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 (6 page)

BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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“I was happy with the score but I’m not particularly happy with the way I played,” Palmer said. Most distressing was his inability to get down in two from green-side bunkers as well as his “mediocre” driving—most annoying because he and his father had worked so intently on driving during the past month.
Although Palmer was satisfied with his four birdies (all from inside eight feet), the four bogeys were curious. For years, the press and fans had chalked up Palmer’s major championship failures to mediocre putting. And the enormous tally of three putts during the 1962 U.S. Open was well documented. On day one in 1973, however, Palmer three-putted only once, on the infamously difficult tenth, and that had come from fifty feet: Three-putts from that distance, on that green, were nothing worse than a draw.
Overall, an even-par start to the Open encouraged Palmer, and the Army. By the time he signed his scorecard, nearly every group had completed their rounds, yet only four men broke par. The course—though toughened up only slightly since 1962—was playing as difficult as the vigilant members had hoped (the average first-round score of 76.8 was actually a half stroke higher than in 1962). And Palmer’s 71 matched his opening-round score in 1962. Eleven years older, the field stronger, and his career having been to hell and back, Palmer remained in the hunt after one round.
The man who had dethroned Palmer as the world’s greatest golfer, Jack Nicklaus, was far less pleased by his start—at least through the first sixteen holes.
Nicklaus had been the talk of the sporting world during the spring and summer of 1972, when he won the first two legs of the Grand Slam. Though he came up just short in the British Open, losing by way of Lee Trevino’s miraculous chip-in on the seventeenth hole at Muirfield, Nicklaus, at age thirty-two, had reached his peak. He took the scoring title, the money title, and a second PGA Player of the Year award in 1972, in addition to winning seven tournaments. Eclipsing that spectacular season seemed impossible, but when Nicklaus arrived at Oakmont in June 1973, he was on his way to doing just that.
As his family and business ventures grew exponentially during the late 1960s, Nicklaus scaled back his playing schedule: He vowed never to be away from his four children and college-sweetheart wife, Barbara (whom he’d married at age twenty) for more than two weeks. (Barbara was currently pregnant with their fifth child.) While many touring pros played in over thirty PGA events a year to make ends meet, Nicklaus now appeared in less than two dozen, yet still regularly finished at the top or near the top of the annual money list. And 1973 was no exception. Prior to the Masters in early April, Nicklaus won twice and finished sixth or better in three of the other five events he competed in.
Only a terrible stretch during the second round of the Masters—three bogeys, then a double bogey on the front nine—kept Nicklaus from winning a fifth Green Jacket. He shot a final-round 66 and finished tied for fourth.
But fourth was not nearly good enough for Nicklaus at this dominating stage of his career. As he later explained, in a logic uniquely his: “Through that period of time, when I didn’t win [at] Augusta, I sort of thought the year was over. It was ... I suppose, an immature way to look at it, but ... the Grand Slam is what I was really after. I did not achieve it. But that’s what I was really after, so, if I didn’t win the first leg, then I sort of felt like, Let’s wait till next year.”
Still, Niektaus—arguably the most insatiable competitor in golf history-battled ferociously throughout the entire season.
“Even in ’73 I still won a lot of golf tournaments [seven],” he acknowledged. But: “I think I probably won those in spite of myself.”
While the psychology of Nicklaus’s 1973 season remains elusive, he did stay home in Orlando for most of the two months following his disappointment at Augusta. He practiced, tended to the family, and actively oversaw his diversifying business empire (including the creation of Muirfield Village, the bold new golf course and housing development that broke ground months earlier in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio). To the chagrin of PGA Tournament sponsors, who knew that Nicklaus’s presence boosted gate and TV revenues, he played in only two events during the next eight weeks: He won both of them, each with a stellar field.
First, at the Tournament of Champions the week following the Masters, Nicklaus outlasted his rival Lee Trevino by a shot. Then, in another single-stroke win, he defeated his heir apparent, Tom Weiskopf, in May’s Atlanta Golf Classic for his fourth victory of the season (he also won in January in the Bing Crosby Pro-Am National Golf Tournament and in late March in the Greater New Orleans Open).
With the U.S. Open at Oakmont only two weeks away, Nicklaus’s game showed no signs of rust. Since he’d already demonstrated that he did not need as much practice or tournament hardening as other top professionals to remain at peak readiness, everyone assumed Nicklaus would, as usual, spend time before the Open preparing on-site for another major. And, predictably, in the two weeks leading up to the 1973 U.S. Open, he visited Oakmont to relearn the course that had jump-started his professional career.
In early June, from his base in Columbus (the Muirfield Village project had entered a key financial stage), Nicklaus awoke early in the morning and flew in his private jet to nearby Greater Pittsburgh International Airport. He then rented a helicopter that, ten minutes later, dropped him off adjacent to Oakmont’s first tee. Even Jack Nicklaus couldn’t switch on his game instantaneously: He cold-topped his opening drive.
Nicklaus shook off the faux pas and played the course at a leisurely pace, with several balls. He also putted from various locations on each green to begin the mental and physical process of adapting to their exceptional speed and mystifying contours. Then the multimillion-dollar entrepreneur jumped back into the helicopter and flew home for a business meeting in Columbus later in the afternoon. Arnold Palmer and Mark McCormack, the founder of IMG, had invented this frantic blend of golf/business multitasking. But Nicklaus practiced it at least as avidly as Palmer, and added several novel twists so that he could remain intimately involved in the daily lives of his children.
Curiously, even though he had just won at Atlanta and felt confident about his practice session at Oakmont, Nicklaus concluded that for him to successfully defend his U.S. Open crown, his game required additional work under the strain of tournament competition.
He broke his long-standing practice of foregoing the PGA event the week before a major championship. To the delight of its sponsors, Nicklaus registered at the last second to play in the IVB Philadelphia Golf Classic at Whitemarsh Valley, a classic course built in 1907, just four years after Oakmont.
“The Whitemarsh course has small greens and narrow fairways and is similar to Oakmont,” Nicklaus told the press in explaining his surprise decision.
Nicklaus’s observation set off a minor war of words between him and Palmer.
The sharply contrasting personalities of the two giants of modern golf created a gnawing friction between them, defining their relationship for decades. The discord even extended to an arcane disagreement about whether playing Whitemarsh was good preparation for playing a U.S. Open at Oakmont.
“There’s no similarity,” Palmer stated. “I won’t be at Whitemarsh.... Whitemarsh is a good course, but Oakmont was designed as a links similar to a Scottish course. It has few trees compared with Whitemarsh. Its bunkers are famous, although they are no longer furrowed. It has magnificent greens and it has no water holes, while Whitemarsh has creeks and ditches. I just don’t agree with Jack at all.”
Nicklaus played erratically at Whitemarsh, especially from tee to green. Still, after three mediocre rounds, he carded a masterful 67, the lowest Sunday score. Six shots behind the winner, Tom Weiskopf, he tied for fifth place. Nicklaus now had only three days left for practice prior to the start of the U.S. Open, but he had a clearer idea (whatever Palmer might think) about which parts of his game needed work before he was Oakmont-ready.
Naturally, Nicklaus stood out as the clear-cut favorite to defend the title he had won at Pebble Beach. He could also become the first man in seventy years to win two U.S. Opens on the same course (Scotsman Willie Anderson won his first and fourth U.S. Open titles at the Myopia Hunt Club in Massachusetts in 1901 and 1905).
Unlike the year before, the Grand Slam was not in Nicklaus’s sights in 1973: He had not won the Masters in April. But never before had he won four tournaments (out of eleven entered) prior to the U.S. Open. Las Vegas oddsmakers set Nicklaus as a four-to-one favorite. So, too, did famed sports prognosticator Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, who predicted that the winner would set a new record score of 279, four below the 283s that Hogan had shot in 1953 and Nicklaus and Palmer had matched in 1962.
Still, by the early 1970s, both the experts and journalists dubbed Nicklaus the favorite in just about every tournament. Since he’d recovered from a minor “slump” in the late 1960s, and especially since his father’s death in 1970, no one (save perhaps Lee Trevino) possessed both the shots and the intestinal fortitude to go toe-to-toe with Nicklaus in the final round of a tournament.
Internally, Nicklaus had a personal, revenge-driven incentive to triumph again at Oakmont. From the moment he arrived in town in June 1973, sportswriters rehashed Pittsburgh fans’ heckling of Nicklaus eleven years earlier. They also stressed how much had changed in his public persona since then.
“He returns now as the game’s premier player, acknowledged the world’s best and eyeing a plateau of performance and accomplishment unattained by any other man to play this old game,” wrote Bob Greene of the Associated Press. “He returns no longer fat, no longer a kid, no longer uncertain. He’s a trim 185 pounds. He’s a mature 33, quietly confident, self-contained, self assured, unfailingly courteous. His drab garb of the early ’60s is gone, replaced by quiet, subdued colors. His blond mane is at modish length.”
Winning tournament after tournament, major title after major title, helped make Nicklaus more appealing to serious golf fans. And once he consciously remodeled his image in the late 1960s-losing weight, lengthening his hair, and modifying his wardrobe to follow the style of the day—Nicktaus transitioned from a spectacularly talented golfer to admire from afar, into a beloved fan favorite. “Jack’s Pack” now crowded the fairways with an intensity that, on occasion, almost rivaled Arnie’s Army.
Nicklaus sternly brushed aside any hint of animosity toward the Palmer-faithful for their unkind behavior in 1962. The crowd’s scorn for Nicklaus may actually have motivated the Golden Bear, as he birdied the first three holes in round one.
“Honestly, I don’t remember the gallery; all I thought about was golf,” he said. “I played with blinders on, I suppose.”
Still, no one could deny that a second triumph at Oakmont, in Palmer’s backyard, would be payback to fans who had so harassed the rookie in 1962 that his father had to be restrained from physically lashing out—restrained by, of all people, Ohio State football coach and Nicklaus family friend Woody Hayes.
In 1973, Nicklaus was the marquee name in a threesome that included reigning U.S. Amateur champion Vinny Giles and former Masters champion Bob Goalby. Teeing off at 10:04 a.m., Nicklaus did not get off to the same blistering start as he had eleven years earlier. He carded three bogeys and a lone birdie over the first thirteen holes. Still, that wasn’t as disturbing as how he racked up strokes. Not only did he fail to birdie the par-five fourth hole, which he had played superbly in 1962; he ended up with a six after hooking his drive into the Church Pew bunkers and then hitting wildly before finally reaching the green.
One over par through eight holes, Nicklaus felt his spirits buoyed when he crossed the bridge that connected the two halves of the Oakmont course. (After completing the first hole, players walk across a bridge above the Pennsylvania Turnpike, play numbers two through eight on that side of the course, then travel back across the bridge to complete the round. Oakmont is the only venue in the world where an interstate highway actually runs through the golf course.) There, Jack spotted his ten-year-old son, Jack Jr., after he crossed the bridge and arrived on the ninth tee.
“Did you play golf yesterday?” Nicklaus asked.
The boy nodded.
“How many holes, thirty-six?”
Again, the answer was yes.
“Did you win?”
Negative. Nicklaus grinned and proceeded to the ninth.
Nicklaus then blasted two enormous shots that placed him on the par-five green in two, and barely rimmed out his eighteen-foot eagle putt. His birdie returned him to one over par for the front nine.
But Jack Jr. wasn’t in sight to energize his dad on the next hole; following a mediocre iron shot, Jack three-putted the tenth green for another bogey. On the par-three thirteenth, his four-iron landed in the rough and a poor chip left him a tricky fifteen-footer to save par. He fortunately rolled it in to keep from ballooning to three over par.
Nicklaus canceled out a terrific birdie on the fourteenth with a bogey on the difficult par-four fifteenth, falling back to two over. After a routine par, he walked down the grassy slope and up to the new tee box on Oakmont’s seventeenth hole, a classic teaser par-four of only 322 yards.
For decades, Oakmont’s next-to-last hole had morphed players’ great hopes into great anguish. Before the Open returned in 1973, the seventeenth measured only 290 yards, an uphill, slight dogleg left with small pin oaks and deep rough that blocked a direct route to the green. Often-in search of an eagle or at worst a birdie—pros chose to cut the dogleg with a single blast of the driver, fly their ball over the trees, and land it just in front of the green. If they were successful, their main concern was avoiding the exceedingly deep sand pit—known affectionately as Big Mouth—that blocked the right entry to the green.
BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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