Read Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont Online

Authors: Adam Lazarus

Tags: #Palmer; Arnold;, #Golfers, #Golf, #Golf - General, #Pennsylvania, #Sports & Recreation, #Sports, #United States, #Oakmont (Allegheny County), #Golf courses, #1929-, #History

Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (21 page)

BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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It was only the beginning. Each with early morning tee times, Bert Yancey, Tom Joyce, and young Jerry Heard all shot 70, and Tom Shaw, another early riser, netted an even-par 71.
As the day wore on, the field continued to assault Oakmont’s sacred identity. Journeyman John Schlee broke par by a stroke, as did fellow former Memphis State Tiger Greg Powers, a young, winless pro who had bounced back and forth between club jobs and the tour. But Powers’s 70 wasn’t even the best round in his threesome. Another winless twentysomething only three years removed from collegiate golf, Billy Ziobro, sank a twisting fifteen-foot birdie putt on the closing hole to post a 69.
Collectively, Ziobro and Powers shot seventeen strokes lower on Friday than on Thursday. On any other day, that remarkable combined effort would have put their picture on the front page of the weekend sports section: “Unknown Duo Scores Revenge on Mean Old Oakmont.” Except that by the time Powers and Ziobro finished their rounds, they had been completely upstaged by another resurgent pairing.
At twenty-nine years old, Brian “Bud” Allin was already one of the tour’s most well-traveled golfers. Born in Washington State, Allin, along with Mike Taylor and Johnny Miller, led Brigham Young to the school’s first Western Athletic Conference title in 1966. But the following year, at the height of the Vietnam War, he left Provo to join the army. An artillery lieutenant, the 135-pound, baby-faced Allin earned two bronze stars in eighteen months of service before returning to America to start a career as a professional golfer.
In his first season on tour, Allin won just $355, but he somehow survived and his career truly took off early in 1973. At the Citrus Open in March, he shot 66-65-67-67 to take an eight-stroke victory, the second of his career. With more than $61,000 earned by mid-June, Allin held down the fifteenth spot on the tour’s money list. And after finishing late Thursday afternoon with a 78, Allin returned to Oakmont Friday morning and stunned the U.S.G.A. by matching Gary Player’s record-tying 67.
Twenty-four hours earlier, Player had labeled his 67 his “finest Open round” ever. Coming from a former champion with five previous top-ten finishes, that statement carried much weight. On Friday, by the time the sun set over Oakmont’s soggy terrain, even 67 had lost its luster.
 
ALLIN’S PLAYING PARTNERS IN THE first two rounds were originally Kermit Zarley and Dave Hill. Hill’s pretournament outburst and subsequent withdrawal had left an opening in the field. John Frillman, a club pro from Omaha, was the U.S.G.A.’s first alternate and would have taken Hill’s place, except he was already filling a spot vacated by Don January, who that very week abruptly abandoned the tour to focus on course design. The U.S.G.A. then turned to its second alternate, thirty-six-year-old Gene Borek, to join Zarley and Allin.
For ten years, Eugene Edward Borek had been the head golf professional at Pine Hollow Country Club in East Norwich, Long Island. Although elite players viewed the job of club pro as a backup for those who could not survive on tour, Borek—who married young and raised four children—had chosen the more stable, family-centered life over that of a touring pro.
Born to a Polish-American family in Yonkers, New York, Borek had first learned golf by caddying at nearby Dunwoodie Golf Course. As a teenager at Saunders High School, he captained the golf team and won consecutive Yonkers Scholastic Golf Championships. Enrolled at Oswego State the following summer, Borek quickly decided that college wasn’t the place for a blue-collar kid with seven older siblings.
“If my family had had the money, I probably would have been able to take a scholarship and go to college. But we were basically a poor family, and none of us went to college. My father was a machinist, but he had heart problems early in life and didn’t work much during the time I was growing up. My mother carried the load during the Depression. She worked very hard. I got all of my drive from her.”
Instead, the seventeen-year-old Borek briefly took a job at the Upper Montclair Country Club in New Jersey, then returned to work closer to home as an assistant to the pro at Scarsdale’s Sunningdale Country Club, Elmer Voight. During his apprenticeship, Borek befriended his boss’s son, Jon, and in August 1954 the two made their first trip to the Midwest for the National Caddie Championship at the Scarlet Course of Ohio State University.
Jon lost in the quarterfinals; he would find more success as a Hollywood movie star than as a tournament golfer. Borek took third place and realized how good he might become ... and the financial constraints that would limit his horizons.
“When we got home on the train in Grand Central we had eleven cents between us,” said Borek, who also won the Westchester caddie tournament that year. “I had the penny.”
When he wasn’t performing the mundane chores of an assistant golf professional at Sunningdale—the club closed down for the winter, so he also worked during those months at the Estate Carlton House and Resort in St. Croix—Borek scraped up enough money to compete on two of the PGA’s minor-league winter circuits in the Caribbean and the Southern states.
“In 1959, I played the Caribbean tour from St. Croix. I remember bringing back a lot of Panama hats and Mrs. Voigt sold them for me,” Borek recalled. “The club gave me some money the first year to play during the winter. Otherwise, I played as far as the money went. It was hard to make money. You didn’t make money just because you made the cut. If you didn’t finish in the top twenty-five, you didn’t make expenses.”
By 1963—on the same day President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas—Pine Hollow Country Club offered Borek the head golf professional job, an unusually high position for a twenty-six-year-old.
“Most of the guys didn’t get their first jobs until age thirty-five or so, only after they had been on tour awhile.”
Excellent tournament performances during 1963 helped Borek land the plum job. He played in thirteen professional tournaments that season, won a (team) Metropolitan PGA event in October, and qualified for both his first United States Open and PGA Championships.
Over the next decade, Borek remained at Pine Hollow while he and his wife, Joan, stayed in Long Island, raising two girls and two boys. He decided not to pursue the temptation of a touring pro’s fortune, but that didn’t stop him from amassing perhaps the most impressive competitive record of any club professional since Winged Foot’s Claude Harmon. Between 1963 and 1972, Borek qualified for seven U.S. Opens and three PGA Championships, and made the cut in six of those events.
Like Lee Trevino—another golfer whose game matured without junior tournaments, amateur championships, or the college circuit—Borek’s finest season came in 1971. Since he never really enjoyed an “off-season,” Borek’s game stayed sharp all year round. So when the PGA held its championship in February (instead of the normal summer date), Borek was ready.
After two days of play at the PGA’s National Golf Club in Palm Beach Gardens, Jack Nicklaus set the pace with consecutive three under 69s. The unfamiliar name near the top of the leaderboard was Borek, who, at two under, held a share of fourth place going into the weekend. He maintained that spot the next day, despite a one over 73, and while Nicklaus left the course Sunday afternoon with his ninth major championship, Borek left Florida knowing he could compete with the world’s best (a tired final round of 77 dropped him to a twenty-second-place tie).
That May, Borek overcame a four-stroke deficit in the final round to win his second Long Island Open. Four weeks later at Merion, while Trevino and Nicklaus battled for another U.S. Open championship, Borek made the cut thanks to a one over par 71 on Friday: a lower round than either Trevino or Nicklaus that day. And if he hadn’t already done enough to shore up a second consecutive Metropolitan (New York) Golf Writers Player of the Year Award, he grabbed more headlines in October.
In the Metropolitan PGA at Sunningdale, Borek took the opening-round lead with a course-record-tying 67. The return to the club where he had spent nine years was a wonderful stroke of good fortune ... and hazardous to his health.
In between rounds, he caught a virus and his second-round 75 dropped him out of the lead. During the thirty-six-hole final, Borek was so weak officials allowed him to use an electric cart. Despite chilly New York October weather, he shot a one under 70 in the morning, then “in the gusty cold wind that swept the Sunningdale Country Club,” shot a 73 to finish alone in third place, two behind the winner, Tom Nieporte. (Borek and Nieporte—a former Bob Hope Desert Classic champion—were the two best club pros in the New York area during the era.)
Despite his illness, Borek returned to the tee a few days later at Pinehurst’s grueling number two course, site of the National PGA Club Pro Championship. While ageless Sam Snead took the lead (and eventually won), Borek posted consecutive 69s to tie for sixth place at the halfway point. He remained in the top ten after three rounds, then dragged to the finish with a 76, which dropped him into a tie for seventeenth place; he still outscored Nieporte by four strokes.
Over the next year and a half, Borek padded his resume: In February 1972, he took second and third, respectively, at the Caracas Open and the International Open in Columbia. High finishes in several New York State tournaments, and a victory in the Long Island PGA Championship in July, earned Borek another Metropolitan Pro of the Year award. The next January, he won a $10,000 stroke-play championship at the PGA National and, in late spring, took runner-up to Nieporte in the 1973 Long Island Open. In June, he felt confident he would earn one of the New York Metropolitan District’s nine qualifying spots for the U.S. Open.
Borek shot 72 in the morning round at the North Hills Country Club in Manhasset, then made the short drive on the Long Island Expressway to the Fresh Meadow Country Club for the final eighteen holes. There he shot another round of even par. Tied with four other players at 144, he returned to Fresh Meadow’s difficult opening hole to compete in a play-off for the remaining two slots.
Peter Kern, the lowest-scoring amateur, effectively bowed out when he launched a shot into a pond; Nashawtuc Country Club pro Charles Volpone Jr.’s double bogey also eliminated him. When former Masters champion Doug Ford sank a thirty-five-foot birdie putt, and Middle Bay Country Club’s Craig Shankland made a conventional par, Borek needed to sink his par putt to remain in contention. He missed and had to settle for first alternate.
Nevertheless, later that week, Borek was headed to Oakmont. A Pine Hollow member in the steel industry, Gil Merrill (the brother of Metropolitan Opera star Robert Merrill), was on his way to Pittsburgh on business and had been invited to play at Oakmont. He asked Borek to come along.
“I said, ‘What?’ but then quickly agreed to fly out with him on his plane.”
Borek arrived at Oakmont the same afternoon that Palmer and Player were prepping for the Open. Early in his career, Borek had jumped at the chance to practice alongside tour stars; by age thirty-six, he had decided against it.
“In the past, whenever I’d play with a ‘name player,’ there was a lot of conversation and the emphasis was inevitably on him. As a result, I found that I would not pay sufficient attention to learning the course itself. Moreover, unlike me, the ‘name players’ usually liked to hit a lot of balls. So, as nice as it was to come back after the Open and say that I’d played with a star, I generally tried to avoid it.”
Instead, Borek focused on the course. He found the greens simply nightmarish; never had he encountered greens so fast and so nuanced in their undulations. He decided to spend every free minute on the practice green, trying to store in his mind and his fingers—just in case an alternate spot opened up—the delicate touch needed to cope with Oakmont’s greens.
Several days later, back in Long Island, still no luck. “I called [U.S.G.A. officials] Tuesday morning and the answer was still no,” said Borek. “I was told it might happen once in twenty years.”
That was until Dave Hill’s outburst.
“John Frillman—we’ve been buddies for a long time—he was the guy who encouraged Dave Hill to withdraw, knowing that I was next, telling Dave that he just couldn’t putt Oakmont’s greens!” Borek quipped many years later.
Hill withdrew Tuesday afternoon and the U.S.G.A. officials immediately called Borek, whose wife transferred the call to him in the pro shop. He drove hurriedly to LaGuardia Airport for a flight to Pittsburgh, only to see it canceled just before departure. He finally boarded a plane later that evening and didn’t arrive in Pittsburgh until three a.m. on Wednesday.
With no motel rooms available near the overstuffed township, Borek headed directly to the course for another practice round. Eventually an Oakmont member, Willie Robertson, who lived only a hundred yards from the course, offered him a place to stay.
“I feel right at home,” Borek said about the six-child Robertson household.
Fortunate after his hectic U.S. Open travel odyssey to have a late tee time (1:35 p.m.), Borek rested Thursday morning. Not long into his round, however, he looked every bit a last-minute substitute who had never equaled par in seven prior U.S. Open championships by shooting 41 on the front side. He “scrambled [his] way back” on the second nine to match the field average of 77.
“I felt that I’d played very well ... the birdies just didn’t convert, and two or three poor shots led to bogeys and double bogeys. You can’t force the game, only play it one shot at a time. I wasn’t discouraged by my first-round score.”
BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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