Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (56 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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“You got to really want it to get it in this business. A lot of guys decide it’s not worth the grind. Most outsiders have a misconception of what it’s like playing the tour. People don’t really know how hard we work, and being on the tour isn’t as glamorous as they think it is.
“A lot of the others are broke. That’s why so many leave eventually. They just fade away. You hear someone ask, ‘Whatever happened to what’s-his-name,’ and then you get the answer, ‘He took a club job someplace in North Overshoe Nowhere.’”
Sometime after he left the Monterey Peninsula, Alzheimer’s incapacitated Schlee and he needed institutional care. On June 2, 2000, his sixty-first birthday—unable to speak, less than a hundred pounds, no friends or family nearby—John Schlee passed away at a facility someplace in North Overshoe Nowhere.
•
17
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Johnny Miller
R
iding the wave of momentum created by his historic U.S. Open triumph, Johnny Miller continued his red-hot play as soon as he stepped back on the pro tour. To start the American Golf Classic in Akron (four days after his victory at Oakmont), Miller sank a twenty-five-footer on number one, birdied number two, then holed a four-wood off the tee on Firestone’s 230-yard, par-three fifth. His opening-round 67 earned both a share of the lead and continued praise from his esteemed playing partner.
“Johnny Miller looks like a fine U.S. Open champ,” Arnold Palmer told the press, dispelling any whispers that Miller was just another fluke Oakmont champion. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
A third-round 78 dropped Miller out of contention at Firestone; he tied for twenty-fourth place with, among others, John Schlee. As the season wore on, Miller didn’t entirely quash his “feast or famine” reputation.
In July’s British Open, he might have topped Weiskopf at Royal Troon had he not missed a pair of very short final-round putts on the fifteenth and sixteenth greens. By year’s end, Miller slipped to ninth on the tour money earnings list. In his final seven PGA appearances, not counting the runner-up at Troon, Miller could do no better than eighteenth. (Although, officially, he finished ninth in the U.S. Match Play event, Miller’s U.S. Open win exempted him from having to qualify, and he was upset in the first round by an unknown rookie, Artie McNickle.)
But the latter part of 1973 was certainly not a disappointment for Miller. In fact, by late November, he would launch one of the greatest stretches in the history of professional golf. With Jack Nicklaus as his partner, Miller won both the individual and team portions of the World Golf Cup, held in Marbella, Spain. In Miller’s mind, he left the Nueva Andalucia course with much more than an unofficial tour victory.
“Before then, I thought there was quite a difference between Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller,” Miller said. “But I saw I was driving as far as he was, my irons were better and I was putting well. I thought, ‘Hey, Miller, you’re not too bad.’ People will never know how much that World Cup meant to me, matching games with Jack Nicklaus.”
Beginning with the kickoff event for 1974, Miller dominated the tour. He won a rain-shortened Bing Crosby Pro-Am at Pebble Beach, then returned to another course he knew quite well. At the Phoenix Country Club, where he had shot a ten under 61 just four years earlier, Miller won the Phoenix Open by a stroke over his friend Lanny Wadkins. Just four days later, he carded a ten under 62 at Tucson National. On Sunday he earned a third consecutive win, over Ben Crenshaw.
“I don’t mean to be boastful,” he told the press after his first-round course record, “but the game seems easy to me. I was always a streaky player, even in college when I began winning, but I see no reason to hit bad shots. If I were under pressure I wouldn’t be able to shoot ten under par.”
Miller won a total of eight PGA events in 1974—including another three-in-a-row binge from late August to late September—to take both the tour money title and the PGA Player of the Year Award. And he was almost as dominant in 1975. Again, Miller opened up the PGA season with a pair of victories, first at Phoenix, then at Tucson. Winning a fourth straight event at Arizona-based tour stops, along with a triumph the next month at Bob Hope’s desert-based event in Palm Springs, earned Miller the nickname “the Desert Fox.”
Even more incredible was the way Miller won. A closing-round 64 in Phoenix yielded a fourteen-stroke victory—the largest in PGA history. The next week, his final-round 61 at Tucson made for a nine-stroke win.
“It was sort of golfing nirvana,” Miller said. “I’d say my average iron shot for three months in 1975 was within five feet of my line, and I had the means for controlling distance. I could feel the shot so well.”
Amazingly, in 144 holes, Miller missed only two greens in regulation. And during those three early wins (Phoenix, Tucson, Bob Hope), Miller’s combined score was seventy strokes under par. Once the major-championship season began in April, Miller came up just a stroke shy of Jack Nicklaus in the Masters, and a stroke shy of Tom Watson and Jack Newton in the British Open at Carnoustie.
“Every time I go out there, I feel sure I’m going to win. The way I’m playing now, I don’t believe anyone can beat me,” he said. “In the last four years I’ve shot more low rounds than anyone. I have the potential, the ability, and now for some reason, I’m reaching that potential. I have more experience now; I make fewer mental errors and my choke level is better.”
With a third straight Tucson Open victory early in 1976, followed by a successful title defense in the Bob Hope, Miller had become the most electrifying golfer since his childhood hero, Arnold Palmer. And to prove he was more than just “the Desert Fox,” Miller finished tenth in June’s U.S. Open, and then overcame a two-shot deficit to win the British Open. Yet another brilliant final round defeated Nicklaus and Seve Ballesteros by six shots. Miller’s 66 at Royal Birkdale sealed his fifteenth victory in less than three seasons.
“When I’m standing over the ball, serenity is knowing that my worst shot is going to be pretty good.”
 
MILLER’S “SERENITY,” AT LEAST ON the golf course, dipped considerably over the next few years. Apart from a strong performance defending his British Open title at Turnberry in 1977, and a top-ten finish in the U.S. Open the following summer, the late 1970s were embarrassing for the two-time major winner.
Miller’s casual attitude toward practice—“hitting five hundred balls a day wasn’t my idea of a good time”—became one explanation for the slump. Another laid blame on new muscles Miller built up via heavy labor on his California ranch; the muscles allegedly interfered with his usual swing. And in the view of a Pittsburgh writer, an issue “ominously echoing the Arnold Palmer of the mid-1960s” was the culprit: Miller’s growing business interests.
The forced time away from his large family also hampered Miller. By the late 1970s, Linda was at home with three young children, while the two eldest were in school.
“They can’t travel with me now,” he said, “and that bothers me.”
At the start of 1979, his tenth full season on tour, Miller’s woes threatened to end his career. He competed in just sixteen PGA events during the 1978 season and made the cut in only half. His scoring average that season (73.23) was more than a stroke higher than ever before. By season’s end, the combination of poor play and minimal appearances had dropped Miller to 114th on the PGA earnings list. Prior to 1978, Miller had never fallen below the top fifty, and he had finished in the top twenty every year from 1971 to 1976.
Famed
Los Angeles Times
columnist Jim Murray chronicled Miller’s decline as a sports tragedy. After Murray watched the patron saint of “going low” finish fifty-fifth—eighteen strokes back, and over par for the tournament—at the same event (the Bob Hope) where his subpar scores had christened him the Desert Fox, Murray declared the career of Johnny Miller, age thirty-one, all but over in January 1979.
“The man wearing Johnny Miller’s clothes and swinging Johnny Miller’s clubs is a clumsy forgery of the artist who used to chase Jack Nicklaus down to the wire at Augusta or who beat back Nicklaus and Seve Ballesteros at Royal Birkdale,” wrote Murray.
“Sometimes it can’t be cured short of psychiatry. Sometimes it’s a simple function of age. In Miller’s case, it would seem to be terminal if it doesn’t unhand him this year. A man plays his best golf in his thirties, not his worst. Johnny Miller seems in the grip of a giant unseen presence who tilts his club-head only a millimeter. Just enough to change 62s into 78s.
“If anyone knows the whereabouts of Johnny Miller’s golf game, phone or wire collect or go see him personally,” Murray concluded. “You’ll find him in the rough.”
A few years later, Ron Rapoport captured the specifics of Miller’s tumble.
“Eventually, Miller’s game came apart,” Rapoport wrote. “First, his long game deserted him and in trying to get it back, he neglected his irons, which had always been his strongest suit. Even when he was playing well, it seemed he would have three or four bad holes and miss the cut. The man who had led the tour in earnings was now finishing 48th. And 111th and 76th.”
The drought did not last for too long. Although his winless streak reached three full seasons in 1979, and he could climb to only seventy-eighth on the tour money list, Miller began the new decade with a win in March 1980 at the Inverrary Classic. His stroke average improved a full shot from the year before, and he jumped to thirty-fourth place in tour earnings.
And by the spring of 1981, Miller was on his way back. He won January’s Tucson Open (his fourth victory there in eight years), and then claimed the prestigious Los Angeles Open a month later.
“I told those who supported me that I thought this would be a good year for me. There were those who dropped me,” Miller told the press at the Riviera Country Club. “And for my friends, they can now answer the question, ‘What is wrong with your pal?”’
Miller’s resurrection seemed complete that April with the annual trip through Magnolia Lane. Employing a “flunky” new putting grip that proved the right antidote for Augusta National’s new, wickedly fast, bent-grass greens, Miller grabbed a share of the first-round Masters lead.
“The redeeming factor during the time I wasn’t playing well is that I remembered at one point I was maybe the best player in the world,” Miller said after his opening 69. “Even when I was playing terrible, I’d tell myself, ‘You must have some talent. What you did wasn’t all a fluke. Don’t get down on yourself.”’
Miller struggled a bit on Friday and Saturday, then soared on Easter Sunday. Five behind front-runner Tom Watson, Miller started the final round in the eighth-to-last pairing—just as he had at Oakmont in 1973—birdied the first two holes, then dropped five more on the afternoon (including three of the final six holes). Three early bogeys, however, left him two short of victory. Sunday evening, Tom Watson claimed his second Green Jacket. When the season ended, Miller had made the cut in seventeen of nineteen events, finished tenth on the money list, and was rewarded with a spot on the 1981 Ryder Cup team.
Over the next two years (1982 and 1983), Miller defeated Jack Nicklaus twice in early season tournaments, and finished among the top twenty money earners. His progress slowed somewhat over the next two seasons, though in both years he shone in the U.S. Open. In 1984, he finished fourth, and in 1985, he played the weekend at “the Monster,” Oakland Hills, better than anyone else, at three under par. He finished eighth, three shots behind champion Andy North.
Miller again slipped into a career freefall in 1986, as he dropped to a new low on the tour earnings list (120th), and managed only one top-ten finish in sixteen events. In the 1987 AT&T Pro-Am, however—on his beloved Monterey Peninsula—he overcame a five-stroke deficit in the final round to forge an exciting win over budding tour star Payne Stewart. Four back-nine birdies—including a clutch fifteen-footer for birdie on the home hole—clinched Miller’s fourth tour victory at Pebble Beach.
“Most important, maybe the other guys on the tour won’t look at me like a dead horse,” he said.
But in the spring of 1987 Miller turned forty, leg injuries persisted, and he still craved seeing more of his large family—including a college-age son who the next year would join the San Jose State varsity golf team. Tour fame no longer seemed to drive him. Speaking about his final-round triumph at Pebble Beach, he had curiously stated, “There was no real point in the round when I thought much about winning. I was just trying to have a good time and check out the scenery.
“When I got to the mountaintop,” he said later, “I kind of looked at the scenery and wondered, ‘Now what?’.... When Jack got there, he said, ‘Where’s the next mountain?’”
A festering problem with his putting expedited Miller’s absence from the tour in the late 1980s.
Since his days as a child sinking long putt after long putt at Harding Park, Miller believed that his putting magic was in constant decline.
“[By] the time I got to college,” he later wrote, “my best putting days were well behind me.”
Somehow, he managed to overcome the handicap to win twenty-four PGA events, two major championships, and many millions in prize and endorsement money. Miller even came to downplay how good his putting had been during his historic final round at Oakmont in 1973.
“I didn’t have that good a putting round. I had twenty-nine putts. That’s nothing special.... If I’d had a real good putting round, twenty-six or twenty-seven putts, made some of the others coming in, I could have shot sixty. I missed from ten feet and twelve feet coming down the stretch and on the eighteenth hole my putt rimmed the cup.”

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