Chasing Greatness

by Adam Lazarus

  “Sam is a better putter than he gives himself credit for,” Wadkins observed after the round. “He might do better if he were more positive about it. Sometimes he finds ways to miss putts.”

  Snead (like his nephew) also couldn’t help but continue his diatribe about U.S. Open golf, complaining especially about the long rough along the fairways.

  “I know everybody’s got to play the same course, but it sure ain’t fun playing this course. But maybe the U.S. Open ain’t meant to be fun.”

  Aside from a few golfers—the rejuvenated Player, a plucky youngster like Wadkins, or the unflappable Nicklaus—it was hard for anyone to stay positive, much less have “fun,” that afternoon at Oakmont.

  “I think this course is unfair,” said Ben Crenshaw, after wrapping up his round of 80 with Snead and Wadkins. Nine days later, the University of Texas superstar would win his third consecutive NCAA title (he was the first ever to do that), turn pro that August, and take the San Antonio Open in just his fourth start. But in the opening round at Oakmont, Crenshaw hit only two fairways and seemed content that he’d three-putted only three times on what he would later call “maybe the strongest greens on the face of the earth.”

  Another hotshot twentysomething came to Oakmont Thursday morning with very high hopes, but left bewildered by his disintegration on the course. As a psychology major at Stanford, Thomas Sturges Watson had taken fourth place in the 1969 U.S. Amateur at Oakmont (won by Steve Melnyk). Originally from Kansas City, the twenty-three-year-old, four-time Missouri Amateur champion had even carded a hole-in-one with a three-iron on the long eighth hole (shortened a bit for the Amateur, as was the entire course). Watson turned pro two years later, and although still winless in 1973 when he arrived at Oakmont for his second U.S. Open, he had nearly won his first tournament in February’s Hawaiian Open, but squandered a four-stroke lead to tour nomad John Schlee.

  Watson had reason to feel that his past familiarity with Oakmont would play to his advantage. Unfortunately, it didn’t, as he shot 81 on the first day, and a 73 on Friday was not enough to make the cut. The legendary Tom Watson had not yet emerged.

  Pittsburgh’s most promising young golfer, Jim Simons, who teed off in the group after Watson, also couldn’t catch a break during his first round at Oakmont. A two-time Pennsylvania Amateur champion, Simons had seen his national golfing reputation soar in the 1972 U.S. Open, where he tied for fifteenth and was low amateur. Soon afterward, he turned professional, became a club pro in nearby Butler, Pennsylvania, and sought to atone for having played so poorly before his hometown fans during the 1969 U.S. Amateur: he shot 81-77 and failed to make the cut.

  It didn’t get any easier for Simons four years later, with Oakmont stiffened to U.S. Open specifications. Suffering from a sore shoulder, he bogeyed three of the first four holes. Three over par and his spirits fading, Simons was thankful to see a familiar face, his father’s, on the fifth tee.

  As a marshal on the 379-yard par-four, Ralph Simons had an inside-the-ropes view of his son’s tee shot, and Jim responded positively to his dad’s words of encouragement by birdying the hole. Unfortunately, that proved to be the only bright spot for the Simons family that afternoon; Jim didn’t make another birdie and added eight more over-par scores to finish with an 81, the same embarrassing number he had posted in the first round in 1969.

  “Everything went bad,” Simons said. “My putting was terrible, but I missed a lot of fairways and got myself into trouble. All I can do is go home and forget this round.”

  Although Watson and Simons teed off just eight minutes apart, and each man finished ten strokes over par, they were not the only golfers that afternoon to post nightmare scores. Dean May, Bill Rogers, Richard Lee, Dean Refram, Bobby Mitchell, and Ron Cerrudo all failed to break 80, each a postnoon starter. And only an injured hand saved Robert Barbarossa—once a fine junior player who won the 1964 Minnesota State Amateur Championship at age sixteen—from a terrible afternoon round. He withdrew after forty-four strokes on the front nine.

  Still, as bad as some of the afternoon scorecards looked, the morning starters did not exactly tear up the course either: Of everyone to tee off before noon (there were ninety), only one, Raymond Floyd, broke par.

  Floyd was a powerful, fierce competitor from North Carolina who showed enormous promise early, joining the tour in 1963 and winning the St. Petersburg Open four months later. He rose to stardom with three wins in 1969, including the PGA Championship, only to go winless over the next three seasons. In 1972, he fell to seventieth in the performance rankings, his lowest position since turning professional.

  By 1973, Floyd was better known for his reckless antics off than on the course, especially his drinking and alleged womanizing. At the Masters one year, a pack of young women dressed in hip-huggers paraded through the stodgy Augusta crowd (before being asked to leave) with buttons reading, MRS. RAYMOND FLOYD, attached to their see-through tops. One Pittsburgh columnist that week referred to him as “a rogue in spiked shoes, a Romeo with a niblick, Valentino in a Ban-lon.”

  “I haven’t lived the straightest life,” he acknowledged to the press, “but I think the playboy tag is overrated. When you’re a bachelor on the tour, you’re seen different places with different girls. After a while, everybody assumes you’re a playboy.”

  In preparation for the U.S. Open, Floyd did not exactly show steadfast devotion to his craft. As he was relaxing in his adopted hometown of Chicago, his tournament preparation consisted mainly of traveling to Wrigley Field to watch his beloved Cubs. He even took batting practice with the team.

  Floyd’s practice with the second-place Cubbies may well have been inspiring; after completing his round of 70 in the early afternoon, he held sole possession of the lead. As he tried to make clear to a disbelieving media, he had taken time away from the tour not to indulge his “playboy” lifestyle, but to regroup mentally.

  “I played in four consecutive tournaments and was playing well but not scoring,” he said. “That’s one of the biggest burdens out here—that’s when you get tired of golf—so I just decided to get away from it for a while.”

  Refreshed by the layoff, Floyd played remarkably steady golf on Thursday: Aside from a birdie-bogey-birdie stretch between the ninth and eleventh holes, he scored easy pars the rest of the way. Thankful for sinking a twenty-five-footer on the eleventh, he genuflected before Oakmont’s greens.

  “These are the fastest greens I’ve ever putted on, and I’ve been playing golf for twenty-seven years.”

  Floyd was among only ten players who navigated Oakmont in par or less on opening day. The 1961 U.S. Open champion, Gene Littler—a smooth-swinging San Diegan known affectionately as “Gene the Machine”—posted a solid 71. Two three-putts scarred his excellent play from tee to green, but he was fortunate to drop a monster putt on the seventh hole, and also to birdie both par-fives on the front nine without reaching either green in two. Everyone came to expect this sort of unflashy brilliance from Littler, especially on a U.S. Open venue.

  Though overshadowed by Gary Player’s inspiring story of return from illness, Littler’s saga during the past year was no less a showcase of resiliency.

  Littler and Player shared more than just a spare, 150-pound frame. The previous summer, a diagnosis of lymphatic cancer had halted Littler’s sterling nineteen-year career.

  “At the time, I wasn’t thinking about playing golf; I was just hoping to stick around.”

  He not only “stuck around”; Littler made a quick, full recovery and went on to win five more PGA events in his mid-forties (including his twenty-fifth tour victory over an elite field in the St. Louis Children’s Hospital Classic a month after the Open at Oakmont).

  But after the opening round, instead of his being recognized for high-caliber golf despite his age, the first thing that concerned everyone was Littler’s health and long-term prognosis.

  “People are bound to talk about it. They wanted to honor me in a testimonial. I am grateful, but this
isn’t something I deserve credit for. I’d rather be honored for doing something positive,” he told the media. “I may be doing some good. People watch me on TV and they know about my illness. There is a glad kind of forgetting in golf. And it may be that it did me good in a way. Now petty things don’t bother me; nothing angers me.”

  Even Oakmont’s greens didn’t dampen Littler’s spirits. In fact, he pretty much picked up in 1973 where he had left off in 1962, when he was the defending U.S. Open champion. He had then rammed in three birdie putts of more than twenty-five feet and sunk a hundred-foot eagle to grab the first-round lead with a 69. Littler stayed strong throughout the 1962 Open, taking eighth place behind Nicklaus and Palmer.

  Asked rather cruelly by a reporter in 1973 if his recent bout with cancer might lead to another strong start, mediocre finish, Littler responded, “It’s not the operation. It’s just that I’m [almost] 43.”

  Arnold Palmer.

  • DAY TWO •

  June 15, 1973

  • 5 •

  The Prince and the King

  “Whoever in the long ago said a prophet is without honor in his own backyard never thought an Arnold Palmer would come along a few hundred years later.”

  —AL ABRAMS, JUNE 16, 1973, PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE

  “Oh, oh, [I’d] better get out of here,” Johnny Miller joked.

  The twenty-six-year-old San Franciscan stood up from his seat at the dais in the press tent, almost finished recapping his just-completed second round.

  “Here comes the King,” Miller announced.

  Shielded by a police escort to buffer the autograph hounds, Arnold Palmer walked into the sportswriters’ big top.

  Five hours of grueling U.S. Open golf and the rugged tour veteran still had enough energy to exchange banter with the rail-thin California kid, who could pass as the sixth member of the Beach Boys.

  “Take your time, Johnny. But please limit your remarks to ten seconds,” Palmer joked.

  Miller knew the drill. He had just completed a third consecutive U.S. Open round alongside golf’s King (they were also paired in the final round a year earlier at Pebble Beach).

  “If I start playing the way I’m putting, I’ll be in business,” added Miller, wrapping up the summary of his two under 69 in Friday’s second round. “This is the best I have ever putted.”

  Coming from Johnny Miller, that was quite a statement.

  Born April 29, 1947, John Laurence Miller epitomized the modern-day golf prodigy. His father, Laurence Otto, married Ida Meldrum in 1942, and their first child, Ronald, was born a year later. Laurence had been a communications specialist in Manila during the Second World War, a post that led afterward to a long career with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

  In his spare time, Laurence joined the burgeoning group of middle-class Americans during the Eisenhower years to become enchanted with the game of golf. He competed regularly on the local amateur circuit, winning the Roos Brothers’ San Francisco golf championship and the sportsman’s flight of the San Francisco City Amateur in 1956. But his greatest golf legacy would be his second-youngest boy, John.

  By his fifth birthday, John had already become an avid golfer—of the indoor variety.

  Under Laurence’s eye, John smacked a cut-down iron into a green canvas tarp in the family basement. To strengthen his grip, Laurence taught John to constantly squeeze a rubber ball, and, under his father’s guidance, the boy studied the game’s finer points by reading the three leading prophets of the postwar era: Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and Sam Snead. From the start, John would learn to chase greatness along the proven path of the modern masters.

  Although he would eventually become famous as a touring professional with a casual attitude toward practice—“I don’t deserve to be the best player. I just don’t put the time in,” he said in his midthirties—as a child, he resembled a young Hogan.

  “Johnny just loved the game,” his father remembered. “Dinner would get cold, and his mother would get mad, but Johnny kept hitting shots into the canvas. He was very dedicated.”

  Laurence complemented the physical regimen with his variant of Norman Vincent Peale’s credo in The Power of Positive Thinking, which became a best-seller the same year (1952) that John took up the game.

  “His number one rule was to always be positive,” Miller later wrote. “Dad had a saying: ‘Four parts praise, one part pruning.’ He knew that children who are complimented constantly bloom like flowers, whereas those who are criticized and chided develop all sorts of problems with self-esteem.”

  To his father, John was known as “Champ.”

  “He treated me as though I were something special.”

  So special, in fact, that after John began his formal training for the game, his father decided to shelter him from it.

  “For the next three years, I never set foot on a golf course,” Miller later explained. “I just hammered away at balls in that basement, memorizing the correct grip, stance, and posture, and matching my swing positions to the ones I saw in the book.”

  After John served his time in golf purgatory, Laurence declared him ready for outdoor training. At San Francisco’s Harding Park course, the eight-year-old boy was finally allowed to exercise the skills he’d learned in solitary. And by summer—standing “about knee-high to his pop”—John won his first event, the Roos-Atkins Father and Son tournament, played on the par-three Golden Gate Park course.

  Three years into John’s happy, golf-filled childhood, tragedy struck the Miller family. In October 1958, while fishing with his father and a friend at Lands End—the windiest, rockiest stretch of San Francisco’s cliff-lined coast—fifteen-year-old Ronald reached into the ocean to haul in a striped bass. A wave crashed down and swept him under; after fighting valiantly to survive, Ronald drowned.

  The Millers, who had formally converted to Mormonism in 1956 at the famous Los Angeles temple in Westwood, relied heavily on their faith to cope with Ronald’s death. Laurence also hoped that golf could serve as an additional distraction for his grieving eleven-year-old son. Three years earlier, Laurence had tabbed fellow Mormon John Geertsen, the head professional at San Francisco Golf Club, to mentor John’s budding golf skills. Coach and pupil became closer after Ronald’s death (indeed, Geertsen later claimed that he first met John at church after his brother’s accident), and Miller’s skills blossomed with the onset of adolescence.

  “He was the smallest guy I’ve ever seen, but he loved to work. He’d do almost everything you asked,” Geertsen remembered. “Johnny didn’t pick up golf right off; it was a slow process. But when he started to come, he seemed to have all the strokes to be a great one.”

  By age eleven, Miller showed enough potential for the prestigious Olympic Club—the site of the 1955 U.S. Open—to grant him a junior membership. As a frequent caddie at the seaside course along with his pal, Steve Gregoire—whose father, Leon, happened to be a member—Miller learned the course inside out. No challenge seemed to faze the cocky youngster, and both Laurence and Geertsen encouraged their prodigy to cultivate a fearless mind-set.

  Miller was especially gifted as a putter; he routinely one-putted the greens at Harding Park, and once needed only sixteen putts there to complete an eighteen-hole round. Miller’s smooth stroke and sure nerves often won him twenty-five-cent bets on the practice greens. His father and John Geertsen overlooked the moral transgression.

  “If there were a better putter in the world than me when I was twelve years old, I’d like to have seen him,” Miller wrote.

  If, on occasion, the undersized, preteen Miller coaxed both friends and unwitting marks into putting contests, by the time he entered Lincoln High School his hustling days were over. He grew ten inches between his freshman and junior years (he grew three additional inches in his twenties), went undefeated in three years of interscholastic matches, and won the 1963 San Francisco City Championship.

  And teenagers were not John’s only golf victims.

  In Jun
e 1963, at age sixteen, Miller reached the second round of the California State Amateur championship at Pebble Beach. There he faced a forty-two-year-old petroleum engineer named John Richardson. Miller won two of the three opening holes against the former champion before his caddie, high school teammate Steve Gregoire, saw an unfamiliar club in the bag: a one-iron Miller had used to warm up. Realizing that this was the fifteenth club (one more than the rules allow), Gregoire handed the club to Miller’s mother, who was trailing her son throughout the match. Miller also immediately admitted the mistake to Richardson, on the fourth tee.

  Although Richardson chose not to invoke the appropriate penalty stipulated by California’s rules of golf (forfeit each hole to that point or a total of three holes), “[D]iscussion of it spread around the course via the grapevine and by the time Miller reached 18, a 2-up winner, almost every galleryite on the course, and the officials as well, knew about it.”

  Technically, the issue was simple: Miller should have forfeited the first three holes of the match instead of holding a two-up lead.

  But Richardson—the father of a teenage boy—saw that Miller was in tears because of the ordeal and refused to formally protest. “If I can’t beat him (Miller) on the golf course, I don’t want to do it on a technicality,” he said.

  After a lengthy conference, according to a local reporter, “The committee ruled that Richardson lost the case when he refused to squeal,” and Miller walked away with a victory. California’s rules of golf left enough leeway for the committee to reach this decision, and the rules, in any case, took a backseat to Richardson’s paternal instincts. The press also treated Miller kindly.

  “John Miller, a quiet, bright young man who minds his manners and obeys his conscience, won a golf match Thursday and learned, the hard way, a few facts of life.”