Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (5 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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“I can’t play any better than I played here and I couldn’t win,” he told the press.
The 1962 U.S. Open at Oakmont was the stage where Nicklaus began to overtake Palmer as the world’s greatest golfer. But the transition took much longer than golf fans and journalists often remember.
For the eight years in the 1960s that Palmer and Nicklaus were both professionals (1962-1969), they shared nearly same the amount of victories: twenty-nine for Palmer and thirty for Nicklaus. And the number of runner-up finishes in major championships was also virtually identical: six for Palmer and seven for Nicklaus. Major wins became where Nicklaus overwhelmed Palmer during these eight years: only one for Palmer versus six for Nicklaus.
So, after the finest tee-to-green ball striking of his career, before thousands of die-hard fans on a course he knew better than anyone in the field, Palmer opened the door for the man who would usurp his throne. A win by Palmer in 1973 at Oakmont obviously would not undo Nicklaus’s surge to golfing greatness (seven wins in 1972, including two majors). But the thought of redemption had driven Palmer throughout his career—he regularly recycled past defeats in his mind as a spur to future achievement—and in 1973 he wanted to remind the world that, not so long ago, major championships and Arnold Palmer heroics were synonymous.
“Ever since I lost in 1962, I’ve been waiting for the Open to come back to Oakmont,” he admitted two days before the 1973 championship began. “This is my country; I am very eager to redeem myself.”
No one was better suited to help Arnold Palmer achieve that lofty goal than the man who had taught him everything he knew about golf: his sixty-eight-year-old father, Deacon Palmer.
PALMER DID NOT PLAY ANOTHER event in the four weeks following the Byron Nelson tournament at the end of April. He did, however, maintain much of his typically harried, around-the-globe golfing schedule, including a hospital charity exhibition at Hidden Valley Country Club in Reno and the filming of The Best 18 Holes in
America,
a three-part television series featuring courses all over the country. Even when he “took off” from the tour, he didn’t shun the obligations (or financial rewards) of celebrity. He happily met public expectations-just as long as the demands centered on golf.
At a press conference to promote the Reno exhibition in early May, a reporter asked Palmer what made him so successful. His answer was simple, his personal identity crystal clear.
“A great amount of desire to play golf,” he responded. “It’s been a life’s ambition since I’ve been a youngster. It’s never fluttered. It never went away. It’s still there.” In between business ventures, Palmer flew back to Latrobe, parking his private plane barely a mile from his home and playing regularly on the course where he had grown up. In mid-May, the power brokers at Oakmont offered him a nonresident membership (though even he had to pay a $5,000 membership fee). Now eligible to play in the club’s intraclub competition known as the SWAT (invented by H. C. Fownes) while tuning up for the Open, Palmer jumped at the opportunity.
Although Oakmont made for a second home as a teenager, Palmer had actually not played the course since losing the 1962 play-off to Nicklaus. There had been only a few changes to the course over the past decade.
In the weeks prior to the Open, Palmer played in the SWAT a handful of times and reinforced his memories of each hole. But his major preparation was back home in Latrobe, hitting practice balls under his father’s sharp eye.
Early in the 1973 season, Gardner Dickinson, a tour regular and a Hogan disciple, told Deacon (or “Pap,” as Arnold called him) that a bad habit had crept into Arnold’s swing and undermined his consistency. Arnold acknowledged the problem and tried various corrections while still on tour, but each piecemeal “fix” not surprisingly generated new difficulties.
Now back in Latrobe for an extended stay, father and son—as only they could—reevatuated every aspect of Arnold’s technique. Working more effectively together as adults than their conflicting personalities had allowed during Arnold’s youth, the two concluded that Arnold had become so “out of position” that major swing surgery was necessary. Together, they took apart his swing and rebuilt it.
“[We changed] the whole ball of wax—the address, the swing, everything.”
It was no wonder Palmer felt so comfortable in drastically reshaping his technique, even this close to a U.S. Open: Deacon was the only man he’d ever trusted with his homemade swing.
“Almost from the moment he put that cut-down club in my hands, Pap would tell me in no uncertain terms to permit nobody to fool with or change my golf swing.”
Even after earning dozens of victories and tens of millions of dollars, Palmer had returned to his father’s side during the 1960s and let him toy with his swing. Weeks before the U.S. Open in 1969, in the midst of a terrible slump, Palmer returned to Latrobe to seek his father’s advice. The work paid off as Palmer tied for sixth place. Four years later, only a month before his much-anticipated return to Oakmont, they hoped for even greater results.
“I worked pretty hard,” Palmer vividly recalled thirty-five years later. “I put a great emphasis on driving, and I practiced my irons a lot. The thing that I should have done was go to Oakmont and putted on the greens more. I didn’t do that as much as I should have.”
By the end of May, Palmer was ready to test his game on tour. A strong 68 at the Kemper Open in Charlotte put him within a stroke of the lead after day one, but he played the final three rounds at even par to fall out of serious contention.
“I’m discouraged by my scoring, but not my game,” Palmer said.
The next day Palmer flew to Ashland, Ohio, and donated his services to help raise money at the Johnny Appleseed Boy Scout Golf Jamboree, where he not only bought a new putter that he liked, but tied the course record before flying back home.
While most tour regulars traveled to Philadelphia for the IVB Classic, Palmer continued his solitary preparation under Pap. Mostly he practiced at Latrobe Country Club, but a week before the Open, he joined former Pittsburgh Pirates stars Dick Groat and Jerry Lynch for a few holes at Oakmont before going off by himself to practice on the course.
Palmer may have gone eleven years without setting foot on Oakmont, but he felt like nothing had changed.
“I feel very much at home here.”
In fact, he felt so much at home at Oakmont, so intimately connected to his childhood memories, that he made a surprising decision just before the championship began. He would forgo the use of either eyeglasses or contact lenses during the U.S. Open, aids that he admitted had become critical to him in recent years in order to judge distances, both on the greens and from the fairways.
“I probably should wear them but I’m not,” he said. “The fact I know the course as well as I do should make up for not being able to see at a distance.”
While that week’s tour stop wrapped up on Sunday in Philadelphia, Palmer fired a solid one under 70 at Oakmont in his final practice round before U.S. Open week officially began.
By late morning on Monday, the 150-man field started arriving at Oakmont to register. All of the PGA tour stars were there: Nicklaus; the new “people’s champion,” Lee Trevino; red-hot Tom Weiskopf, winner of three of his last four tour stops; and Australia’s Bruce Crampton, who had already won three times during the 1973 season. Representing the new breed of “young lions” were the former collegiate sensations Lanny Wadkins and Jerry Heard, the current U.S. Amateur champion, Vinny Giles, and the reigning three-time NCAA champion, Ben Crenshaw. Sixty-one-year-old Sam Snead, fifty-three-year-old Julius Boros (a two-time U.S. Open winner), and forty-two-year-old Billy Casper (also a two-time U.S. Open winner) spoke for the previous generation of stars.
But amid all these great players of past and present, Palmer was undeniably
the
star.
During the practice rounds, children and adults alike crowded excitedly beside him wherever he walked, begging for autographs. The enormous galleries that followed the King’s every move continuously shouted words of encouragement whenever he hit a shot or simply passed by. More ambitious members of the army even managed to sneak in a quick photograph with Palmer as he made his way around the course or into the clubhouse.
The reporters who gathered at Oakmont acted much like the fans, craving every minute they could spend with the King. While experts agreed that Jack Nicklaus was the greatest golfer who ever lived, many still believed that Palmer had an honest chance to win the 1973 U.S. Open. In light of his victory in the Bob Hope, where he had outlasted a direct challenge from Nicklaus, his close familiarity with Oakmont, and his dead-serious intent to seek vindication for what happened in 1962, Palmer was as much a threat as anyone. And for those who saw him in the flesh, he still conveyed the robust athletic magnetism of a true champion, the same dynamic figure they had admired so often during the past decade and a half on magazine covers and newspaper pages.
“Palmer still is the well-muscled piece of talent he’s always been,” Bill Nichols of the
Cleveland
Plain Dealer
wrote that week. “His bronzed arms still ripple with every swing. He stalks the fairway as though he’s trying to beat everyone to the end of the rainbow. And he forever hitches his trousers as he prepares to assault the unprotected flagsticks.”
But others viewed Palmer very differently, agonizing that the chiseled hero—a model of athleticism-had unfortunately not been frozen in time. Readers of the New York Times opened their morning editions on the first day of the 1973 U. S. Open to find a column by the noted sportswriter Dave Anderson, entitled “The Last Stand.” Anderson not only didn’t share Nichols’s optimistic appraisal; he didn’t even see the same Palmer:
“But he’s 43 years old. When he crouches over a putt, his jowls thicken. So does his belly. The charisma isn’t quite the same. Jack Nicklaus is the most feared golfer now. Lee Trevino is more respected too. And now Tom Weiskopf, with three victories in his last four tournaments, appears to be maturing. But for many people golf still means Arnold Palmer, nobody else. Especially here, where he is Pittsburgh’s most exalted sports idol.
“Maybe the electricity will begin to flow in him tomorrow,” Anderson continued. “But maybe there is no electricity in him anymore, not even in his last stand.”
Remarkably, on the dawn of Oakmont’s fifth U.S. Open, all anyone could talk about was the aging King of golf, Latrobe’s Arnold Palmer.
•
2
•
The Big Three Reborn
P
almer’s “last stand” began at 1:52 p.m. Thursday afternoon, as he stepped to the first tee with eighteen-year-old Vince Berlinsky, who drew the honor of carrying his bag that week. (Until the U.S. Open in 1977, local caddies were randomly assigned by the host club; the pros were not allowed to use their regular tour caddies.)
The gallery roared wildly when Palmer’s name was called, and for nearly five hours Arnie’s Army remained at fever pitch, yelling, jostling, and running ahead for position to catch a glimpse of their hero. Over half the fans that afternoon followed Palmer, unconcerned about being still or silent in fairness to his playing partners, two-time tour winners Johnny Miller and Lou Graham. And, with a vintage-Palmer display of peaks and valleys, the King’s opening round consumed the crowd’s emotions.
Palmer stumbled on the relatively easy 343-yard, par-four second hole when his short-iron approach to the green landed in a bunker and he two-putted for bogey. He immediately rebounded on the next two holes, sticking a five-iron to inside two feet on the famous Church Pews third hole and then a wedge to two feet on the par-five fourth hole. Landing irons off the tee into bunkers on the par-three sixth and par-three eighth yielded bogeys, canceling out the two early birdies to return to one over par.
A strong drive and a crisp four-wood allowed Palmer to easily birdie the par-five ninth and return to par, only to give the stroke right back by three-putting the perilous tenth green. Ten holes, just three pars; not the ideal way to play a U.S. Open.
But Palmer righted the ship, first with pars over the next five holes, then by lasering a four-wood to within eight feet of the flagstick on the challenging par-three sixteenth. Following pars on numbers seventeen and eighteen, Palmer met with reporters, eager to dissect his first-round score of par 71.

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