Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont

433 Pages·2010·1.86 MB·English

by  Adam Lazarus

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication

• DAY ONE • - June 14, 1973
• 1 • - The King Never Left
• 2 • - The Big Three Reborn
• 3 • - A View from the Parking Lot
• 4 • - Carnage

• DAY TWO • - June 15, 1973
• 5 • - The Prince and the King
• 6 • - A Watered-down Open

• DAY THREE • - June 16, 1973
• 7 • - “He’s Longer Than Nicklaus.... Go Watch This Boy.”
• 8 • - A Day for All Ages
• 9 • - Joe Feast vs. Joe Famine
• 10 • - Chasing a Living, Chasing Trouble

• DAY FOUR • - June 17, 1973
• 11 • - The Mad Scramble
• 12 • - The Greatest Nine Ever
• 13 • - Chasing Greatness
Chasing Greatness, Twenty Years Later
• 14 • - Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Lee Trevino
• 15 • - Tom Weiskopf
• 16 • - John Schlee
• 17 • - Johnny Miller
Appendix I - Johnny Miller’s 63: The Greatest Round Ever?
Appendix II
Acknowledgements
ENDNOTES
INDEX

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First Printing, May 2010

Copyright © Steve Schlossman and Adam Lazarus, 2010 All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK-MARCA
RECISTRADA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Lazarus, Adam.
Chasing greatness. Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the miracle at Oakmont/Adam Lazarus, Steven
Schlossman p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references eISBN : 978-1-101-18708-1
1. U.S. Open (Golf Tournament) (1973. Oakmont, Pa.) 2. Golf courses—Pennsylvania—Oakmont
(Allegheny County)—History. 3. Miller, Johnny, 1974-4. Palmer, Arnold, 1929-5. Golfers—United States.
I. Schlossman, Steve. II. Title.
GV970.3.U69L39 2010
796.352′66—dc22 2009052780

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For Mom and Dad, who helped me to chase greatness.
-AGL

To Stephanie—still my sunshine.
—SS
PROLOGUE
Talkin’ Oakmont
“Since my arrival in this country ... all the boys in New York are talking
Oakmont and what is liable to happen there in the Open,” said Sid Brews, South
Africa’s top golfer, as he debarked in America to compete in the 1935 U.S.
Open. From coast to coast—indeed, around the golfing world—everyone was
talking Oakmont.
In 1935, the U.S. Open came to the Oakmont Country Club: a field of night-
mares planted three decades earlier by iron baron Henry C. Fownes on rolling
farmland northeast of Pittsburgh, flanking the Allegheny River. No one expected
this contest to be easy: The 1927 U.S. Open, which saw Tommy Armour defeat
Harry Cooper in a play-off, was the most exacting test in the history of amateur
or professional golf. That week, putting on Oakmont’s greens, according to the
sportswriter Grantland Rice, was “like a marble skidding across ice.”
Armour, the intrepid, shrapnel-filled war hero, admitted that the strain of
playing Oakmont in 1927 and 1935 emotionally scarred him. Cooper—whose
twenty-foot putt on the fifth green ran into the sand sixty feet beyond the
flagstick—insisted that while Oakmont was superbly designed, the slippery
greens and uniquely “furrowed” bunkers were simply unfair. Walter Hagen
stated his viewpoint concisely: “Oakmont is a duffers’ course. It makes duffers
out of all of us.” And Scotsman MacDonald Smith, briefly Oakmont’s head
professional before World War I, held his tongue, but spoke clearly enough for
his colleagues in 1935: “We canna’ say anything, ye ken, but we can think our
thoughts.”
Not every notable judged Oakmont so harshly in the weeks leading up to the
championship. All agreed the course was the toughest in the United States and
perhaps “the severest test of golf in the world”—a “real Frankenstein”—but
several praised it as rigorously fair and “scientific.” Even Bobby Jones, who
after winning the 1925 National Amateur at Oakmont criticized the furrowed
bunkers as unjust to better players, was on board: “I always regard Oakmont as
the finishing school of golf.... If you have a weakness, it will be brought to light
playing there. It is not tough because it is freakish. The holes are all fair. They
are fundamental from an architectural and scientific point of view.”
Oakmont’s most vocal advocate among the era’s great golfers was Gene