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 (36 page)

BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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Unlike Fort Bragg and West Point, however, Memphis State did not have its own golf course. The team did have year-round free access, in the afternoons, to different country club courses on specific weekdays. When the Tigers finished their practice, the coaches usually convinced a club member to spring for a hot dog and Coke for everyone. Naturally the boys were expected to follow a few courtesies: No hitting several balls into a green or off the tee, no extended bunker practice, no playing too slowly, and, of course, no hitting into the group in front. Most important, the players could practice only as a team, not as individuals, and they could show up to play each course only on the team’s designated day.
John Schlee didn’t believe these rules applied to him.
“When I was at Memphis State, we had five country clubs at our disposal [for practice], and at one time or another during my career I got us kicked off all of them,” he said later.
Schlee refused to let anyone stand in the way of his tour destiny. He had only one dream, and he fiercely felt a right to pursue it.
“He was probably the most self-centered, goal-directed person I’ve known in any walk of life. He was a total loner,” a college teammate observed. “I was as close to him as anybody, and you couldn’t get that close. Nothing else mattered but being the best golfer in the world.”
Schlee’s favorite of the five available courses was the Memphis Country Club, a challenging layout only a few miles from campus. When the team practiced there, the two-time U.S. Open champion and Tennessee native Cary Middlecoff would often walk around with a club in hand, hitting an occasional shot and regularly talking with and advising the players. The club was formally closed on Mondays, but members were allowed to play if they carried their own bags.
Although Monday was not the team’s designated day to play the Memphis Country Club, Schlee had an uncontrollable urge to do so, and one day he convinced himself it would do no one any harm if he did. He sneaked on at a distant hole location, far from the clubhouse, prepared to scam his way out of trouble if he got caught.
Before long, Schlee was spotted on the course and called back to the clubhouse to explain what he was doing there. As a former teammate, Ken Lindsay, recounted, Schlee “was not very gracious in being caught,” trying to make his case by saying things like, “Well, hell, there’s nobody out there and I need to practice.... You got the best course out here and you ought to open your heart and let us come out here and play a little bit more often.” Not surprisingly, that explanation didn’t impress club members, who promptly revoked the team’s playing privileges for the entire school year.
“I was there to play golf, not socialize,” Schlee said with little remorse.
Neither was Schlee at Memphis State to study anything but golf. During his junior year, he struggled all semester in his accounting course, and one day during class he quietly asked a teammate if he would bring his books back to the dorm. The teammate couldn’t understand what Schlee meant, until he noticed that Schlee’s hands were clasped tightly over a pencil, in a golf grip. “I’ve just found something; I’ve got to go try this,” he said.
Schlee stood up, sidled to the aisle, and started walking toward the back door of the large classroom. The instructor asked, “Mr. Schlee, are you going somewhere?” To which Schlee responded, without breaking stride, “Hell, Professor, I’ve been waiting to get this grip for a long time, and now that I’ve got it I’m not letting up until I can try it out.” By that time, Schlee had reached the door and just kept going.
Unlike in high school, Schlee wasn’t openly disruptive at Memphis State; he was just indifferent to academics as his mind drifted toward golf. To his teammates he could be enjoyable, telling jokes, easing the mood.
“He was a good person to be around,” said Lindsay, his regular senior-year golfing partner. “I have no bad memories whatsoever about John.”
Schlee also became close friends with a young couple who lived near the athletic dormitory in married-student housing. They entrusted Schlee with babysitting their infant son. Schlee treated their home as his, regularly eating meals there and sneaking in when they were away (once removing the air conditioner to gain entry) in order to sleep with a flock of coeds.
Some shared less fond memories of John Schlee. One day during lunch in the cafeteria, he was eating a hamburger and fries when one of the football players reached over periodically to grab a few fries. Schlee already had a tumultuous relationship with the football team: He liked to hit balls dangerously close to the team’s practice facility. Schlee told the fry snatcher to stop and buy his own, but the player persisted. Finally, one last warning was issued to the player, who ignored him and attempted to snatch another fry. Schlee took a sharp fork and “absolutely stabbed him” on the back of the hand. No matter where he moved—Seaside, Fort Bragg, West Point, Memphis—Schtee whatever-it-takes attitude came with him.
Still, Schlee impressed and fascinated his golf buddies. No one practiced longer or harder, both on and off the course, than Schlee. And with his physical strength, he hit “some of the longest drives that I had ever seen in my life,” Lindsay recalled. “John’s forearms reminded me of Arnold Palmer’s. He just had tremendous hand-arm strength.”
Just as in high school, Schlee still hit all of his clubs very low, which gave him a tremendous advantage: The cold and wind of spring in Memphis were similar to the weather he’d experienced nine months a year while learning the game on the Oregon coast.
For all his talent and confidence, Schlee knew that as a member of the unheralded Memphis State program, joining the PGA tour would not be easy.
“In my first year at Memphis,” Schlee recalled, “I asked Dub Fondren [a well-known Memphis-area professional] to take a look at my swing. He let me practice six straight hours with every club in my bag before he said a single word. I was so tired I was ready to collapse. Finally he said, ‘John, if you want to be a good player, it’s going to take a long time.’”
Instead of studying accounting or British literature, Schlee meticulously analyzed the basic elements of the golf swing, as defined by Ben Hogan in his 1957 classic,
Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf.
Hogan’s popular but exhaustively technical book became Schlee’s bible. He regularly quoted it verbatim at Memphis State as he sought to emulate Hogan’s swing positions, and encouraged his teammates to do the same.
For Schlee, a better swing guru than Hogan did not exist. But Schlee took many Hoganisms too literally, such as, “Reverse every natural instinct and do the opposite of what you are inclined to do, and you will probably come very close to having a perfect golf swing.” Other, relatively simple ideas, Schlee morphed into extreme concepts.
 
SINCE CHILDHOOD, SCHLEE HAD EMPLOYED a strong left-hand grip (i.e., the V formed by the thumb and forefinger were pointed to the right shoulder); this made him prone to hitting sharp hooks. In his book, Hogan recommended as a remedy a weaker left-hand grip, with the left thumb on top of the shaft and the V aimed at the right ear or perhaps even the chin. This grip—which produced a predictable, soft fade that he could control without sacrificing power-helped transform Hogan into a nine-time major championship winner.
Schlee obsessively tried to implement Hogan’s grip advice, but he just could not achieve the results he hoped for. Out of frustration, he broke off the butt end of a golf club (the grip and upper part of the shaft) and asked a Memphis State athletic trainer to tape his left hand to the club in the extreme weak grip position. Although he kept his hand taped for a full month, Schlee still tended to draw the ball from right to left, despite his weak left grip.
Five Lessons made Schlee the golf team’s technical authority and a convert to Hogan’s “fundamentals.” A chance, outside-the-ropes personal encounter following Schlee’s freshman year clinched his conversion to the Hogan gospel.
In June 1960, Ben Hogan arrived in Tennessee to warm up for the U.S. Open, just two weeks away. Forty-eight years old and semiretired, Hogan played in only the Masters, the U.S. Open, and a few other American tournaments; the Memphis Open would be just his fifth appearance of the season.
The site of the event, the Colonial Country Club, was only a short distance from Memphis State’s campus, and Schtee—a summer lifeguard at the club’s pool—managed to find a ticket to the third round. He even received VIP treatment, as an official brought him and a few friends to the door of the players’ locker room. There Schlee spotted Hogan, and the excitement of seeing golf’s swing guru in the flesh led Schlee to blurt out, “I would love to learn how to play golf from you someday.”
As Schlee’s friend and future pupil Tom Bertrand later wrote, the stoic, four-time U.S. Open Champion didn’t quite know what to make of the tall, gangly collegian.
“Their eyes locked,” Bertrand wrote, “and the room instantly fell silent. John could feel the intensity of Hogan’s gaze boring straight through his eyeballs. Everyone knew that Hogan hated to give lessons.
“Before Hogan had a chance to reply to this impertinent outburst, John’s official escort grabbed his arm and whisked him away. The official cast an apologetic glance toward Hogan as they marched out the doorway.”
However awkward, this brisk encounter with golf’s “Wee Ice Mon” seemed to elevate Schlee’s game. Three days later at the nearby Fox Meadows Golf Course, he scored a 70-72 (the second-lowest total) in the qualifier to earn a spot in the National Public Links Championship. A few weeks later, in July 1960, he flew to Hawaii for his first appearance in a national event. Although he failed to qualify for the match-play portion of the championship, the experience on the big stage paid off. On his return to the mainland, he finally won the Oregon coast match-play championship in Astoria that had eluded him in high school.
The following summer, in 1961, Schlee scored the nation’s third-lowest qualifying score (138), and then reached the semifinals of the national Public Links Championship, contested in Detroit. There he lost 2 & 1 to the eventual winner and future NCAA individual champion, R. H. Sikes.
Schlee’s tournament play only improved and he performed well in several high-profile Southern events, including the Tennessee State Amateur and two Arkansas-based invitational tournaments. That reputation blossomed with consecutive strong showings in the National Public Links in 1962 and 1963. He even had a shot at revenge against Sikes in the 1963 championship.
“You are darned right I’ve been waiting to play him,” Schlee told a reporter on the eve of a 3 & 2 loss to Sikes in the third round.
By then, Schlee had already left Memphis State, without earning his degree. He had begun to prepare for a professional golf career.
“I needed a couple of dumb courses like British literature to get my degree in marketing and I couldn’t see how they would help my backswing, so I left.”
With a few sponsors behind him, Schlee turned pro and joined the tour in 1964. Poor showings in his first three events convinced his backers to pull their support. He found work as an assistant pro at Woodmont Country Club in Nashville and competed in local events, winning the 1964 Capital City Open with a record score.
But an ugly scuffle with a member of a new group of sponsors in Nashville—just days after he won the Capital City Open—forced Schlee out of town once again. He soon landed a club job in Phoenix, and within a few months found support from several Moon Valley Country Club members, who agreed to cover all his expenses ($13,500) on tour for a year, in exchange for a substantial share of his eventual earnings. He also secured an additional $200 per month from Arizonan Del Webb, who paid him to represent the Sun City retirement community.
By late August, Schlee’s game was sharp (he took third in the Wyoming Invitational) and he headed for Florida in October. There he was set to compete in a brand-new event that, to some, meant far more than a U.S. Open trophy or a Green Jacket at Augusta National.
In 1965, the PGA established a new avenue to the tour: a grueling event in which fifty-one players certified by their local PGA section competed to earn their “tour card.” The commencement of the first “Q School” (officially, the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament; the players also studied business, rules, and public relations, and attended lectures to pass a 150-question examination) took place at PGA National Golf Club in Palm Beach Gardens.
Before the advent of Q School, prospective touring pros could get into the field for PGA events only if they finished among the top sixty money earners the year before, or if they made the cut in the previous week’s tournament. They could also receive special invitations to play in select events. After the creation of Q School, the seventeen top finishers became eligible to play in each week’s tournament, but only by qualifying on Mondays for one of the limited entry spots.
Still, a “tour card” provided a regular opportunity to compete for purses, and the PGA had created this new path explicitly so that fervid dreamers, like Schlee, might chase golfing greatness. “If we all realized how much it meant to everybody,” said one member of the pioneer Q School class, “we probably all would have fainted.”
Schtee—who found short-term sponsorship from a Valley Dodge, Californian named Bill Smith—made the most of the opportunity, emerging as the school’s prize pupil. He bested the course’s par 71 during the opening two rounds, then hung on to his lead through the next ninety holes, finishing three strokes better than the runner-up, John Josephson. His tour card in hand, Schlee wasted no time in beginning his career. He Monday-qualified to play at the Cajun Classic in Lafayette, Louisiana, the PGA’s last event of the 1965 season. In his first round as a tour professional, he shot a 69, matching the same score as Jack Nicklaus. Schlee tied for eleventh and earned $850.
BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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