Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (2 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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The course setup perfectly embodied the stern philosophy of Fownes and Loeffler: “A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost.”
Given these conditions, Sarazen made a startling prediction. Without downplaying his own chances of victory, he told everyone to watch out for the relatively unknown Sam Parks Jr.
The current teaching professional at nearby South Hills Country Club, Parks had improved his game during the past two seasons on the Florida winter tour; he’d finished thirty-seventh in the 1934 U.S. Open and fifteenth in the recently contested Masters Golf Tournament. Parks had also become an exceptionally straight driver during a two-year stint as the pro at Summit Golf Course near Uniontown, where the penalty for errant shots was a lost ball over a cliff. Parks had been practicing feverishly at Oakmont, working especially on adapting his putting stroke and pitch shots to the exceptional firmness and speed of Oakmont’s greens.
“His knowledge of Oakmont and its pitfalls should be a great asset,” Sarazen observed of the native Pittsburgher. “Oakmont is a course that needs knowing. This knowledge must be gained long in advance of the championship, to give one a chance to get over the first shock coming from its severity.”
In the end, Parks won the 1935 U.S. Open by two shots with a score of 299, largely because he outputted everyone and kept most of his tee shots in the fairways. A few commentators begrudged Parks his triumph. H. B. Martin labeled Parks a “mediocre player,” and the long-hitting Jimmy Thomson, who finished second to Parks and toured with him afterward, called him (according to Charles Price) “the most consistent seventy-five player who ever lived.”
Still, Parks earned his victory at Oakmont in classic U.S. Open style: straight driving, great lag putting. The top players were mainly furious at the course setup by Fownes and Loeffler that allowed a journeyman with special local knowledge to triumph. Inaccessible pin positions and “spun-glass” greens (“a bit of fuzz atop a rock-hard surface of tiny pebbles,” according to Ron Whitten) made three- and four-putts commonplace. The greens came to befuddle, even embarrass, stars like Leo Diegel and Harry Cooper, each among the game’s best short-game artists.
Some called the 1935 U.S. Open “Fownes’s Folly.” In the words of New York golf journalist George Trevor, the championship was transformed into “some strange species of outdoor bagatelle ... a travesty on golf.” Bob Harlow, the PGA Tour manager, called the greens “skating rinks” that presented not “a test of skills, but a roulette wheel, upon which no one could tell what hole the ball would drop into.”
Armour especially stung the stewards of Oakmont for making the course itself, rather than the quality of golf, the main show: “the first course I ever saw that was bigger than the player,” said the 1927 champion.
W. C. Fownes gave back in kind: “The virility and charm of the game lies in its difficulties. Keep it rugged, baffling, hard to conquer, otherwise we shall soon tire of it and cast it aside.... Let the clumsy, the spineless and the alibi artist stand aside!”
The 1935 championship had barely ended when Oakmont’s counterparts at Baltusrol—host of the 1936 U.S. Open—let it be known that they would give the players “a sporting chance to recoup the prestige lost on Oakmont’s roller-coaster greens.” Baltusrol did just that: Tony Manero, already a six-time winner on the tour, won the 1936 U.S. Open with a score of 282, the lowest by four shots in over four decades of U.S. Open history.
Regardless of the murky legacy of the 1935 U.S. Open, no one—including W.C. and Loeffter—wanted to revive the controversies that surrounded Oakmont’s extreme penalty. It simply wasn’t good for the game; golf wasn’t meant to be a public display of self-flagellation.
The 1935 U.S. Open inevitably left club members queasy. How long could Oakmont maintain its fearsome reputation if it produced “fluke” winners? What could Oakmont’s stewards do to better enable the course to identify the best golfers in the world?
 
IN 1973, AS THE U.S. Open returned for the fifth time to Oakmont Country Club, its reputation as the meanest test in American championship golf remained fully intact. And while Fownes and Loeffler were long gone, their penal philosophy—embodied in slick, mystifying greens and endless carpets of sand— continued to be the course signatures. Oakmont still screamed tough, and not due to a U.S.G.A. makeover. “If they want to see Oakmont when it’s really tough,” the members liked to say, “they should play in the member-guest.” That was when the greens rolled till tomorrow and the fairways were best located by microscope.
Much had changed since the 1930s. Oakmont still set the punitive standard in American championship golf, but it was no longer as brutal. Oakmont officials had cut the number of bunkers nearly in half, and removed just about every cross bunker. More important, furrows no longer striped the bunkers. In 1964, Oakmont substituted a conventional silicon-based sand for the heavy, coarse Allegheny River variety that had made it possible to form furrows in the first place. The bunkers would now have to stand, strategically, on their own.
The one-of-a-kind greens had also been rehabilitated agronomically, following Loeffler’s passing in 1947. His frequent low mowing (one-sixteenth of an inch) of the naturally growing Poa annua grass (a weed, in reality), combined with constant topsoiling, no aeration, and incessant rolling—using rollers that weighed around 500, maybe even 750 pounds—had caused irreparable damage. Modern greenkeeping methods eventually brought the putting surfaces back to good health in the 1950s, and while they were definitely slower than in 1927 and 1935, the greens—at the express request of the membership-remained exceptionally “keen” and preserved all of their original undulations. In the postwar era, as earlier, Oakmont’s greens still set the standard as the fastest, firmest, trickiest, and truest in the United States—“true to the ultimate wiggle,” as Rice described them over a half century earlier.
Oakmont had seen several other changes, as Sam Parks observed when he made an appearance at the 1973 U.S. Open, thirty-eight years removed from his one and only tour triumph. The course played much longer, as the fairways were now irrigated and the grass grew taller (Loeffler had also “rolled” the fairways with his heavy machinery, making three-hundred-yard drives common when conditions were dry). Several fairways in 1973 had been narrowed and the rough grown thicker, partly to compensate for the removal of bunkers (Fownes and Loeffler preferred to see errant shots scamper into the furrows). Overall, Parks contended, the course in 1973 would play around two shots easier than when he won in 1935.
While the changes to Oakmont had evolved gradually, under the club members’ careful scrutiny, one question they no longer had to address in 1973 was whether the severity of the course tended to produce quirky champions. Since World War II, Oakmont had hosted three major championships: the PGA in 1951 and the U.S. Opens of 1953 and 1962. And a more stellar, era-defining group of champions was impossible to find.
Sam Snead won his third and final PGA Championship in 1951, struggling in early matches (the PGA was still contested at match play) before winning big against his last two opponents. Rains affected play decisively; one of the longest hitters of his generation, Snead was delighted to see a wet course that played longer, with softer and slower greens as well. (Like most who learned to play on Bermuda grass, Snead preferred slower greens.)
Rain or no rain, Snead broke par in most of his matches, and he shot well under par in both closing matches. Oakmont may still have been the toughest course in the land (that was what the assembled pros said), but with the U.S. Open scheduled for Oakmont in 1953, a four-round total over 300 would no longer be a competitive score.
Unavailable to play the PGA in 1951, Ben Hogan showed up very early to practice at Oakmont in the late spring of 1953, and his scoring improved dramatically with successive practice rounds. His comfort with the Oakmont terrain peaked during the first round, as he shot a record-breaking 67, five under par. Hogan scored even par for the remainder of the championship, enough to easily defeat Snead, who collapsed over the final holes to lose by a large margin (283 to 289).
Hogan and Snead were undeniably the two greatest players of their generation; the post-Fownes, post-Loeffler Oakmont now boasted a superior ability to filter out and crown the era’s top players as its champions. And with two other Hall of Famers, Lloyd Mangrum and Jimmy Demaret, finishing in the third and fourth positions in 1953, the renovated course allowed the cream to rise to the top.
The 1962 U.S. Open only confirmed Oakmont’s stature as America’s best course for bestowing golf greatness (later it would be joined by Augusta National). In one of the most famous championships in history, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus tied for the lead after four rounds—totaling the same 283 as Hogan had nine years earlier. Nicklaus, the most accomplished “rookie” in tour history, defeated Palmer in a mild upset (a staggering defeat to distraught Pittsburghers, however). As with Hogan and Snead nine years earlier, the 1962 championship marked another indelible moment at Oakmont, when the two top players of their generation separated themselves out from everyone else.
It was hard to deny that the modifications club members introduced to Oakmont in the postwar era—without damaging the course’s reputation as quintessentially tough—had produced a better, fairer, and more predictable test of championship golf than during the reign of Fownes and Loeffler.
For the 1973 U.S. Open, several fairways were pinched and a few bunkers were added or removed: a number of holes arguably played slightly tougher than in the previous championship. On the sixteenth, for example, a strategic bunker that Fownes and Loeffler had placed in front of the green for the 1935 U.S. Open—but which had been removed afterward to ease up on amateurs-was now restored, “changing the whole character of this long par-3.” On the seventeenth, the members spent $10,000 to build a new tee farther back and farther left than the original, in order to fend off exceptionally long hitters: a guarantee that for everyone, this short, dogleg par-four would require two well-executed shots to set up a birdie opportunity.
Other than that, the course in 1973 remained virtually identical to the course where Snead, Hogan, Nicklaus, and Palmer had finished on top. There was no better place to chase greatness in golf, and to identify the era’s greatest golfers, than Oakmont.
•
DAY ONE
•
June 14, 1973
•
1
•
The King Never Left
A
rnold Palmer had made the drive dozens of times.
Early Thursday morning, June 14, 1973, he once again hopped into his statement Cadillac and headed west. It was just forty-five minutes from his home in Latrobe to Oakmont Country Club in Oakmont, Pennsylvania.
As he drove, first along U.S. State Route 30, then veering north up the Pennsylvania Turnpike, he passed through the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains and the eastern sections of greater Pittsburgh, the region that for the past decade also went by another name: Arnold Palmer Country.
At the end of the familiar route, he pulled into the nondescript, austere entry of Oakmont Country Club. It had been thirty-two years since Palmer first visited Oakmont as a precocious twelve-year-old golfer—accompanied by Harry Saxman, president of Latrobe Country Club and an Oakmont member—but not all that much had changed.
“I think my first round was about 1941,” Palmer said decades after posting what he remembered was a ten-over-par 82. “And I was enthralled with the golf course, with the presence of this place, the locker room, the pro shop, everything here. The wooden floor in the grillroom, all the things that made it feel like a golf club and one that you wanted to be present in. And you wanted to go out and play golf and come back in and have that cool drink, whatever it might be. This was a place that lent itself to golf.”
A few years later, in August 1945, a fifteen-year-old Arnold Palmer, along with eight thousand other golf fans, crowded Oakmont’s fairways to see Gene Sarazen, Sam Snead, Harold “Jug” McSpaden, and Byron Nelson tee off in the Victory Loan golf tournament, a four-day exhibition in which the participants were paid in war bonds. Nelson, nearing the end of the most triumphant season in golf history (eighteen wins, including eleven in a row), recorded the lowest total, three less than Snead. But Oakmont proved the real winner: Nelson, whose 68.33 scoring average that season set a record that would last fifty-five years, finished at seven over par 295. On a daily basis, Oakmont still played as tough as any championship golf course in America.
Soon Palmer became the area’s top young star, winning five of six West Penn Amateur tournaments between 1947 and 1952. Given his growing local celebrity, as well as his close friendship with Oakmont pro Lew Worsham’s younger brother, Bud, the club’s brass happily invited the brawny local kid to play.
“I used to play it a lot in my high school days,” Palmer said about Oakmont at the peak of his professional career. “In fact, it almost amounted to a daily diet.”
Over the years, Palmer did more than just play the club regularly—to the point where it became his second “home” course. From childhood on, Oakmont served as a main stage for landmark moments that defined his illustrious career. There in 1949, he won his second West Penn Amateur title, trouncing four-time champion Jack Benson, 11 & 10 in the final match. Four years later, still a top-notch amateur, he competed in his first U.S. Open at the then par-seventy-two course, missing the cut while Ben Hogan cruised to his fourth and final national title in 1953. A decade later, Oakmont was the site of Palmer’s most painful career disappointment, when his putter betrayed him and the favored King of the PGA Tour lost the 1962 U.S. Open to upstart Jack Nicklaus in an eighteen-hole play-off.

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