Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (7 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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Anyone who arrived at Oakmont in 1973 could recite in detail the maddening series of events that had occurred to Phil Rodgers on the seventeenth hole in the first round of the 1962 Open. Rodgers, a former marine from San Diego, was putting the finishing touches on a stellar opening round. One under par with two holes to play, he aimed for the green in hopes of a birdie that would give him at least a share of the lead.
Rodgers’s drive initially looked good but then smacked right into a branch of a pine tree, four feet off the ground, and stayed there. After surveying the situation, he chose to play the shot rather than remove the ball and take a one-stroke penalty (“unplayable lie”). In order to get his best angle to hit the ball, Rodgers dropped to his knees and swiped at it. The ball fell and became ensconced in the next-lowest branch. At this point, pride grabbed hold of Rodgers, and he took two more stabs before the ball finally dropped to the ground in a miserable lie, from which he still could not play to the green.
When he finally holed out, Rodgers had used eight strokes, a quadruple bogey, on the par-four hole. His search for an easy birdie had ended in a “snowman.” Instead of the opening-round lead, Rodgers saw twenty-nine names ahead of his on the scoreboard.
Over the next three rounds, Rodgers fought back valiantly. He tied for the lead at one under par with a birdie on the fourteenth hole of the final round, but then bogeyed the fifteenth and sixteenth and ultimately tied for third place, two behind the leaders. Had it not been for Rodgers’s pine tree adventure on Thursday, the classic Palmer-Nicklaus play-off might never have happened.
The seventeenth hole was just as tantalizing to Arnold Palmer in 1962. He grabbed birdies there in the opening two rounds; then, on the morning of the final day (the third and fourth rounds of the U.S. Open were still played on Saturday), he nailed the green with his drive and dropped an uphill eighteen-footer for an eagle. The army gave Palmer a two-minute standing ovation, as he regained the lead despite frittering away shots earlier in the round.
As Palmer had shown, great drama (he was four under through three rounds) regularly unfolded on the seventeenth. Unfortunately, following another thunderous whack onto the fringe of the green in the afternoon round, he missed a short birdie putt that would have avoided the play-off against Nicklaus.
The Fowneses had designed the seventeenth to encourage a bold try for the green across the dogleg. To make the alternate, “safe” route difficult, they tilted the fairway sharply and protected the green with Big Mouth. They also tilted the green from right to left so that when it was firm, even a perfectly struck high-iron might not hold the putting surface. Even WC., one of the nation’s premier amateurs, but never a long hitter, regularly tried to drive the green on number seventeen. He felt that cutting the dogleg provided him a better chance to score a par or birdie than playing conventionally through the fairway.
But Palmer’s eagle in 1962 prompted the modern-day Oakmont members to rethink the design of number seventeen. They delighted in the course’s in-your-face toughness, premised on straight-ahead, pinpoint accuracy off the tee. Apart from the two par fives on the front nine, Oakmont offered no clear-cut birdie opportunities for even great players to redeem themselves. If a player made mistakes along the way, he should, as the Fowneses had put it, “irrevocably” suffer the consequences in his final score. Oakmonters did not want their course vulnerable to a dramatic comeback at the tail end of a major championship-even at the hands of their hometown son. Thus, the club members, following the 1962 U.S. Open, questioned whether the original design of the seventeenth still fit with Oakmont’s punitive philosophy.
Shortly after Oakmont hosted the 1969 U.S. Amateur, the club spent $10,000 redesigning the hole. The pine trees that had so frustrated Phil Rodgers were removed and a series of punishing bunkers took their place. But the most money went toward building a new tee box thirty yards farther back and to the left of the old tee, thereby sharpening the dogleg and making the hole play completely blind. Members confidently believed that direct access to the green was now impossible except from the fairway.
“A man would be a fool to try to drive seventeen now,” said Oakmont’s longtime head pro and former U.S. Open champion Lew Worsham.
During his practice round two weeks before the Open, Nicklaus initially heeded the advice of Worsham: “It wouldn’t be worth the gamble,” Nicklaus said before he hit a three-wood safely onto the fairway. But, as he walked toward the green, Nicklaus reconsidered the strategy when he realized that the pine trees—the same pine trees that ensnared Rodgers—had been removed.
“Maybe you can go for it. You’re not much worse off in the sand than you are on the fairway,” Nicklaus reasoned. “The fairway is not a very good place to approach from the green—it’s too tough a shot. My thinking is to put it over in the bunker or in the rough.”
When U.S. Open week began, Nicklaus remained leery of playing the seventeenth aggressively because of his recent troubles in driving the ball straight. After his final practice round on Wednesday, he went to the driving range and toyed with his grip.
Nicklaus had practiced incessantly as a youth. At the driving range the young boy hit thousands of balls, running up huge bills, which his father gladly paid. But as a pro, he had become much more efficient in his tournament preparations. He never practiced for practice’s sake, à la Ben Hogan. Instead, he drilled with specific, technical goals in mind that had been instilled by his teacher, Jack Grout. Once satisfied, Nicklaus might require only a dozen or two perfectly struck shots to complete a practice session.
Thus Nicklaus needed very little time to experiment with his grip before he felt ready to return to the course. With the sun setting and the course abandoned by everyone else, Nicklaus walked onto Oakmont’s fifteenth, a tee box near the driving range.
“I didn’t want to start playing [Thursday] using a new grip,” he said. “So I went out and replayed the last four holes.”
With the wind at his back, Nicklaus knocked his ball onto the seventeenth green. Regardless of what Worsham and the Oakmont faithful thought, Nicklaus now knew what he needed to know: Under the right wind conditions, and especially if his chance to win the championship hung in the balance, he would not hesitate to drive the “undriveable” green.
As he ascended the seventeenth tee box on late Thursday afternoon, a disappointing two over par for the round, the wind was again at Nicklaus’s back. Going for the green and scoring an easy birdie would help take the sting out of a mediocre performance. It would also send a message to the field: Nothing was impossible for Nicklaus, and he would attempt the unthinkable to defend his title.
Nicklaus motioned for the driver to his caddie, Joe Stoner Jr.—the son of Oakmont’s caddie master, who had suspiciously won Nicklaus in the “random” drawing for bags. Stoner eagerly handed the club to Nicklaus; he alone had witnessed Nicklaus drive the green less than twenty-four hours ago, so why not again? This could be the shot that put Nicklaus back in the hunt for the $35,000 first prize, of which Stoner stood to earn a hefty payday.
Bob Goalby, a member of Nicklaus’s threesome, hardly shared young Stoner’s enthusiasm.
“When I saw him point his driver at the trees on the dogleg, I knew he was going to try and cut the dogleg,” Goalby said. “I turned to a marshal and said, ‘That’s a stupid shot. He’ll wind up in a tree. Or he’ll hit a bunker. Or he’ll hit weeds so deep we’ll never find the ball.”’
Nicklaus remained unmoved by the criticism that would come his way if Goalby’s prediction came true.
“I needed to keep [it] close,” he quietly said afterward, revealing the supreme confidence of a player whose only goal was victory.
Nicklaus tattooed the tee shot, on his trademark high trajectory, a hundred feet above the hazards that blocked its pathway. In the words of columnist Jim Murray, the ball seemed “to be in the air longer than
Skylab I
.” (America’s first space station had been launched one month earlier.)
“That one’s on the green,” Nicklaus said casually.
“How the hell do you know,” asked Goalby, who, like Nicklaus, could not see the green from the tee box.
“I know because I came out here and practiced it last night.”
Indeed, the ball dropped from orbit ten yards shy of its target, rolled up a modest incline, and came to rest twelve feet from the flagstick.
“When we got down the fairway and I saw the ball on the green, I said, ‘Jack, that will teach me to keep my mouth shut,’” Goalby told reporters after the round. “I also told Jack, ‘I think that shot will win the Open for you.’”
Goalby, who five years earlier had won the infamous Masters Tournament in which Roberto De Vicenzo signed an incorrect scorecard, continued his praise of Nicklaus.
“You watch now,” Goalby said to the third member of their threesome, Vinny Giles. “Jack will work harder on this twelve-foot putt than he has on any other today. When the course gives Jack something, he always takes advantage of it.”
Nicklaus did exactly that. The Golden Bear sank the eagle putt and returned to even par for the day.
“That got him all pumped up,” added Goalby. “Now watch him go on and win it. I don’t care what anybody else shoots.”
ON A COURSE LIKE OAKMONT, Goalby’s prediction sounded reasonable. When the world’s best player can make up two shots with a single swing, other legitimate contenders begin to seem irrelevant. There was, however, one very special man in the field, in addition to Arnold Palmer, who possessed the temerity and grit to topple Nicklaus. Even though visibly gaunt due to a recent battle with cancer, Gary Player did not tremble before Oakmont, Nicklaus, or anyone else.
For fifteen years Player, the indomitable, five-foot-seven South African-a a brash-talking health addict who dressed in black, supposedly to absorb maximum energies from the sun—conquered golf tournaments across the world. The son of a miner who worked twelve hundred feet under the earth’s crust, Player grew up in Johannesburg yearning for a life in the great outdoors. He dropped out of school at age fifteen, turned pro two years later, and adopted the grueling Hogan ethic of endless practice to tame a lashing, homemade swing.
Like Hogan, Player fought a crippling hook during his early career; established British players who observed gave him no chance for success. But Player improved with astonishing rapidity and, helped financially by his future father-in-law, traveled the world in search of fame and lucre. By the age of twenty-three, he had won sixteen tournaments in England, Australia, the United States, Egypt, and South Africa, including the 1959 British Open at Muirfield. He was also a runner-up to Tommy Bolt at the 1958 U.S. Open in Tulsa.
Although Player mainly competed abroad, wins in the Masters and the PGA Championship in 1961 and 1962 made him a bona fide superstar in America as well. In 1965, he won the U.S. Open at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis and became the youngest man, at age twenty-nine, to capture the “Career Grand Slam.” (Gene Sarazen and Ben Hogan were the only others to have won each of the four major championships; Nicklaus would do so in 1966 at age twenty-five, and Tiger Woods in 2000 at age twenty-four.)
Player saved his best golf for the grandest stage: critical moments of major championships. He fought off Palmer in a classic final-round duel at Augusta in 1961 to win his first Green Jacket. The next year, late in the third round of the 1962 PGA Championship, he nearly gave away a two-stroke lead. With his tee shot buried in deep rough on the eighteen at Donald Ross’s Aronimink Golf Club, Player grabbed a two-iron and hit “the best iron shot of my life” under a tree and onto the green. He two-putted from sixty feet to save par and, the next day, holed a string of clutch par putts to win the title. And during the final round of the 1968 British Open, paired with Jack Nicklaus, Player edged out the Golden Bear, Billy Casper, and Bob Charles to take his second British Open title.
By the middle of the decade, Palmer, Player, and Nicklaus had established themselves as the most dominant golfers in the world. From 1960 to 1966, the Masters title went solely to one of these three men; they combined to win eight of the other major championships during that stretch. Boosted by the catalytic role of television in popularizing golf, they hosted their own TV show as golf’s “Big Three,” replacing the Big Three of the preceding era, Hogan, Nelson, and Snead. Sports fans across the country knew each member of the trio by first name alone.

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