Chasing Greatness

by Adam Lazarus

  For a time, Miller passed the putting “test.” He acknowledged a slight case of the “yips” but (at first) combated them with equipment. His win at the 1987 AT&T had come using a forty-eight-inch putter that he kept tucked under his right arm.

  Miller also relied on mind games to secure that win: “I knew I couldn’t make [the birdie putt at number eighteen]. So I pretended my son was putting it. I figured he could do it. So I’m hanging over the putt saying, ‘Come on, young John.’

  “So I was sort of a third party to the putt and it went right in the middle,” he said later.

  Not long after that win, the prophecy by Palmer—who knew plenty about fleeting putting genius—had been realized.

  “By 1989, my play on the PGA tour had become so erratic that I considered chucking the whole thing,” Miller explained. “From tee to green I was never better, but on the greens I would flinch as though I had some kind of nervous disorder. My yips were so bad I’d feel embarrassed even when I was alone on the putting green. I’d tried every type of putter and technique you could imagine, but nothing worked for long. It wasn’t unusual for me to hit fifteen greens in regulation and make only two birdies.”

  Miller had overcome a career in the doldrums once before in the late 1970s; he didn’t want to try again.

  “Golf just wasn’t much fun anymore, and after twenty years as a tour pro, I’d had enough. I secretly told my wife, Linda, that I was going to retire. I intended to ride off into the sunset and only do a few corporate outings and expand my golf course design business.”

  Now into his forties, the business-savvy father of six had long ago clipped the lengthy blond locks and flashy wardrobe he’d displayed during the 1970s. But he was still the same man that modeled slacks for Sears and appeared in tomato juice advertisements in Japan: charismatic and photogenic. And he was witty and lucid, especially when it came to clarifying golf’s mysteries for the casual fan.

  Within weeks of his deciding to retire, NBC Sports approached Miller. The network’s current analyst, Lee Trevino, would be eligible for the Senior Tour beginning in 1990, and producer Larry Cirillo needed a replacement. He chose Miller.

  As a rookie broadcaster, Miller endured a few growing pains, including feeling “awkward and useless” at the outset. He was chaperoned by sixty-year-old Charlie Jones, an experienced, genuinely passionate broadcaster who steered NBC’s expanding golf coverage, and tried his best to serve as Miller’s setup man.

  Eventually, Miller found his niche. And although it didn’t take him nearly as long, “Johnny Miller, the broadcaster” soon blossomed into a boundary-breaking star, just like the upstart who had dared shoot 63 to win the U.S. Open.

  Ever since comparing himself to Arnold Palmer in the August 1964 issue of Sports Illustrated, Miller had always been self-assured and outspoken. When speaking about his historic win at Oakmont at age twenty-six, he responded, “Some people may have been surprised I won the 1973 U.S. Open. But I wasn’t one of them. The surprise in my mind was that I hadn’t won the U.S. Open before.”

  And in early 1975, having just won the Bob Hope to topple the tour’s best for the third time in four weeks, he again surprised the golf world with his innocent braggadocio.

  “Jack has been on top so long people are beginning to look for someone to beat him. He’s been up there, been the best so long, now people are starting to say, ‘Maybe, right now, maybe Johnny Miller is better.’ Right now I might be.”

  Rather than suppress Miller’s tendency to “go with my gut,” NBC Sports executives encouraged it.

  “I want to be unpredictable. [NBC Sports Executive Producer Terry O’Neil] has told me to say whatever comes to my mind,” Miller said as he warmed to his new vocation.

  That directive stirred controversy by the end of his very first assignment. With tour veteran Peter Jacobsen standing on the eighteenth fairway and leading the final round of the 1990 Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, Miller told his viewers exactly what was on his mind.

  “This is absolutely the easiest shot to choke on I’ve ever seen in my life,” Miller said on air.

  The man who, while leading the 1973 U.S. Open, had stood on the seventy-second fairway muttering, “You crummy dog, don’t shank this shot,” believed his comment to be fairly innocuous. Reporters and fans didn’t agree.

  “I guess I opened up a can of worms. No analyst had ever mentioned that word [choke] before. I’m a loose cannon. It’s nice not knowing what a guy is going to say.”

  Miller would increasingly cultivate an edgy TV persona and shoot from the hip: deeming a bad shot under pressure a “choke,” criticizing a club selection, and poking fun at less aesthetically pleasing swings.

  Miller was regularly over-the-top, even when he said he wasn’t.

  “I’ll pull a guy’s pants down, but I won’t pull down his boxers.”

  During the 1991 Ryder Cup at windswept Kiawah Island, tour star Paul Azinger called Miller “the biggest moron” in the broadcasting booth, after Azinger had finished his match and heard about some of the television commentary. (Azinger later gave a tongue-in-cheek retraction, saying he meant “the biggest Mormon.”)

  Miller, though furious at Azinger’s comments, ultimately held his ground and soon expanded his role, as NBC substituted Jim Lampley for Charlie Jones in 1993 to try to climb in the Nielsen ratings. He also began to grow viewers’ golf vocabulary, often in humorous ways: He spoke of “muffie” lies to describe shots from fairways or bunkers that players were likely to hit fat; “buggy whip” swings that began and ended much too fast; and “chicken wing” left elbows that condemned duffers to forever slice.

  Before long, Miller became as much the attraction to viewers as the golf itself.

  “I feel bad when players think I’m an adversary. I’m not. In reality, I’m their best friend.... If a player hits a bad shot, I’m not going to make up excuses for him. I might go on the tee and show what happened, how he went underneath, undercut the ball, and left the face open and blocked it to the right. And that player will go, ‘I don’t like that; why did you say that? You can’t talk about me like that.’

  “I’m not trying to criticize anyone. I’m trying to report what happened and use the opportunity to maybe help the viewer with his or her game.... And while I’m doing it, maybe I can entertain.”

  Miller didn’t completely give up his clubs for an NBC microphone. He made select appearances in the early 1990s at tour stops where he had forged his legacy of dominance two decades earlier. In addition to playing in the 1991 British Open at Royal Birkdate—site of his 1976 win—and tying for sixty-fourth at Tucson a year later, Miller always left a spot in his schedule to play Pebble Beach. He missed the cut in the AT&T in 1992 and 1993, and posted an unremarkable thirty-seventh-place finish at the Pebble Beach-hosted Ben Hogan Invitational, an unofficial event featuring several LPGA and minitour players, including the aspiring young professional Johnny Miller Jr.

  So when the PGA tour returned to Pebble Beach in early February 1994, Johnny Sr. was, as always, excited to play, with few expectations.

  “I didn’t come to win,” he said that week. “I just came to have a good time.”

  One round at Spyglass and another at Poppy Hills in the books, the forty-six-year-old held his own, reaching the halfway point five strokes off the lead, and tied with twelve others for sixteenth place.

  Miller was slated to play his third round at Pebble Beach, the course he had been playing since the early 1960s and the scene of some of his most memorable tournaments. Apart from the extra-club, tear-inducing performance in the 1963 California State Amateur, and the embarrassing shank at the tail end of his battle with Jack Nicklaus in 1972, Miller cherished every opportunity to play at the famed oceanside links.

  In a way—even more than Harding Park or Olympic—Pebble Beach Golf Links was his “home” course. He’d won three times there since turning pro and had also posted five top tens at Pebble Beach-hosted PGA events. And in 1994, the Miller family was ev
en building a house in Pacific Grove, just five miles north of the course.

  “I’ve always called Pebble his girlfriend,” Linda Miller told a reporter that week.

  “Nobody in the field has played more rounds at Pebble Beach than I have. Nobody. Not even Jack Nicklaus,” Miller said.

  “When I get here to Pebble Beach I just feel like I play young. It’s like Nicklaus at the Masters. It’s like the seventies again.”

  Miller’s flashback started early in the third round of the 1994 AT&T. Beginning on the second hole, he carded four straight birdies, and added another on the majestic ninth. His superb ball striking that afternoon was evocative of Miller in his prime; he landed several approach shots inside five feet of the flagstick, and also holed out a wedge for a birdie on the thirteenth. By late Saturday, Miller’s five under 67 pulled him into sole possession of second place, one shot behind twenty-five-year-old Dudley Hart.

  “To be honest, for me to win, it would be a fluke,” Miller said that evening.

  Fluke or not, with the final round also being played at Pebble Beach, Miller had a chance. Hart eventually dropped out of the race with a series of back-nine bogeys. That left Miller alone in contention with Tom Watson, another forty-something hero of the 1970s.

  Like Miller’s, Watson’s career was punctuated both by Pebble Beach heroics—two victories in the Bing Crosby Pro-Am, plus the unforgettable chip-in to defeat Nicklaus in the 1982 U.S. Open—and recent, notorious putting woes, especially from short distances. Watson had also not won a PGA tour event since 1987.

  Playing ahead of Miller, Watson took a two-stroke lead with a birdie on the thirteenth, but Miller soon pulled even. Then, on the fifteenth, Miller made “the biggest club selection blunder of my career” by launching a downwind nine-iron nearly twenty yards past the flag, leading to a bogey.

  Miller’s stroll down Pebble Beach memory lane was complete on the next hole: His drive on the sixteenth landed in roughly the same spot as where he struck his infamous “shank” twenty-two years earlier, in his final-round battle with Jack Nicklaus.

  “I flashed back to that shank,” he said. “I had that in my brain. I was thinking, ‘Geez, don’t shank it.’”

  An elder, shorter-haired, more conservatively attired Johnny Miller didn’t shank. He parred the sixteenth and, as he waited on the next tee box, assumed the lead when Watson three-putted the seventeenth. From there, Miller sank a pair of clutch par putts to earn an incredible victory at the age of forty-six.

  “You want to know the truth? I can’t believe I won,” Miller said. “It goes to show you that in the right place, at the right time, magic can happen. This is magic.”

  That magic—and the foresight to try to grow the game’s living history—led the U.S.G.A. to issue Miller a special exemption to return to Oakmont and compete in the 1994 U.S. Open.

  “No one’s going to enjoy this Open more than I,” he wrote in Golf World. “That’s the attitude I play golf with these days. I’m still going to play aggressively—probably too aggressively, I might add—but that’s the enjoyment I get from the game now. I’ll try to play to win, even though that is a one-in-a-million shot. I’ll have fun and shoot for the pins. At least, as many as I can. When I won at Pebble Beach this year, I went for every pin. I had nothing to lose. And that’s probably why I won.”

  In a sentimental pairing, the U.S.G.A. grouped Miller alongside Larry Nelson (winner of the 1983 U.S. Open at Oakmont) and Jack Nicklaus: the last three men to win U.S. Opens at Oakmont.

  While Nicklaus fervently believed he would record another major championship victory at Oakmont—and seemed destined to do so on Thursday and Friday—Milter just enjoyed himself, as he intended.

  “It’s the first time in my life I ever played just for an experience,” he said after an opening 81. “Right off the bat I went [double bogey-par-double bogey] and my thinking was that I was going to have a good time regardless of the score.

  “I pretended I was two under all day. That’s how I approached every shot. I had a good time.”

  Not everyone was as cheerful about the carefree effort. Miller openly admitted, “I’ve hardly practiced at all,” and, “I never thought of myself as competitive,” which only further irritated Seve Ballesteros. As was the case with Arnold Palmer’s special exemption, Ballesteros disapproved of Miller’s receiving a free pass.

  “Why should Palmer keep getting an invitation and why should Miller? He’s virtually retired now.”

  Despite his recent victory at Pebble Beach, Miller was indeed “virtually retired,” as Ballesteros said. And he played that way at Oakmont, shooting 81-76 to miss the cut by ten shots. Miller would never again compete in a U.S. Open or any other major championship. And after 1994, he would appear in only four more PGA tour events.

  Nevertheless, the very next summer, in June 1995, Johnny Miller again headlined the cast at America’s national championship.

  Two weeks before Miller’s final Oakmont appearance, NBC Sports proudly announced that the network had outbid ABC for the U.S.G.A.’s exclusive television broadcasting rights to the U.S. Open. An impassioned appearance by Miller before the U.S.G.A. helped NBC secure the contract.

  “Johnny described what it meant to him and he broke down, remembering what the U.S.G.A. meant for him as a child and a young adult,” NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol remembered.

  “I thought of all the sacrifices my dad made and how excited he was when I won it,” Miller said. “I hold this tournament sacred.”

  By the late 1990s, Miller had cemented his role as the premier television golf analyst: An NBC Sports golf broadcast featured a distinctive flavor that no other network could match. He proudly stated that his TV persona differed little from his everyday approach to the game. “I was that way before I was on television, saying the same things in my living room watching golf.... When I see something, I’ve got to say it. That’s what I’m paid to do. I can’t just sugar-coat it, when it’s delicious to talk about. I’m not trying to do anything unusual. It’s not an act. It’s just me. OK?”

  Miller was crystal clear about his approach to broadcasting, whether his former colleagues liked it or not. For the growth of the game, he would continue to exercise his “go-for-the-flagstick” mentality on air.

  “Golf is on a roll,” he said. “It has incredible momentum.... There’s an opportunity for golf to cross over to the mainstream.... The pro tour is really a big, traveling circus. As an announcer, I’m part of it. I’m promoting the traveling circus. The players don’t understand that.... The sooner more of today’s players realize it, the better.”

  DESPITE MILLER’S ENTHUSIASM FOR THE tour, both golf and his burgeoning television stardom would never be his greatest passion. Minutes after he walked off the Oakmont course and into the press tent, he casually told reporters that “my family and the church are both more important to me than golf. If I had to give up one of the three it would have to be golf.”

  Miller still kept the game at a distance. He was far more content to spend time at his home in California, see his children (and grandchildren), and devote only an occasional weekend in the spring or summer behind an NBC microphone.

  At the peak of his playing career, one that had begun to bring him worldwide acclaim, Miller flew to New York City in May 1975. Linda and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter with him, Johnny attended an early morning business meeting, then drove through the city to attend the recently finished Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In between a round of golf and an evening flight to Mexico City for an exhibition, Johnny attended a luncheon presented by the National Father’s Day Committee.

  Standing next to Jim “Catfish” Hunter, Maine senator Edmund Muskie, and a few other prominent figures, Miller received the committee’s Father of the Year Award. After the luncheon, he conducted another of the innumerable question-and-answer sessions he’d participated in during the past few years. Amid comments about Jack Nicklaus and his thrilling battle with Nicklaus
and Tom Weiskopf a month earlier at Augusta National, a reporter asked, “When you’re through with tournament golf, how would you like to be remembered?”

  “I’ll probably leave as many records broken as anybody who ever played,” he said. “I’ll never win as many major titles as some others, but I can score. I probably range from sixty-one to seventy-six; Jack Nicklaus would be about sixty-four to seventy-three. His poor is better than mine. My good might be better than his.

  “But I’m not driven,” he added. “I’m not like Gary Player, who burns to be recognized as the best in the world. Oh, I’ve got the killer instinct.... I never set out to be the best in the world, just to be the best I can be. I was happy with my game in 1974. I had won the National Open, although not the way you would plan it. Six strokes behind starting the last round and shoot a sixty-three to win by one. You wouldn’t program the Open that way. Still, I felt good, and last year I did more, leading the money winners. This year has been going well.

  “Golf isn’t my only goal, though. My goals are eternal.”

  Of course, Miller was speaking of something spiritual: not about his exploits as a professional athlete. Nevertheless, “the Miracle at Oakmont”—the day when Johnny Miller overwhelmed a legendary course and a Murderer’s Row of golf legends to shoot 63 and win the U.S. Open championship—will always hold an eternal place in the game’s history.

  Appendix I

  Johnny Miller’s 63: The Greatest Round Ever?

  A Historical and Statistical Perspective3

  In narrating the final round of the 1973 U.S. Open, we tried to clear up several lingering sources of confusion regarding both the physical conditions at Oakmont, and the overall scoring patterns on the Sunday when Johnny Miller shot his famed 63 to win the championship. The oft-cited sprinkler malfunction, for example, occurred between Thursday and Friday, not between Saturday and Sunday; heavy rains saturated Oakmont on Saturday morning, not Sunday morning; “winter rules” were never invoked, etc.