Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (43 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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His birdie on number two had been canceled out by the bogey on number four, and he dropped another stroke with a bogey on number six. His prospects dimmed further when—having underestimated the increasing wind—he overshot the eighth green. Fortunately for Heard (less so for the patron), his iron struck a spectator behind the green and died just before entering a series of bushy pine trees. Instead of a certain bogey or worse, Heard rebounded with a superb chip, and the par save kept him just two shots behind the leaders.
If that stroke of dumb luck didn’t convince Heard that this might be his day, his odyssey at the next hole certainly did.
Of the several young lions who made headlines in the early 1970s, Heard had impressed tour veterans the most. Byron Nelson liked Heard so much, he took him on as an informal protégé. And ageless Chi Chi Rodriguez loved that Heard possessed one of the most cherished skills of the “old-timers.” According to Rodriguez, Heard was the only youngster who could, at will, “hit the ball two ways” (i.e., hit a draw or fade as dictated solely by the shape of a hole or the location of a flagstick). Even golf’s ultimate throwback, Lee Trevino—with whom Heard would soon share a near-fatal encounter with a lightning bolt near the thirteenth green of Butler National in the 1975 Western Open—singled out Heard as one of the game’s premier ball strikers.
But Heard’s celebrated control was spotty throughout the final round. On the ninth tee, trying to fade his drive and stay clear of the punishing bunkers and drainage ditch on the left, he hit a duck hook. The shot strayed so far off-line that, remarkably, it crossed over all the trouble and landed cleanly in the parallel first fairway.
After playing an excellent, long recovery shot safely back into the ninth fairway—no small feat, given the massive cross bunker that loomed before him—Heard flew a pitching wedge straight at the flag, which drew back several feet on the softened green. Faced with an uphill thirteen-footer, Heard knew that his championship prospects were now on the line. Just about every contender had birdied the ninth, and he would fall dangerously behind if he could not make a birdie four.
Heard rose to the challenge, sinking the coiling left-to-right putt and staying in the mix. He joined the large group of contenders who finished the front nine at three under par.
As invigorated as Heard was by his unlikely birdie, Julius Boros, his playing partner, could not have been more deflated when the final twosome left the ninth green. Having birdied the sixth, Boros arrived on the ninth tee at four under. He smacked a perfect drive and seemed guaranteed a third birdie on the front side, which would give him sole possession of the lead. Then a string of events torpedoed Boros’s momentum.
As calm and serene as he appeared, Boros was impatient with slow play. He took only seconds to plan each shot, and barely bothered to survey greens or line up his putts. When the two-time U.S. Open champion reached his tee shot in the ninth fairway, he eagerly prepared to hit his approach, make his birdie, slam the door on all the youngsters chasing him, and take the title back to Miami for a week of fly-fishing.
Tom Weiskopf ruined Boros’s idyllic dream. The usually imperturbable Boros was irritated to see that there was a delay on the ninth green: Some kind of ruling was in progress. The holdup had already taken so long that Palmer and Schlee had played through (i.e., skipped ahead of) Weiskopf and his playing partner, Bob Charles.
In this type of situation, once Palmer and Schlee sank their putts, Boros probably should have waited so that officials could determine who should hit next. If a ruling had already been rendered, then Weiskopf and Charles would be asked to complete the hole, and Boros and Heard would play behind them for the rest of the round.
Boros didn’t wait. Before Schlee and Palmer had even left the green—and with Charles only a few feet from the flagstick, planning his next shot from green-side—Boros addressed his ball and stroked a long iron toward the green.
The shot was well off-line. Boros hooked his two-iron thirty yards left, nearly missing all twenty-two thousand square feet of the ninth green before settling on its far edge. With the pin located on the right, Boros had to traverse countless heaving valleys of Oakmont Poa annua.
Regarded as “an indifferent putter,” Boros had already missed a short birdie putt on number seven that would have dropped him to five under par. Afterward, he gently kicked his putter in disgust for blowing the opportunity. But none of the leaders had birdied number seven, whereas everyone—Nicklaus, Trevino, Schlee, Palmer, his partner, Heard—was birdying number nine. Failing to match the rest of the leaders would be costly.
Boros’s patience was then stretched even thinner after he hit his second shot: U.S.G.A. officials were busy trying to resolve Tom Weiskopf’s green-side conundrum. Worse yet, when a ruling was
finally
issued, officials asked Weiskopf and Charles to finish the hole before allowing Heard to hit onto the green. All the while, a restless Boros had no choice but to wait in the fairway and contemplate his terrifying putt.
Boros nonetheless produced an outstanding eagle effort. His travelogue putt rolled up and down, left and right, over and over again, before halting six feet below the hole. The remaining putt for birdie would break sharply left to right, as Heard’s had done. At first, Boros’s putt looked dead-on, but he hit it too softly and the ball skirted off the cup’s right edge.
Tapping in for par—after witnessing Heard’s unlikely birdie—appeared to take a lot out of the fifty-three-year-old, even though he still held a share of the lead. Saturday afternoon’s “Arnie and Julie Show” now felt like a solo act.
 
THE COMMOTION, DELAY, AND RESHUFFLING surrounding the ninth green were entirely Tom Weiskopf’s fault.
Weiskopf—the only man among the leaders to escape the front side bogey-free—pushed his tee shot on number nine into the right rough, between two trees; this was one of the few spots at Oakmont where trees actually affected play. Unshaken by the minor setback, Weiskopf, wearing a lime green top and yellow slacks, arched his body over the ball: Tall and narrow, he looked like a half-ripened banana. Daring as ever, Weiskopf eschewed the safe play (pitching back onto the fairway) and elected to carry the trees and attack the green with a high five-iron fade. Unfortunately, the tall grass forced the clubface to open wide at impact and launched the ball into a pronounced slice.
“Oh, my God,” Weiskopf moaned as soon as he hit the shot, rushing toward the fairway to follow the ball’s wayward flight. A marshal shouted, “Fore to the right,” at the top of his voice, to alert everyone in the vicinity of the immediate danger.
In the ABC booth, Chris Schenkel and Byron Nelson saw the ball lift off and curve wildly, but neither knew where it landed. Watching from her home on 179 Bexley Drive in Bedford, Ohio, Eva Weiskopf—the recently widowed, former teen phenom who still competed regularly in Cleveland amateur circles—had no clue either about where the ball was heading, and wondered if her son’s championship hopes had also vanished. Because trees blocked most of the area from camera view, Nelson could describe the area where it was heading only as “dark country over there.”
Green-side fans helped officials locate Weiskopf’s ball inside a large, green-and-white-striped tent that was still “in bounds,” but well beyond the conventional field of play. His wayward iron had struck a vendor selling periscopes near the tent, then bounced through an open flap into a concession stand and onto a snack table, where it nearly hit a few startled patrons munching hot dogs. The ball nestled several feet off the ground on a table—between a mustard jar and a loaf of bread.
While Weiskopf and the crowd chuckled over the absurdity of the scene, U.S.G.A. officials faced a complicated rules quandary that required considerable time to resolve. Ten minutes into the confusion, they instructed the twosome behind (Palmer and Schlee) to play through so the officials could continue deliberating.
The rules issue centered on what constituted fair relief for Weiskopf from the concession stand. Though he did not indulge spectators who suggested he enjoy a hot dog while waiting, Weiskopf remained notably relaxed throughout the ordeal. In the end, the long wait was rewarded with a tremendous break that kept alive his championship dream.
“At the back of the shelf was a protective awning shielding the view of the ball from curious spectators,” Lincoln Werden of the
New York Times
explained the following day. “Because of the obstruction it was decided that Weiskopf should be given two club lengths’ relief from the edge of the snack bar. This would put him in casual water and therefore he received further relief by being permitted to drop without penalty in a dry spot in rough grass.”
While Boros and Heard continued to wait in the fairway, officials carved a narrow path through the gallery as Weiskopf paced back and forth from his ball to the green, scouting his options.
“He will have a difficult shot from there to get the ball close to the hole, even if he does have a good lie,” counseled Nelson. “The pin is cut close to that side of the green, and there’s a bank between it that goes up to the edge of the green.”
Through the makeshift alleyway, Weiskopf decided not to loft the ball high, but rather—with the green-side rough fairly well trampled by spectators—to pitch the ball low. He hoped to deaden the force of the shot against the top of the embankment, and slowly roll the ball onto the green. Weiskopf perfectly executed his creative plan: The ball scampered off the embankment and onto the green, six feet past the hole. For a moment, the shot even looked like it might go in.
“Oooooooo!” the normally placid Nelson exclaimed. “Look at that shot.... That’s a remarkable shot from where he was.”
An elated Weiskopf waved to the stunned crowd and walked onto the green. His understandably anxious playing partner, Bob Charles—it seemed like an hour since he’d played his last shot—putted out, then watched Weiskopf roll in the improbable birdie to join the leaders at four under.
As he walked to the tenth tee, all smiles and peering up at the Father’s Day late-afternoon sky, Temperamental Tommy no longer had reason to lament that his father “never saw me play as good as I can.”
•
12
•
The Greatest Nine Ever
A
few myths about the final round of the 1973 U.S. Open need to be debunked.
For one, Oakmont’s greens were not slowed by a sprinkler malfunction during the wee hours of
Sunday
morning—or Saturday morning, or Thursday morning, or Wednesday morning either, as several respected authorities have claimed. The sprinklers—or perhaps a member of the grounds crew—actually “malfunctioned” sometime between late Thursday evening and early Friday morning (see chapter six). The accidental overwatering led to considerably slower greens during Friday’s second round—though how much slower depended on the individual hole and the time of day. And the sprinkler mishap also led to significantly softer greens for the remainder of the championship.
The players’ Friday performances reflected the changed conditions: Scores fell by nearly one-and-a-half shots between Thursday’s and Friday’s rounds. These unique conditions probably aided Long Island club professional Gene Borek in shooting his course-record 65.
But by late Friday afternoon, many greens had dried in the broiling summer heat and they again putted very fast, especially for those who started play in the afternoon. The ninth green remained lightning-quick all day.
Also contrary to a common legend, no biblical rainstorm occurred Saturday night or Sunday morning that turned the greens on day four to dartboard mush. Not unless the U.S. Weather Service and every newspaper in western Pennsylvania completely missed the storm. The only significant rainfall to strike the Pittsburgh region during the 1973 U.S. Open occurred on
Saturday
between six and ten a.m., when over a quarter inch delayed the first tee time less than an hour.
The Saturday-morning downpour affected more than just the greens: It softened the fairways as well. This helped players keep their drives more easily in the short grass over the entire weekend, especially on Oakmont’s more steeply inclined fairways (such as the twelfth and fifteenth), without the ball skirting into the rough.
Sunday-afternoon winds did dry out the course a bit. But between the sprinkler mishap on Friday and the rains on Saturday morning, Oakmont simply couldn’t regain its legendary “fast” reputation or return to the same slick greens and fairways that prevailed on Thursday, when the scores were actually a half stroke higher than on day one of the 1962 U.S. Open at Oakmont.
But by no means were the greens “slow” during the final round of the 1973 U.S. Open. In fact, they were speedier on Sunday than on Friday, following the sprinkler malfunction, and also faster on Sunday than on Saturday, following the heavy morning rains. As Byron Nelson explained during an instructional segment on Sunday, to putt Oakmont’s quick greens, players still needed to allow for huge amounts of break, grip the club lightly in their fingers, and barely let the putter head touch the ground. The greens, said Nelson on Sunday morning, were putting as fast as proud club members claimed to play them on a regular basis—at least as fast as any other American championship course in this era.
Still, the greens on Sunday did show more variation than usual—depending on drainage, sun exposure, and the amount of sprinkler soaking they’d received on Friday. Discovering
where
the moisture lay on each green mattered most.

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