Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (41 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
8.79Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Although he was not quite as keenly motivated as in 1972—when, having won the Masters, he had his sights on the Grand Stam—Nicktaus’s competitive fires were still stoked at Oakmont by the roster of men he was competing against: Trevino, admittedly his toughest competitor; Palmer, the man he would always trail in the battle for public adoration; and his heir apparent, Tom Weiskopf, were each playing right behind Nicklaus. A lengthy putt for birdie on number two brought the thirteen-time major championship winner back to even par. Trailing by just three strokes with two reachable par-fives ahead, the Golden Bear believed he could overtake the leaders with a Baltusrol-like final round.
Just as Nicklaus rolled in his birdie putt on number two, a frustrated Lee Trevino shook his head in disgust back on the first green. For a remarkable fifty-third time in fifty-five tries at Oakmont, Trevino had reached the green in regulation figures. And for what must have seemed like the hundredth time that week, he could not capitalize on the opportunity. He promptly three-putted the first green and dropped to even par for the championship, tied with Nicklaus.
Missed birdie putts that teased the hole, along with the bad luck of drawing a thirteen-year-old caddie who knew nothing about Oakmont’s harrowing greens, were only minor sources of frustration that week for Trevino. What most drained the once “Happy Hombre” was the weight of his celebrity and the resulting lack of privacy, which he let everyone at Oakmont know about. Each day he retreated as quickly as possible from the golf course to the seclusion of his motor home, parked near the practice range in Oakmont’s members-only parking lot.
Yet however much he complained, Trevino’s greatest strength as a golfer was his ability to compartmentalize: to separate his professional performance from his turbulent personal life.
Trevino shook off the slipup on the first hole and rebounded by sinking a quick, curling putt on number two that matched Nicklaus’s birdie a few moments earlier. That success enticed America’s most gifted golf writer, Herbert Warren Wind, to believe that Trevino’s putter might arrive just in time.
“Trevino’s putt was the first one of any length he had made all week,” wrote Wind, who saw Trevino as Hogan’s true successor. “I remember wondering if that might set the little Texan off.”
It did stir Trevino up. He grabbed another birdie on the fourth hole to move to two under, then reached the par-five ninth green in two shots, settled for a birdie, and reached three under par for the championship.
Sunday morning, three under par had been good enough for a share of the lead, and—typical of a U.S. Open—not much had changed by midafternoon. Trevino’s ball striking at Oakmont remained second to none, and if Wind’s prophecy proved true, a third U.S. Open championship in six years might soon be his.
 
TALL TOM WEISKOPF TEED UP at the starting hole immediately after Trevino. With Weiskopf only one shot behind the leaders, a quick birdie would earn him a share of the top spot, and bring him within reach of that Father’s Day present he so dearly wanted to give to the late Thomas Mannix Weiskopf.
He parred number one, then crossed the bridge above his father’s railroad tracks and boldly smacked a driver on the 343-yard par-four hole—an option available only to the game’s longest hitters. Weiskopf’s towering drive carried to the upslope in front of the green. From there, he took dead aim at the devilishly placed flagstick on the green’s back right corner, and pitched his ball seven feet above the hole. The putt was as slick as any on the golf course, but Weiskopf knocked in the birdie and, for the moment, grabbed a share of the lead.
Although Weiskopf’s birdie pushed him to three under, the logjam at the top remained four deep; Palmer, Boros, and Heard made it through the first hole unscathed. John Schlee did not.
Schlee’s “lunar point” may have been sky-high, thanks to the alignment of his natal moon, but after his great 67 on Saturday, he quickly descended back to earth. Being paired on Sunday with Palmer likely hastened the fall: “Gary Player told me last night to just not listen to those people, but there’s just so much you can’t avoid listening to. It wasn’t an anti-Schlee element; the people were well mannered but I just couldn’t settle down with them always chanting, Arnie! Arnie!’” On Sunday morning, Schlee wore an enormous white visor on his head that, he insisted, was “the same as wearing blinders.”
Neither “blinders” nor his consistent success in playing with Palmer in the past helped calm Schlee on the eve of the biggest moment in his professional career.
“[You] should have seen me. Normally, I like to stay up late when I have a late tee time the following day, so I can stay in bed longer. That way, I don’t worry about finding things to do for six hours or more before I tee off.
“I think I stared at the ceiling all night Saturday.”
Observing on the first tee that afternoon—and just as eager as Schtee—was Bob Ford. A nineteen-year-old from the University of Tampa, Ford had come to Oakmont in early June 1973. The club’s famed head professional, Lew Worsham, gave the polite, somewhat intimidated young man a three-week job before, during, and after the Open, selling hats, shirts, and periscopes. At the time, compensation was not discussed, but in the end, Worsham asked what to pay Ford for his work: $300 or a set of Ben Hogan irons. Ford took the irons.
With Worsham’s permission, Ford left his cashier’s post on Sunday to see the main attraction play the first hole.
“It was all about Arnold Palmer,” Ford remembered, admitting to being a bit “brainwashed” because Worsham was so insistent that Palmer was “going to win to get revenge for the loss in 1962.”
Having shucked his duties to see the game’s greatest star, a thrilled Ford had to endure a most exasperating sight: the journeyman John Schlee alongside Arnold Palmer on the tee at number one.
“I couldn’t believe he was in the position he was in,” Ford remembered. Even though Schlee had won a tournament earlier that year, he stood out equally, in Ford’s mind, for the “goofy Hawaiian shirt” he wore. “He didn’t belong with Nicklaus and Trevino and Player and Palmer, my idols, you know.”
Dressed in a powder blue shirt with white slacks, and sporting a visor of his own, Palmer mounted the tee as the boisterous crowd cheered in support; they exploded with joy when his opening drive split the fairway.
As several thousand enlistees of the undisciplined army raced down the first fairway, noisily competing for a spot to view Palmer’s approach to the green, a practically invisible Schlee lined up his tee shot. The lanky, six-foot-three Dallas pro looked anything but graceful next to the shorter, broader Palmer, and not only due to his tacky wardrobe. Unusually long arms, an elastic upper torso, and an overly weighted left side at address (an extreme interpretation of Hogan’s advice) made Schlee seem awkward. Try though he did, his flat, three-quarter swing looked nothing like his mentor’s, and unlike Hogan, who was always in perfect balance, Schlee sometimes fell backward after lashing his driver and long irons.
“So many people were packed around the first tee,” Schlee remembered. “I tried not to notice, to stay focused on my shot at hand.”
Unfortunately, he couldn’t do that, as Arnie’s fans paraded loudly down the fairway. Schlee unleashed a quick, sloppy swipe at the ball and lurched backward.
“When I made contact, I knew I’d blocked it, and wouldn’t like the result.”
The ball jumped sharply to the right, a severe block, and headed toward Hulton Road—the busy thoroughfare that guards Oakmont’s northern perimeter.
Assuming that the ball was out-of-bounds, Schlee now had to play a provisional, having already given away two shots and still hitting his driver on this demanding opening hole.
Schlee overcompensated for the previous blocked drive; he pulled his second tee shot to the left, into a treacherous fairway bunker. Laying three, he knew that he’d have no choice but to recover safely to the fairway from the bunker, and would be lucky to escape the hole with a triple bogey.
But maybe Schlee’s “natal moon” was aligned. An alert U.S.G.A. official stationed to locate balls in the deep right rough caught sight of Schlee’s first drive before a thick hedge stopped it from going out-of-bounds. As a result, Schlee’s “provisional” ball—the second drive he’d hit into the left-side bunker—no longer counted. For official scoring purposes, it had never happened.
With the ball under the hedge and clearly unplayable, Schlee now had two options. He could drop the ball two club lengths from the hedge, no nearer to the hole, add a penalty stroke, and hit his third shot from there. Or he could return to the tee and hit his third shot from where the debacle began.
Schlee chose to return to the tee. “[The relief] wouldn’t have done any good because I still would have been two inches short of the outside hedge. I could have spent all day out there.”
Even if the two-club relief had taken him beyond the hedge, Schlee would still have been mired in dense, untrammeled rough. Instead, he accepted the two-shot penalty and returned to the first tee to hit what was essentially, in duffer’s parlance, a “do-over.” With one drive pushed badly right and the second hooked badly left, the odds seemed good that Schlee might finally hit one down the middle. He did.
Though U.S.G.A. video footage clearly shows Heard, Boros, and a huge gallery of spectators looking on in horror while Schlee walked back to the first tee to hit his third drive, Schlee had never felt more alone.
“It was so strange going back to the first tee,” he later misremembered. “Hundreds of people were watching us tee off only moments ago, but now the only person in sight was an older gentleman in coveralls. He was holding a bag and a pole with a nail in the end, poking around picking up discarded cups and wrappers.
“When the old man saw me walk up, he stopped poking and stared at me with a questioning look on his face. Then he said, ‘Not so good, huh?’
“‘No, not so good,’ I said as I teed up a new ball. ‘But wait’ll you see this next shot.’”
That next shot landed safely in the fairway. Still, he was laying three and more than 150 yards away from completing the most difficult starting hole in all of championship golf.
“That verified the fact that he didn’t belong,” Bob Ford recalled thinking. “I was kind of glad, you know, because I was rooting for Palmer. I wanted everybody out of the way as fast as they could get out of the way.”
But Schlee was not ready to move out of Palmer’s or anyone else’s way—not after the tortuous path he’d traveled from Seaside to the precipice of winning a major championship at Oakmont. Preparing to play his fourth shot into the number one green, “All I could think was, I’d blown the Open with my very first shot,” Schlee recalled. “But all the time consumed gave me a chance to talk to myself. I just told myself, ‘Okay, you’ve got to spot these guys two strokes to win; now go out and play.’”
 
AFTER EACH MEMBER OF THE field had completed at least one hole, three under par still meant a spot at the top of the leaderboard. The first man to break the deadlock was Jerry Heard.
Saturday evening, reporters had asked Heard, the greenest of the final-round leaders, how he planned to deal with the daunting new pressure of leading a major championship.
“I think everybody chokes, except maybe Jack Nicklaus,” he said.
By Sunday afternoon, with reporters still badgering the leaders in the locker room, Heard could no longer control his excitement.
“If I win this one I’ll get so drunk tonight, I’ll be able to fly home without a plane.”
Through two holes, Heard could taste the champagne. Like Weiskopf, Nicklaus, Trevino, Wadkins, and his pal Johnny Miller before him, Heard grabbed a birdie on number two to stand alone in the top spot at four under par.
Heard seemed still to be riding high from the momentum of his brilliant third-round 66, an effort he attributed in good part to the levity provided by his playing partner, John Schlee. Chatting about “horses, fishing, girls.... everything,” Heard and Schlee together had shot Saturday’s two lowest scores.
“I hope I get paired with someone who likes to talk,” Heard said Saturday evening. “This relaxes me out there. John and I had a great time.”
Heard didn’t get his wish. For the most part, the only things coming out of the mouth of his Sunday partner, Julius Boros—nearly thirty years his senior-were Kent cigarette butts. With Boros virtually silent on the course and the bulk of the gallery trailing Palmer in the twosome ahead, at least Heard’s afternoon was comparatively quiet and mellow.
Not so for John Schlee, whose carefree Saturday became a distant memory the moment he nearly blocked his first drive onto Hulton Road. But somehow Schlee—this interloper trying to fend off a pride of heralded young lions, beneath the shadow of major championship icons—refused to buckle.
Following the double bogey on number one, Schlee strung together a pair of conventional pars on the next two holes, then matched a great drive with an even better four-wood on the par-five fourth. His ball snuggled just inside the fringe on the back left corner of the green and from twenty feet, he stared down an eagle putt that could essentially erase his opening-hole catastrophe. Perched over his homemade putter, he firmly struck the ball into the bottom of the cup.
Schlee removed his visor and doffed it to the gigantic gallery circling the green; they clapped and acknowledged Schlee’s remarkable recovery from his first-hole disaster. But the applause was one of respect, not love. Schlee’s outstanding eagle putt—like each of his strokes that afternoon—was simply the undercard to the main event: Arnold Palmer’s long overdue reunion with U.S. Open victory.

Other books

Lustrum by Robert Harris
To Risks Unknown by Douglas Reeman
Beyond the Hell Cliffs by Case C. Capehart
Revengeful Deceptions by Dukes, Ursula
Running Out of Night by Sharon Lovejoy
Hart of Empire by Saul David
Magic City by Jewell Parker Rhodes
Merit Badge Murder by Leslie Langtry