Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (19 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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Matching the length of those “young kids,” the thirty-seven-year-old reached the 549-yard, par-five fourth in two shots and registered an easy birdie. A perfect four-iron off the sixth tee that died three feet from the flagstick led to another birdie that returned him to even par. Two holes later, at the long par-three eighth, Charles ran his four-wood onto the green and demonstrated his putting prowess by dropping a thirty-footer for birdie.
And he was far from finished.
On number eleven, he split the fairway with a solid drive and, from 130 yards, stroked a nine-iron directly into the cup for an eagle.
“It was just a lucky shot.”
Lucky or not, Charles’s precision carried over to the 603-yard, par-five twelfth. Still a long way from the green in two, he nearly sank his next shot to score consecutive eagles. When he tapped in for birdie, he had made up six strokes over nine holes and, at four under, was back in contention.
Although Charles’s hot streak cooled during the final holes (he bogeyed numbers fourteen and eighteen), he stood at two under par for the championship and only one behind the leader, Gary Player. Now that he was a contender halfway through a championship that “doesn’t mean anything” to him, reporters relayed Charles’s indifference toward the U.S. Open to his fellow pros.
“I can’t believe Bob said it; that’s absolutely horse crap,” said Player, who a decade earlier had hosted Charles’s wedding in Johannesburg (Charles married a high school friend of Player’s wife). “Let me say only that if somebody offered me a million dollars in one hand and the U.S. Open title in the other, I’d take the Open title.”
To Charles’s playing partner, Chi Chi Rodriguez, who had grown up in poverty in Puerto Rico and served in the American military, the U.S. Open Championship also meant far more than a million dollars. To him, just having a
chance
to win stirred patriotic fervor.
“No matter who wins or loses,” he said, “it’s beautiful to get up in the morning, look out the window, and realize not only are you in the best country in the world, but also you’re a citizen of it. To me, that is worth more than winning 100,000 U.S. Opens.”
Just nine days older than Player and of similar small stature, Rodriguez was also a marvel of physical fitness. Despite his size, not many on the tour hit the ball longer. And in the spring of 1973—while Player lay in bed recovering from his dual illnesses—Rodriguez flourished. He won April’s Greater Greensboro Open, followed that up with a tenth-place finish a week later at the Masters, then, two weeks afterward, took fourth place at the Tournament of Champions. By early June, he ranked seventh on the PGA money list, the highest in his career. And having placed ninth in the brutal U.S. Open the year before at Pebble Beach, Rodriguez proved that—despite a herky-jerky, whiplash swing—he possessed enough game to compete at an unyielding venue like Oakmont.
Prior to the first round, reporters had crowded around the fast-talking Puerto Rican to hear his prediction of the favorites.
“Nicklaus, Weiskopf, Palmer, Trevino, Player,” he immediately spat out. “With all the heat and humidity here, this is no fat man’s weather. Notice those I mentioned? Which of the ones I named is fat?”
“What about you? You’re skinny,” a listener responded.
“I never pick myself. Besides, in Puerto Rico, I’m a giant.”
By the early 1970s, Rodriguez had become a hero in his native land, even though golf on the island was mainly reserved for the superrich. But the most beloved Puerto Rican athlete of all time was Roberto Clemente, the star right fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Sports fans in western Pennsylvania had come to bond with Clemente almost as closely as native Puerto Ricans. Those fans and Clemente’s countrymen also now shared the same grief.
On New Year’s Eve, 1972, Clemente had hastily boarded a plane filled with relief supplies destined for Central America. An earthquake had brought death and suffering to thousands of impoverished Nicaraguans, and Clemente, a proud Latin American, vowed to lend his own hand in the relief effort. Badly overloaded with supplies, his plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean within minutes of takeoff. Rescue teams never found his body.
Americans of all nationalities mourned Clemente, whose devotion as a humanitarian had cost him his life. But to those from his homeland, Clemente was more than just a great ballplayer, or a great man. He was a symbol that no matter where they came from, they too could rise out of poverty and achieve the “American dream.”
“Every time I strike a ball, I will be thinking of Roberto Clemente,” Chi Chi said on the eve of the U.S. Open.
An inspired Rodriguez got off to a slow start on Thursday afternoon, shooting three over par on the front side, but playing better on the back nine to shoot a respectable 75. On Friday, playing with the uninspired Bob Charles, Rodriguez carded a smooth 71 and was thrilled that he’d easily made the cut for the third consecutive June.
But Rodriguez wasn’t the only contestant geared up for the high stakes of the U.S. Open. Regardless of what Snead or Charles had said, or the criticisms that several veterans and newcomers had levied at Oakmont and the U.S.G.A., most players considered qualifying for a U.S. Open the defining moment of their professional or amateur careers.
“I look forward to the Open. Sure, the pressure is there, but if you’re going to measure up, you have to accept the demands of the Open. It demands things of you no other tournament does. You have to play all the shots or go home,” said Jim Colbert, a thirty-two-year-old Kansas State product who attended college on a football scholarship.
“I’ve been playing in tournaments for the last two weeks, but my heart has been up here.”
He also couldn’t wait for another trip to Oakmont. He’d been fortunate to play the course several years earlier because his sister, a Pittsburgh-area resident, belonged to a nearby club and arranged for him to play with a friend who belonged to Oakmont.
Colbert certainly was not a tour superstar. In eight years, he claimed three wins and one top-ten finish in a major championship (the 1971 U.S. Open at Merion). But he had moved up in the performance rankings from fifty-ninth to twenty-third between 1971 and 1972. Early in 1973, he won the Greater Jacksonville Open in March, and took third at the Tournament of Champions in April. Still, inconsistency plagued him in the first half of the season: He finished no better than twenty-third in any other event, and missed the cut in nearly half of his nineteen tournament starts.
A grind-it-out competitor who never lacked confidence, Colbert stitched all facets of his game together just in time for Oakmont. After dropping two strokes to par early on the front nine, he carded four birdies during a seven-hole stretch and shot 70, joining Player, Floyd, and Trevino as the only players under par.
Colbert’s excellent play continued into the second round. With only his wife and three children, plus his sister and her three children, watching him, Colbert teed off just before nine a.m. on Friday. He birdied number two by sinking a tricky fifteen-footer, and grabbed another birdie on number seven thanks to a perfectly lofted nine-iron that stopped seven feet from the flagstick.
Two holes later, on the strength of a once-in-a-lifetime shot, Colbert pulled within a single stroke of Player.
In his bag that week, Colbert carried clubs the
New York Times
referred to as “Golf’s Magic Wand—Maybe.” Colbert was one of the first touring pros to experiment with graphite-shafted woods in order to hit the ball farther. Not a long hitter, he would especially need a boost to compete on par-five holes (like Oakmont’s fourth and ninth), where power players enjoyed a considerable advantage : They could easily reach the green in two shots.
In the early days of graphite technology, most pros considered the experimental shafts too whippy, too unpredictable, too fragile, or all of the above. In their view, the tradeoff between greater distance versus less control or predictability was simply not worth it. Indeed, most power players went in the opposite direction, preferring superstiff or X shafts (at least on their drivers) to restrict the bend of the club, and thereby achieve maximum strength without sacrificing control. And this, of course, held especially true on tight U.S. Open venues, where slightly off-line shots yielded steep penalties.
But Colbert would try anything to neutralize the advantage the longer hitters held over him. And at Oakmont, the gamble worked. Despite one sharp hook on the third hole that landed him in the Church Pews, he was driving the ball longer than usual, and down the middle. He approached number nine confident he could get home in two shots.
Again, however, Colbert badly hooked his tee shot, which brought into play one of the Fowneses’ more terrifying hazards: the deep, narrow ditch. Ten minutes of studying his awful lie forced him to remove his ball from the ditch, take a one-stroke penalty, and drop the ball no more than two club lengths away. “I was tempted to hit the ball out of the ditch,” he said, “but Homero Blancas was playing in my threesome and it took him three swings to get a similar shot out of it.”
Even after the drop, Colbert’s ball lay in deep, gnarly rough: virtually invisible. Still 225 yards from the green, he decided, to his caddie’s astonishment, to go for broke and hit his graphite-shafted fairway wood from the buried lie.
Miraculously, Colbert “fractured” the shot, and his ball came to rest eighteen inches from the cup. “My three-wood came so close that it should have been a gimme.”
“Jim made the greatest shot I’ve ever seen in my life at No. 9,” recalled Rusty Guy, Colbert’s seventeen-year-old caddie, and an Oakmont member to whom Colbert attributed much of his success that week.
Following his miracle birdie, Colbert promptly dropped a stroke when he drove into a bunker on the tenth, only to gain it back on number eleven, where he stuck his short-iron approach to six feet. A birdie and four consecutive pars over the next five-hole stretch put Colbert at four under for the championship, just one shot behind Player.
On the tee at the long, par-three sixteenth, Rusty Guy handed Colbert two more pieces of golf equipment not usually carried by an American touring pro: a Skyway Ball from Japan, and an iron made by Karsten Solheim, the golf guru/ engineer now in the early stages of reinventing the shape and composition of “iron” clubs.
Colbert smacked the Japanese ball crisply with his PING one-iron, and with Oakmont’s greens holding like never before—especially on the punchbowlshaped sixteenth green—it came to rest fifteen feet from the flag. Colbert rammed in the birdie putt to pull even with Player at five under par.
Unfortunately, an errant drive into a bunker on number eighteen cost Colbert a share of the lead. Alone in second place, one behind Player, he earned a spot in the last pairing for Saturday’s round. As spirited as ever, Colbert brushed aside questions about impending weekend nerves.
“After I got to be starting quarterback in high school, I eloped with my girlfriend. We had to come back to tell our parents. That’s pressure.”
ANOTHER EARLY MORNING STARTER ON Friday was Lee Trevino, who carded eight pars over eight holes. He then thrilled the crowd of several hundred onlookers as he nearly carded an eagle on the ninth; his fifty-foot putt rolled directly over the hole, and he had to settle for a birdie that dropped him to two under par.
Trevino’s play was nothing short of brilliant; astonishingly, he hit every fairway and green over the first twenty-seven holes. At the turn, he stood just three shots off the lead. But two hours later, when he returned to Oakmont’s unofficial hub—the spot where the clubhouse, the ninth, and the eighteenth greens triangulate—Trevino fumed. Not only did he miss an eight-foot birdie opportunity at number twelve, he three-putted and became noticeably “testy” afterward.
Having nailed every fairway that afternoon, Trevino continued his textbook golf on the home hole. From the eighteenth fairway, his approach shot landed comfortably on the green but a long distance from the hole. The large gallery, eager to see Trevino’s first birdie on the back side, crowded the green, only to be disappointed when the ball died inches from the hole. Forced to settle for a one over 72, Trevino sighed and then stuck out his tongue in frustration.
The events on the eighteenth summed up Trevino’s round, and his entire tournament so far: perfect tee shot, adequate but slightly misjudged approach, followed by a birdie-miss that petered out on the lip. Trevino’s hometown paper, the
El Paso Herald-Post,
reported he “had at least five birdie putts stop short by as little as a quarter or half an inch.”

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