Chasing Greatness

by Adam Lazarus

  Boros didn’t wait. Before Schlee and Palmer had even left the green—and with Charles only a few feet from the flagstick, planning his next shot from green-side—Boros addressed his ball and stroked a long iron toward the green.

  The shot was well off-line. Boros hooked his two-iron thirty yards left, nearly missing all twenty-two thousand square feet of the ninth green before settling on its far edge. With the pin located on the right, Boros had to traverse countless heaving valleys of Oakmont Poa annua.

  Regarded as “an indifferent putter,” Boros had already missed a short birdie putt on number seven that would have dropped him to five under par. Afterward, he gently kicked his putter in disgust for blowing the opportunity. But none of the leaders had birdied number seven, whereas everyone—Nicklaus, Trevino, Schlee, Palmer, his partner, Heard—was birdying number nine. Failing to match the rest of the leaders would be costly.

  Boros’s patience was then stretched even thinner after he hit his second shot: U.S.G.A. officials were busy trying to resolve Tom Weiskopf’s green-side conundrum. Worse yet, when a ruling was finally issued, officials asked Weiskopf and Charles to finish the hole before allowing Heard to hit onto the green. All the while, a restless Boros had no choice but to wait in the fairway and contemplate his terrifying putt.

  Boros nonetheless produced an outstanding eagle effort. His travelogue putt rolled up and down, left and right, over and over again, before halting six feet below the hole. The remaining putt for birdie would break sharply left to right, as Heard’s had done. At first, Boros’s putt looked dead-on, but he hit it too softly and the ball skirted off the cup’s right edge.

  Tapping in for par—after witnessing Heard’s unlikely birdie—appeared to take a lot out of the fifty-three-year-old, even though he still held a share of the lead. Saturday afternoon’s “Arnie and Julie Show” now felt like a solo act.

  THE COMMOTION, DELAY, AND RESHUFFLING surrounding the ninth green were entirely Tom Weiskopf’s fault.

  Weiskopf—the only man among the leaders to escape the front side bogey-free—pushed his tee shot on number nine into the right rough, between two trees; this was one of the few spots at Oakmont where trees actually affected play. Unshaken by the minor setback, Weiskopf, wearing a lime green top and yellow slacks, arched his body over the ball: Tall and narrow, he looked like a half-ripened banana. Daring as ever, Weiskopf eschewed the safe play (pitching back onto the fairway) and elected to carry the trees and attack the green with a high five-iron fade. Unfortunately, the tall grass forced the clubface to open wide at impact and launched the ball into a pronounced slice.

  “Oh, my God,” Weiskopf moaned as soon as he hit the shot, rushing toward the fairway to follow the ball’s wayward flight. A marshal shouted, “Fore to the right,” at the top of his voice, to alert everyone in the vicinity of the immediate danger.

  In the ABC booth, Chris Schenkel and Byron Nelson saw the ball lift off and curve wildly, but neither knew where it landed. Watching from her home on 179 Bexley Drive in Bedford, Ohio, Eva Weiskopf—the recently widowed, former teen phenom who still competed regularly in Cleveland amateur circles—had no clue either about where the ball was heading, and wondered if her son’s championship hopes had also vanished. Because trees blocked most of the area from camera view, Nelson could describe the area where it was heading only as “dark country over there.”

  Green-side fans helped officials locate Weiskopf’s ball inside a large, green-and-white-striped tent that was still “in bounds,” but well beyond the conventional field of play. His wayward iron had struck a vendor selling periscopes near the tent, then bounced through an open flap into a concession stand and onto a snack table, where it nearly hit a few startled patrons munching hot dogs. The ball nestled several feet off the ground on a table—between a mustard jar and a loaf of bread.

  While Weiskopf and the crowd chuckled over the absurdity of the scene, U.S.G.A. officials faced a complicated rules quandary that required considerable time to resolve. Ten minutes into the confusion, they instructed the twosome behind (Palmer and Schlee) to play through so the officials could continue deliberating.

  The rules issue centered on what constituted fair relief for Weiskopf from the concession stand. Though he did not indulge spectators who suggested he enjoy a hot dog while waiting, Weiskopf remained notably relaxed throughout the ordeal. In the end, the long wait was rewarded with a tremendous break that kept alive his championship dream.

  “At the back of the shelf was a protective awning shielding the view of the ball from curious spectators,” Lincoln Werden of the New York Times explained the following day. “Because of the obstruction it was decided that Weiskopf should be given two club lengths’ relief from the edge of the snack bar. This would put him in casual water and therefore he received further relief by being permitted to drop without penalty in a dry spot in rough grass.”

  While Boros and Heard continued to wait in the fairway, officials carved a narrow path through the gallery as Weiskopf paced back and forth from his ball to the green, scouting his options.

  “He will have a difficult shot from there to get the ball close to the hole, even if he does have a good lie,” counseled Nelson. “The pin is cut close to that side of the green, and there’s a bank between it that goes up to the edge of the green.”

  Through the makeshift alleyway, Weiskopf decided not to loft the ball high, but rather—with the green-side rough fairly well trampled by spectators—to pitch the ball low. He hoped to deaden the force of the shot against the top of the embankment, and slowly roll the ball onto the green. Weiskopf perfectly executed his creative plan: The ball scampered off the embankment and onto the green, six feet past the hole. For a moment, the shot even looked like it might go in.

  “Oooooooo!” the normally placid Nelson exclaimed. “Look at that shot.... That’s a remarkable shot from where he was.”

  An elated Weiskopf waved to the stunned crowd and walked onto the green. His understandably anxious playing partner, Bob Charles—it seemed like an hour since he’d played his last shot—putted out, then watched Weiskopf roll in the improbable birdie to join the leaders at four under.

  As he walked to the tenth tee, all smiles and peering up at the Father’s Day late-afternoon sky, Temperamental Tommy no longer had reason to lament that his father “never saw me play as good as I can.”

  • 12 •

  The Greatest Nine Ever

  A few myths about the final round of the 1973 U.S. Open need to be debunked.

  For one, Oakmont’s greens were not slowed by a sprinkler malfunction during the wee hours of Sunday morning—or Saturday morning, or Thursday morning, or Wednesday morning either, as several respected authorities have claimed. The sprinklers—or perhaps a member of the grounds crew—actually “malfunctioned” sometime between late Thursday evening and early Friday morning (see chapter six). The accidental overwatering led to considerably slower greens during Friday’s second round—though how much slower depended on the individual hole and the time of day. And the sprinkler mishap also led to significantly softer greens for the remainder of the championship.

  The players’ Friday performances reflected the changed conditions: Scores fell by nearly one-and-a-half shots between Thursday’s and Friday’s rounds. These unique conditions probably aided Long Island club professional Gene Borek in shooting his course-record 65.

  But by late Friday afternoon, many greens had dried in the broiling summer heat and they again putted very fast, especially for those who started play in the afternoon. The ninth green remained lightning-quick all day.

  Also contrary to a common legend, no biblical rainstorm occurred Saturday night or Sunday morning that turned the greens on day four to dartboard mush. Not unless the U.S. Weather Service and every newspaper in western Pennsylvania completely missed the storm. The only significant rainfall to strike the Pittsburgh region during the 1973 U.S. Open occurred on Saturday between six and ten a.m., when over a quarter inch delayed t
he first tee time less than an hour.

  The Saturday-morning downpour affected more than just the greens: It softened the fairways as well. This helped players keep their drives more easily in the short grass over the entire weekend, especially on Oakmont’s more steeply inclined fairways (such as the twelfth and fifteenth), without the ball skirting into the rough.

  Sunday-afternoon winds did dry out the course a bit. But between the sprinkler mishap on Friday and the rains on Saturday morning, Oakmont simply couldn’t regain its legendary “fast” reputation or return to the same slick greens and fairways that prevailed on Thursday, when the scores were actually a half stroke higher than on day one of the 1962 U.S. Open at Oakmont.

  But by no means were the greens “slow” during the final round of the 1973 U.S. Open. In fact, they were speedier on Sunday than on Friday, following the sprinkler malfunction, and also faster on Sunday than on Saturday, following the heavy morning rains. As Byron Nelson explained during an instructional segment on Sunday, to putt Oakmont’s quick greens, players still needed to allow for huge amounts of break, grip the club lightly in their fingers, and barely let the putter head touch the ground. The greens, said Nelson on Sunday morning, were putting as fast as proud club members claimed to play them on a regular basis—at least as fast as any other American championship course in this era.

  Still, the greens on Sunday did show more variation than usual—depending on drainage, sun exposure, and the amount of sprinkler soaking they’d received on Friday. Discovering where the moisture lay on each green mattered most.

  For some golfers, these uncertainties produced as many problems as if the greens were predictably lightning-fast. Fear of three-putting from short distances continued to dominate players’ minds. Even after the greens dried out on Sunday afternoon, players regularly left putts short from ten or twelve feet, worried about turning a birdie opportunity into a bogey. Whether the greens were damp or not, no one seeking to come from behind dared putt Oakmont’s greens aggressively in a last-ditch effort to “go low.”

  Even though softer greens made gauging approach shots easier, the dampness of the course made the round more difficult in other ways for Sunday’s sixty-five contestants. The heavy, humid air shortened how far the ball would carry, and soaked fairways slowed drives once they hit the ground: Balls could not run as much as on drier, harder surfaces. The wet conditions also made Oakmont’s dense, gnarly rough more of a nightmare than usual. But at no time during the 1973 U.S. Open—including Sunday’s final round—were “lift-and-clean” (i.e., winter) rules in effect, as one urban legend maintains.

  In short, for the players who made the weekend cut, Oakmont did not play notably easier on Sunday than it had on Thursday, when the course played traditionally fast and firm. Only four men broke 70 on Sunday, and the average scores (for the players who made the cut) were not statistically different on Thursday compared to Sunday. The median score on both days was 74. The “most difficult” scoring day (although the differences did not reach statistical significance) was actually Saturday—following the heavy morning rains—when the median score was 75, and the mean score was 74.323.

  Thus, the myth that scoring conditions on the final Sunday of the 1973 U.S. Open championship were exceptionally easy and ripe for low scoring needs to be debunked once and for all. On Sunday, just as on Thursday and Saturday, missed fairways, missed greens, and misgauged putts continued to be punished by the merciless logic of the Fownes patriarchs: “A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost.”

  LAURENCE OTTO MILLER NOT ONLY introduced his son to golf; he did so without ruling via an iron fist. Still, no matter how much Laurence preached the power of positive thinking, by the time his son reached tour stardom, he did not quite abide. Miller’s hang-ups on Sunday about gagging on putts at the seventh and eighth holes, or feeling, in his own words, “depressed” before the final round began, hardly echoed his father’s teachings. Then again, twenty-five hundred miles west, in San Francisco’s Richmond district, Dad didn’t exactly follow his own advice.

  “We turned on the TV set Sunday afternoon,” Laurence Miller said, “and they said something about Johnny Miller making four straight birdies and getting into contention. We thought they made a mistake. Once we came to the realization of what was happening, we got on pins and needles. My wife was shaking. We just didn’t want him to lose it.”

  During all of the excitement that took place on the ninth green—birdies by Palmer and Schlee, Weiskopf’s hot-dog stand adventure, Heard’s birdie from the first fairway, Boros’s exasperation—Miller played Oakmont’s second nine. The day before, Miller had made a clutch eagle on number nine to finish the front side at only two over par, despite playing horribly on the first seven holes. On Sunday, he strained a little less as he walked onto the ninth green: He wasn’t frantically looking through the crowd to learn whether Linda had returned from their rental quarters with his yardage book.

  Lou Beaudine, Miller’s caddie, was frantic enough for both of them.

  “Break out a package of new balls, caddie,” Miller said as he passed the hot-dog tent that would soon be the scene of Tom Weiskopf’s ninth-hole high jinks.

  “But, but ... you don’t want to do that now, do you?” Beaudine asked. After watching his man score five front-nine birdies, the well-traveled bagman couldn’t fathom Miller changing balls midround.

  “Sure, I’m not superstitious,” Miller said on the tenth tee.

  Almost immediately, Miller reflected on what he’d said. After three-putting number eight, he had climbed back to red numbers with a birdie on number nine. Only three shots separated him from the front-runners, his good friend Jerry Heard and Arnold Palmer, the man whom, as a skinny California kid, he’d patterned his game after. In less than two hours, Miller had cut his deficit in half and leapfrogged seven men on the scoreboard with the entire back nine left to play. Even a religious man like Miller probably didn’t think it was a good idea to defy the golf gods. Especially not on the tee at Oakmont’s legendary tenth hole.

  “Uh, give me one of the old balls,” Miller told Beaudine, returning to his senses.

  To have a chance for par on the downhill tenth, driving the ball into the right half of the fairway—letting the natural slant of the turf kick it left—is a must. Miller did just that. But his five-iron approach barely reached the front of the green, dying around forty feet short and left of the flagstick.

  Like its nearby counterpart (Oakmont’s first hole), the tenth green slants steeply from front to back and right to left: hardly an easy two-putt. Hit the forty-footer a tad light, and it would break early and end as far from the cup as it began. Strike the putt too hard and it would build speed as it passed the hole, perhaps not stopping until off the green. The tenth green epitomized the Fownes/Loeffler philosophy of using fear to test a golfer’s character ... and to punish hubris.

  From the left front portion of the green, the forty-footer was actually uphill rather than downhill, but it broke at least seven feet from right to left. Miller tapped the first putt with appropriate caution; he quickly realized it was short, but the speed was excellent and he left himself a two-and-a-half-footer that, by Oakmont standards, was relatively flat, straight, and below the hole. A minute later, he carefully stroked it in.

  Having escaped with a par on the tenth—a hole that putting guru Dave Pelz would later call “the toughest par-four in America”—Miller happily advanced to the short par-four eleventh, which offered a much better chance at birdie.

  Success on number eleven depends heavily on producing a fine tee shot. The fairway peaks, slanting sharply left to right, so to have a birdie opportunity the drive needs to travel far enough to reach the crest. But hitting the ball too far means that it will kick into the right rough, or even into a ditch. From the top of the crest, the green—set at around a forty-five-degree angle from the fairway, and tilted sharply back-to-front—is clearly in view. With the pin placed Sunday in an accessible position on th
e forward left part of the green, the ideal approach would stop just under the hole, leaving an uphill putt.

  Miller smashed a terrific drive to the summit on the fairway, then stroked a smooth wedge that died fourteen feet below the hole. He then grabbed his sixth birdie in eleven holes and—just as Arnold Palmer missed an eight-foot par saver on the sixth to create a five-way tie atop the leaderboard—was only one shot behind the pace, at two under par. Next up, the twelfth.

  Since its creation, the 603-yard twelfth hole has been one of the epic par-fives in American championship golf. And not simply because of its length; throughout the U.S. Open’s first half century (until 1955), it marked the longest hole in the history of the event. With the green flowing lazily downhill and no bunkers to guard the green’s entry, a handful of long-hitting pre-World War II golfers—before the advent of a fairway sprinkler system—actually reached the green in two shots by rolling the ball along a summer-baked pathway across the last fifty yards.

  But few players ever saw a chance to attempt this stunning feat. Numerous deep bunkers narrowed the driving area, and even if the golfer escaped these, keeping a long drive out of the rough was nearly impossible because of the fairway’s sharp left-to-right incline. And the green’s front-to-back tilt—featuring innumerable undulations as deceptive as any on the course—flustered even the most skilled putters.

  But the twelfth played somewhat easier (though longer) over the weekend, as a result of Saturday’s rains; the relatively soft fairway increased chances that anyone who struck an accurate drive would be able to keep the ball in the short grass. Then they could hit a fairway wood past a cross bunker, and clip a wedge from a reasonably flat lie onto the green from around a hundred yards. The pin on Sunday stood planted on a knoll on the green’s firm front left side.