Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (39 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 tournament returned once again to Waialae on February 1, 1973. With a field featuring Palmer, Trevino, and Bruce Crampton—who already had two wins during the young season—Schtee was by no means a favorite to win. Given his performances the past two years, perhaps he should have been. Aside from knowing the course so well, Schlee thrived, as his combative personality seemed to take a vacation when he traveled to Honolulu.
“There’s something about the air here, about the people. You never see anyone getting mad. Everyone seems to be happy. I feel close to people. And that makes me happy,” he said that week. “In other places my wife follows me around every course in the country. She’s known as one of the great [course] walkers. But she’s never been on the Waialae course. Never even been out here. She spends all her time on the beach at Waikiki. And if I didn’t have to play golf for a living I’d be there with her.”
Schlee continued to play great golf at Waialae. By the close of the third round, only his playing partner, Tom Watson, owned a better score. But Schlee liked his chances on Sunday, despite trailing by four strokes. He didn’t hesitate to engage the twenty-three-year-old former psychology major from Stanford in spirited gamesmanship.
“I think I am playing better than Watson is,” Schlee said. “He got down those three putts on the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth holes—at! over twenty feet. There’s no way he can keep that up. Nobody does.
“Second isn’t bad, but I’d like to win.”
On Sunday, Watson collapsed: A double-bogey seven on the thirteenth hole crushed his chances. Meanwhile, Schlee played the front nine consistently at even par before making a move on the back, scoring birdies on numbers ten, twelve, and fourteen. He came to the eighteenth tee nursing a two-stroke lead over Watson, Orville Moody, and fellow Preston Trail member Gay Brewer. With Waialae’s par-five eighteenth measuring 566 yards and a very real eagle possibility for those trailing him, Schlee still had work to do.
From the seventy-second tee, Schlee nailed “his best drive of the day.” Caddie Bruce Forsythe stood next to Schlee on the fairway, watching him envision the next shot. In Schlee’s mind, a third person stood beside him.
“I got to thinking, ‘Now, what would [Hogan] tell me to do in this situation?’ If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have never pulled it off. I’d have been out on the street somewhere.”
“He was walking one step beside me all the way.”
Schlee landed a perfect three-iron onto the putting surface. With his wife standing green-side—she made it to the course just in time, thanks to tournament sponsors, who retrieved her from the beach, where she was calmly reading a book—he two-putted for a birdie and a score of 32 on the back nine to win by two strokes. After nine maddeningly erratic years as a professional, John Schlee had finally made his mark on the PGA tour.
Sporting a lei around his neck, he told the crowd after raising the trophy: “I owe this great moment to a lot of people—most of all my wife ... who encouraged me when the going was the roughest.”
His wife, tearful and exultant, repeated over and over, “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.” And then she added, “Tonight, I’ll know how it feels to sleep with a winner.”
The same year when Arnold Palmer desperately hoped to reclaim his throne; the same year when Jack Nicklaus again craved the mythical Grand Slam; the same year when Lee Trevino set the million-dollar milestone in his sights; and the same year that Tom Weiskopf and Johnny Miller each struggled to overcome a festering legacy of unfulfilled greatness, John Schlee’s modest, decade-long goal of
survival
was far more poignant.
“Not once over the first ten or twelve holes was I thinking of winning,” he said. “I was just trying to make a living.”
The $40,000 paycheck that Schlee took home—one of the largest on tour that year—meant that for the foreseeable future, the Schlee family would not have to worry about making ends meet. An official PGA tour victory would lead to new endorsement deals for equipment and clothes, much larger appearance checks for exhibitions, and guaranteed invites to several of the tour’s most lucrative stops, like the Masters and the Tournament of Champions, as well as an exemption for the entire 1974 PGA season. But Schlee’s most satisfying reward came much sooner.
“Right after I won the Hawaiian Open in 1973, I headed to Palm Springs for the Bob Hope Desert Classic. When I went to the Registration Table at the hotel, there were a lot of press people waiting for me.
“One of the reporters told me that there was a telegram for me from Ben Hogan. He handed me the telegram and I opened it in front of the people who were gathered around the desk. ‘What does it say?’ they all asked.
“I read it to them: ‘ATTABOY. BEN.’”
Boosted by a lofty “tournament champion” title, the praise of his peerless mentor, and media hype as “one of the favorites” at next week’s Bob Hope Desert Classic, Schlee was reborn.
“Now my confidence is up,” he told the
Dallas Morning News,
“and really, that’s all you need to win out here.”
•
DAY FOUR
•
June 17, 1973
•
11
•
The Mad Scramble
“W
hat did you do last night, Arnie,” one of the many reporters called out Sunday morning in Oakmont’s locker room.
“I went to a birthday party,” Palmer replied as he changed into his cleats. “My sister and brother celebrated their birthdays.... No, they’re not twins. They’re close together—their birthdays are close together, not their ages.
“Why’d you join Oakmont, Arnold?” another yelled out.
“I like to come in to play, to play in their swats [an intraclub competitive format invented by the Fowneses that remains unique to Oakmont]. I always like to bring friends in, which I couldn’t do before.”
“Are you thinking of getting in politics, Arnie?” another chimed in, for the umpteenth time that week.
“I’ll have to stop playing competitively before I start thinking about it,” Palmer answered. “There are times when I think about giving up everything else and playing more competitively.... But I’ve worked too hard just to get things in order.” Those “things” included IMG, the multimillion-dollar management company that he built with Mark McCormack—an empire that grew more profitable each day, despite Palmer’s inability to win a major since 1964.
Even though he shared a piece of the final-round lead—and less than twenty-four hours after shooting 68, tying his finest performance in three U.S. Opens at Oakmont—the King was still being politely ushered off the throne.
While Palmer sat in the clubhouse, the final round got underway. Long before the big names hit the course, Sunday morning featured several intriguing matchups, or lack thereof. At 10:21 a.m., six-foot-five behemoth George Bayer hit the first tee alone: With an odd number of golfers in the field, Bayer had no partner to play with. The day before, New Zealander John Lister also had to play as a single; he attributed part of the blame for his third-round 80 to the belief that “playing alone disrupts your rhythm. All year you get used to the pace of playing with someone and suddenly you are by yourself. It’s nice to relax while you are waiting for someone else to hit a shot.”
With no one to pace him, Lister needed just two hours and forty minutes to complete his Saturday round. Bayer actually scored three strokes worse that same day, a twelve over 83; as he entered the final round, his main interest was finishing early enough for brunch.
“I played so badly in the third round that I just wanted to get the last round over with.”
He easily achieved his goal, needing just over two hours to shoot a 79 and finish alone in last place. He still earned $800 for his time.
Bud Allin, the Vietnam veteran and former BYU teammate of Johnny Miller, was lucky enough to have a playing partner, and one with whom he shared much in common. Former West Point cadet Bert Yancey joined him for an early afternoon tee time. Sam Snead and Chi Chi Rodriguez formed another intriguing twosome: arguably the most beautiful and the ugliest golf swings in the history of the professional game. The ninety-eight-year-old duo both finished inside the top thirty.
And Ralph Johnston, a Queens-born journeyman pro, turned in a fine appetizer for the main course of Palmer, Nicklaus, Trevino, and the other heavyweights preparing to do battle. The former aeronautical engineer from Texas A&M constructed a scrambling three under 68 to balance a 76 the day before. The $2,300 he won by tying Al Geiberger and Larry Ziegler for thirteenth place marked nearly a quarter of his earnings for the entire season, and ensured him a place in the 1974 U.S. Open.
Of the many inevitable also-rans—those who began Sunday too far behind to contend for the title—Lanny Wadkins was the most defiant: He refused to simply go through the motions. In addition to the Wake Forest connection, Wadkins’s brawny, compact physique and emotionally charged, go-for-broke mentality reminded many of the young Arnold Palmer.
Wadkins’s boldness accounted for a mercurial performance in his third trip to the U.S. Open. On Thursday, the Richmond native, who tied for eleventh when Oakmont hosted the 1969 U.S. Amateur, outplayed the younger (Ben Crenshaw) and older (Sam Snead) members of his threesome. He played the first ten holes at even par and seemed headed for a top spot on the leaderboard, until four bogeys over the last eight holes sent him reeling. Although he hit every fairway—an exceptional achievement on Thursday’s firm, fast track—a three over 74 dropped him outside the top thirty.
“I went for the birdies, and I wound up getting bogeys.”
Still, Wadkins had no regrets and stayed true to his aggressive personality. The following day, he missed only two fairways (both produced bogeys) but made four birdies, two via lengthy putts, for a two under 69.
“Two more sixty-nines and I can be a winner,” the twenty-three-year-old proclaimed at the halfway point. “That will put me at two eighty-one, and if you can have anything between two eighty and two eighty-four, you can be right in there for those last two or three holes Sunday.”
Wadkins’s boyish optimism only increased when he learned that his third-round playing partner would be fellow Virginian Vinny Giles. Eight years apart in age, Giles and Wadkins shared impressive resumes, including consecutive Walker Cup appearances in 1969 and 1971, and matching U.S. Amateur trophies.
At age sixteen, Wadkins had reached the semifinals of the 1966 Virginia State Amateur and narrowly lost to Giles—the eventual champion—in a classic match-play battle. At the North & South Amateur in April 1970, Giles lost a morning match but lent his putter to fifty-three-year-old insurance salesman and Pennsylvania golf notable Bill Hyndman. The next afternoon, Hyndman and Giles’s putter triumphed over Wadkins. And on July Fourth, 1971, in a state finals match still regarded as the greatest ever played in the Old Dominion State, Giles again defeated Wadkins (the reigning U.S. Amateur champion) 3 & 2.
Even in victory, Giles deferred to his fierce young rival and friend.
“There’s no question in my mind at all that Lanny Wadkins is the top amateur in the country.”
Not for long; Wadkins left Wake Forest only nine days later. After two years as a college All American and winner of the coveted Byron Nelson Award for combined golf and academic achievement, he joined the PGA tour in 1971 and found immediate success, winning his first tournament and Rookie of the Year honors in 1972.
But when the two again shared a big-time championship stage at Oakmont, both men’s performances could best be summed up as, well, amateur.
Giles—fresh off his eagle-par-birdie-birdie finish the day before—got off to a rough start on Saturday, missing the first green for a bogey, one of four that yielded a three over 74. Wadkins was worse, taking a double-bogey six on number one, bogeying the next hole, and finishing with a disappointing 75 instead of the 69 he hoped for.
“I felt I hit the ball better than I did yesterday. I just hit some bad shots. I missed my yardage because I figured today’s air was heavy—but it wasn’t.”
With the two best scores on Saturday coming from the group immediately behind them—Jerry Heard (66) and John Schlee (67)—Giles’s and Wadkins’s struggles were baffling and, to their wives, even darkly humorous.
“Hey, you guys,” Wadkins’s wife, Rachel, yelled out to the group. “How about hitting a few in the fairway?”
“Yeah,” chimed in Key Giles, “how about hitting it out of the rough?”
“If they keep playing like this,” Mrs. Wadkins added, “they’ll be lucky to break a hundred.”
By a fluke in scheduling, on Sunday afternoon Giles and Wadkins were right back where they were a day earlier: teeing off together at the one-o’clock hour, with Giles one stroke ahead of Wadkins and seven off the pace. And though little changed for Giles in the final round (he shot 73 and finished sixteenth—the top amateur), twenty-four hours made a huge difference for Lanny Wadkins.
At five over par—eight strokes behind the pack of leaders—Wadkins predictably aimed for the flagstick in the final round. After a birdie on number two, he reached the par-five fourth in two shots, rolling his three-wood onto the green for the first time in four days. He then drained a forty-five-footer for an eagle. Roughly an hour later, Wadkins made another spectacular eagle putt on the difficult ninth green, this time from forty feet.

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