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 (40 page)

BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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Had it not been for a poor iron shot on the par-three sixth—he made a bogey there by missing the green—Wadkins would have made up all five strokes to par on the front nine. Instead, he settled for one over par at the turn, after a sparkling 32—tying Gary Player and Gene Borek for the best front nine posted during the championship.
Considering that this was the U.S. Open, the tournament that brings out the inner choker in every player, Wadkins felt certain he could stage the greatest final march in championship golf history—an eight-stroke, come-from-behind win. None of his fellow touring pros dared doubt him.
Two weeks before the U.S. Open, a reporter had asked Jack Nicklaus to assess who posed the most serious challenge to defending his Pebble Beach title. With typical candor, Nicklaus voiced veteran players’ respect for Wadkins’s steely drive.
“Tom Weiskopf has more talent than anyone, but he hasn’t learned to harness his insides. Lee Trevino is about as sound as there is in golf,” Nicklaus said. “The best young player coming along is Ben Crenshaw. Some say he hits the ball farther than I, but I don’t think so. There’s Lanny Wadkins, who has more guts than talent. Johnny Miller has all the natural talent and does everything a golfer on tour should. If he had Wadkins’ guts ...”
 
BY HIS OWN ADMISSION, JOHNNY Miller did not have Lanny Wadkins’s guts early Sunday morning at Oakmont. The 76 he shot the day before—whether due to the missing yardage book or not—had drained his hopes and evoked old fears that he didn’t have what it took to win a major championship. Now in a four-way tie for thirteenth place and six strokes back, Miller had no illusions of contending for the title. Indeed, Linda Miller was “so unhappy with the way I played yesterday she nearly cried” and decided to stay behind on Sunday morning, packed the car, and waited with their infant to pick Johnny up and head to the next tour stop in Akron. Meanwhile, Johnny hitched a ride to the course with a colleague’s wife, mumbling throughout the drive about his miserable play on Saturday.
Miller dragged himself to the practice tee and, with his caddie observing, began warming up for his 1:47 p.m. tee time with tour veteran Miller Barber.
“I was really down [that] morning. I had almost no desire,” Miller said that evening.
“Here I had had a chance to win the Open, and I had gagged it.”
The third-round 76 may have deflated Miller, but it also liberated him. Freed from the burden of strategizing his round and planning each hole, he relaxed.
But exactly what happened next remains a puzzle. Over the years, accounts have changed greatly, even taken on supernatural overtones, regarding Miller’s preparations for Sunday’s final round.
While hitting balls on the practice tee, Miller decided to open his stance (i.e., draw back his left foot and point his left toe more in the direction of the target). Later that evening, Miller explained that this was not a radical or new adjustment; during February’s Bob Hope, he had made this exact change, with success, to correct a small glitch in his alignment.
“I remembered earlier in the year, when in eight weeks I was seventy under par and I shot a sixty-three in the Hope Classic. I was playing with an open stance. I had let my stance slip closed [since then], allowed my left foot to slide around too far, so I opened it up on the practice tee.”
As Miller’s “Miracle at Oakmont” has been embellished over the decades, so, too, has his memory of what occurred beforehand. When Miller returned to Oakmont thirty-four years later to broadcast the 2007 U.S. Open, he added a new element to what he had been thinking on the practice tee. His Sunday-morning stance adjustment was no longer just a recollection of a similar change he’d made a few months earlier.
“Well, I was on the practice tee and I had about five balls to go and I just had this clear thought or voice say to me, ‘Open your stance way up. Way open.’ And I never had that before, and never had it since. I was thinking, ‘What was that?’ It was like, I don’t want to do that, and it just said, ‘Open your stance way up,’ again. And I thought, ‘Well, I’ll try it.’ I’m always open to trying things.”
Miller’s caddie, “Sweet” Lou Beaudine, offered a still different account of Miller’s swing adjustments.
“On Friday evening [after Miller’s second-round 69] he went down on the range and worked on opening his stance. He was hopped up. ‘I’m going to win,’ he said. He was hitting his five-iron two hundred yards.”
1
According to Beaudine, Miller’s misplaced yardage book wasn’t the reason for his roller-coaster round of 76 on Saturday.
“I’m going back to my old stance on Sunday,” Beaudine remembered Miller saying. “I shouldn’t have changed.”
“That’s what you get for changing your stance in the middle of a major tournament,” Beaudine added. “It didn’t matter whether he shot a seventy or an eighty. He had given up.”
Of course, blindly endorsing Beaudine’s account over Miller’s would be foolish. At the same time, Beaudine’s account may help explain an overlooked mystery regarding Miller’s third-round score.
Without his yardage book on Saturday, Miller shot a 38 on the front nine, two over par. After Linda retrieved the book and handed it to him on the tenth tee, Miller shot another 38 on the back side, three over par.
Given how much emphasis Miller, even today, places on the absence of precise yardage measurements to explain his third-round 76, he probably shouldn’t have scored worse with the yardage information than without it. But that is what actually happened: three over par with the yardage book in hand, two over par without it.
Over the years, as Miller retold the story countless times, the facts became a bit garbled. “I had forgotten my yardage book on Saturday,” he claimed years later. “My wife, Linda, went back and got it for me and gave it back to me on the tenth tee. By that time, I was five over par.”
In truth, Miller did not shoot a 41 (five over par) on the front nine, as he claimed; he was actually only two shots over par when he reached the tenth tee and his wife gave him the yardage book.
Miller has also exaggerated just how well he played the back nine, with the yardage book in hand. “I played like par on the back nine,” he said several decades later. Miller actually played the back nine in three over par: a 38, not an even-par 35.
Whatever the cause, Miller’s explanation of his high scoring in Saturday’s third round just doesn’t add up, or seem solidly grounded in the available facts: neither the front and back nine scores, nor his account of them.
This tangled web of memories remains irresolvable; so, too, the irresistible tendency to embroider a compelling athletic tale. Regardless of when, why, where, or how it occurred, a rejuvenated Johnny Miller stepped onto the first tee Sunday morning: the one-of-a-kind, zoned-in, inspired golfer blessed with an unearthly ability to “go low.”
Miller led off his Sunday round with a superb drive down the middle of the damp fairway. He followed that with a high, perfectly clipped three-iron that stuck to five feet, despite the front-to-back-sloping green. The pair of brilliant shots yielded a rare birdie on the daunting first hole.
After crossing the bridge over the turnpike, Miller played for position off the tee on the short, uphill par-four. He then calmly nailed his nine-iron approach to a foot from the flagstick. A pair of birdies from a combined putting distance of six feet: a perfect recipe for conquering two of the most punishing greens in the entire golfing world.
On the third hole, Miller avoided the Church Pews off the tee and reached the green in regulation, but had a long putt for birdie when his five-iron lacked the precision of his two previous approach shots.
“I was just trying to get close from twenty-five feet,” he recalled, “but when it went in, I said to myself, ‘Well, son of a gun, I’m back to even par.’”
Miller had not played the par-five fourth hole particularly well, scoring no better than par each of the first three days. Still, despite letting his three-wood sail right into the green-side bunker, over a hundred feet from the flagstick, he remained confident about getting his birdie. His sand blast was a beauty, carrying thirty yards in the air before landing gently and skirting the cup’s left edge, a mere six inches away.
Four birdies in four holes (three via putts from near tap-in range) unexpectedly made Miller a contender, while the preround leaders continued to stroke putts on the practice green.
“When I get charged up, all I can think about is birdies,” he said. “I’m Joe Feast or Famine—I get everything or nothing.”
And after the fourth consecutive birdie, clearly Joe Feast was playing Oakmont.
“I was sky-high and said, ‘Okay, baby, let’s go!’”
Miller fell slightly from his atmospheric high once he walked off the fourth green. Unspectacular on the fifth and sixth—though he did leave both approach shots safely below the hole—his two-putts from around twenty-five feet secured easy pars.
Now two shots behind the leaders, Miller hit a long, straight drive beyond the crest of the hill on the seventh fairway; this left him staring down the unnerving pin located on the green’s back right corner. With the afternoon winds picking up, the safe play was to leave the second shot well below the hole to avoid overshooting the green. But Miller was flag-hunting that Sunday afternoon. Just as the last pairing of the day (Julius Boros and Jerry Heard) started their round, Miller flew his nine-iron straight at the flagstick and stopped the ball a mere six feet away.
If he could sink the relatively simple putt on number seven, Miller would be within a stroke of the lead, one step closer to winning his first major championship. But as he lined up his putt, the excitement of what was happening finally caught up with Miller. Not only was he creeping up on the leaders; he seemed yet again on his way to the kind of surreal round that was becoming his tour trademark—much like the 61 he shot at Phoenix three years earlier, or his 63 back in February at the Bob Hope. And just like two years earlier at Augusta National and the following January at Pebble Beach, his mind started to wander.
His short putt for birdie on number seven wasn’t even close. “I really got pumped up. I was super nervous ... my putt at seven was a choke.” Still four under through seven holes, but a great opportunity squandered.
Miller regathered himself on the tee at the gigantic, par-three eighth (playing 255 yards that day to the rear pin position), and dropped a four-wood safely onto the green: a fine shot, and close enough to ensure a simple par on Oakmont’s flattest putting surface.
But again Miller lost mental focus and stumbled on the green. He misstruck his thirty-footer and it came up well short. He badly missed the remaining five-footer.
“I can honestly say I gagged on those putts on seven and eight,” he said afterward. “One thing I kept in my head out there all day. ‘Don’t shank,’ I was thinking. I was thinking that on almost every iron shot. I know that’s bad thinking, but I couldn’t help it. It was always up there in my mind.”
At the most critical moment in his pro career, Johnny Miller seemed to have completely forgotten his father’s advice: “Never allow yourself to think negatively.”
“I remembered [how] at Augusta in 1971,” Miller would say later, “I got so pumped up that I was finger-walking down the fairways and took three straight bogeys.”
As he crossed the Pennsylvania Turnpike to play the last ten holes, back to even par for the championship and four shots behind the leaders, Miller couldn’t help but fear that history was about to repeat itself.
 
FOUR STROKES OFF THE LEAD at one over par, Gary Player teed off two groups after Johnny Miller. Sapped of his legendary stamina, Player improved significantly upon Saturday’s collapse (77) but never roamed into contention, with a 73 on Sunday. His finishing twelfth at the U.S. Open, just a few months after two major surgeries, let his colleagues know that he was back to stay and a threat in any major championship.
Just minutes after Player teed off, the youngest member of golf’s Big Three took the stage. At 2:02 p.m., Jack Nicklaus, also four shots back at one over par, set out to replicate the finest single round of his luminous career.
Six years earlier, at another of America’s esteemed golf cathedrals, Baltusrol in New Jersey, Nicklaus began the last round of the Open trailing the leader by a stroke. Playing alongside Arnold Palmer, an inspired Golden Bear shot a faultless five under 65. Four strokes better than his nemesis, Nicklaus won his second U.S. Open, adding another glorious chapter to his major championship legacy—and another heartbreak to Palmer’s.
Given Nicklaus’s record of final-round brilliance and his 1962 victory at Oakmont, only a fool would count him out. Despite driving the ball inconsistently on Saturday, he scrambled to a 74 and stayed in the hunt. That night, he made an adjustment: not in his strategy or putting stroke, but one he nevertheless hoped would resurrect his chance to win.
Nicklaus concluded that the pillow he’d been sleeping on was cramping his neck and preventing a full turn on his backswing. He switched pillows (he also made this change before the final round of the 1972 British Open, where a 65 nearly edged out Lee Trevino for the Claret Jug) and was pain-free on Sunday afternoon. From that point forward, Nicklaus traveled with his own pillow to every tournament.
BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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