Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (50 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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Regardless of how he got there, Palmer would be making a record fifth U.S. Open appearance at the same course. He played five Senior Tour events in five consecutive weeks during May and early June of 1994 to sharpen his game, then spent the week before the U.S. Open preparing at Oakmont.
“Yes, this will be my last. I thought that happened long ago, but they want me to play one more,” he said after a practice round with a few local amateurs and Oakmont assistant pros. “[My game is] no good. No good. I thought I had the irons for a while but they disappeared again. I’ll have to find something pretty soon.”
The next day, during an official practice round, Jack Nicklaus joined Palmer (along with the defending U.S. Open champion Lee Janzen and Rocco Mediate) for eighteen holes. Nicklaus and Palmer bantered back and forth, hurling self-deprecating comments and good-natured barbs at each other before closing out the round and meeting with the press.
“I’m sure a lot of people enjoyed it,” Nicklaus said. “But I’m sure both of us would have wanted to play better.”
“I would like to play respectable golf,” Palmer added. “The chance of me doing that on a scale of 1 to 10 is about three or four. I would be happy to play any kind of golf. But I’m just going to enjoy the week.”
The last United States Open Championship played without Eldrick “Tiger” Woods began at seven a.m. on Thursday, June 16, 1994. By the early afternoon, 126 golfers had already teed off, including Greg Norman, John Daly, Phil Mickelson, eleven past U.S. Open champions, and Tommy Armour III, grandson of the champion in the 1927 Open. But when Palmer’s threesome walked to the first tee at two p.m., no one else mattered.
Despite their vast age differences, Palmer actually had a lot in common with his playing partners. As Palmer did as an amateur in the late 1940s, John Mahaffey had won at Oakmont before; the Texan claimed the 1978 PGA Championship at the Hades of Hulton. And thirty-one-year-old Rocco Mediate, from nearby Greensburg, grew up less than an hour from the Oakmont course. Naturally, he worshiped Arnold Palmer.
“He’s responsible for all this,” Mediate said that week. “The popularity of golf. The Open. These crowds. The money. We owe him a lot.”
Mediate and Mahaffey teed off first. Then Palmer endured an eerie—and presumably comical—moment of déjà vu. His caddie, Royce Nielson, was nowhere in sight. Since Nielson had his clubs, Palmer could only wait. Unlike his young, scared-to-death caddie in 1973, Nielson hadn’t abandoned the King; he just couldn’t fight his way through the gallery to reach the tee box. After a few minutes, Nielson finally made it through the mass of people and handed the driver to Palmer, who promptly drove into the right rough.
Palmer would go on to make a respectable bogey: In the opening round, more than half of the field failed to par the opening hole. Under a brutal sun, he played the next seven holes in two over par before coming to the par-five ninth tee. Palmer struck a poor wedge for his third shot that left him far from the hole. But he thrilled the next generation of Arnie’s Army, massed in front of the clubhouse, by sinking the birdie to finish the front side in thirty-eight strokes. A few hours later, at the home hole, the showman again excited the crowd with a beautiful bunker shot that nearly landed in the cup. From there, he nailed the eight-footer.
“I was pretty darn proud of that shot on eighteen,” he told the press after wrapping up a six over 77. “Making the cut was my goal when I started, and it still is. I didn’t enhance it, but I have [a] chance. I need a good round [tomorrow]. Then I’ll worry about winning the tournament.”
Friday morning, Palmer couldn’t produce the same heroic bunker saves or long putts. His score ballooned, and standing on the eighteenth tee, he was fifteen over par, well back of the projected cut. Palmer’s last U.S. Open was almost over.
He struck a solid, straight drive and headed down the fairway. Two hundred yards ahead, all three grandstands, along with the green-side gallery, stood and cheered. The army momentarily quieted so that Palmer could poke his lengthy approach up the steep bank toward the green. The ball skidded to the green’s edge, forty feet from the flagstick. As he walked toward the putting surface, the gallery again roared. Palmer doffed his straw hat to the fans, then flashed a prolonged thumbs-up.
Although everyone wanted to see Palmer close out his U.S. Open career by sinking a long, winding birdie on Oakmont’s harrowing eighteenth green—just as he had done in 1973, after John Schlee almost sank his chip to tie Johnny Miller, twenty-one years earlier to the day—it didn’t happen. The try rolled six feet past the hole, and he missed the comebacker.
Palmer putted out, and again, the fans exploded.
“When you walk up the eighteenth and you got an ovation like that,” he said, fighting back tears, to an ESPN television reporter, “I guess that says it all.”
Not long afterward, in the press tent, Palmer sat down to answer more questions. But no one said a word.
“I think you all know pretty much how I feel,” he said.
After toweling tears from his face, he haltingly continued. “It’s been forty years of fun, work, and enjoyment.... The whole experience ... I haven’t won all that much. I won a few tournaments. I won some majors. I suppose the most important thing ... [
long pause
] ... is the fact it’s been as good as it’s been to me.”
Palmer apologized to his audience; he just could not continue.
“[Then came] a rare standing ovation from the assembled press,” Jim McKay noted. “They know, as do we all, that whatever any future giants may achieve in this game, there will never be another Arnold Palmer.”
 
JACK NICKLAUS TURNED FIFTY-FOUR IN 1994, and that year, unusually, he played a great deal of competitive golf on both the senior and regular PGA tours. Although he won an event in January and accumulated three additional top tens on the Senior Tour, his game was not PGA-tour sharp: in all six of his “regular” tour appearances, including the Masters, he missed the cut.
Still, Nicklaus believed that a miraculous, turn-back-the-clock victory rested inside of him. And there was no better place for that than the 1994 U.S. Open at Oakmont. For inspiration, throughout the tournament Nicklaus even used balls branded with the number five: A win that week would be his fifth U.S. Open Championship.
Aside from playing together in their wistful practice round, Nicklaus largely took a backseat to Arnold Palmer prior to the Open: References to the Golden Bear centered on his heart-rending defeat of the local hero in 1962, not his indisputable place as golf’s finest champion of all time. And although Palmer certainly grabbed the headlines on Thursday and Friday, Nicklaus made news.
Barbara Nicklaus had been there in 1962 to suffer the gallery’s harsh words when Jack toppled the King. Nevertheless, the morning the 1994 U.S. Open began, she encouraged her husband to flash back to that week.
“Usually, when he leaves, I say, ‘Play well,’ or, ‘Good luck,’ or something. But this morning, for some reason [while dangling her fingers in his face to mimic a hypnotist], I told him ‘You’re twenty-two, you’re twenty-two, it’s 1962 again.’”
Nicklaus did not repeat that first-round performance; he played better.
In 1962, he had birdied the opening three holes, then fallen apart toward the end of the front nine. Thirty-two years later, again armed with a wooden driver—Nicklaus switched back to persimmon that week—his tee shot on number one sliced into the right rough. He gouged out onto the fairway, then struck a low-running pitch some ninety yards to within par-saving range. He hit the ball well for the next several holes but struggled with his putter, missing makeable birdie putts on numbers two, four, and five before bogeying the sixth and saving par on the seventh.
“And then I started to play golf.”
On the par-three eighth, Nicklaus’s two-iron landed three feet from the pin. He made birdie there, then sank two birdie putts—a curving twenty-footer on number twelve, and another from twelve feet on number fourteen. Five hours into the round, at two under par, Nicklaus held a share of the U.S. Open lead.
Shaking off a bogey on the sixteenth, Nicklaus parred the seventeenth—he didn’t try to repeat his first-round eagle magic from 1973—then lashed a great drive onto the eighteenth fairway. A mediocre approach left him pin-high, forty feet left of the pin.
“I was just trying to figure some way to get close to two-putt,” Nicklaus explained, “and it went in.”
The thrilling birdie at the home hole dropped Nicklaus to two under par—the first time he ever broke par in the opening round of a championship at Oakmont. And if Tom Watson had not shot a three under 68 later that day, the Golden Bear would have been tied for the lead.
The next afternoon, Palmer completed his tearful good-bye to the U.S. Open.
“I think Arnie feels he’s had enough of it. We’ve played a lot of golf together for a lot of years, and I think we are all sorry to see anyone finish their career in anyplace, but I think he feels a little bit like I do,” Nicklaus said. “There’s a time when you sort of pass it on, let the younger players have it. I’m at that point, too. I don’t want to be around when I shouldn’t.”
During Friday’s second round, Nicklaus proved he still belonged.
Four front-nine birdies dropped him to five under par. Although he missed six fairways—“the weakest part of my game is off the tee. It used to be my strength”—and carded a trio of bogeys in the late afternoon, Nicklaus reached the halfway point with his trademark confidence on full display.
“I feel very calm about the way I’m hitting the ball. If I get myself in position on Sunday, I think I have a good shot to win.”
Friday’s 70 put Nicklaus at three under going into the weekend: a better thirty-six-hole total than he’d ever posted at Oakmont. Tied for fifth, he trailed the leader by three strokes.
The magic disappeared over the weekend. A 77 on Saturday and a 76 on Sunday dropped him back into the pack, but for a senior player who hadn’t made a PGA tour cut all year, a twenty-eighth-place finish at Oakmont was still impressive. Even for Jack Nicklaus.
 
FOLLOWING HIS FOURTH-PLACE FINISH BEHIND Johnny Miller in the 1973 U.S. Open, Nicklaus had immediately resumed his quest to become the greatest golfer of the century.
Eight days after shooting a 68 in the final round (only Miller and Wadkins scored lower), Nicklaus served as the unofficial host of the eighth-annual Columbus Invitational Charity Pro-Am. All proceeds from the one-day, Monday event went to the
Columbus Dispatch
Charities and the area’s Children’s Hospital. Saddled with a well-known hacker named Bob Hope—who managed to birdie the home hole—Nicklaus and three local area pros carded an aggregate 55, the event’s lowest score.
Nicklaus played in only seven tournaments the remainder of the season. He posted three wins, a fourth in July’s British Open, and three additional top tens. At age thirty-three, Nicklaus dominated 1973: nineteen tour starts, seventeen top tens, seven wins, first on the money list ($308,362), and the lowest stroke average of his career (69.81). It was another season filled with remarkable highs—arguably equal to his celebrated 1972 season.
His most notable feat came in August. Three closing rounds under 70 at the Canterbury Golf Club in Shaker Heights, Ohio, earned Nicklaus a four-stroke win in the last major of the season, the PGA. That fourteenth major championship (including two U.S. Amateurs) pushed him one past the late Bobby Jones.
“Everything was Bobby Jones,” Nicklaus told the press afterward, “and the fact that he had won thirteen major championships, a record, was hammered into my mind.”
Nicklaus’s excellence in majors only continued after he surpassed his hero. In addition to twenty-one more regular tour victories, he won six additional majors. And he did so in practically every way imaginable.
In perhaps the most exciting Masters of all time, Nicklaus edged out both Tom Weiskopf and Johnny Miller by a single stroke in 1975 to earn a record fifth Green Jacket. In 1978, a year after losing to Tom Watson in Turnberry’s famous “Duel in the Sun,” Nicklaus overcame a balky putter to win his third British Open—a second straight at his beloved St. Andrews.
But in a career filled with awesome highlights, Nicklaus most enduring victory came in April 1986. He’d turned forty-six three months earlier, and without a victory in nearly two years, chatter pervaded Augusta National the week before that he could no longer compete.
“Nicklaus is gone, done,”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
writer Tom McCollister declared the week of the fiftieth Masters tournament. “He just doesn’t have the game anymore. It’s rusted from lack of use. He’s 46, and nobody that old wins the Masters.”
Nicklaus had set the bar so high that even in his mid-forties, he was destined to disappoint if not chasing the Grand Slam or winning six tour events each year.
Rather than ignoring the criticism, Nicklaus used it as motivation, and kept within four shots of the pace entering Sunday’s final round. Still trailing Seve Ballesteros, Greg Norman, and Tom Kite by several strokes, Nicklaus scored birdies on numbers nine and ten, then grabbed two more (and a bogey) at Amen Corner to close the gap to two.
With his son Jackie serving as his caddie, Nicklaus eagled the par-five fifteenth after a brilliant long-iron approach, then drained a short birdie putt on number sixteen and a ten-footer on number seventeen to steal the lead. Playing behind Nicklaus, Norman and Kite couldn’t catch up, and from the clubhouse, the Golden Bear won at Augusta National for the sixth time. His final-round 65—and an incredible 30 on the back nine—remains the greatest finishing performance in Masters history.

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