Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (45 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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As Arnold Palmer lined up his short birdie putt on the ninth to tie Miller and Boros for the lead at four under, Miller tattooed a 280-yard drive down the narrow fifteenth fairway, safely avoiding the mini Church Pews bunkers that line the left side. Only a lengthy, precise, perfectly struck second shot would hold: The fairway slanted harshly left to right, and the green’s right side was guarded by “a mammoth bunker that begins twenty yards ahead of the green and runs almost to the back edge.” A month earlier, Palmer had played the 463-yard, par-four fifteenth with a camera crew filming, for his three-part television series,
The Best 18 Holes in America.
With his adrenaline flowing, Miller’s prodigious tee shot prompted a moment of brainstorming between him and his caddie. Despite his weak birdie effort on the hole before, he still oozed courage, especially after the wonderful drive.
“[He] had 187 yards to the flag and a little wind in his face,” Lou Beaudine remembered.
“‘Looks like a three-iron to me,’ I said.
“‘Naw, I’m going to use a four-iron and hit it a little different,’ he said.
“‘Uh-oh,’ I thought. ‘He’s going to open up his stance and hit it into the woods.’”
Miller, in fact, did open his stance to fade his trusty four-iron—the third time he’d used it on the last four holes. As Beaudine expected, he carved the shot toward the pin located on the front right side of the green, dangerously close to the mammoth bunker. The wind picked up as his shot soared—it blew Miller’s long blond hair back and flapped the collar of his shirt—but still the ball tracked the flag all the way. Striking twenty feet before the hole—and proof that the afternoon sun had started to firm up the greens—the ball bounced nearly as high as the flag before grabbing hold, then skidded ten feet to the right of the cup, along the surface’s natural contour.
Miller walked to his ball and addressed the ten-footer—uphill, almost perfectly straight: the easiest putt he could have left himself on the entire green-determined not to come up short again, as he had on number fourteen. Bent at the waist, weight shifted strongly to the left side, putter aligned off the left heel, hands well ahead of the blade and inches from his left knee, he stroked the putt solidly into the bottom of the cup. He had reached eight under par for the day, and became the first man to reach five under for the championship since Gary Player on Friday evening.
“Come on, Johnny,” shouted one member of the still-sparse green-side crowd. Miller, unsmiling, waved once, clenched his teeth, and waited for his playing partner, Miller Barber, to close out the hole. By now, his awesome round had electrified even the tranquil PGA veteran.
Known as “Mr. X,” Barber more than lived up to his nickname. He earned a solid living on tour (six victories to date), but was content to stay in the background. Sunday at Oakmont was no exception. His donning black pants and dark sunglasses only reinforced his anonymity during the unfolding drama; so did shooting a final-round 78 to drop to twenty-fifth place.
But the forty-two-year-old from Shreveport, Louisiana, wasn’t entirely inconspicuous.
“Barber started pulling for me on the back nine and that helped my confidence,” Johnny remembered. “We’re not good friends, especially, or anything, and I thought it was wonderful that an older fellow like that would keep cheering me on.”
Caught up in the excitement that Miller was fashioning on Oakmont’s back nine, Barber opted to shed his role as “final-round playing partner” and become an enthusiastic and encouraging coach—much as Laurence Miller might have done.
“Johnny, you’re playing very well,” he told Miller with each succeeding birdie or par. “Now let’s keep on playing this way.”
Next, Miller stepped to the par-three, 230-yard sixteenth. He had bogeyed the hole on Saturday, and while the flagstick on Sunday did not rest as treacherously close to the green’s right edge as the day before, he knew he must avoid the deep bunker guarding the right front entry, as well as the bunkers left of the green. Miller aimed to the fat left half of the green—the only pin he didn’t target the entire round—opening his stance a bit to encourage a fade, as he had on number fifteen. His goal was to let the green’s natural left-to-right slant guide the shot toward the flag.
From the moment he struck it, the shot displeased Miller; the ball stayed left and flirted with the bunkers, from which it would be next to impossible to make par because of the green’s severe left-to-right pitch. Dropping to a full knee squat to get a better view, he watched anxiously as the ball barely curled onto the left side of the green, more than seventy feet from the flag. As Keith Jackson observed, Miller would “have to go across a big crown in the middle of the green, an extremely difficult putt to get the ball close to the hole.”
While not targeting the flagstick, Miller had certainly hoped to be closer; he simply could not afford to lose momentum (and sole possession of the lead) by giving a shot back to the field at this late stage. Getting down in two from seventy feet would be as good as a birdie, and with that goal in mind, Miller lagged his first putt short and to the right—four feet away. As Keith Jackson explained, “Below the hole, where you can take a good firm rap at a flat, level putt and knock it in.” This Miller did, and with two holes to play, he remained an astonishing eight under for the day.
“Johnny Miller,” Jim McKay told his audience, “could be headed for the greatest round in U.S. Open history.”
Miller was less concerned with history, and more concerned about getting through the next two holes.
“Barber told me when I parred sixteen, ‘Baby, you got it won,’ and I said, ‘Wait a minute....”’
Clearly, Miller did not want to assume anything. He still had two holes to go and was well aware of his resume of chokes in big tournaments before. Doing so again would reinforce his reputation as a man who possessed “the habit of roaring into contention with brilliant shot making, only to stumble.” And the easiest way to “stumble” would be to do too much on any single shot—a choice that fell at Miller’s feet on the seventeenth tee.
All afternoon, Miller had pounded his tee shots magnificently; with his customary high trajectory, he could easily carry the trees and bunkers down the left side of the fairway that blocked the direct path to the seventeenth green. A Nicklaus-like, drive-the-green eagle was tempting; his strategy during the past three days—a fairway wood or iron safely to the fairway—had not been particularly successful. He carded only pars on a short par-four that most pros expected to birdie at least once.
But Miller’s irons on Sunday were as sharp as ever. The smart, strategic choice was to place his tee shot where he could nuzzle another wedge into easy birdie range, just as he’d done on numbers eleven, twelve, and fourteen. And at eight under for the day, why should he change strategy now?
So Miller played the safest shot possible, a one-iron to the far right side of the seventeenth fairway. He left himself a perfect angle to the pin, where he could take a full, hard swing with a wedge: nothing “cute” at this stage.
“That looks great,” Lou Beaudine said as Miller’s shot zeroed in on the flagstick. Landing fifteen feet short, the ball rolled another five feet before coming to a halt. Miller waved to the dazzled crowd, suddenly six rows deep, as Keith Jackson observed, “When Lady Fate is holding your hand, I guess you just grip it as much as you can.”
Another birdie here would be mind-boggling, but more important, it would inch Miller’s lead to two strokes at six under par. Once the leaders behind him saw that score and began running out of holes, that might be too much for any of them to match.
“If Miller makes that putt at seventeen,” Dave Marr concluded, “he’ll be pretty hard to catch, cause it seems like in a U.S. Open the first man in with a low score is pretty tough to beat once he’s already made the scores.”
But a tenth birdie didn’t fall. Miller struck the ten-footer a bit too firmly, and the ball glided just past the hole’s right edge. As he had done on the fourteenth, a disgusted Miller recoiled, double-checked the line from both directions, and tapped in for par. He was still shaking his head as he climbed up toward the final tee box.
Miller channeled his anger into a fabulous 280-yard drive on number eighteen.
Chris Schenkel, Byron Nelson, and the ABC producers were so impressed by Miller’s swing that they showed it twice, the second time employing the slow-motion, instant-replay technology that was becoming a staple of American sports broadcasting.
“What a freewheeling swing!” Schenkel exclaimed.
“I’ve never seen him hit through the ball as well as he has today,” Nelson added. “Of course, naturally the score speaks for itself, but as I was saying earlier, Chris, the greens are absolutely perfect. They are holding well in the best test of grass on the green I’ve ever seen.”
In search of one last birdie, Miller charged down the fairway. He found his ball in perfect position, then kept on walking toward the green, all the while measuring distances and studying his yardage book: His drive there had soared a bit farther than on previous days.
Miller tried to remain calm and follow the advice of his friend Jerry Heard, who had recently told him “to stay cool, not to get the adrenaline flowing so I got too high, too pumped up.”
But four hours into the round, Miller’s nerves were frayed. Instead of following Heard’s advice, or the round-long encouragement of Miller Barber, he reverted to negative thoughts and once again relied on fear, doubt, and self-condemnation to steady himself.
“Standing in the middle of the fairway at the last hole, I told myself, ‘You crummy dog, don’t shank this shot.’”
He didn’t shank, lacing a five-iron in perfect alignment with the flagstick. The ball crashed into the ridge before the cup, looked for a moment like it might jump forward, then rolled back just over twenty feet away, with the ridge still to climb on his putt. Standing next to the green, pin high, Lanny Wadkins thought that Miller’s shot was so perfect it would leave him only a five- or six-footer for 62.
But Miller could see none of that from below the green. And all that mattered to him was that he hadn’t folded under the pressure, and had given himself every opportunity to win by hitting yet another iron stiff.
Miller sent his eighteenth consecutive birdie putt up over the ridge, then down toward the hole, the ball breaking only slightly left to right as it drew nearer and nearer to the left edge of the cup. No way this putt would be short, with a U.S. Open title on the line.
“[I hit] as good a putt as I’ll ever hit under pressure like that,” he said.
But, as on the seventeenth green, Miller stroked the ball a touch too firmly. It caught the left edge of the cup and lipped out a full 180 degrees, leaving a tricky, right-to-left-breaking two-footer that he painstakingly lined up and sank for his 63.
“Even with only about a foot-and-a-half putt, I was just trying to avoid the yips.”
While the gallery erupted in applause, Miller steamed about his two consecutive birdie misses. He underhand-tossed his ball into the gallery, said his pleasantries to Mr. X, and, with a grimace on his face, shook his head as if he were ashamed. Miller quickly lightened up when Wadkins, standing at the entrance to the scorer’s tent, greeted him with a smile and a handshake.
As Arnold Palmer played the par-five twelfth, hoping for a birdie that would tie him for the lead, Miller signed his scorecard and walked to the adjacent press tent.
“No, I’m not nervous,” Miller told the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’
s Marino Parascenzo and other assembled reporters. “But if I hadn’t shot this score, those guys would be out there choking among themselves. But now, with my score up there, they know what they’ve gotta do.”
•
13
•
Chasing Greatness
L
anny Wadkins indeed had guts, just as Jack Nicklaus said. The eagle he made at number nine brought the twenty-three-year-old to one over par for the championship. With the leaders still at three and four under, he hadn’t quite roared back into contention, but he had certainly made some noise.
Despite a three-year age difference, Wadkins and Johnny Miller were close friends. They shared the same business manager and often played practice rounds together. And both were known for raw aggressiveness.
Wadkins kept an eye on his friend from the start of Sunday’s round, and he knew that Miller had birdied the first four holes. While each played the front side in 32, Wadkins—who had begun the round eight strokes behind the leaders, and two behind Miller—had more ground to make up. No one brandished more confidence on a golf course than Wadkins, and he earnestly believed he could make up the enormous gap.
Apart from the sixth hole, he played with his customary accuracy off the tee on the front side, but did not hit his irons very sharply. That changed with the new nine, as Wadkins lasered one iron shot after another to within close range.
He just missed makeable birdie tries on numbers ten and eleven, then holed short birdie putts on numbers twelve and thirteen. A few more birdies and he might sneak up on the leaders—an even more shocking thought than Miller’s doing so. On the fourteenth, Wadkins carried a nine-iron to the perfect spot on the green—just beyond the back ridge, eight feet from the cup, slightly downhill—and readied for a third consecutive birdie.

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