by Adam Lazarus
“I played the first fourteen holes as well as ever in my life,” he said afterward.
At number fifteen, Boros’s fountain of youth looked to have dried up when he pushed his tee shot into a drainage hole in the deep rough off the right side of the fairway.
“That happens once in a while when you get to be fifty-three,” he joked later in describing the most critical moment of his round, as a double bogey or worse loomed.
Following a lengthy deliberation, U.S.G.A. officials ruled that the area in which Boros’s ball had come to rest was “ground under repair.” After two unsuccessful drops, they allowed him to place the ball. Using a self-described baseball swing with his three-iron, he caught enough of the ball to drive it twenty-five yards shy of the green. A chip to twelve feet and the subsequent one putt produced what Boros’s distinguished partner called “one of the greatest pars in the history of golf.”
Two more thrilling pars followed. On the par-three sixteenth, he nailed his three-wood onto the green and smacked his birdie putt seven past the cup and considerably off-line. The unflappable Boros then smoothly rolled in the difficult par save. On the 322-yard seventeenth, Boros’s iron off the tee left an ideal approach to the pin, located on the right side of the green. But from an uneven stance, he pulled his wedge badly; the ball touched down on the green’s left edge and, three hops later, found a green-side bunker.
“So it was perhaps that uphill stance that he had to assume, and from that you get a natural pull,” ABC’s Keith Jackson said about Boros’s horrific shot, to which lead analyst Byron Nelson added, “Yes, that’s very easy to do. But I’m surprised that at this point, the way that Julius has been playing, that he let the ball do that.”
A mediocre blast out of the bunker left Boros a tricky, right-to-left-breaking sixteen-footer that he gently caressed toward the hole, where it dropped in for another terrific par save.
Boros played the fifty-fourth hole equally on the edge, as his approach shot stopped on the outermost perimeter of the multitiered green, fifty feet from the cup. But he nimbly two-putted for a closing par and a three under 68, the third-lowest score of the day. Boros’s outstanding play may have surprised many writers and fans—Hogan never broke 70 as a pentagenarian in two U.S. Opens—but not Boros himself.
“I sure don’t feel fifty-three,” he said after downing a few beers with Lew Worsham in the pro shop. “I’m not tired and the only thing that bothered me out there today was I heard some guy call me an old man.”
Impressed by Boros’s wizardry on the greens, slightly graying partner-Arnold Palmer—lauded the old man’s sparkling revival:
“Some of the damnedest putting I’ve ever seen.”
ALTHOUGH PITTSBURGH WAS HIS “HOMETOWN” and Oakmont “his course,” Arnold Palmer, swarmed all week with his die-hard fans, had a lot working against him before the start of the third round.
For one, the thirty-nine-mile commute from Latrobe to Oakmont wasn’t made any easier by Saturday morning’s lengthy rainstorm. And once he finally reached the course, changed in the clubhouse locker room, and readied himself for practice on the nearby driving range, the downpour continued.
In rounds one and two, an eighteen-year-old named Vince Berlinsky served as Palmer’s caddie. For a man who had played Oakmont dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, a teenage caddie was more a bag toter than a source of special wisdom or practical guidance. But the combination of Palmer’s slightly diminished vision, plus his insistence that he knew the course so well he could do without glasses or contact lenses, meant that the King could probably have benefited from an extra pair of educated eyes.
To all appearances, Berlinsky had handled his caddying tasks adequately on Thursday and Friday. Even-par scores on both days gave Palmer a leg up on most of the field. But Berlinsky never showed up to caddie during the third round. Later that day, a reporter implied that there was some sort of disagreement between the boy and the King, to which Palmer declined comment.
“Vince was nervous,” said a fellow caddie. “It was too much caddying for a prominent player like Palmer.”
While Oakmont’s caddie master, Joe Stoner, sought a replacement for Berlinsky, Palmer spoke to both reporters and himself—“Arnold Palmer, go out there, get off your dead [ass], and do something”—then answered a series of inconsiderate questions with his customary grace and good humor.
“Who’s the greatest golfer you’ve ever seen?”
“Jack Nicklaus . . . when he’s right,” Palmer replied.
“If you had to pattern your entire career after one golfer, who would it be?”
“Sam Snead,” he said immediately. “I mean, here’s a man still playing golf at sixty-one. How can you beat that? It’s sure something I’d like to be doing when I get to be his age.”
Nicklaus, Snead, and Ben Hogan, “although not necessarily in that order,” was his answer when asked to name the best three golfers he’d ever seen. “I never saw Walter Hagen play. I never saw Bobby Jones either, although I have seen movies of him. I did see [Byron] Nelson play in 1942 and he had one of the finest swings I’ve ever seen.”
After a string of similar questions—best putter, best sand player, longest driver, etc.—Palmer responded to speculation that he might sponsor a younger, rising tour pro who needed backing.
“Not while I’m still playing. I might after I’m all through. You know, some people thought I would sponsor Lanny Wadkins, or that I had been. That wasn’t so at all. How would it be if I was sponsoring him and the both of us came to the last hole together needing it to win?... You couldn’t do a thing like that.”
Palmer politely continued speaking as he dressed for the round. Given that each day that week he walked past a parade of ARNIE FOR GOVERNOR signs, perhaps this wasn’t the best moment to pump him for self-reflection.
Palmer’s last-minute replacement caddie was twenty-two-year-old Tom Tihey, the assigned looper that week for Bobby Mitchell (who missed the cut by five strokes). Tihey had been a caddie at Oakmont since age twelve and knew the course well, though he played most of his golf at Oakmont East, the adjacent public facility, where he boasted a scratch handicap. Shortly before being assigned to Palmer, Tihey had finished up a quick breakfast at the nearby Howard Johnson, and was hanging out on the pro shop veranda before deciding which players to watch. He was both shocked and elated when Stoner singled him out to work for Palmer—as soon as he could locate an extra orange jump-suit (Tihey had left his at home), the garish, one-piece garb that caddies were required to wear that week.
After Tihey nervously introduced himself, Palmer asked whether he was nearsighted or farsighted.
“One of each,” the bespectacled youngster replied.
Unable to catch a break, even in his own backyard, Palmer burst into laughter.
With the caddie crisis resolved, trouble still followed Palmer onto the course. From the first fairway, he missed the green with an eight-iron. After an overly aggressive chip barely stayed on the green, he two-putted for a bogey. Palmer made a conventional par on the second hole, while Boros sank his second consecutive birdie putt.
Losing an early stroke to par was hardly catastrophic. But falling three behind so quickly to his playing partner, that hurt. A decade after Boros had thumped Palmer in a play-off to win the U.S. Open in Brookline, and five years after he had edged out Palmer to win the PGA Championship, the two veterans were together again at this critical moment in a major championship.
But—as he had done so many times over the years—Palmer quickly reminded everyone never to count out the King. He started his climb back into contention at a familiar location, Oakmont’s fourth hole. This was Palmer’s tenth visit to the 549-yard par five under U.S.G.A. auspices—twice as an amateur in 1953, five times in 1962 (including the play-off), and twice this week. He owned the hole: six birdies, three pars.
Driver, then a booming three-wood put Palmer to the base of the fourth green, where he stroked an immaculate chip to leave an easy three-f
ooter for another birdie. He then landed a five-iron eight feet from the flagstick on the par-three sixth, rolled in the tricky birdie putt, and moved to one under par. Driving into a green-side bunker on number eight—and subsequently needing two strokes to escape the damp sand—could have been a lot worse if Palmer had not made a clutch putt for a bogey four.
By the time Palmer arrived on the ninth tee, again at even par for the day and for the tournament, he was still in the thick of the race. Then began a revival of the Palmer “charge,” the kind that, a decade earlier, had stolen America’s heart and made him the most riveting performer the game had ever known.
Palmer’s eagle chip from the fringe on number nine bobbled in and out of the cup; an easy tap in clinched his third birdie on the front side. At his own personal hell—Oakmont’s tenth, which in nine U.S. Open rounds he had played at nine over par—Palmer followed a strong drive with a brilliant six-iron that stopped dead on the softened green. He nailed the ten-footer, improving to two under par.
Palmer had one more miracle for the army of thousands who marched in stride with him to the eleventh tee. A marginal drive left him under a tree on the fairway’s right side that seriously hampered his swing. Somehow, he hit a low eight-iron punch that just carried the front bunker, leaving him forty-five feet from the flagstick. Birdie seemed out of the question. But Palmer’s new approach to mastering Oakmont’s greens—he slowed his stroke in order to strike the ball more solidly—and a new putter (purchased two weeks earlier during an exhibition in Ashland, Ohio) kept the magic going.
Palmer lined up the putt, sent the ball “over the swales and valleys of Oakmont’s undulating green,” then exploded, charging his fist into the ground when the ball roared into the hole.
Pars the rest of the way did not lack Palmer’s trademark electricity. His gallery cheered so loudly after his successful par putt on the twelfth that the group ahead of him—Bert Yancey and his partner, Raymond Floyd—could barely hear their own thoughts as Floyd lined up his birdie putt on number thirteen.
“Yancey turned around and held his arms up to try and quiet the crowd, but it was useless.”
Floyd blew the putt far beyond the hole.
“The gallery following me helped a lot as well,” Palmer acknowledged. “It was large and got excited, but hell, I know most of them.”
Palmer’s own “damnedest putting” continued on number sixteen, where he two-putted from sixty feet. On the seventeenth—as all golfers within earshot waited until he putted out before playing their own shots—an eight-footer for birdie and sole possession of the lead barely missed.
Minutes later, standing on the eighteenth green with Boros, Palmer joked with the crowd about the heroic play of a twosome measuring ninety-six years in combined age.
“One thing about it, when you get older, you learn to putt,” he wryly stated. And whether he meant it or not, Palmer had putted damn well: His 68 marked the lowest score he ever registered in a championship at Oakmont. Longtime Associated Press golf reporter Will Grimstey—along with several members of the media—delighted in calling the pairing of giants of the previous generation “the Arnie and Julie Show.”
“It was a great day for the paunchy and middle-aged and also for Arnie’s Army,” Grimsley wrote. “Where did those blokes come from, anyway? We thought they were dead.”
Boros’s and Palmer’s matching 68s; the 66 and 67 shot, respectively, by Heard and Schlee; combined with the nightmarish afternoons of the leaders behind them (Player, Colbert, Nicklaus, Borek), created a four-way tie at the top of the leaderboard on Saturday evening: the biggest logjam in U.S. Open history. Although the twentysomething Heard, thirtysomething Schlee, forty-something Palmer, and fiftysomething Boros were all tied at three under par 210, the players’ (as well as the fans’) favorite was self-evident.
“I think Arnold’s going to be the man to beat,” Lee Trevino predicted, “because he knows the course so well.”
Palmer, who admitted he was “charged up” by the birdie binge in the middle of the round, tried in vain to shield his glee with cautious optimism.
“When I got my round going I felt like it was ten years ago. I’ve had opportunities to win major championships in recent years, and it’s bothered me that I haven’t done it,” he said.
“I have nothing to get excited about yet. There are ten or twelve guys in position to win this thing.”
Or maybe even thirteen.
• 9 •
Joe Feast vs. Joe Famine
Johnny Miller had a lot on his mind the morning before the third round at Oakmont. No wonder he forgot to grab his personal yardage book.
For the week of the U.S. Open, he and his wife, Linda, rented a small house twenty minutes from the golf course. The Millers needed a house rather than a motel room because they brought their six-month-old daughter, Kelly, to Pittsburgh with them. But as he dressed on Saturday morning, a crying baby was probably not the only reason Miller absentmindedly left his distance book in the pocket of the pants he wore the day before.
The magnificent 69 he shot on Friday did more than bring him back to even par at the halfway point. Miller now stood just three strokes off the lead, tied with Jack Nicklaus and the world’s best left-hander, Bob Charles. Seven years had passed since Miller ascended the world’s golf stage in 1966 as an amateur at the Olympic Club; after a brief pro career mixed with high points and heartbreaks, he believed that this U.S. Open was finally his time to claim greatness.
“I can win,” he told reporters. “But I can’t try to win. I’ve just got to play well, and maybe some of the leaders will make some bogeys.”
Shooting that ten under 61 in the 1970 Phoenix Open—just his eleventh start as a professional—had created an aura around Miller, as a man of magic who could truly “go low,” seemingly at will. (Record-shattering, sub-65 rounds would soon become a Miller trademark.) But even though he was the most photogenic young lion on tour—the only one to earn big dollars via modeling and endorsements from the moment he turned pro—his reputation remained blemished with high-profile failures.
More than a year after his 61 and still winless, Miller posted what he called “the best round I ever played as far as eliminating mental errors” at the Jacksonville Open in March 1971. Despite North Florida winds blowing thirty miles per hour, a bogey-free third round pulled him into a first-place tie with Hal Underwood, his old University of Houston rival and fellow first-team All American in 1967.
“It’s the worst wind I’ve ever tried to play in,” said Miller, who learned his golf amidst the blustery winds of the Pacific coast. “I didn’t know I could play this well in wind. Maybe I’ve learned something.”
The lone man to break 70 in an exceptional field that featured the “Big Four”—Nicktaus, Palmer, Player, and Trevino—Miller scored three birdies against no bogeys to tame Hidden Hills Country Club.
Paired with Trevino on Sunday, Miller birdied the second hole to nudge one past Underwood and into first place. Across the cool, now windless course, he retained sole possession of the top spot throughout most of the round. But as Miller played the sixteenth, Underwood and Gary Player each made birdies one hole ahead of him, forcing a three-way tie.
On the home hole, Miller landed his second shot twenty feet from the flagstick. A two-putt for par meant a share of the lead and a three-way play-off; draining the twenty-footer for birdie would give him his first PGA victory. The birdie stroke came up two feet short, but then, shockingly, he missed the short par save, and with it, a chance to seize his first tour victory.
“Miller was in tears as he signed his card for a 72,” the Associated Press reported.
A second painful collapse, this time with the entire world watching, crushed Miller just three weeks later. Twenty-three years old and playing in his first Masters as a professional, Miller carded a sensational third-round 68 at Augusta National, one of only four sub-70 Saturday scores. Miller’s play sparked serious talk that he might become the tournament’s y
oungest winner since Nicklaus, who also posted a third-round 68.
Easter Sunday began with Miller alone in sixth place, four strokes behind the Golden Bear and journeyman Charles Coody. Miller then tore up Bobby Jones’s masterpiece as if it were no tougher than the Phoenix course he’d demolished a year earlier. The “nerveless kid,” as one reporter called him, made the turn with three birdies and no bogeys to pull within two strokes of the lead. A pair of birdies on numbers eleven and twelve—where he holed out from a bunker, seventy feet away—gave him a share of the lead.
When Miller sank a six-foot birdie on the fourteenth, the Augusta crowd went wild, and not just because the blond-maned youngster had grabbed the lead.
“[It] seemed that every teenager on the premises was screeching and yelling for him,” wrote Lincoln Werden of the New York Times. “Clad in a light green shirt and mod slacks of blue, green, black and white stripes, he seemed to personify the younger element on tour and in the gallery.”
Another Times reporter claimed that Miller’s heroics evoked the play of another famed Masters hero, as Miller’s three birdies in four holes “brought the tournament alive with a charge that recalled Arnold Palmer in his heyday.”
Miller’s friend and mentor, Billy Casper, loved his “protégé’s” approach.
“He has no fear,” the reigning Masters champion said about Miller’s birdie barrage. “John said early this week that these Masters greens are easy to putt. Now he’s proving it.”
Minutes after Miller so easily nailed his birdie, Coody three-putted the fourteenth to fall two behind. With Nicklaus’s bogey on the twelfth a little earlier, and then, surprisingly, no more birdies in his arsenal, Miller held sole possession of the lead and seemed destined to win.
“I had a great mental attitude those first fourteen holes,” he said. “I was at ease all day. I kept telling myself this was just a practice round, a lot of fun, and everything was going like crazy.... When I started walking down the fifteenth fairway I started thinking to myself that my dad will really love to see me win this thing.”