by Adam Lazarus
His wife, tearful and exultant, repeated over and over, “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.” And then she added, “Tonight, I’ll know how it feels to sleep with a winner.”
The same year when Arnold Palmer desperately hoped to reclaim his throne; the same year when Jack Nicklaus again craved the mythical Grand Slam; the same year when Lee Trevino set the million-dollar milestone in his sights; and the same year that Tom Weiskopf and Johnny Miller each struggled to overcome a festering legacy of unfulfilled greatness, John Schlee’s modest, decade-long goal of survival was far more poignant.
“Not once over the first ten or twelve holes was I thinking of winning,” he said. “I was just trying to make a living.”
The $40,000 paycheck that Schlee took home—one of the largest on tour that year—meant that for the foreseeable future, the Schlee family would not have to worry about making ends meet. An official PGA tour victory would lead to new endorsement deals for equipment and clothes, much larger appearance checks for exhibitions, and guaranteed invites to several of the tour’s most lucrative stops, like the Masters and the Tournament of Champions, as well as an exemption for the entire 1974 PGA season. But Schlee’s most satisfying reward came much sooner.
“Right after I won the Hawaiian Open in 1973, I headed to Palm Springs for the Bob Hope Desert Classic. When I went to the Registration Table at the hotel, there were a lot of press people waiting for me.
“One of the reporters told me that there was a telegram for me from Ben Hogan. He handed me the telegram and I opened it in front of the people who were gathered around the desk. ‘What does it say?’ they all asked.
“I read it to them: ‘ATTABOY. BEN.’”
Boosted by a lofty “tournament champion” title, the praise of his peerless mentor, and media hype as “one of the favorites” at next week’s Bob Hope Desert Classic, Schlee was reborn.
“Now my confidence is up,” he told the Dallas Morning News, “and really, that’s all you need to win out here.”
• DAY FOUR •
June 17, 1973
• 11 •
The Mad Scramble
“What did you do last night, Arnie,” one of the many reporters called out Sunday morning in Oakmont’s locker room.
“I went to a birthday party,” Palmer replied as he changed into his cleats. “My sister and brother celebrated their birthdays.... No, they’re not twins. They’re close together—their birthdays are close together, not their ages.
“Why’d you join Oakmont, Arnold?” another yelled out.
“I like to come in to play, to play in their swats [an intraclub competitive format invented by the Fowneses that remains unique to Oakmont]. I always like to bring friends in, which I couldn’t do before.”
“Are you thinking of getting in politics, Arnie?” another chimed in, for the umpteenth time that week.
“I’ll have to stop playing competitively before I start thinking about it,” Palmer answered. “There are times when I think about giving up everything else and playing more competitively.... But I’ve worked too hard just to get things in order.” Those “things” included IMG, the multimillion-dollar management company that he built with Mark McCormack—an empire that grew more profitable each day, despite Palmer’s inability to win a major since 1964.
Even though he shared a piece of the final-round lead—and less than twenty-four hours after shooting 68, tying his finest performance in three U.S. Opens at Oakmont—the King was still being politely ushered off the throne.
While Palmer sat in the clubhouse, the final round got underway. Long before the big names hit the course, Sunday morning featured several intriguing matchups, or lack thereof. At 10:21 a.m., six-foot-five behemoth George Bayer hit the first tee alone: With an odd number of golfers in the field, Bayer had no partner to play with. The day before, New Zealander John Lister also had to play as a single; he attributed part of the blame for his third-round 80 to the belief that “playing alone disrupts your rhythm. All year you get used to the pace of playing with someone and suddenly you are by yourself. It’s nice to relax while you are waiting for someone else to hit a shot.”
With no one to pace him, Lister needed just two hours and forty minutes to complete his Saturday round. Bayer actually scored three strokes worse that same day, a twelve over 83; as he entered the final round, his main interest was finishing early enough for brunch.
“I played so badly in the third round that I just wanted to get the last round over with.”
He easily achieved his goal, needing just over two hours to shoot a 79 and finish alone in last place. He still earned $800 for his time.
Bud Allin, the Vietnam veteran and former BYU teammate of Johnny Miller, was lucky enough to have a playing partner, and one with whom he shared much in common. Former West Point cadet Bert Yancey joined him for an early afternoon tee time. Sam Snead and Chi Chi Rodriguez formed another intriguing twosome: arguably the most beautiful and the ugliest golf swings in the history of the professional game. The ninety-eight-year-old duo both finished inside the top thirty.
And Ralph Johnston, a Queens-born journeyman pro, turned in a fine appetizer for the main course of Palmer, Nicklaus, Trevino, and the other heavyweights preparing to do battle. The former aeronautical engineer from Texas A&M constructed a scrambling three under 68 to balance a 76 the day before. The $2,300 he won by tying Al Geiberger and Larry Ziegler for thirteenth place marked nearly a quarter of his earnings for the entire season, and ensured him a place in the 1974 U.S. Open.
Of the many inevitable also-rans—those who began Sunday too far behind to contend for the title—Lanny Wadkins was the most defiant: He refused to simply go through the motions. In addition to the Wake Forest connection, Wadkins’s brawny, compact physique and emotionally charged, go-for-broke mentality reminded many of the young Arnold Palmer.
Wadkins’s boldness accounted for a mercurial performance in his third trip to the U.S. Open. On Thursday, the Richmond native, who tied for eleventh when Oakmont hosted the 1969 U.S. Amateur, outplayed the younger (Ben Crenshaw) and older (Sam Snead) members of his threesome. He played the first ten holes at even par and seemed headed for a top spot on the leaderboard, until four bogeys over the last eight holes sent him reeling. Although he hit every fairway—an exceptional achievement on Thursday’s firm, fast track—a three over 74 dropped him outside the top thirty.
“I went for the birdies, and I wound up getting bogeys.”
Still, Wadkins had no regrets and stayed true to his aggressive personality. The following day, he missed only two fairways (both produced bogeys) but made four birdies, two via lengthy putts, for a two under 69.
“Two more sixty-nines and I can be a winner,” the twenty-three-year-old proclaimed at the halfway point. “That will put me at two eighty-one, and if you can have anything between two eighty and two eighty-four, you can be right in there for those last two or three holes Sunday.”
Wadkins’s boyish optimism only increased when he learned that his third-round playing partner would be fellow Virginian Vinny Giles. Eight years apart in age, Giles and Wadkins shared impressive resumes, including consecutive Walker Cup appearances in 1969 and 1971, and matching U.S. Amateur trophies.
At age sixteen, Wadkins had reached the semifinals of the 1966 Virginia State Amateur and narrowly lost to Giles—the eventual champion—in a classic match-play battle. At the North & South Amateur in April 1970, Giles lost a morning match but lent his putter to fifty-three-year-old insurance salesman and Pennsylvania golf notable Bill Hyndman. The next afternoon, Hyndman and Giles’s putter triumphed over Wadkins. And on July Fourth, 1971, in a state finals match still regarded as the greatest ever played in the Old Dominion State, Giles again defeated Wadkins (the reigning U.S. Amateur champion) 3 & 2.
Even in victory, Giles deferred to his fierce young rival and friend.
“There’s no question in my mind at all that Lanny Wadkins is the top amateur in the country.”
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nbsp; Not for long; Wadkins left Wake Forest only nine days later. After two years as a college All American and winner of the coveted Byron Nelson Award for combined golf and academic achievement, he joined the PGA tour in 1971 and found immediate success, winning his first tournament and Rookie of the Year honors in 1972.
But when the two again shared a big-time championship stage at Oakmont, both men’s performances could best be summed up as, well, amateur.
Giles—fresh off his eagle-par-birdie-birdie finish the day before—got off to a rough start on Saturday, missing the first green for a bogey, one of four that yielded a three over 74. Wadkins was worse, taking a double-bogey six on number one, bogeying the next hole, and finishing with a disappointing 75 instead of the 69 he hoped for.
“I felt I hit the ball better than I did yesterday. I just hit some bad shots. I missed my yardage because I figured today’s air was heavy—but it wasn’t.”
With the two best scores on Saturday coming from the group immediately behind them—Jerry Heard (66) and John Schlee (67)—Giles’s and Wadkins’s struggles were baffling and, to their wives, even darkly humorous.
“Hey, you guys,” Wadkins’s wife, Rachel, yelled out to the group. “How about hitting a few in the fairway?”
“Yeah,” chimed in Key Giles, “how about hitting it out of the rough?”
“If they keep playing like this,” Mrs. Wadkins added, “they’ll be lucky to break a hundred.”
By a fluke in scheduling, on Sunday afternoon Giles and Wadkins were right back where they were a day earlier: teeing off together at the one-o’clock hour, with Giles one stroke ahead of Wadkins and seven off the pace. And though little changed for Giles in the final round (he shot 73 and finished sixteenth—the top amateur), twenty-four hours made a huge difference for Lanny Wadkins.
At five over par—eight strokes behind the pack of leaders—Wadkins predictably aimed for the flagstick in the final round. After a birdie on number two, he reached the par-five fourth in two shots, rolling his three-wood onto the green for the first time in four days. He then drained a forty-five-footer for an eagle. Roughly an hour later, Wadkins made another spectacular eagle putt on the difficult ninth green, this time from forty feet.
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 th
at 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.’”