by Adam Lazarus
Miller had not played the par-five fourth hole particularly well, scoring no better than par each of the first three days. Still, despite letting his three-wood sail right into the green-side bunker, over a hundred feet from the flagstick, he remained confident about getting his birdie. His sand blast was a beauty, carrying thirty yards in the air before landing gently and skirting the cup’s left edge, a mere six inches away.
Four birdies in four holes (three via putts from near tap-in range) unexpectedly made Miller a contender, while the preround leaders continued to stroke putts on the practice green.
“When I get charged up, all I can think about is birdies,” he said. “I’m Joe Feast or Famine—I get everything or nothing.”
And after the fourth consecutive birdie, clearly Joe Feast was playing Oakmont.
“I was sky-high and said, ‘Okay, baby, let’s go!’”
Miller fell slightly from his atmospheric high once he walked off the fourth green. Unspectacular on the fifth and sixth—though he did leave both approach shots safely below the hole—his two-putts from around twenty-five feet secured easy pars.
Now two shots behind the leaders, Miller hit a long, straight drive beyond the crest of the hill on the seventh fairway; this left him staring down the unnerving pin located on the green’s back right corner. With the afternoon winds picking up, the safe play was to leave the second shot well below the hole to avoid overshooting the green. But Miller was flag-hunting that Sunday afternoon. Just as the last pairing of the day (Julius Boros and Jerry Heard) started their round, Miller flew his nine-iron straight at the flagstick and stopped the ball a mere six feet away.
If he could sink the relatively simple putt on number seven, Miller would be within a stroke of the lead, one step closer to winning his first major championship. But as he lined up his putt, the excitement of what was happening finally caught up with Miller. Not only was he creeping up on the leaders; he seemed yet again on his way to the kind of surreal round that was becoming his tour trademark—much like the 61 he shot at Phoenix three years earlier, or his 63 back in February at the Bob Hope. And just like two years earlier at Augusta National and the following January at Pebble Beach, his mind started to wander.
His short putt for birdie on number seven wasn’t even close. “I really got pumped up. I was super nervous ... my putt at seven was a choke.” Still four under through seven holes, but a great opportunity squandered.
Miller regathered himself on the tee at the gigantic, par-three eighth (playing 255 yards that day to the rear pin position), and dropped a four-wood safely onto the green: a fine shot, and close enough to ensure a simple par on Oakmont’s flattest putting surface.
But again Miller lost mental focus and stumbled on the green. He misstruck his thirty-footer and it came up well short. He badly missed the remaining five-footer.
“I can honestly say I gagged on those putts on seven and eight,” he said afterward. “One thing I kept in my head out there all day. ‘Don’t shank,’ I was thinking. I was thinking that on almost every iron shot. I know that’s bad thinking, but I couldn’t help it. It was always up there in my mind.”
At the most critical moment in his pro career, Johnny Miller seemed to have completely forgotten his father’s advice: “Never allow yourself to think negatively.”
“I remembered [how] at Augusta in 1971,” Miller would say later, “I got so pumped up that I was finger-walking down the fairways and took three straight bogeys.”
As he crossed the Pennsylvania Turnpike to play the last ten holes, back to even par for the championship and four shots behind the leaders, Miller couldn’t help but fear that history was about to repeat itself.
FOUR STROKES OFF THE LEAD at one over par, Gary Player teed off two groups after Johnny Miller. Sapped of his legendary stamina, Player improved significantly upon Saturday’s collapse (77) but never roamed into contention, with a 73 on Sunday. His finishing twelfth at the U.S. Open, just a few months after two major surgeries, let his colleagues know that he was back to stay and a threat in any major championship.
Just minutes after Player teed off, the youngest member of golf’s Big Three took the stage. At 2:02 p.m., Jack Nicklaus, also four shots back at one over par, set out to replicate the finest single round of his luminous career.
Six years earlier, at another of America’s esteemed golf cathedrals, Baltusrol in New Jersey, Nicklaus began the last round of the Open trailing the leader by a stroke. Playing alongside Arnold Palmer, an inspired Golden Bear shot a faultless five under 65. Four strokes better than his nemesis, Nicklaus won his second U.S. Open, adding another glorious chapter to his major championship legacy—and another heartbreak to Palmer’s.
Given Nicklaus’s record of final-round brilliance and his 1962 victory at Oakmont, only a fool would count him out. Despite driving the ball inconsistently on Saturday, he scrambled to a 74 and stayed in the hunt. That night, he made an adjustment: not in his strategy or putting stroke, but one he nevertheless hoped would resurrect his chance to win.
Nicklaus concluded that the pillow he’d been sleeping on was cramping his neck and preventing a full turn on his backswing. He switched pillows (he also made this change before the final round of the 1972 British Open, where a 65 nearly edged out Lee Trevino for the Claret Jug) and was pain-free on Sunday afternoon. From that point forward, Nicklaus traveled with his own pillow to every tournament.
Although he was not quite as keenly motivated as in 1972—when, having won the Masters, he had his sights on the Grand Stam—Nicktaus’s competitive fires were still stoked at Oakmont by the roster of men he was competing against: Trevino, admittedly his toughest competitor; Palmer, the man he would always trail in the battle for public adoration; and his heir apparent, Tom Weiskopf, were each playing right behind Nicklaus. A lengthy putt for birdie on number two brought the thirteen-time major championship winner back to even par. Trailing by just three strokes with two reachable par-fives ahead, the Golden Bear believed he could overtake the leaders with a Baltusrol-like final round.
Just as Nicklaus rolled in his birdie putt on number two, a frustrated Lee Trevino shook his head in disgust back on the first green. For a remarkable fifty-third time in fifty-five tries at Oakmont, Trevino had reached the green in regulation figures. And for what must have seemed like the hundredth time that week, he could not capitalize on the opportunity. He promptly three-putted the first green and dropped to even par for the championship, tied with Nicklaus.
Missed birdie putts that teased the hole, along with the bad luck of drawing a thirteen-year-old caddie who knew nothing about Oakmont’s harrowing greens, were only minor sources of frustration that week for Trevino. What most drained the once “Happy Hombre” was the weight of his celebrity and the resulting lack of privacy, which he let everyone at Oakmont know about. Each day he retreated as quickly as possible from the golf course to the seclusion of his motor home, parked near the practice range in Oakmont’s members-only parking lot.
Yet however much he complained, Trevino’s greatest strength as a golfer was his ability to compartmentalize: to separate his professional performance from his turbulent personal life.
Trevino shook off the slipup on the first hole and rebounded by sinking a quick, curling putt on number two that matched Nicklaus’s birdie a few moments earlier. That success enticed America’s most gifted golf writer, Herbert Warren Wind, to believe that Trevino’s putter might arrive just in time.
“Trevino’s putt was the first one of any length he had made all week,” wrote Wind, who saw Trevino as Hogan’s true successor. “I remember wondering if that might set the little Texan off.”
It did stir Trevino up. He grabbed another birdie on the fourth hole to move to two under, then reached the par-five ninth green in two shots, settled for a birdie, and reached three under par for the championship.
Sunday morning, three under par had been good enough for a share of the lead, and—typical of a U.S. Open—not much had changed by
midafternoon. Trevino’s ball striking at Oakmont remained second to none, and if Wind’s prophecy proved true, a third U.S. Open championship in six years might soon be his.
TALL TOM WEISKOPF TEED UP at the starting hole immediately after Trevino. With Weiskopf only one shot behind the leaders, a quick birdie would earn him a share of the top spot, and bring him within reach of that Father’s Day present he so dearly wanted to give to the late Thomas Mannix Weiskopf.
He parred number one, then crossed the bridge above his father’s railroad tracks and boldly smacked a driver on the 343-yard par-four hole—an option available only to the game’s longest hitters. Weiskopf’s towering drive carried to the upslope in front of the green. From there, he took dead aim at the devilishly placed flagstick on the green’s back right corner, and pitched his ball seven feet above the hole. The putt was as slick as any on the golf course, but Weiskopf knocked in the birdie and, for the moment, grabbed a share of the lead.
Although Weiskopf’s birdie pushed him to three under, the logjam at the top remained four deep; Palmer, Boros, and Heard made it through the first hole unscathed. John Schlee did not.
Schlee’s “lunar point” may have been sky-high, thanks to the alignment of his natal moon, but after his great 67 on Saturday, he quickly descended back to earth. Being paired on Sunday with Palmer likely hastened the fall: “Gary Player told me last night to just not listen to those people, but there’s just so much you can’t avoid listening to. It wasn’t an anti-Schlee element; the people were well mannered but I just couldn’t settle down with them always chanting, Arnie! Arnie!’” On Sunday morning, Schlee wore an enormous white visor on his head that, he insisted, was “the same as wearing blinders.”
Neither “blinders” nor his consistent success in playing with Palmer in the past helped calm Schlee on the eve of the biggest moment in his professional career.
“[You] should have seen me. Normally, I like to stay up late when I have a late tee time the following day, so I can stay in bed longer. That way, I don’t worry about finding things to do for six hours or more before I tee off.
“I think I stared at the ceiling all night Saturday.”
Observing on the first tee that afternoon—and just as eager as Schtee—was Bob Ford. A nineteen-year-old from the University of Tampa, Ford had come to Oakmont in early June 1973. The club’s famed head professional, Lew Worsham, gave the polite, somewhat intimidated young man a three-week job before, during, and after the Open, selling hats, shirts, and periscopes. At the time, compensation was not discussed, but in the end, Worsham asked what to pay Ford for his work: $300 or a set of Ben Hogan irons. Ford took the irons.
With Worsham’s permission, Ford left his cashier’s post on Sunday to see the main attraction play the first hole.
“It was all about Arnold Palmer,” Ford remembered, admitting to being a bit “brainwashed” because Worsham was so insistent that Palmer was “going to win to get revenge for the loss in 1962.”
Having shucked his duties to see the game’s greatest star, a thrilled Ford had to endure a most exasperating sight: the journeyman John Schlee alongside Arnold Palmer on the tee at number one.
“I couldn’t believe he was in the position he was in,” Ford remembered. Even though Schlee had won a tournament earlier that year, he stood out equally, in Ford’s mind, for the “goofy Hawaiian shirt” he wore. “He didn’t belong with Nicklaus and Trevino and Player and Palmer, my idols, you know.”
Dressed in a powder blue shirt with white slacks, and sporting a visor of his own, Palmer mounted the tee as the boisterous crowd cheered in support; they exploded with joy when his opening drive split the fairway.
As several thousand enlistees of the undisciplined army raced down the first fairway, noisily competing for a spot to view Palmer’s approach to the green, a practically invisible Schlee lined up his tee shot. The lanky, six-foot-three Dallas pro looked anything but graceful next to the shorter, broader Palmer, and not only due to his tacky wardrobe. Unusually long arms, an elastic upper torso, and an overly weighted left side at address (an extreme interpretation of Hogan’s advice) made Schlee seem awkward. Try though he did, his flat, three-quarter swing looked nothing like his mentor’s, and unlike Hogan, who was always in perfect balance, Schlee sometimes fell backward after lashing his driver and long irons.
“So many people were packed around the first tee,” Schlee remembered. “I tried not to notice, to stay focused on my shot at hand.”
Unfortunately, he couldn’t do that, as Arnie’s fans paraded loudly down the fairway. Schlee unleashed a quick, sloppy swipe at the ball and lurched backward.
“When I made contact, I knew I’d blocked it, and wouldn’t like the result.”
The ball jumped sharply to the right, a severe block, and headed toward Hulton Road—the busy thoroughfare that guards Oakmont’s northern perimeter.
Assuming that the ball was out-of-bounds, Schlee now had to play a provisional, having already given away two shots and still hitting his driver on this demanding opening hole.
Schlee overcompensated for the previous blocked drive; he pulled his second tee shot to the left, into a treacherous fairway bunker. Laying three, he knew that he’d have no choice but to recover safely to the fairway from the bunker, and would be lucky to escape the hole with a triple bogey.
But maybe Schlee’s “natal moon” was aligned. An alert U.S.G.A. official stationed to locate balls in the deep right rough caught sight of Schlee’s first drive before a thick hedge stopped it from going out-of-bounds. As a result, Schlee’s “provisional” ball—the second drive he’d hit into the left-side bunker—no longer counted. For official scoring purposes, it had never happened.
With the ball under the hedge and clearly unplayable, Schlee now had two options. He could drop the ball two club lengths from the hedge, no nearer to the hole, add a penalty stroke, and hit his third shot from there. Or he could return to the tee and hit his third shot from where the debacle began.
Schlee chose to return to the tee. “[The relief] wouldn’t have done any good because I still would have been two inches short of the outside hedge. I could have spent all day out there.”
Even if the two-club relief had taken him beyond the hedge, Schlee would still have been mired in dense, untrammeled rough. Instead, he accepted the two-shot penalty and returned to the first tee to hit what was essentially, in duffer’s parlance, a “do-over.” With one drive pushed badly right and the second hooked badly left, the odds seemed good that Schlee might finally hit one down the middle. He did.
Though U.S.G.A. video footage clearly shows Heard, Boros, and a huge gallery of spectators looking on in horror while Schlee walked back to the first tee to hit his third drive, Schlee had never felt more alone.
“It was so strange going back to the first tee,” he later misremembered. “Hundreds of people were watching us tee off only moments ago, but now the only person in sight was an older gentleman in coveralls. He was holding a bag and a pole with a nail in the end, poking around picking up discarded cups and wrappers.
“When the old man saw me walk up, he stopped poking and stared at me with a questioning look on his face. Then he said, ‘Not so good, huh?’
“‘No, not so good,’ I said as I teed up a new ball. ‘But wait’ll you see this next shot.’”
That next shot landed safely in the fairway. Still, he was laying three and more than 150 yards away from completing the most difficult starting hole in all of championship golf.
“That verified the fact that he didn’t belong,” Bob Ford recalled thinking. “I was kind of glad, you know, because I was rooting for Palmer. I wanted everybody out of the way as fast as they could get out of the way.”
But Schlee was not ready to move out of Palmer’s or anyone else’s way—not after the tortuous path he’d traveled from Seaside to the precipice of winning a major championship at Oakmont. Preparing to play his fourth shot into the number one green, “All I could think was, I’d
blown the Open with my very first shot,” Schlee recalled. “But all the time consumed gave me a chance to talk to myself. I just told myself, ‘Okay, you’ve got to spot these guys two strokes to win; now go out and play.’”
AFTER EACH MEMBER OF THE field had completed at least one hole, three under par still meant a spot at the top of the leaderboard. The first man to break the deadlock was Jerry Heard.
Saturday evening, reporters had asked Heard, the greenest of the final-round leaders, how he planned to deal with the daunting new pressure of leading a major championship.
“I think everybody chokes, except maybe Jack Nicklaus,” he said.
By Sunday afternoon, with reporters still badgering the leaders in the locker room, Heard could no longer control his excitement.
“If I win this one I’ll get so drunk tonight, I’ll be able to fly home without a plane.”
Through two holes, Heard could taste the champagne. Like Weiskopf, Nicklaus, Trevino, Wadkins, and his pal Johnny Miller before him, Heard grabbed a birdie on number two to stand alone in the top spot at four under par.
Heard seemed still to be riding high from the momentum of his brilliant third-round 66, an effort he attributed in good part to the levity provided by his playing partner, John Schlee. Chatting about “horses, fishing, girls.... everything,” Heard and Schlee together had shot Saturday’s two lowest scores.
“I hope I get paired with someone who likes to talk,” Heard said Saturday evening. “This relaxes me out there. John and I had a great time.”
Heard didn’t get his wish. For the most part, the only things coming out of the mouth of his Sunday partner, Julius Boros—nearly thirty years his senior-were Kent cigarette butts. With Boros virtually silent on the course and the bulk of the gallery trailing Palmer in the twosome ahead, at least Heard’s afternoon was comparatively quiet and mellow.