Chasing Greatness Read online

  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 published by NewAmerican Library,

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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 Sarazen. In 1922, as a twenty-year-old, Sarazen won the PGA at Oakmont; in April 1935, just two months before the U.S. Open, he electrified the golfing world by scoring his famous double eagle at Augusta National to win the Masters. Sarazen became the bookmakers’ favorite (6-1 odds) to win his eighth major at Oakmont, and his views naturally received close scrutiny by the partisan Pittsburgh press.

  “Wherever you go they ask you about Oakmont,” Sarazen told reporters upon his return from playing exhibitions in South America, the South Seas, and Australia. “It is the most talked-of course in the world ... a masterpiece ... one of the few scientifically constructed layouts ... I have come to the conclusion that it is the greatest golf course in the world.”

  But its being the “greatest” course did not
necessarily mean that the greatest golfers won. That was clearly the case in the 1919 National Amateur, won by Davey Herron, the son of an Oakmont member and former collegiate golfer (of no great distinction) at Princeton. Admittedly quirky, Oakmont gave locals like Herron a distinct advantage—most obviously in its lightning-quick, sharply tilted, compulsively undulating greens, and its two hundred-plus “furrowed” bunkers, where the ball lay partially submerged between deep, wide furrows of sand (better fit for growing potatoes, said an irate Brit). The course also stood out for its great length (nearly seven thousand yards), the long carries required off the tee, huge greens, narrow fairways, cross bunkers, thickly grassed mounds, and assorted ditches, pits, and other hazards to harshly penalize the slightest error.

  And to add insult to injury in 1935, H.C.’s son, William C. Fownes Jr., and his trusted greenkeeper, Emil Loeffler, had recently stiffened the difficulty of the course. Following a record-setting score of 294 (six over par) by Willie Macfarlane in the Pennsylvania State Open, they added numerous bunkers, expanded existing bunkers, and shifted tees laterally to lengthen holes and prevent “shortcuts.” “Yes, you bet this course is tougher than it was in 1927,” Armour told reporters. “I would say that it is easily two shots tougher.... Those traps and greens are going to make a lot of trouble.”

  The course setup perfectly embodied the stern philosophy of Fownes and Loeffler: “A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost.”

  Given these conditions, Sarazen made a startling prediction. Without downplaying his own chances of victory, he told everyone to watch out for the relatively unknown Sam Parks Jr.

  The current teaching professional at nearby South Hills Country Club, Parks had improved his game during the past two seasons on the Florida winter tour; he’d finished thirty-seventh in the 1934 U.S. Open and fifteenth in the recently contested Masters Golf Tournament. Parks had also become an exceptionally straight driver during a two-year stint as the pro at Summit Golf Course near Uniontown, where the penalty for errant shots was a lost ball over a cliff. Parks had been practicing feverishly at Oakmont, working especially on adapting his putting stroke and pitch shots to the exceptional firmness and speed of Oakmont’s greens.

  “His knowledge of Oakmont and its pitfalls should be a great asset,” Sarazen observed of the native Pittsburgher. “Oakmont is a course that needs knowing. This knowledge must be gained long in advance of the championship, to give one a chance to get over the first shock coming from its severity.”

  In the end, Parks won the 1935 U.S. Open by two shots with a score of 299, largely because he outputted everyone and kept most of his tee shots in the fairways. A few commentators begrudged Parks his triumph. H. B. Martin labeled Parks a “mediocre player,” and the long-hitting Jimmy Thomson, who finished second to Parks and toured with him afterward, called him (according to Charles Price) “the most consistent seventy-five player who ever lived.”

  Still, Parks earned his victory at Oakmont in classic U.S. Open style: straight driving, great lag putting. The top players were mainly furious at the course setup by Fownes and Loeffler that allowed a journeyman with special local knowledge to triumph. Inaccessible pin positions and “spun-glass” greens (“a bit of fuzz atop a rock-hard surface of tiny pebbles,” according to Ron Whitten) made three- and four-putts commonplace. The greens came to befuddle, even embarrass, stars like Leo Diegel and Harry Cooper, each among the game’s best short-game artists.

  Some called the 1935 U.S. Open “Fownes’s Folly.” In the words of New York golf journalist George Trevor, the championship was transformed into “some strange species of outdoor bagatelle ... a travesty on golf.” Bob Harlow, the PGA Tour manager, called the greens “skating rinks” that presented not “a test of skills, but a roulette wheel, upon which no one could tell what hole the ball would drop into.”

  Armour especially stung the stewards of Oakmont for making the course itself, rather than the quality of golf, the main show: “the first course I ever saw that was bigger than the player,” said the 1927 champion.

  W. C. Fownes gave back in kind: “The virility and charm of the game lies in its difficulties. Keep it rugged, baffling, hard to conquer, otherwise we shall soon tire of it and cast it aside.... Let the clumsy, the spineless and the alibi artist stand aside!”

  The 1935 championship had barely ended when Oakmont’s counterparts at Baltusrol—host of the 1936 U.S. Open—let it be known that they would give the players “a sporting chance to recoup the prestige lost on Oakmont’s roller-coaster greens.” Baltusrol did just that: Tony Manero, already a six-time winner on the tour, won the 1936 U.S. Open with a score of 282, the lowest by four shots in over four decades of U.S. Open history.

  Regardless of the murky legacy of the 1935 U.S. Open, no one—including W.C. and Loeffter—wanted to revive the controversies that surrounded Oakmont’s extreme penalty. It simply wasn’t good for the game; golf wasn’t meant to be a public display of self-flagellation.

  The 1935 U.S. Open inevitably left club members queasy. How long could Oakmont maintain its fearsome reputation if it produced “fluke” winners? What could Oakmont’s stewards do to better enable the course to identify the best golfers in the world?

  IN 1973, AS THE U.S. Open returned for the fifth time to Oakmont Country Club, its reputation as the meanest test in American championship golf remained fully intact. And while Fownes and Loeffler were long gone, their penal philosophy—embodied in slick, mystifying greens and endless carpets of sand— continued to be the course signatures. Oakmont still screamed tough, and not due to a U.S.G.A. makeover. “If they want to see Oakmont when it’s really tough,” the members liked to say, “they should play in the member-guest.” That was when the greens rolled till tomorrow and the fairways were best located by microscope.

  Much had changed since the 1930s. Oakmont still set the punitive standard in American championship golf, but it was no longer as brutal. Oakmont officials had cut the number of bunkers nearly in half, and removed just about every cross bunker. More important, furrows no longer striped the bunkers. In 1964, Oakmont substituted a conventional silicon-based sand for the heavy, coarse Allegheny River variety that had made it possible to form furrows in the first place. The bunkers would now have to stand, strategically, on their own.

  The one-of-a-kind greens had also been rehabilitated agronomically, following Loeffler’s passing in 1947. His frequent low mowing (one-sixteenth of an inch) of the naturally growing Poa annua grass (a weed, in reality), combined with constant topsoiling, no aeration, and incessant rolling—using rollers that weighed around 500, maybe even 750 pounds—had caused irreparable damage. Modern greenkeeping methods eventually brought the putting surfaces back to good health in the 1950s, and while they were definitely slower than in 1927 and 1935, the greens—at the express request of the membership-remained exceptionally “keen” and preserved all of their original undulations. In the postwar era, as earlier, Oakmont’s greens still set the standard as the fastest, firmest, trickiest, and truest in the United States—“true to the ultimate wiggle,” as Rice described them over a half century earlier.

  Oakmont had seen several other changes, as Sam Parks observed when he made an appearance at the 1973 U.S. Open, thirty-eight years removed from his one and only tour triumph. The course played much longer, as the fairways were now irrigated and the grass grew taller (Loeffler had also “rolled” the fairways with his heavy machinery, making three-hundred-yard drives common when conditions were dry). Several fairways in 1973 had been narrowed and the rough grown thicker, partly to compensate for the removal of bunkers (Fownes and Loeffler preferred to see errant shots scamper into the furrows). Overall, Parks contended, the course in 1973 would play around two shots easier than when he won in 1935.

  While the changes to Oakmont had evolved gradually, under the club members’ careful scrutiny, one question they no longer had to address in 1973 was whether the severity of the course tended to produce quirky champions. Since World W
ar II, Oakmont had hosted three major championships: the PGA in 1951 and the U.S. Opens of 1953 and 1962. And a more stellar, era-defining group of champions was impossible to find.

  Sam Snead won his third and final PGA Championship in 1951, struggling in early matches (the PGA was still contested at match play) before winning big against his last two opponents. Rains affected play decisively; one of the longest hitters of his generation, Snead was delighted to see a wet course that played longer, with softer and slower greens as well. (Like most who learned to play on Bermuda grass, Snead preferred slower greens.)

  Rain or no rain, Snead broke par in most of his matches, and he shot well under par in both closing matches. Oakmont may still have been the toughest course in the land (that was what the assembled pros said), but with the U.S. Open scheduled for Oakmont in 1953, a four-round total over 300 would no longer be a competitive score.

  Unavailable to play the PGA in 1951, Ben Hogan showed up very early to practice at Oakmont in the late spring of 1953, and his scoring improved dramatically with successive practice rounds. His comfort with the Oakmont terrain peaked during the first round, as he shot a record-breaking 67, five under par. Hogan scored even par for the remainder of the championship, enough to easily defeat Snead, who collapsed over the final holes to lose by a large margin (283 to 289).

  Hogan and Snead were undeniably the two greatest players of their generation; the post-Fownes, post-Loeffler Oakmont now boasted a superior ability to filter out and crown the era’s top players as its champions. And with two other Hall of Famers, Lloyd Mangrum and Jimmy Demaret, finishing in the third and fourth positions in 1953, the renovated course allowed the cream to rise to the top.