Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (23 page)

Read Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont Online

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
4.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“Only Ben Hogan could take this course day after day,” one collegian said. They were playing Oakmont.
As the final round began, Melnyk held a three-stroke edge over Giles and Allen Miller, the current golf team captain at the University of Georgia. Although the husky Melnyk “appeared to be sweltering from the humidity,” it was his partner in the last pairing, Giles, who spent the afternoon buried in sand.
Melnyk was a natural enemy to both Miller and Giles; that May, his University of Florida Gators had lost the SEC title to the Georgia Bulldogs. After opening with a bogey, Melnyk overpowered both Bulldogs and, at the turn, was eight strokes ahead, largely because Giles bunkered shots on the second, third, fourth, and fifth holes. Giles narrowed the gap late, but Melnyk still emerged with a five-stroke victory.
A third consecutive runner-up in the world’s premier amateur event did nothing to discourage Giles. Neither did the steady growth of first-class collegiate talent, including the emergence of the all-world prodigy, Ben Crenshaw. In 1970, Giles took sixth in the U.S. Amateur behind his fellow Virginian Lanny Wadkins. And for those who believed he could no longer claim the state of Virginia’s top amateur billing, Giles beat his younger counterpart twice the next season: in May during the semifinals of the North & South Amateur, and again on Independence Day in the Virginia State Amateur. He then took third in the 1971 U.S. Amateur. Over the eight years in which he competed at medal play, Giles averaged better than eighth place, easily the best of his era.
Giles returned to the U.S. Amateur at Charlotte Country Club in 1972 for a ninth try at the championship. He opened with a 73, then fired “one of the best rounds I’ve ever played”—a bogey-free 68—to grab the lead. Despite an erratic third round (four birdies, five bogeys), Giles retained his one-stroke advantage heading into the last day. He promptly squandered the lead and seemed to be doomed for another U.S. Amateur heartbreak: a three-putt bogey on number two pulled him even with his playing partner, Mark Hayes. Birdies by Hayes on the third and seventh dropped Giles two strokes behind the twenty-three-year-old soldier, who was stationed at nearby Fort Jackson in South Carolina.
But on the eighth, Giles redirected his round ... and his golf career. At what he called the “key hole,” Giles saved par from ten feet and, with Hayes bunkered, pulled to within a stroke. Another par for Giles and a bogey for Hayes on the tenth evened the score before Giles laced a four-iron to three feet on number thirteen. Two strokes ahead of Hayes, Giles soon drained birdie putts from five and twenty feet. And despite a double bogey on number sixteen, followed by a bogey on number seventeen, Giles still closed the championship out with a three-stroke win.
“I always felt I was destined to win this tournament,” Giles told the press. (In 2009, at age 66, Giles won the U.S. Senior Amateur; the thirty-seven-year gap between his U.S.G.A. titles is the largest in men’s amateur golf history.)
The 1972 U.S.G.A. Amateur title came with several perks. For one, Giles garnered exemptions to play that year in several PGA tour events. And in April 1973, he received his third invitation to play in the Masters. Paired with Nicklaus on the first two days and Trevino in the third round, he tied for thirty-fifth place.
During the first half of the 1973 season, Giles accepted invitations to play in the Colonial Invitational and the Kemper Open. Although he was cut from both events, mingling with the tour professionals accelerated his new business. In February, Giles and his friend C. Vernon Spratley announced the formation of a sports management firm. Over the next three decades, Giles would go on to represent several PGA stars (including Davis Love III, Tom Kite, Justin Leonard, and, eventually, Lanny Wadkins); he arguably became the best-known agent not named Mark McCormack.
As the reigning U.S. Amateur champion, Giles also earned a return trip to Oakmont to play in the 1973 U.S. Open, a major bonus, since he had failed to qualify for the U.S. Open the previous two summers. Giles headed to Oakmont a few days early to reacquaint himself with the course, and despite the rain that cut short Tuesday’s practice round, he understood the course’s idiosyncrasies better than most contestants.
Giles already knew one of his Thursday playing partners fairly well; Jack Nicklaus and he had been paired together in both the 1969 and 1973 Masters. Giles’s uneventful 74 on Thursday lacked the spark of Nicklaus’s great eagle on the seventeenth, but it still left him inside the top twenty going into Friday’s second round.
Late into the afternoon—both notoriously slow players, Giles and Nicklaus would not finish until nearly seven p.m.—Giles stood at a respectable two over par through number fourteen. Because so many low scores were being shot that day, he would not be a shoo-in to make the cut unless he played the finishing holes close to par.
Even on a day when several anonymous pros posted outrageously low scores, Giles’s final four holes stunned U.S.G.A. die-hards.
It all began on Oakmont’s treacherous, 453-yard, par-four fifteenth. The hole opens with a blind tee shot onto a sharply left-to-right-sloping fairway, guarded on both sides by bunkers. Giles’s perfect drive left him 180 yards downhill to the pin, which stood on the left front corner of the green. With the greens fairly dried out by this late in the afternoon, he knew that trying to carry his iron to the flagstick would only invite disaster.
“I drew back a six-iron and hit it perfect,” Giles remembered. “It took a couple of hops before the green and rolled into the left center or left front cup.”
Upon the sight of his ball dropping into the cup, Giles hurled his six-iron into the air and was then bear-hugged by his caddie, long-term professional looper “Storm in’” Norman Smith. The huge crowd that had gathered to watch Nicklaus exploded in excitement.
Even the normally tunnel-visioned Nicklaus broke character for a moment.
“After it went in, Jack was standing near me on the fairway,” Giles remembered years later. “He took out his seven-iron, held it up to the hole; he pretended to plumb-bob his shot! That was pretty funny and the gallery thought so too. It was really the first time he’d acknowledged my presence all day. Jack was all business on the course. He stayed focused on his game.”
Giles picked up a conventional par-three on the sixteenth, then struck a conservative iron shot into the heart of the fairway on the seventeenth (by contrast, Nicklaus again attempted to cut the dogleg and drive the green in a single stroke). With a wedge from a hundred yards, Giles struck his approach shot a bit thin, but it held the softened green and stopped thirty feet from the cup.
“Everyone talks about how soft those greens were,” Giles said. “Sure, they were holding better than usual—that’s why the thin wedge I hit didn’t skid off the back of the green—but they were still incredibly fast. Somehow, I was lucky enough to roll in the birdie.”
Safely two over par for the championship and well under the cut line, Giles played the eighteenth aggressively. He nailed a great drive, then again took the magical six-iron from Stormin’ Norman. This time, the ball didn’t fall into the cup, but it did stop pin-high on the green’s back tier, fifteen feet away and on a reasonably flat plateau. Giles struck home the putt for a second straight birdie, almost running directly through Nicklaus’s line in his great excitement.
On a day of record-low scoring, Giles’s two under 69 earned few headlines. He was, after all, the reigning U.S. Amateur champion and already knew Oakmont well from the 1969 Amateur championship. But completing Oakmont’s finishing holes in 2-3-3-3—eagle-par-birdie-birdie—was mind-boggling.
“[I was just trying] to make the cut [which came at 150]. I was trying to shoot seventy-four or better. It’s funny how it happens sometimes. I’m still shell-shocked. I’m not supposed to make all these good numbers in a row. [I don’t] expect to beat all these guys. I just go out and play and see what develops.”
NINETEEN MEN BROKE PAR ON Friday, and twelve shot in the 60s, besting the old U.S. Open record for low scoring set in 1960 during the second round at Cherry Hills. The average score of the entire field was nearly a stroke and a half lower than on Thursday.
The score needed to make the cut was 150, the same as in 1962, despite the sprinkler debacle. Besides Giles, the only amateur to qualify was University of Florida junior Gary Koch. There must have been a strange connection between Gainesville, Florida, and Oakmont, Pennsylvania: Apart from Melnyk’s win four years earlier, former Gators Frank Beard, Tommy Aaron, and Bob Murphy (one of the nineteen to best par) all qualified for the weekend.
The long list of surprise names posting low scores on Friday left several of the “usual suspects” on the outside looking in. In addition to Crenshaw, whose game never rebounded from his first-round 80, tour money leader Bruce Crampton—already a three-time winner that season—missed the cut. So did Orville Moody and Billy Casper, both recent U.S. Open champions. No wonder the
Los Angeles Times
used a double entendre in its headline, calling the event a “watered-down Open.”
But in a golf world centered around the belief that Oakmont’s impenetrable par was as much a certainty as death and taxes, the
cause
of the low scores hardly mattered. For better or worse, a new day had dawned in Oakmont’s history. The Fownes/Loeffler era was now officially over.
“The legend had grown like the pin oaks, the legend of a golf course with massive greens of shaved turf that wouldn’t yield to iron shots or birdie putts, of a course where the scores climbed faster than the price of gold,” Art Spander wrote in the
San Francisco Chronicle.
“It was Oakmont, that green monster in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, where people had three-putted into oblivion tournament after tournament for more than half a century. But yesterday, during the second round of the 1973 U.S. Open, the legend came to an end.”
•
DAY THREE
•
June 16, 1973
•
7
•
“He’s Longer Than Nicklaus.... Go Watch This Boy.”
T
om Weiskopf could be smarmy or charming, pensive or funny, and quite often cantankerous, especially with photographers who clicked during his backswing. After experiencing his moodiness for several years, sportswriters assigned the nicknames “Temperamental Tommy” and “the Towering Inferno” to the gifted, yet often disappointing young pro. Still, it was not his emotional outbursts, but his fragile self-confidence and wavering commitment that would determine whether he could ever channel his superabundant talent into a Hall of Fame career.
In 1973, at the age of thirty, Weiskopf began to display a new level of confidence and his professional commitment reached an all-time high. And to no one’s surprise, after three rounds in the U.S. Open at Oakmont, he found himself in a familiar spot: the doorstep of greatness.
Weiskopf had been there before, especially at the Masters. Augusta National suited the special strengths of his game, notably his explosive power off the tee and his brilliant command of the long irons. Three of the past five Masters tournaments had featured Weiskopf in the last or second-to-last pairing during the final round. But by the end of each of those April Sundays, he had come up just short of donning the Green Jacket—an honor that his hero, rival, and fellow Buckeye Jack Nicklaus had already earned four times.
Nineteen seventy-three was to be a completely different year. While Weiskopf again failed to win the Masters, he blossomed in May to become the tour’s hottest player, posting three wins and a runner-up in the four weeks leading up to the U.S. Open.
As he went about his business at Oakmont, there was no sign of the emotional tempest that usually flashed for all to see. Weiskopf was customarily cocky, but also subdued that week in western Pennsylvania; clearly he was playing for more than money and glory, trying to seize the moment to honor the memory of his father, Thomas Mannix Weiskopf, a local Pennsylvania boy who had died less than three months earlier.
To get to the second tee box at Oakmont, players cross a concrete bridge erected thirty feet above the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Just beside the turnpike lies a line of railroad tracks that connects Ohio to Pennsylvania: two once-great industrial states whose lifeblood had been the steel and rail industries.
Long before he climbed his way up to railroad middle management, Thomas Mannix Weiskopf, a teenager during the Great Depression, had worked part-time as a steel worker in western Pennsylvania. He and his work gang helped lay the railroad tracks that bisected Oakmont’s first and second holes.

Other books

Take a Chance on Me by Susan May Warren
On Grace by Susie Orman Schnall
Just One More Breath by Lewis, Leigha
Spurious by Lars Iyer
Her Journey Begins by Karen Einsel