his awful first round in good humor.
“I shot an 86 my first time here in 1938, so I’ve improved two strokes in thirty-five years.”
Even a supremely gifted putter like Dave Stockton was flustered by the course setup on Thursday. He needed thirty-six strokes on the greens just to card a 77. “I’m an aggressive putter. A U.S. Open course just doesn’t fit my game,” Stockton said. “I don’t like to be made to look foolish. It’s a humbling week.”
Oakmont—the Hades of Hulton—was living up to its nickname.
Anyone named Snead (or Sneed) who walked off the course that afternoon was inclined to agree with Sifford and Stockton. A member of Ohio State’s golf team during the early 1960s, Ed Sneed had been overshadowed by teammates Nicklaus and Weiskopf. Sneed’s career got off to a poor start after he turned professional in 1967, but his game improved dramatically in 1973 and he scored his first tour victory later that year. Tee-to-green, Sneed played superbly during the opening round at Oakmont, as he hit sixteen of eighteen greens. But he could still manage only a 76, mainly due to mishaps on the greens.
The first hole was typical. After driving into the wet rough (he teed off early, shortly after Hensley), Sneed was fortunate to draw a good lie, and landed his second shot only twenty feet from the flagstick. “[But] then I three-putted. I had three three-putts today, all of them on relatively good first putts.”
Sneed had joined Nicklaus and Weiskopf in a practice round on Wednesday. With former NCAA champion Hale Irwin joining the three Buckeyes, thousands of fans crowded the fairways to see the high-profile foursome. The participants were unusually eager to play that day: A terrible rainstorm on Tuesday, which knocked down trees and the press tent, had washed away vital practice time. Since most players—including Sneed, Irwin, and Weiskopf—had never played Oakmont before, studying the course’s idiosyncrasies firsthand was essential.
Tuesday’s afternoon downpour bothered more than just the golfers. Over eighty-three hundred fans had bought cheaper tickets and traveled to Oakmont to see their favorite pros play in a more relaxed environment. Most swarmed around Palmer’s foursome, only to be disappointed when lightning and rain chased the King off the course after he had played just a few holes.
A uniformly older group of fans was at least as disappointed as Arnie’s Army. The indomitable Samuel Jackson Snead, at age sixty-one, had qualified for his twenty-ninth U.S. Open. Hitting the ball as long as ever, and increasingly proficient in his sidesaddle putting stroke, Sam genuinely expected to contend with players less than half his age.
Sam had planned to practice and offer some pointers on Tuesday to his nephew, Jesse Carlyle (or J. C.) Snead, a three-time PGA tour winner, who had never seen Oakmont. J.C. was quite sour on how the U.S.G.A. “tricked up” courses for the Open, seemingly with the goal of humbling the best players in the world and occasionally making them look foolish. J.C. still had lots to learn about what the U.S.G.A. had in store for him at Oakmont, so Tuesday’s storms set back his preparations considerably.
“Uncle Sam” was not nearly as concerned about losing practice time. While Jerry McGee and other youngsters peered out the locker room window, praying that the storms would cease, Sam—his trademark straw hat balancing on the slight bulge of his belly while exposing his bald head—lay down on a bench and slept peacefully through the loud blasts of thunder. Snead already knew Oakmont and how the U.S.G.A. would set it up for a major championship.
Four times Snead had narrowly missed out in the National Open, and two of those failures had Oakmont ties. In addition to his collapse against Hogan on Oakmont’s back nine in 1953, Snead had squandered a late lead in the 1947 Open in St. Louis, then lost in a play-off to Lew Worsham, Oakmont’s recently appointed head professional. Twenty-six years later, Worsham was still the man in charge of Oakmont’s pro shop.
Snead owned a Claret Jug, three Green Jackets, three PGA Championships (including the 1951 installment at Oakmont), and more PGA tournaments (eighty-two) than any man in history. He also won his seventeenth West Virginia Open in 1973, nearly four decades after winning his first in 1936. But for all his record-breaking achievements and the continuing stellar quality of his game, Snead’s string of second-place finishes in the U.S. Open—he never won the championship in twenty-eight tries—hung sadly over his head.
“Why does the Open mean so much?” was his evasive reply to the predictable questions about whether or not he could finally win one.
“I’m playing the same fellows I beat each week. There’s just too much emphasis and prestige put on it. It’s like Mickey Mantle hitting three home runs in the last game of the World Series and winning the batting title for that. In 1950 I won twice as many tournaments as anybody else, I had [the] low average, I won the Vardon [Trophy]. [Ben] Hogan wins the Open and he’s player of the year. Sentiment is fine and Hogan did a helluva thing by coming back, but are they going to let sentiment go by the record? Heck, I beat Hogan that year in a playoff at Los Angeles. A man doesn’t just have to play well to win the Open; he has to have a hell of a lot of luck.... I guess the Open is rated so highly because it’s the daddy of them all. They’ve been playing it since the year one.”
Snead happily put his gripes on hold in 1973; after two years of failing to qualify, he returned to the event by tying for first place in the nation’s largest sectional U.S. Open qualifier in Charlotte. Well rested and anxious to resume his lifelong quest, Snead joined two of the most flamboyant young stars in the field, twenty-three-year-old Lanny Wadkins and twenty-one-year-old Ben Crenshaw, for an early Thursday morning start.
“Hey, Sam,” a member of the field called to him after the round, “you’re older than those two guys you played with combined!”
“Hell,” Snead replied, “you could throw a third one in.”
By sticking his approach to within eighteen inches on the fifth green, Snead found himself one under par early in the round. But he mangled the last three par-threes, bogeying the eighth and sixteenth and double-bogeying the shortest hole of all, the thirteenth. As usual, Snead mainly blamed his handiwork on the greens; he just couldn’t turn brilliant approach shots into birdies.
“I missed only two fairways,” he said after shooting a 75. “And I only had one long putt. Just one putt over twenty feet. I was putting awful. Kept missing ’em to the right. I had no three-putt greens, but had thirty-three putts. Should have had a seventy.”
“Sam is a better putter than he gives himself credit for,” Wadkins observed after the round. “He might do better if he were more positive about it. Sometimes he finds ways to miss putts.”
Snead (like his nephew) also couldn’t help but continue his diatribe about U.S. Open golf, complaining especially about the long rough along the fairways.
“I know everybody’s got to play the same course, but it sure ain’t fun playing this course. But maybe the U.S. Open ain’t meant to be fun.”
Aside from a few golfers—the rejuvenated Player, a plucky youngster like Wadkins, or the unflappable Nicklaus—it was hard for anyone to stay positive, much less have “fun,” that afternoon at Oakmont.
“I think this course is unfair,” said Ben Crenshaw, after wrapping up his round of 80 with Snead and Wadkins. Nine days later, the University of Texas superstar would win his third consecutive NCAA title (he was the first ever to do that), turn pro that August, and take the San Antonio Open in just his fourth start. But in the opening round at Oakmont, Crenshaw hit only two fairways and seemed content that he’d three-putted only three times on what he would later call “maybe the strongest greens on the face of the earth.”
Another hotshot twentysomething came to Oakmont Thursday morning with very high hopes, but left bewildered by his disintegration on the course. As a psychology major at Stanford, Thomas Sturges Watson had taken fourth place in the 1969 U.S. Amateur at Oakmont (won by Steve Melnyk). Originally from Kansas City, the twenty-three-year-old, four-time Missouri Amateur champion had even carded a hole-in-one with a three-iron on the long eighth hole (shortened a bit for the Amateur, as was the entire course). Watson turned pro two years later, and although still winless in 1973 when he arrived at Oakmont for his second U.S. Open, he had nearly won his first tournament in February’s Hawaiian Open, but squandered a four-stroke lead to tour nomad John Schlee.
Watson had reason to feel that his past familiarity with Oakmont would play to his advantage. Unfortunately, it didn’t, as he shot 81 on the first day, and a 73 on Friday was not enough to make the cut. The legendary Tom Watson had not yet emerged.

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