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 (44 page)

BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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For some golfers, these uncertainties produced as many problems as if the greens were predictably lightning-fast. Fear of three-putting from short distances continued to dominate players’ minds. Even after the greens dried out on Sunday afternoon, players regularly left putts short from ten or twelve feet, worried about turning a birdie opportunity into a bogey. Whether the greens were damp or not, no one seeking to come from behind dared putt Oakmont’s greens aggressively in a last-ditch effort to “go low.”
Even though softer greens made gauging approach shots easier, the dampness of the course made the round
more
difficult in other ways for Sunday’s sixty-five contestants. The heavy, humid air shortened how far the ball would carry, and soaked fairways slowed drives once they hit the ground: Balls could not run as much as on drier, harder surfaces. The wet conditions also made Oakmont’s dense, gnarly rough more of a nightmare than usual. But at no time during the 1973 U.S. Open—including Sunday’s final round—were “lift-and-clean” (i.e., winter) rules in effect, as one urban legend maintains.
In short, for the players who made the weekend cut, Oakmont did
not
play notably easier on Sunday than it had on Thursday, when the course played traditionally fast and firm. Only four men broke 70 on Sunday, and the average scores (for the players who made the cut) were not statistically different on Thursday compared to Sunday. The median score on both days was 74. The “most difficult” scoring day (although the differences did not reach statistical significance) was actually Saturday—following the heavy morning rains—when the median score was 75, and the mean score was 74.323.
Thus, the myth that scoring conditions on the final Sunday of the 1973 U.S. Open championship were exceptionally easy and ripe for low scoring needs to be debunked once and for all. On Sunday, just as on Thursday and Saturday, missed fairways, missed greens, and misgauged putts continued to be punished by the merciless logic of the Fownes patriarchs: “A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost.”
 
LAURENCE OTTO MILLER NOT ONLY introduced his son to golf; he did so without ruling via an iron fist. Still, no matter how much Laurence preached the power of positive thinking, by the time his son reached tour stardom, he did not quite abide. Miller’s hang-ups on Sunday about gagging on putts at the seventh and eighth holes, or feeling, in his own words, “depressed” before the final round began, hardly echoed his father’s teachings. Then again, twenty-five hundred miles west, in San Francisco’s Richmond district, Dad didn’t exactly follow his own advice.
“We turned on the TV set Sunday afternoon,” Laurence Miller said, “and they said something about Johnny Miller making four straight birdies and getting into contention. We thought they made a mistake. Once we came to the realization of what was happening, we got on pins and needles. My wife was shaking. We just didn’t want him to lose it.”
During all of the excitement that took place on the ninth green—birdies by Palmer and Schlee, Weiskopf’s hot-dog stand adventure, Heard’s birdie from the first fairway, Boros’s exasperation—Miller played Oakmont’s second nine. The day before, Miller had made a clutch eagle on number nine to finish the front side at only two over par, despite playing horribly on the first seven holes. On Sunday, he strained a little less as he walked onto the ninth green: He wasn’t frantically looking through the crowd to learn whether Linda had returned from their rental quarters with his yardage book.
Lou Beaudine, Miller’s caddie, was frantic enough for both of them.
“Break out a package of new balls, caddie,” Miller said as he passed the hot-dog tent that would soon be the scene of Tom Weiskopf’s ninth-hole high jinks.
“But, but ... you don’t want to do that now, do you?” Beaudine asked. After watching his man score five front-nine birdies, the well-traveled bagman couldn’t fathom Miller changing balls midround.
“Sure, I’m not superstitious,” Miller said on the tenth tee.
Almost immediately, Miller reflected on what he’d said. After three-putting number eight, he had climbed back to red numbers with a birdie on number nine. Only three shots separated him from the front-runners, his good friend Jerry Heard and Arnold Palmer, the man whom, as a skinny California kid, he’d patterned his game after. In less than two hours, Miller had cut his deficit in half and leapfrogged seven men on the scoreboard with the entire back nine left to play. Even a religious man like Miller probably didn’t think it was a good idea to defy the golf gods. Especially not on the tee at Oakmont’s legendary tenth hole.
“Uh, give me one of the old balls,” Miller told Beaudine, returning to his senses.
To have a chance for par on the downhill tenth, driving the ball into the right half of the fairway—letting the natural slant of the turf kick it left—is a must. Miller did just that. But his five-iron approach barely reached the front of the green, dying around forty feet short and left of the flagstick.
Like its nearby counterpart (Oakmont’s first hole), the tenth green slants steeply from front to back and right to left: hardly an easy two-putt. Hit the forty-footer a tad light, and it would break early and end as far from the cup as it began. Strike the putt too hard and it would build speed as it passed the hole, perhaps not stopping until off the green. The tenth green epitomized the Fownes/Loeffler philosophy of using fear to test a golfer’s character ... and to punish hubris.
From the left front portion of the green, the forty-footer was actually uphill rather than downhill, but it broke at least seven feet from right to left. Miller tapped the first putt with appropriate caution; he quickly realized it was short, but the speed was excellent and he left himself a two-and-a-half-footer that, by Oakmont standards, was relatively flat, straight, and below the hole. A minute later, he carefully stroked it in.
Having escaped with a par on the tenth—a hole that putting guru Dave Pelz would later call “the toughest par-four in America”—Miller happily advanced to the short par-four eleventh, which offered a much better chance at birdie.
Success on number eleven depends heavily on producing a fine tee shot. The fairway peaks, slanting sharply left to right, so to have a birdie opportunity the drive needs to travel far enough to reach the crest. But hitting the ball too far means that it will kick into the right rough, or even into a ditch. From the top of the crest, the green—set at around a forty-five-degree angle from the fairway, and tilted sharply back-to-front—is clearly in view. With the pin placed Sunday in an accessible position on the forward left part of the green, the ideal approach would stop just under the hole, leaving an uphill putt.
Miller smashed a terrific drive to the summit on the fairway, then stroked a smooth wedge that died fourteen feet below the hole. He then grabbed his sixth birdie in eleven holes and—just as Arnold Palmer missed an eight-foot par saver on the sixth to create a five-way tie atop the leaderboard—was only one shot behind the pace, at two under par. Next up, the twelfth.
Since its creation, the 603-yard twelfth hole has been one of the epic par-fives in American championship golf. And not simply because of its length; throughout the U.S. Open’s first half century (until 1955), it marked the longest hole in the history of the event. With the green flowing lazily downhill and no bunkers to guard the green’s entry, a handful of long-hitting pre-World War II golfers—before the advent of a fairway sprinkler system—actually reached the green in two shots by rolling the ball along a summer-baked pathway across the last fifty yards.
But few players ever saw a chance to attempt this stunning feat. Numerous deep bunkers narrowed the driving area, and even if the golfer escaped these, keeping a long drive out of the rough was nearly impossible because of the fairway’s sharp left-to-right incline. And the green’s front-to-back tilt—featuring innumerable undulations as deceptive as any on the course—flustered even the most skilled putters.
But the twelfth played somewhat easier (though longer) over the weekend, as a result of Saturday’s rains; the relatively soft fairway increased chances that anyone who struck an accurate drive would be able to keep the ball in the short grass. Then they could hit a fairway wood past a cross bunker, and clip a wedge from a reasonably flat lie onto the green from around a hundred yards. The pin on Sunday stood planted on a knoll on the green’s firm front left side.
Fresh off his birdie on number eleven, Miller struck a driver as hard as he could off the twelfth tee. And for the only time all afternoon (aside from the “gag” putts on numbers seven and eight), he stumbled. The ball hooked slightly left and settled in the thick rough along the fairway. It was a shot poorly played, but, miraculously, not a shot irrevocably lost.
“It was horrible stuff, about eight inches high,” Miller said of the tall grass.
2
Those in Miller’s gallery who associated him only with a resume of high-profile collapses—Augusta National, 1971; Pebble Beach, 1972; the Bob Hope, 1973—thought that making par on number twelve was a pipe dream. So did Miller.
“I should have bogeyed the hole,” he said.
From an unexpectedly good lie in the rough, Miller didn’t have to take his full dose of medicine and wedge back weakly into the fairway. Instead, he was able to strike a fairly solid seven-iron that brought him within long-iron distance of the green, 190 yards away.
In his bloodred collared shirt and another pair of flashy houndstooth slacks, Miller eased into his picture-perfect, rhythmic backswing, then exploded his four-iron through the ball. He wrinkled his nose and, as the ball flew high and straight, spun the club a few times in nervous anticipation, only to be delighted by the result.
A few hundred miles east, in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, Oakmont member and later club champion Dick Thompson watched too. His wife had finally worn him down, and the family began a summer vacation that day, despite the final round of the world’s greatest golf tournament being played at the country club where he had been a member since 1961.
“I’ll never forget twelve,” Thompson said, recalling his memory of watching the Open on TV in a bar. “He hit a good drive; he hooked it a little bit and was in the rough. He came out with a seven-iron. Then he hit the most incredible shot I’ve ever seen, because that number twelve green slopes away from you. And they had the pin ... I’d say it was about near the middle, but over a little rise.
“What was incredible about it was how it stopped.”
The shot hit the front of the green, eight feet short of the flag, grew legs, then died fourteen feet away, leaving Miller an uphill putt with a slight left-to-right break. Miller marched toward the green, surveyed the putt from several different angles, then rolled it in for an incredible birdie four.
“Number twelve was the whole turning point for me,” Miller said.
Miller’s eighth birdie came only a few minutes later, when he dropped a four-iron to within five feet of the flag on the par-three thirteenth.
“I really flagged it,” he said about the stroke that took two hops before settling into the only easy position (directly below the hole) on this fast, partially humpbacked green. The putt broke barely an inch as Miller knocked it in. He cracked a quick smile, acknowledged the applause of the small crowd, and walked quickly off the green.
In Oakmont’s pro shop, Bob Ford was stunned. After watching Schlee and Palmer on the first tee, he had returned to selling merchandise. From the shop’s big picture window, he could see the scoreboard near the eighteenth green. He had glanced at it periodically, but the posting of Miller’s birdie on the thirteenth really caught his attention.
“I said, ‘Mr. Worsham, they must have run out of black numbers, because all they are putting up for Mr. Miller are red numbers.’
“‘Son, I think those are birdies,’ he said.
“No way he’s doing that,” Ford countered.
“In my mind, I think in the minds of many, Arnold was still going to win. It’s only a matter of time. Arnie will find out what Johnny shoots and then he’s going to shoot something better.”
Miller—unconcerned at this moment about the men behind him—continued to the next hole. He launched a three-wood off the fourteenth tee that veered slightly toward the safe right side of the fairway: technically in the rough, but in a tame patch that left him a perfect angle to the flagstick, about a hundred yards away. He looked primed for a fourth consecutive birdie (for the second time that afternoon), thanks to a picturesque pitching wedge that cleared the hump before the hole and settled twelve feet away. He spoke briefly to his caddie as the two walked side by side toward yet another realistic birdie try. They could see the scoreboard behind the green confirming that Miller’s three consecutive birdies had just given him a share of the lead at four under par.
“Coming down fourteen, I was crying,” Beaudine remembered. “I was crying all the way around. I was half hopped up, my heart was beating fast, and I had a lump in my throat. I grabbed hold of his hand and he said, ‘Hey, let me get hopped up.’ I was thinking about what could happen. He could bogey seventeen and double-bogey eighteen.”
When his downhill putt found the perfect line—antsy, Miller tapped at the ground with his putter, trying to
will
the ball in—only to stop two inches short, Miller nodded his head in dismay. The Mormon who “doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and doesn’t wink at the blonde in the gallery” probably didn’t curse either, prior to his par tap-in. But he did walk back to the spot of the birdie try and regrip the putter, attempting to re-create in his mind and hands the feel that would have been necessary to sink the putt.
BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
12.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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