Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (32 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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“One thing about it, when you get older, you learn to putt,” he wryly stated. And whether he meant it or not, Palmer had putted damn well: His 68 marked the lowest score he ever registered in a championship at Oakmont. Longtime Associated Press golf reporter Will Grimstey—along with several members of the media—delighted in calling the pairing of giants of the previous generation “the Arnie and Julie Show.”
“It was a great day for the paunchy and middle-aged and also for Arnie’s Army,” Grimsley wrote. “Where did those blokes come from, anyway? We thought they were dead.”
Boros’s and Palmer’s matching 68s; the 66 and 67 shot, respectively, by Heard and Schlee; combined with the nightmarish afternoons of the leaders behind them (Player, Colbert, Nicklaus, Borek), created a four-way tie at the top of the leaderboard on Saturday evening: the biggest logjam in U.S. Open history. Although the twentysomething Heard, thirtysomething Schlee, forty-something Palmer, and fiftysomething Boros were all tied at three under par 210, the players’ (as well as the fans’) favorite was self-evident.
“I think Arnold’s going to be the man to beat,” Lee Trevino predicted, “because he knows the course so well.”
Palmer, who admitted he was “charged up” by the birdie binge in the middle of the round, tried in vain to shield his glee with cautious optimism.
“When I got my round going I felt like it was ten years ago. I’ve had opportunities to win major championships in recent years, and it’s bothered me that I haven’t done it,” he said.
“I have nothing to get excited about yet. There are ten or twelve guys in position to win this thing.”
Or maybe even thirteen.
•
9
•
Joe Feast vs. Joe Famine
J
ohnny Miller had a lot on his mind the morning before the third round at Oakmont. No wonder he forgot to grab his personal yardage book.
For the week of the U.S. Open, he and his wife, Linda, rented a small house twenty minutes from the golf course. The Millers needed a house rather than a motel room because they brought their six-month-old daughter, Kelly, to Pittsburgh with them. But as he dressed on Saturday morning, a crying baby was probably not the only reason Miller absentmindedly left his distance book in the pocket of the pants he wore the day before.
The magnificent 69 he shot on Friday did more than bring him back to even par at the halfway point. Miller now stood just three strokes off the lead, tied with Jack Nicklaus and the world’s best left-hander, Bob Charles. Seven years had passed since Miller ascended the world’s golf stage in 1966 as an amateur at the Olympic Club; after a brief pro career mixed with high points and heartbreaks, he believed that this U.S. Open was
finally
his time to claim greatness.
“I can win,” he told reporters. “But I can’t try to win. I’ve just got to play well, and maybe some of the leaders will make some bogeys.”
Shooting that ten under 61 in the 1970 Phoenix Open—just his eleventh start as a professional—had created an aura around Miller, as a man of magic who could truly “go low,” seemingly at will. (Record-shattering, sub-65 rounds would soon become a Miller trademark.) But even though he was the most photogenic young lion on tour—the only one to earn big dollars via modeling and endorsements from the moment he turned pro—his reputation remained blemished with high-profile failures.
More than a year after his 61 and still winless, Miller posted what he called “the best round I ever played as far as eliminating mental errors” at the Jacksonville Open in March 1971. Despite North Florida winds blowing thirty miles per hour, a bogey-free third round pulled him into a first-place tie with Hal Underwood, his old University of Houston rival and fellow first-team All American in 1967.
“It’s the worst wind I’ve ever tried to play in,” said Miller, who learned his golf amidst the blustery winds of the Pacific coast. “I didn’t know I could play this well in wind. Maybe I’ve learned something.”
The lone man to break 70 in an exceptional field that featured the “Big Four”—Nicktaus, Palmer, Player, and Trevino—Miller scored three birdies against no bogeys to tame Hidden Hills Country Club.
Paired with Trevino on Sunday, Miller birdied the second hole to nudge one past Underwood and into first place. Across the cool, now windless course, he retained sole possession of the top spot throughout most of the round. But as Miller played the sixteenth, Underwood and Gary Player each made birdies one hole ahead of him, forcing a three-way tie.
On the home hole, Miller landed his second shot twenty feet from the flagstick. A two-putt for par meant a share of the lead and a three-way play-off; draining the twenty-footer for birdie would give him his first PGA victory. The birdie stroke came up two feet short, but then, shockingly, he missed the short par save, and with it, a chance to seize his first tour victory.
“Miller was in tears as he signed his card for a 72,” the Associated Press reported.
A second painful collapse, this time with the entire world watching, crushed Miller just three weeks later. Twenty-three years old and playing in his first Masters as a professional, Miller carded a sensational third-round 68 at Augusta National, one of only four sub-70 Saturday scores. Miller’s play sparked serious talk that he might become the tournament’s youngest winner since Nicklaus, who also posted a third-round 68.
Easter Sunday began with Miller alone in sixth place, four strokes behind the Golden Bear and journeyman Charles Coody. Miller then tore up Bobby Jones’s masterpiece as if it were no tougher than the Phoenix course he’d demolished a year earlier. The “nerveless kid,” as one reporter called him, made the turn with three birdies and no bogeys to pull within two strokes of the lead. A pair of birdies on numbers eleven and twelve—where he holed out from a bunker, seventy feet away—gave him a share of the lead.
When Miller sank a six-foot birdie on the fourteenth, the Augusta crowd went wild, and not just because the blond-maned youngster had grabbed the lead.
“[It] seemed that every teenager on the premises was screeching and yelling for him,” wrote Lincoln Werden of the
New York Times.
“Clad in a light green shirt and mod slacks of blue, green, black and white stripes, he seemed to personify the younger element on tour and in the gallery.”
Another
Times
reporter claimed that Miller’s heroics evoked the play of another famed Masters hero, as Miller’s three birdies in four holes “brought the tournament alive with a charge that recalled Arnold Palmer in his heyday.”
Miller’s friend and mentor, Billy Casper, loved his “protégé’s” approach.
“He has no fear,” the reigning Masters champion said about Miller’s birdie barrage. “John said early this week that these Masters greens are easy to putt. Now he’s proving it.”
Minutes after Miller so easily nailed his birdie, Coody three-putted the fourteenth to fall two behind. With Nicklaus’s bogey on the twelfth a little earlier, and then, surprisingly, no more birdies in his arsenal, Miller held sole possession of the lead and seemed destined to win.
“I had a great mental attitude those first fourteen holes,” he said. “I was at ease all day. I kept telling myself this was just a practice round, a lot of fun, and everything was going like crazy.... When I started walking down the fifteenth fairway I started thinking to myself that my dad will really love to see me win this thing.”
In a flash, Miller fell apart. He played the fifteenth (often a birdie hole) poorly from tee to green and luckily saved par, then found the right-side bunker on the par-three sixteenth. When his par putt rattled out of the cup, the lead vanished. Although Coody promptly birdied the sixteenth, Miller was not out of it until his horrid play at the final hole, where his tee shot hooked left, hit a spectator, and bounded into an area once used as practice grounds. With no chance to get the birdie he needed, Miller bogeyed number eighteen and finished as runner-up to the anonymous Coody.
“On that day, I lost my cool,” he later wrote.
Not surprisingly, in light of his recent run at the Masters and his earlier top-ten finish at Olympic, the press now considered Miller a gambler’s bet to win the next major championship: June’s U.S. Open at Merion. In his final start before the Open, Miller fully displayed his dare-the-gods “go low” talent by shooting a seven under 65, the lowest opening round in the history of the Atlanta Golf Classic, before finishing respectably in fifth place behind Gardner Dickinson.
Miller did not quite see himself as a “dark horse.”
“I can hit the ball with anybody,” he said before the Open. “I always feel I play better in the U.S. Open. I feel a lot of guys choke, but my game isn’t affected by pressure.”
Whether or not Miller’s blow-up at the Masters contradicted his brash claim that everyone choked but him, those who had seen him “go low” expected him to perform as well at Merion as he had at Augusta National. Merion’s hilly terrain and numerous small, treacherously slick and contoured greens placed a premium on pinpoint approach shots, and no one hit his irons straighter, higher, or controlled his distance better than Miller. His game clearly “fit” the course, and Miller wondered aloud if that week in Pennsylvania, something grand might happen at the stately, turn-of-the-century venue.
“This is a wonderful course,” he said, “but I believe if it’s wet there are going to be a lot of low scores—maybe they’ll even break the course record.”
In his fourth U.S. Open, Miller stared down Merion like an old veteran, finishing fifth behind Trevino after his historic play-off triumph over Nicklaus. Attesting to how well he could play the nation’s toughest courses, Miller matched par in three of his four rounds, a feat equaled only by Trevino.
Miller finally reached the winner’s circle later in the 1971 season, but he received considerably less praise for his triumph than for his top-five finishes at the Masters and the U.S. Open. After Merion, Miller made the cut in seven consecutive starts, but he felt his game was going stale: Only once did he finish in the top ten, a tie for ninth at Akron’s American Golf Classic. Deciding he needed a rest from the tour grind, he and his California junior golf pal, Jerry Heard, planned a fishing trip to Montana.
But John Montgomery, tournament director of the recently established Southern Open, convinced Miller to skip the vacation and compete in September’s PGA event in Columbus, Georgia.
“He begged me to go,” Miller said. “He said I had done so well previously in Georgia [i.e., April’s Masters], I should come back down here again.”
Montgomery may have been desperate for
any
name—wintess young lion or not—to join the rather lackluster field. Without Nicklaus, Trevino, Player, Palmer, Weiskopf, Casper, or even the hotshot Heard—now eighth on the tour money list—the
Atlanta Constitution
proclaimed lawyer Dan Sikes and defending champion Mason Rudolph the top contenders. Local native Tommy Aaron, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Gay Brewer, Grier Jones, and a few other youngsters provided the remaining “star” power at the Southern Open.
Miller slashed the Green Island Country Club with an opening-round low of 65, then shot a three under 67 to keep pace with Brewer for the halfway lead. A 68 on Saturday put him one stroke on top, heading into the final round. Wearing “a navy blue shirt, red-white-and-blue Uncle Sam pants, no cap and a winning grin,” the twenty-four-year-old “Mod Miller” ran away from the field and coasted to a five-stroke victory, his first as a professional.
Tunnel vision, Miller believed, kept him focused throughout the round. “I’m not going to look at the leaderboards,” said Miller, narrating his final round for the press. “I know a lot of people do it, even Arnold Palmer, but I don’t want to know what anybody else is doing. A lot of times you’ll see what some other guy is doing and you start figuring that you’ve got to do this.
“I may have been destined to win this one; I had no intention of being here,” Miller frankly told the crowd afterward, before handing over the $20,000 winner’s check to Linda as a gift (the couple’s two-year anniversary would be later that week).
“It was getting a little old being introduced as an ‘outstanding young golfer.’ Honestly, the money didn’t mean that much to me because I’ve had a [pretty] good year money-wise. I just wanted to win. It means that I will be paired with the tournament winners in the future, guys like Palmer, Nicklaus, Casper, etc., instead of nonwinners.
“Winning this one will give me a big lift.”
In truth, Miller did not experience any “lift” for the remainder of the 1971 season; he finished no higher than seventeenth, and averaged a thirty-fifth-place finish in four straight late-season events. Still, the win at the Southern Open and his stellar performances in the first two majors earned Miller the seventeenth spot on the tour’s annual earnings list, far higher than his fortieth-place finish a year earlier.
Nineteen seventy-two opened with great expectations for the three-year veteran, but early in the season he mainly experienced heartache.
Miller eagerly awaited January’s Bing Crosby Pro-Am, which was spread over the breathtaking courses of the Monterey Peninsula—Cypress Point, Spyglass Hill, and Pebble Beach—only two hours south of his childhood home. After an ugly first-round 75 at Cypress Point dropped him nine strokes behind the front-running Nicklaus, Miller pulled within three of the leader the next day, thanks to a sparkling 68 at Spyglass. On a calm and peaceful winter Saturday along the rocky shore of Carmel Bay, Miller shot a 67 at Pebble Beach—the same course where he’d won the California Amateur five years earlier, and the site of his controversial extra-club match-play win in 1963—to grab a one-stroke lead.

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