Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (37 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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But during the opening months of his official rookie season in 1966, Schlee’s game deteriorated and he made the cut just twice in his first thirteen starts.
“[Out] here on the tour is something else. That’s been one of the biggest problems ... adjusting to losing,” he told the
Dallas Morning News
in April. “I have $1,000 a month to spend, but I try to send some of it home to my wife. She works. It’s hard to get by for less than $200 a week. I have made it for $175 on occasion ... you know, when a (club) member takes you to lunch, maybe. A couple bucks here and a couple of more there add up.”
Because Schlee had to qualify on Mondays before events began,
and
play in the Wednesday pro-ams, he sometimes played six formal rounds per week, and the grind wore him down.
“I seem to get it going and then have a bad round,” he said. “But I don’t intend to stay out here that long if I’m not doing any good. I figure I’ll have the answer after twenty tournaments.”
Schlee’s mental toughness was his strongest asset, recalled Curt Siegel, a fellow Q School student whom Schlee traveled and roomed with during their first season on tour. From the start, Schlee exuded a confidence that eclipsed every other rookie.
“[He] had that instinct, ‘Nobody’s gonna beat us,’” said Siegel.
Schlee validated his self-assured psyche by July. At the Minnesota Golf Classic (the same event where Tom Weiskopf met his future wife, Jeanne Marie Ruth), he shot a closing-round 66 to finish in second place, only one behind Bobby Nichols.
“It was only my fifth [pay] check. I figured I had a chance to do something big on those last few holes and I was shaking like a leaf,” Schlee said after accepting the $12,000 runner-up prize. “I look back at a double-bogey seven I had on the twelfth hole Friday and think maybe.... But I have no regrets. This is the biggest day for me. It’s a super day.”
Another “super day” followed just two weeks later, as he fired nine birdies and a 66 in the opening round of the Indianapolis “500” Festival Open. He tied for twelfth to earn another $2,000, then scored a pair of late-season top-fifteen finishes in Canada and Louisiana. In the end, despite the poor start, he finished forty-eighth on the tour money list—posting an impressive 72.62 stroke average that season—and earned
Golf Digest’
s PGA Rookie of the Year.
The prize money and honors meant less to Schlee than the approval of his peers.
“I enjoy being on tour. The players are a nice bunch of guys. Nicklaus came around to me after I shot an eighty-two and told me not to lose confidence and told me how he shot eighty in the British Open once. Palmer came around and congratulated me once after I had a round in the sixties.”
Playing beside the tour’s best only bolstered Schlee’s confidence.
“I was in a threesome with Arnold Palmer and Mike Souchak. I shot a lousy score but I’m a good driver. Every hole, Palmer is here, Souchak is a little farther, and I’m maybe five yards ahead of him. The gallery can’t believe a young guy can outdrive them, although I do it all the time. Now, Palmer hits his ball and the whole gallery takes off.... I’m lucky I get to swing. It’s a race to keep ahead of the gallery.... All I hope is someday, they’ll be following me like that.”
 
SCHLEE FREQUENTLY APPEARED IN THE spotlight during his sophomore season on tour. In February 1967, during the final round of the Tucson Open, he was again paired with Palmer (the tournament’s eventual winner), and even had a few chances during the weekend to catch the King. Schlee’s hitting into a lake on the last hole on Saturday, coupled with a wild tee shot out-of-bounds at the fifteenth on Sunday, widened the gap between him and Palmer to four strokes. Despite besting Palmer by two in the final round, Schlee had to be content with finishing fourth in the Arizona desert.
Just four weeks later, Schlee shot a course-record final round of 63 in the Greater Greensboro Open (trumping the record shared by Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, and George Archer) to tie for eighth. Some believed him to be the tour’s next big star.
Then it all fell apart. His game probably didn’t benefit from his constantly experimenting with different putting methods and a variety of innovative golf clubs, including the Shakespeare Company’s fiberglass Wonder Shaft, and the bizarrely shaped, reconfigurable driver head with removable weights invented by Steve Biltz of Phoenix. (Schlee claimed that at the 1966 Sahara Invitational, Jack Nicklaus was curious enough to ask Schlee to order him two of the triangular-headed drivers.)
A collapse in Schlee’s personal life probably also triggered his professional decline.
Schlee’s wife had given birth to a daughter around the time he triumphed at Q School. His absence while on tour, coupled with financial hardships during his initial fallow months, badly damaged the marriage. And when Schlee happened to meet a woman he had briefly known and corresponded with several years earlier in Oregon, his first marriage effectively ended.
“It’s something I had to do. It’s a lonely life,” he tried to explain later.
Schlee divorced quickly and remarried in mid-1967. He chose to have nothing to do with his daughter (his new wife had a child from a previous marriage). In the meantime, as his wife and stepchild accompanied him on tour, his game continued to deteriorate. Although he competed in his first U.S. Open that June at Baltusrol (he missed the cut by six strokes), the remainder of the season was a disaster: He earned less than $5,000 in the final eight months. When the 1967 season ended, Schlee had fallen from forty-eighth on the money list a year earlier to seventy-fourth.
The slump turned out to be more than just a sophomore jinx. Aside from two fine individual rounds that led to top-fifteen finishes in 1968—a third-round 65 in January’s Los Angeles Open, and another in August on the tough Firestone course at the American Golf Classic—Schtee turned in a second consecutive terrible season. Few reporters or sponsors noticed him any longer, other than to poke fun at his triangle-shaped driver and the odd putter he was then using (the head came from a discontinued model that had spent the past decade as a secretary’s paperweight). The media that did cover him mostly just commented on how the twenty-nine-year-old was “graying prematurely at the temples.”
By March 1969, Schlee was ready to give up the tour. “I was materially, not spiritually, in bad shape,” Schlee recalled. Having been dropped by his Arizona sponsors, Schlee and his family moved to Texas. There he paid his own way on tour for the next few months and returned to using the more standard Wilson clubs with which he had learned the game.
“There are a lot of young kids who can play good, but their sponsors don’t give them enough money. They have to eat hamburgers and hot dogs, sleep in cheap motels, and then go out and try to play against the millionaires. It’s hard to do. You have no idea how hard it is to play golf without money.”
The whole Schlee family struggled to endure financial hardships.
“Christmastimes were the worst for us,” his wife remembered a few years later. “We have an eleven-year-old daughter and twice in recent years sponsors have called us just before Christmas to tell us they were dropping us. It was awful always to be broke around that time of year. However, John never stayed in any flophouses on the road. He always believed in staying in good hotels. He felt if you stayed in cheap places then you played like a cheap person.”
Schlee didn’t practice at cheap places either.
Regardless of his meager earnings and winless record, he was still a regular member of the PGA circuit and enjoyed a few of the perks that came with tour celebrity. Dallas’s Preston Trail Golf Club—a luxurious, Ralph Plummer/ Byron Nelson-designed club composed of wealthy businessmen and high-profile athletes—invited Schlee to play their course and use their facilities free of charge. Hitting balls on the Preston Trail driving range in April 1969, Schlee noticed Ben Hogan drive right past him in a cart and hit balls at the opposite end of the range. He hadn’t seen the legend—who had now entirely given up tournament golf—since shouting out to him at the Memphis Open nine years earlier. Schlee tried in vain to “look my best and be professional, but I was scattering golf balls everywhere.”
Then, a life-changing event—according to Schlee, a “miracle” and one that he likely distorted while retelling—occurred.
“After about twenty minutes, he got into his cart and approached me. I could feel myself freezing with anticipation. Could he possibly remember the fleeting moment when we first met? Would he even know my name? He stopped his cart a few yards away and said simply, ‘John, would you like to play?’ I put my clubs on his cart and we headed for the first tee. It was the beginning of a journey that would change my life.”
The gawky nomad and golf’s most revered shot maker were well into playing the back nine at Preston Trail before the two exchanged a single word.
“The first six, I witnessed near perfect golf from tee to green. Ben hit every fairway, every green and never had a birdie putt over fifteen feet. In total contrast, I was spraying the ball all over the course. Also in total contrast, I made every putt. I holed them from sixty-five feet ... forty-five feet, you name it.
“After five holes, I could sense a turmoil in Ben’s mind.... Finally, he looked at me with total honesty—the kind a father might show toward a son—and said something like, ‘John, you are destroying everything I’ve worked for in my life. It’s so obvious you are confused and have no idea what you need to do to swing a club and play golf. All you can do is putt.’
“He sensed my desire to learn and, in the next six holes, he tried to help me. My mind was so confused, so stuffed with ‘try this, try that’ golf, I was unable to comprehend what he was telling me. There literally wasn’t any place for the information to go.”
Hogan soon took Schlee under his wing (how much so remains unclear, although Schlee kept a tape recorder in his car to retain Hogan’s advice while it was still fresh in his mind). Over the next few months, the two met periodically and worked on every technical part of his faltering game, from setup to follow-through. Schlee also signed up to play exclusively with Hogan golf equipment.
“He said to me, ‘Son, with that left-hand grip, you’re going to have to learn how to use the right side—your power side, where you’ve got most of your athletic and artistic ability. You’re going to learn how to load that side to the maximum ... then let it go to the target,’” Schlee recalled twenty years later. “Ben taught me to look at the left side as the stabilizing side. There is no cup in the back of the left wrist. The bowed-out left wrist allows maximum cupping or leverage in the right wrist.”
And Hogan tweaked more than just Schlee’s grip on the golf club; he secured his mental grip on the game itself.
“You see, golf is an attitude game,” Schlee wrote in his book,
Maximum Golf,
paraphrasing another Hoganism. “It’s played one shot at a time with a dream ... and believing it will come true. When you have the courage to let this concept underly
[sic]
your golf strategy, you’ll be a winner.”
Schlee’s association with the game’s greatest technician also strengthened his confidence. More important than any swing advice Schlee drew from Hogan was a focus on the now, not on past failures. “It is a mind that wipes the slate clean with moment-by-moment, minute-by-minute rebirths, one shot at a time. It is a renewed mind, the ultimate clean machine, washed with forgiveness and forgetfulness.”
Having absolved himself for all the missed cuts, the dropped sponsorships, and the struggles to provide for his family, Schlee believed he could start again. And there was no better occasion for that rebirth than his thirtieth birthday.
 
BEYOND ITS BOLD POLITICAL and sexual messages, the 1968 Broadway musical
Hair—
especially its theme song, “The Age of Aquarius”—rejected 1960s Americans’ growing fascination with the cosmos.
In March 1969,
Time
magazine’s cover—under a banner reading “Astrology and the New Cult of the Occult”—featured a celestial-bound portrait of Carroll Righter, the widely syndicated “astrologer to the stars” (including Grace Kelly and Joan Fontaine) and the de facto leader of the era’s popular astrology movement.
“Isn’t astrology just a fad, and a rather absurd one at that?” wrote the article’s author. “Certainly. But it is also something more. The number of Americans who have found astrology fun, or fascinating, or campy, or worthy of serious study, or a source of substitute faith, have turned the fad into a phenomenon.”
In addition to alerting readers about yet another revolution among America’s youth,
Time
attempted to profile its followers. “They’re interested in astrology because they’ve found the material things failing them, and they’re trying to find their souls.... Preposterous as it may be, the astrology cult suggests a deep longing for some order in the universe—an order denied by modern science and philosophy.”
He was writing about people like John Schlee.
Schlee boarded the astrology bandwagon earlier than most; by the late 1960s, he was reading his horoscope religiously. Sometimes, Righter’s horoscopes seemed personally written to redirect Schlee’s self-centered, combative ways.
Your Horoscope: Sunday, June 1, 1969:
Show much consideration for persons dwelling with you and clear up any quarrels tactfully. Make harmony the keynote. Take it easy tonight at your own home and have fun.

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