Chasing Greatness

by Adam Lazarus

  Now back in Latrobe for an extended stay, father and son—as only they could—reevatuated every aspect of Arnold’s technique. Working more effectively together as adults than their conflicting personalities had allowed during Arnold’s youth, the two concluded that Arnold had become so “out of position” that major swing surgery was necessary. Together, they took apart his swing and rebuilt it.

  “[We changed] the whole ball of wax—the address, the swing, everything.”

  It was no wonder Palmer felt so comfortable in drastically reshaping his technique, even this close to a U.S. Open: Deacon was the only man he’d ever trusted with his homemade swing.

  “Almost from the moment he put that cut-down club in my hands, Pap would tell me in no uncertain terms to permit nobody to fool with or change my golf swing.”

  Even after earning dozens of victories and tens of millions of dollars, Palmer had returned to his father’s side during the 1960s and let him toy with his swing. Weeks before the U.S. Open in 1969, in the midst of a terrible slump, Palmer returned to Latrobe to seek his father’s advice. The work paid off as Palmer tied for sixth place. Four years later, only a month before his much-anticipated return to Oakmont, they hoped for even greater results.

  “I worked pretty hard,” Palmer vividly recalled thirty-five years later. “I put a great emphasis on driving, and I practiced my irons a lot. The thing that I should have done was go to Oakmont and putted on the greens more. I didn’t do that as much as I should have.”

  By the end of May, Palmer was ready to test his game on tour. A strong 68 at the Kemper Open in Charlotte put him within a stroke of the lead after day one, but he played the final three rounds at even par to fall out of serious contention.

  “I’m discouraged by my scoring, but not my game,” Palmer said.

  The next day Palmer flew to Ashland, Ohio, and donated his services to help raise money at the Johnny Appleseed Boy Scout Golf Jamboree, where he not only bought a new putter that he liked, but tied the course record before flying back home.

  While most tour regulars traveled to Philadelphia for the IVB Classic, Palmer continued his solitary preparation under Pap. Mostly he practiced at Latrobe Country Club, but a week before the Open, he joined former Pittsburgh Pirates stars Dick Groat and Jerry Lynch for a few holes at Oakmont before going off by himself to practice on the course.

  Palmer may have gone eleven years without setting foot on Oakmont, but he felt like nothing had changed.

  “I feel very much at home here.”

  In fact, he felt so much at home at Oakmont, so intimately connected to his childhood memories, that he made a surprising decision just before the championship began. He would forgo the use of either eyeglasses or contact lenses during the U.S. Open, aids that he admitted had become critical to him in recent years in order to judge distances, both on the greens and from the fairways.

  “I probably should wear them but I’m not,” he said. “The fact I know the course as well as I do should make up for not being able to see at a distance.”

  While that week’s tour stop wrapped up on Sunday in Philadelphia, Palmer fired a solid one under 70 at Oakmont in his final practice round before U.S. Open week officially began.

  By late morning on Monday, the 150-man field started arriving at Oakmont to register. All of the PGA tour stars were there: Nicklaus; the new “people’s champion,” Lee Trevino; red-hot Tom Weiskopf, winner of three of his last four tour stops; and Australia’s Bruce Crampton, who had already won three times during the 1973 season. Representing the new breed of “young lions” were the former collegiate sensations Lanny Wadkins and Jerry Heard, the current U.S. Amateur champion, Vinny Giles, and the reigning three-time NCAA champion, Ben Crenshaw. Sixty-one-year-old Sam Snead, fifty-three-year-old Julius Boros (a two-time U.S. Open winner), and forty-two-year-old Billy Casper (also a two-time U.S. Open winner) spoke for the previous generation of stars.

  But amid all these great players of past and present, Palmer was undeniably the star.

  During the practice rounds, children and adults alike crowded excitedly beside him wherever he walked, begging for autographs. The enormous galleries that followed the King’s every move continuously shouted words of encouragement whenever he hit a shot or simply passed by. More ambitious members of the army even managed to sneak in a quick photograph with Palmer as he made his way around the course or into the clubhouse.

  The reporters who gathered at Oakmont acted much like the fans, craving every minute they could spend with the King. While experts agreed that Jack Nicklaus was the greatest golfer who ever lived, many still believed that Palmer had an honest chance to win the 1973 U.S. Open. In light of his victory in the Bob Hope, where he had outlasted a direct challenge from Nicklaus, his close familiarity with Oakmont, and his dead-serious intent to seek vindication for what happened in 1962, Palmer was as much a threat as anyone. And for those who saw him in the flesh, he still conveyed the robust athletic magnetism of a true champion, the same dynamic figure they had admired so often during the past decade and a half on magazine covers and newspaper pages.

  “Palmer still is the well-muscled piece of talent he’s always been,” Bill Nichols of the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that week. “His bronzed arms still ripple with every swing. He stalks the fairway as though he’s trying to beat everyone to the end of the rainbow. And he forever hitches his trousers as he prepares to assault the unprotected flagsticks.”

  But others viewed Palmer very differently, agonizing that the chiseled hero—a model of athleticism-had unfortunately not been frozen in time. Readers of the New York Times opened their morning editions on the first day of the 1973 U. S. Open to find a column by the noted sportswriter Dave Anderson, entitled “The Last Stand.” Anderson not only didn’t share Nichols’s optimistic appraisal; he didn’t even see the same Palmer:

  “But he’s 43 years old. When he crouches over a putt, his jowls thicken. So does his belly. The charisma isn’t quite the same. Jack Nicklaus is the most feared golfer now. Lee Trevino is more respected too. And now Tom Weiskopf, with three victories in his last four tournaments, appears to be maturing. But for many people golf still means Arnold Palmer, nobody else. Especially here, where he is Pittsburgh’s most exalted sports idol.

  “Maybe the electricity will begin to flow in him tomorrow,” Anderson continued. “But maybe there is no electricity in him anymore, not even in his last stand.”

  Remarkably, on the dawn of Oakmont’s fifth U.S. Open, all anyone could talk about was the aging King of golf, Latrobe’s Arnold Palmer.

  • 2 •

  The Big Three Reborn

  Palmer’s “last stand” began at 1:52 p.m. Thursday afternoon, as he stepped to the first tee with eighteen-year-old Vince Berlinsky, who drew the honor of carrying his bag that week. (Until the U.S. Open in 1977, local caddies were randomly assigned by the host club; the pros were not allowed to use their regular tour caddies.)

  The gallery roared wildly when Palmer’s name was called, and for nearly five hours Arnie’s Army remained at fever pitch, yelling, jostling, and running ahead for position to catch a glimpse of their hero. Over half the fans that afternoon followed Palmer, unconcerned about being still or silent in fairness to his playing partners, two-time tour winners Johnny Miller and Lou Graham. And, with a vintage-Palmer display of peaks and valleys, the King’s opening round consumed the crowd’s emotions.

  Palmer stumbled on the relatively easy 343-yard, par-four second hole when his short-iron approach to the green landed in a bunker and he two-putted for bogey. He immediately rebounded on the next two holes, sticking a five-iron to inside two feet on the famous Church Pews third hole and then a wedge to two feet on the par-five fourth hole. Landing irons off the tee into bunkers on the par-three sixth and par-three eighth yielded bogeys, canceling out the two early birdies to return to one over par.

  A strong drive and a crisp four-wood allowed Palmer to easily birdie the par-five ninth and return to par, only
to give the stroke right back by three-putting the perilous tenth green. Ten holes, just three pars; not the ideal way to play a U.S. Open.

  But Palmer righted the ship, first with pars over the next five holes, then by lasering a four-wood to within eight feet of the flagstick on the challenging par-three sixteenth. Following pars on numbers seventeen and eighteen, Palmer met with reporters, eager to dissect his first-round score of par 71.

  “I was happy with the score but I’m not particularly happy with the way I played,” Palmer said. Most distressing was his inability to get down in two from green-side bunkers as well as his “mediocre” driving—most annoying because he and his father had worked so intently on driving during the past month.

  Although Palmer was satisfied with his four birdies (all from inside eight feet), the four bogeys were curious. For years, the press and fans had chalked up Palmer’s major championship failures to mediocre putting. And the enormous tally of three putts during the 1962 U.S. Open was well documented. On day one in 1973, however, Palmer three-putted only once, on the infamously difficult tenth, and that had come from fifty feet: Three-putts from that distance, on that green, were nothing worse than a draw.

  Overall, an even-par start to the Open encouraged Palmer, and the Army. By the time he signed his scorecard, nearly every group had completed their rounds, yet only four men broke par. The course—though toughened up only slightly since 1962—was playing as difficult as the vigilant members had hoped (the average first-round score of 76.8 was actually a half stroke higher than in 1962). And Palmer’s 71 matched his opening-round score in 1962. Eleven years older, the field stronger, and his career having been to hell and back, Palmer remained in the hunt after one round.

  The man who had dethroned Palmer as the world’s greatest golfer, Jack Nicklaus, was far less pleased by his start—at least through the first sixteen holes.

  Nicklaus had been the talk of the sporting world during the spring and summer of 1972, when he won the first two legs of the Grand Slam. Though he came up just short in the British Open, losing by way of Lee Trevino’s miraculous chip-in on the seventeenth hole at Muirfield, Nicklaus, at age thirty-two, had reached his peak. He took the scoring title, the money title, and a second PGA Player of the Year award in 1972, in addition to winning seven tournaments. Eclipsing that spectacular season seemed impossible, but when Nicklaus arrived at Oakmont in June 1973, he was on his way to doing just that.

  As his family and business ventures grew exponentially during the late 1960s, Nicklaus scaled back his playing schedule: He vowed never to be away from his four children and college-sweetheart wife, Barbara (whom he’d married at age twenty) for more than two weeks. (Barbara was currently pregnant with their fifth child.) While many touring pros played in over thirty PGA events a year to make ends meet, Nicklaus now appeared in less than two dozen, yet still regularly finished at the top or near the top of the annual money list. And 1973 was no exception. Prior to the Masters in early April, Nicklaus won twice and finished sixth or better in three of the other five events he competed in.

  Only a terrible stretch during the second round of the Masters—three bogeys, then a double bogey on the front nine—kept Nicklaus from winning a fifth Green Jacket. He shot a final-round 66 and finished tied for fourth.

  But fourth was not nearly good enough for Nicklaus at this dominating stage of his career. As he later explained, in a logic uniquely his: “Through that period of time, when I didn’t win [at] Augusta, I sort of thought the year was over. It was ... I suppose, an immature way to look at it, but ... the Grand Slam is what I was really after. I did not achieve it. But that’s what I was really after, so, if I didn’t win the first leg, then I sort of felt like, Let’s wait till next year.”

  Still, Niektaus—arguably the most insatiable competitor in golf history-battled ferociously throughout the entire season.

  “Even in ’73 I still won a lot of golf tournaments [seven],” he acknowledged. But: “I think I probably won those in spite of myself.”

  While the psychology of Nicklaus’s 1973 season remains elusive, he did stay home in Orlando for most of the two months following his disappointment at Augusta. He practiced, tended to the family, and actively oversaw his diversifying business empire (including the creation of Muirfield Village, the bold new golf course and housing development that broke ground months earlier in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio). To the chagrin of PGA Tournament sponsors, who knew that Nicklaus’s presence boosted gate and TV revenues, he played in only two events during the next eight weeks: He won both of them, each with a stellar field.

  First, at the Tournament of Champions the week following the Masters, Nicklaus outlasted his rival Lee Trevino by a shot. Then, in another single-stroke win, he defeated his heir apparent, Tom Weiskopf, in May’s Atlanta Golf Classic for his fourth victory of the season (he also won in January in the Bing Crosby Pro-Am National Golf Tournament and in late March in the Greater New Orleans Open).

  With the U.S. Open at Oakmont only two weeks away, Nicklaus’s game showed no signs of rust. Since he’d already demonstrated that he did not need as much practice or tournament hardening as other top professionals to remain at peak readiness, everyone assumed Nicklaus would, as usual, spend time before the Open preparing on-site for another major. And, predictably, in the two weeks leading up to the 1973 U.S. Open, he visited Oakmont to relearn the course that had jump-started his professional career.

  In early June, from his base in Columbus (the Muirfield Village project had entered a key financial stage), Nicklaus awoke early in the morning and flew in his private jet to nearby Greater Pittsburgh International Airport. He then rented a helicopter that, ten minutes later, dropped him off adjacent to Oakmont’s first tee. Even Jack Nicklaus couldn’t switch on his game instantaneously: He cold-topped his opening drive.

  Nicklaus shook off the faux pas and played the course at a leisurely pace, with several balls. He also putted from various locations on each green to begin the mental and physical process of adapting to their exceptional speed and mystifying contours. Then the multimillion-dollar entrepreneur jumped back into the helicopter and flew home for a business meeting in Columbus later in the afternoon. Arnold Palmer and Mark McCormack, the founder of IMG, had invented this frantic blend of golf/business multitasking. But Nicklaus practiced it at least as avidly as Palmer, and added several novel twists so that he could remain intimately involved in the daily lives of his children.

  Curiously, even though he had just won at Atlanta and felt confident about his practice session at Oakmont, Nicklaus concluded that for him to successfully defend his U.S. Open crown, his game required additional work under the strain of tournament competition.

  He broke his long-standing practice of foregoing the PGA event the week before a major championship. To the delight of its sponsors, Nicklaus registered at the last second to play in the IVB Philadelphia Golf Classic at Whitemarsh Valley, a classic course built in 1907, just four years after Oakmont.

  “The Whitemarsh course has small greens and narrow fairways and is similar to Oakmont,” Nicklaus told the press in explaining his surprise decision.

  Nicklaus’s observation set off a minor war of words between him and Palmer.

  The sharply contrasting personalities of the two giants of modern golf created a gnawing friction between them, defining their relationship for decades. The discord even extended to an arcane disagreement about whether playing Whitemarsh was good preparation for playing a U.S. Open at Oakmont.

  “There’s no similarity,” Palmer stated. “I won’t be at Whitemarsh.... Whitemarsh is a good course, but Oakmont was designed as a links similar to a Scottish course. It has few trees compared with Whitemarsh. Its bunkers are famous, although they are no longer furrowed. It has magnificent greens and it has no water holes, while Whitemarsh has creeks and ditches. I just don’t agree with Jack at all.”

  Nicklaus played erratically at Whitemarsh, especially from tee to green. Still, after three me
diocre rounds, he carded a masterful 67, the lowest Sunday score. Six shots behind the winner, Tom Weiskopf, he tied for fifth place. Nicklaus now had only three days left for practice prior to the start of the U.S. Open, but he had a clearer idea (whatever Palmer might think) about which parts of his game needed work before he was Oakmont-ready.

  Naturally, Nicklaus stood out as the clear-cut favorite to defend the title he had won at Pebble Beach. He could also become the first man in seventy years to win two U.S. Opens on the same course (Scotsman Willie Anderson won his first and fourth U.S. Open titles at the Myopia Hunt Club in Massachusetts in 1901 and 1905).

  Unlike the year before, the Grand Slam was not in Nicklaus’s sights in 1973: He had not won the Masters in April. But never before had he won four tournaments (out of eleven entered) prior to the U.S. Open. Las Vegas oddsmakers set Nicklaus as a four-to-one favorite. So, too, did famed sports prognosticator Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, who predicted that the winner would set a new record score of 279, four below the 283s that Hogan had shot in 1953 and Nicklaus and Palmer had matched in 1962.

  Still, by the early 1970s, both the experts and journalists dubbed Nicklaus the favorite in just about every tournament. Since he’d recovered from a minor “slump” in the late 1960s, and especially since his father’s death in 1970, no one (save perhaps Lee Trevino) possessed both the shots and the intestinal fortitude to go toe-to-toe with Nicklaus in the final round of a tournament.

  Internally, Nicklaus had a personal, revenge-driven incentive to triumph again at Oakmont. From the moment he arrived in town in June 1973, sportswriters rehashed Pittsburgh fans’ heckling of Nicklaus eleven years earlier. They also stressed how much had changed in his public persona since then.

  “He returns now as the game’s premier player, acknowledged the world’s best and eyeing a plateau of performance and accomplishment unattained by any other man to play this old game,” wrote Bob Greene of the Associated Press. “He returns no longer fat, no longer a kid, no longer uncertain. He’s a trim 185 pounds. He’s a mature 33, quietly confident, self-contained, self assured, unfailingly courteous. His drab garb of the early ’60s is gone, replaced by quiet, subdued colors. His blond mane is at modish length.”