The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (24 page)

Of course following his round, Nicklaus was asked about Johnny Miller. “Golf’s a bigger game than any individual. Really, if you win 20 percent of the time, you’re on top. Of course, you like to have the best record. That’s only human nature,” said Nicklaus. Then, as a little dig at Miller, Nicklaus added, “It’s easier to play when you’re not in contention, but it’s not as much fun.”

After being on edge mentally all week, Miller wound up making the cut by three shots. “I was out of it,” he admits.

He trailed Nicklaus by eleven shots, a seemingly insurmountable deficit considering no one in the history of golf’s four major championships had ever come back from that many strokes after 36 holes to win.

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MILLER

J
ohnny Miller had blown his best opportunity to win the Masters, and his critics reveled in the failure. To them, all the West Coast wins, low rounds, endorsements, and fame would never make up for the lack of a Masters title. By Saturday morning, they hammered away. Kenneth Denlinger in the
Washington Post
was one of the harshest: “Johnny. Hey, Johnny Miller. Let me tell you something. All those 61s at Tu-nix, or whatever, and all that money don’t mean much unless you win some tournaments the big guys want, too. Get yourself some more majors, kid, then maybe I’ll get excited.”

Miller had no shot at a rebuttal. Going back to Hilton Head, the Golden Bear had now bettered him by thirty-three shots in the last four rounds when they were both in the field. In order to make up an eleven shot deficit on Nicklaus the next two days, he would have to pick up a shot on him every three holes the rest of the way. In the minds of the press and sports fans everywhere, that just wasn’t going to happen. Not to Jack Nicklaus. Not at Augusta National.

This, however, was the Plastic Arm. Two days of marginal golf did nothing to dilute the unwavering self-confidence inside of Johnny Miller. By April 1975, he wasn’t afraid of poor starts to tournaments.
He wasn’t afraid of Jack Nicklaus. He wasn’t afraid of going low. And he wasn’t afraid of large deficits. Before the third round began, he could recall the midway point of the Masters four years earlier, when in Miller’s mind, a green jacket should already have been in his closet.

IN 1971
, Miller was in only his second full season on the PGA Tour. Although winless, he was starting to contend on Sundays. Three weeks before that year’s Masters, he held his first 54-hole lead on Tour at the Greater Jacksonville Open. Playing in a field that included Nicklaus and Palmer, Miller battled thirty-mile-per-hour winds to shoot a 69 in the third round—the only sub-70 score of the day. Leading much of the final round, he walked up to the last green with a twenty-foot birdie putt to win the tournament. Instead of giving it a firm run, he left his putt two feet short. Then, unimaginably, he missed the par putt. His three-putt bogey left him one shot out of a playoff, which was eventually captured by Gary Player. The Associated Press reported, “(Miller was) in tears as he signed his card.”

The heartbreaking conclusion was offset by a benefit—the high finish assured Miller of his first Masters appearance as a professional. In a category employed only once, Augusta National officials had instituted a points system based on finishes from the week after the 1970 Masters to the week before the 1971 tournament. Miller, who entered a whopping thirty-six events in that time span, was one of eight players not otherwise eligible who qualified off this list.

When Miller arrived at Augusta, he played all of his practice rounds with his friend and mentor Billy Casper. A fellow Mormon, Casper was also the defending champion, having defeated Gene Littler in a playoff the previous year. Miller felt like his game measured up to Casper’s in those practice rounds, but his good play didn’t translate to low scores the first two days. He opened the tournament with a double bogey on the very first hole, and, following rounds of
72–73, he trailed by seven shots at the midway point—seemingly out of contention.

In the third round, Miller began two hours and ten minutes ahead of the final group. After holing a twenty-foot par putt on the 4th hole to ignite his round, Miller made five birdies. Even a bogey at the 18th didn’t prevent him from firing the low round of the day, a 68 (later matched by Jack Nicklaus). He had climbed to within four shots of Nicklaus and Charles Coody going into the final round.

On Sunday, Miller went off in the third to last pairing with Hale Irwin and picked up where he left off the day before. He birdied the 3rd, 4th, and 8th holes to go out in 33. Then at the 11th, he poured in a nine-foot birdie putt to reach four under on the day. “This (charge) drove the hordes mad,” wrote Dan Jenkins in
Sports Illustrated
. “Suddenly, they personally had discovered the new Nelson, or Hogan or Nicklaus.”

If Arnie had his army, Miller was quickly forming his own militia. “That was the most excitement that I had ever caused on a golf course,” he says. “They were really pulling for me.” With a willowy physique and blond mop-top, Miller already stood out, aided by what he admits were some pretty wild clothes. The Men’s Fashion Association of America had voted him the flashiest dresser on Tour. On this day, his ensemble consisted of a pale lime-green shirt with wide collar, extra-wide white belt, and Technicolor pants with the seamless colors of army green, aqua blue, grey, black, and white vertical stripes.

This flamboyant figure right out of the
Mod Squad
was a striking juxtaposition against the backdrop of Amen Corner where Miller’s young career was about to take off. On the par-three 12th, Miller played his tee shot at the middle of the front bunker, trying to fade a 7-iron to the far-right hole location. After hitting it, Miller thought the shot would end up stiff. But a gust of wind caught the ball, and it came up short in the bunker, buried deep under its front lip. Miller’s
run up the leaderboard appeared over. “It looks like I’m going to make bogey or double bogey,” Miller says. “I hit it as hard as I could, and that thing popped out of that dang bunker, ran down the hill, and went right in the hole.”

After a par on the next hole, he launched a long iron to within six feet on the 14th for another birdie. Suddenly, Miller was six under for the round, seven under for the tournament. The fledgling professional, just eighteen days shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, now led the Masters by two shots over Coody with four holes to play.

During this stretch, Miller had been completely in the moment. He didn’t realize his position until walking to the 15th tee, when a patron told him that he was leading by a pair of shots. “I didn’t know whether to believe him or not,” says Miller. “But on the 15th tee, I’m thinking, my dad’s watching this thing at home. I’m going to win the Masters, and he’s going to be so excited.”

Until then, Miller had just been trying to make birdies, like he would in a practice round. Suddenly, with the thought of actually winning the Masters for his first professional title—something only Claude Harmon had done in 1948—he had committed one of golf’s deadliest sins. He had thought ahead to the end result.

With a rush of adrenaline, Miller did hit a good drive on the par five and, following some debate, went for the green in two with a 4-wood, his ball kicking into the right greenside bunker. To the gallery’s delight, he nearly holed another bunker shot, but the ball ran six feet past the hole. It was not a tough putt, and a birdie would give him complete control of the tournament. Instead, the ball lipped out violently.

On the 16th tee, Miller—“like a dumbbell,” he says—made an unwise decision to play at the flagstick. His 5-iron went directly at the hole, but the ball jumped into the back right bunker. After blasting out to eight feet, his par putt caught the right side of the hole, horseshoeing out for another crucial miss. Shortly thereafter, Coody, who two years before had led by one with three to play before
bogeying each hole coming in to lose by two, made birdie at 15 and then another at 16.

Now Miller was one back. He parred the 17th, but then made another bogey at 18, failing to get up and down for par after a poor chip from short right of the green. Unlike in 1969, Coody didn’t blink, even making a miraculous par on 17 after hooking his drive into the greenside bunker on the 7th. From there, he managed to hit to the front of the green with what he called “the greatest shot I ever hit in my life” and sink a seven-foot putt. On the last hole, Coody manufactured another par after a wild hook off the tee to win his first, and only, major championship by two shots.

Even with bogeys on two of the final three holes, Johnny Miller had again shot the day’s low round with a 68 and elicited the most vocal cheers. He became only the fourth player in Masters history to shoot the low round each of the last two days. There were no tears this time around. “It was all a bit of a blur to me,” says Miller. “I just got ahead of myself. I stayed awfully aggressive and hit good shots coming in. The putts just spun out.”

Miller sat next to Nicklaus during the awards ceremony on the practice putting green, awaiting their silver medals as joint runners up. Nicklaus nudged Miller, leaned over and said, “Big deal, huh, second place.” Miller, the youngest competitor to finish 2nd in Masters history, responded in kind, but recalls, “I wanted to say, ‘You know, Jack, it is kind of a big deal’.” Miller had recorded his best finish ever as a professional, more than doubled the largest paycheck of his life ($17,500), and upstaged the big four of the time (Nicklaus, Palmer, Player, and Casper). But looking back, he realized what Nicklaus meant: winning matters most.

For a short time, Miller became haunted by the ending of the 1971 Masters. He thought Coody got lucky and he got hosed. “I should’ve won that thing,” he declares.

The one characteristic Johnny Miller did not lack was self-belief. The loss bothered him, but it didn’t become him. He truly thought
that he would win the Masters one day. In fact, he was destined to win it. Johnny Miller had always been—and would always be—a “champ.” After all, Larry Miller had made sure of that.

JOHNNY MILLER’S FATHER
served as the poster-dad for childhood affirmation. Laurence Otto Miller always spoke positive and encouraging words to his children. Johnny never remembers his father uttering a negative or derogatory comment toward him or any of his siblings. To him, anyone who tried hard was a “champ”—a term he called Johnny more often than his actual name. That praise and pronouncement would have a lasting effect on his son.

Genetically, Larry Miller also handed down quite a creative spark. He came from a family of artists—his grandfather was a noted sculptor, creating many pieces for the California State Capital in Sacramento. Johnny’s father was highly intelligent—an outside-the-box thinker—with his ideas straddling the line between genius and quack. The wheels were constantly turning in his head. He came up with countless inventions, wrote poetry, and composed songs. But he was also fiery, driven, and harvested a temper he tried to hide as much as possible from his children. Once during the 1966 NCAA Championship at Stanford, he broke his hand after slamming it into a steel post when Johnny three-putted a par-five green he’d reached in two. “He would’ve been a Tommy Bolt if he’d played the Tour,” his son reckons.

Miller’s day job was at the RCA Corporation in San Francisco, where he missed only a handful of days in thirty-eight years of work. His expertise was in Morse code, and he could type a warp-speed 120 words a minute (forty is the average). During World War II, RCA sent him to the Philippines, where he served as a communications specialist to aid the United States’s military effort.

At RCA, Miller met Ida Meldrum. A quite, introspective woman, Meldrum descended from Mormon pioneers. With jobs scarce during the Depression, she left Utah and ventured on her own to San
Francisco, where she found work in RCA’s operations department. There, Meldrum relayed messages from one wireless telegraph operator to another while zooming around on roller skates.

Johnny Miller may have received his father’s wiring—inquisitive mind, creative veins, energetic soul—but off the course, he took after his mother, who was reserved and tranquil and never raised her voice. Religion was the bedrock of her life. With children in tow every Sunday morning, she hopped on the K Car to Sloan Boulevard, caught an L bus to 19th Avenue, and then walked a third of a mile to church (she didn’t learn how to drive until in her fifties).

Larry and Ida were a perfect match for each other. “It was quite a yin and yang with my dad—so much passion and energy—and my mom who was very calm,” Miller says. But the vastly different styles and personalities they passed on to Johnny created a walking paradox: someone committed to his family, deeply religious, loyal, caring, yet antsy, competitive, egocentric, and overly confident. Johnny Miller would tussle with these contradictions throughout his life, especially when it came to golf.