Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (13 page)

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Authors: Adam Lazarus

Tags: #Palmer; Arnold;, #Golfers, #Golf, #Golf - General, #Pennsylvania, #Sports & Recreation, #Sports, #United States, #Oakmont (Allegheny County), #Golf courses, #1929-, #History

BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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Trevino scored a conventional par on Oakmont’s troublesome starting hole and made another easy par on the second. Cautious with a two-iron off the tee, followed by a precise five-iron from the fairway, he reached red numbers with a twelve-foot birdie on the fifth. Trevino moved to two under par at the turn with a fabulous bunker recovery to three feet on the par-five ninth.
The momentum of that second birdie faded halfway into the back nine. He three-putted on the short eleventh to lose a stroke, but quickly gained it back with a brilliant iron on the lengthy, par-five twelfth, which he had decided to play rather creatively by hitting two consecutive six-irons following his drive. Two holes later, a missed green followed by a poor chip gave another shot back to the course.
“[Trevino] fell victim to the easy-looking par-4 14th,” wrote a future chronicler of Oakmont’s history, Marino Parascenzo, for the
Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette. “The pin was in a depressingly deceptive little swale. Coming from behind there, one inch wide meant four feet too long and Trevino was both, for a bogey 5.”
What angered Trevino most about the two strokes he squandered was not how, but where they happened.
“I bogeyed the two easiest holes,” he remarked, speaking about his bogeys on the eleventh and fourteenth.
As much interest as reporters showed in Trevino’s performance, many wanted his take on how Nicklaus had negotiated the beguiling seventeenth a little earlier by driving the green for an easy eagle.
For decades, Trevino’s approach to life had been anything but conservative. He drank, gambled, stayed out late, occasionally associated with seedy characters, and frivolously spent his income—whether it was a few dollars or a few thousand. But his risk-taking lifestyle bore no resemblance to his golf game, which was meticulous in its sobriety and advance planning.
“I think about what I should make on a hole in every tournament,” he said at the height of his dominance in the early 1970s. “For instance, if I’ve got a par-three, two-hundred-and-twenty-yard hole I’ll hope to play the thing in one over par for four rounds. I won’t go for the pin, just the green, and I almost never gamble.”
Oakmont was no exception. After one round he believed “[you] don’t have to make a lot of birdies to win, but you have to avoid the bogeys.”
Predictably, Trevino found fault with Nicklaus’s game plan to attack the seventeenth green with a driver.
“I hope he does it every day. Because if he [pushes] one he’s over on the driving range and he’s got to reload and fire away again,” Trevino proclaimed. “I won’t do it unless I’m two shots behind on Sunday and I have to make up some ground. I have a game plan and I stick to it. That’s not in my game plan.
“I used a three-iron and I was only eighty-seven yards from the hole. I measure that hole as three hundred and sixteen yards to the front of the green. But there was no point in my gambling today with a driver,” he insisted.
That game plan centered on a belief that the championship would be won on the greens. And after the first round, he was pleased with his one-under score of 70. Trevino faced nine forty-foot putts and two-putted each time, including a snake from seventy feet. “My round couldn’t have been better. I two-putted from here to El Paso,” he told Bill Nichols of the
Cleveland Press.
Remarkably, Trevino hit sixteen greens in regulation and missed only one fairway in round one (he had missed only one fairway during forty-five practice holes). But Trevino was still annoyed by his inability to position approach shots near the flagsticks, and by his overall timidity in playing the course.
“I want to shoot a decent round, not blow it all. I didn’t go for the flag. I didn’t want to take a chance of knocking it over the greens,” he added. “The longer you stay in there, the more you get to know the course. I played very scared all day but tomorrow I’m going to start going for the flag.”
Save for Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino understood course management as well as any golfer of his time. He’d played every type of course imaginable, in every type of climate: Texas, California, Florida, Panama, Japan, Britain, Singapore. Oakmont, as Palmer had said, was built loosely in the style of the Scottish links courses, and on Thursday it played hard and fast in the British tradition. A two-time British Open champion, Trevino had certainly proved he could master those speedy tracks.
But that week in western Pennsylvania, there was only one authority on Oakmont toward whom everyone deferred: Arnold Palmer. And when reporters relayed Trevino’s comment that he intended to play much more aggressively on Friday, the King smiled.
“This is a course which requires conservative play,” he said. “Going for the pin can cause you a lot of trouble.”
Trevino had made a meteoric career of defying the odds and showing up the “experts.” After his opening round, he walked briskly through the crowds and across the parking lot before encasing himself in his fortress motor home-lonely, but never alone.
•
4
•
Carnage
G
eoff Hensley wanted to make a good first impression. Making his debut in the U.S. Open, the pro from Quail Hollow Golf Club, thirty miles northeast of Tampa, was given a tall order.
Hensley had captained the University of Cincinnati golf team in the early 1970s and, as a sophomore, became just the second Bearcat to compete in the NCAA individual championships. Two months after graduating in 1971, at the Western Amateur in Benton Harbor, Michigan, Hensley fired an opening-round 68, which tied the course record.
In early June 1973, he took fifth at a Cincinnati sectional qualifier for the U.S. Open, and was rewarded with the daunting task of teeing off first in Thursday’s opening round.
“I was thrilled,” Hensley remembered, “being with the best players in the world at one of the top clubs in the country.”
That club was Oakmont, the course that Tommy Armour called “the final degree in the college of golf.” The very first hole set the tone: a 459-yard, downhill par four, widely accepted as the most challenging starting hole in all of championship golf.
Eager to get off to a strong start, Hensley left the locker room a half hour before his tee time to warm up with a few balls at the driving range and stroke a few practice putts to get a feel for how the greens were rolling in the morning dew. He planned to calmly ascend the first tee minutes before his 7:29 a.m. start time and block everything from his mind, except striping a drive down the heart of the tight fairway.
Typical for a young pro in his first U.S. Open, Hensley’s game plan went right out the window. While he was still on the range, a member of the grounds crew charged up in a golf cart and anxiously yelled to him:
“Hey, you’re on the tee!”
“What time you got?” Hensley asked his caddie.
“Seven twelve.”
“Hop on; I’ll ride you up,” the grounds crewman said. Some 340 yards separated Oakmont’s practice range from the first tee.
Startled and panicky, Hensley got in the cart while his caddie trailed behind.
“The caddie’s running with the bag,” Hensley remembered years later, “the clubs are falling out, jingling all over the place.”
When they finally reached the tee box, Hensley discovered that he had actually been summoned to participate in the U.S.G.A.’s traditional opening ceremony, which began roughly ten minutes before the first scheduled tee time. With that completed, the championship formally began.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the seventy-third U.S. Open,” cried out Jack Crist, the starter. “First off the tee this morning are Geoff Hensley, from Zephyrhills, Florida; Bob Gilder, an amateur from Tempe, Arizona; and Roland Stafford of Verona, Pennsylvania. Mr. Hensley has the honor.... Mr. Hensley, first tee, please.”
Frantically, Hensley put on a glove, teed up a ball, and swung away with his driver.
The ball sailed into the deep, dew-laden rough on the right side—dead. He double-bogeyed the hole.
Given his jarring start, Hensley gathered himself pretty well and played the next seventeen holes in six over par, finishing with a 79. He got some extra sleep with his 11:17 a.m. tee time the next day and fired a solid 72; unfortunately, he missed the cut by a single stroke.
Hensley was not the only golfer Oakmont exasperated that week. Days before the first round, volatile Dave Hill had played four practice holes at Oakmont, walked off the course, and withdrawn from the tournament.
“I don’t have the equipment to play this thing,” said the thirty-six-year-old who had been performing superbly in the first half of 1973. In fact, he had scored his tenth tour victory four weeks earlier in Memphis at the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic.
Hill was infamous for bashing U.S. Open courses, as he did in 1970 at Hazeltine in Minnesota, calling the course a “cow pasture.” Three years later, at Oakmont, he focused his criticism more on the U.S.G.A. officials.
“In the Super Bowl, they don’t move the goalposts into the stands. In basketball, they don’t grease the floor for the play-offs. In the World Series they don’t flood the outfield. So why does the United States Golf Association have to take a course and make it impossible? That’s like digging chuckholes at the Indianapolis 500. I guess they want to embarrass pro golfers.”
Hill withdrew Tuesday afternoon and was content to play cards at his home club outside Denver while the U.S. Open (which would have been his ninth) proceeded without him. He’d finally had enough of the U.S.G.A. “taking a good course and making it zero fun to play.”
The only man who seemed to have less fun on a U.S. Open golf course than Hill was Australia’s Bruce Crampton. But then again, Crampton never seemed to enjoy himself, not even in the middle of the 1973 season, which was by far his finest in sixteen years on tour.
Crampton had developed a solid resume since first being invited to play in the Masters in 1957, three years after winning the New Zealand PGA Championship at age nineteen. Between 1961 and 1971, he accumulated nine PGA tour victories, topped $100,000 in earnings for five consecutive years (starting in 1968), and in 1972 twice finished as runner-up to Jack Nicklaus when the Golden Bear won the first two legs of the Grand Slam at Augusta National and Pebble Beach.
Once the 1973 season began, Crampton only got better, winning the Phoenix and Tucson opens on consecutive Sundays in January. And in the spring, he nearly won consecutive tournaments again, escaping the Houston Open with a one-stroke victory in May, then holding the lead after seventy-one holes the following week at the Colonial in Fort Worth. A horrific double bogey on the final hole cost Crampton his thirteenth tour win, and gave Tom Weiskopf the honor of donning the tournament’s traditional Scottish plaid jacket.
Weiskopf’s victory—which would set off a hot streak of his own in the weeks leading up to the U.S. Open—had its ironic side. Even the quarrelsome Weiskopf found Crampton insufferable: “He’s just not any fun.”
Several other notables on tour also couldn’t bear Crampton’s melancholy. Dow Finsterwald and Gardner Dickinson openly proclaimed they didn’t want to play with him, and on more than one occasion, even placid Julius Boros chewed him out for offensive behavior toward fans, marshals, and photographers.
“We all have double bogeys; we all blow tournaments,” Boros said. “His kind of conduct is totally unnecessary.”
Crampton’s three wins early in the 1973 season inevitably brought his behavior under greater scrutiny. But even though
Sports Illustrated
—in an article entitled “Golf’s Jekyll and Hyde”—acknowledged that Crampton was
occasionally
kind and thoughtful and was consciously seeking to become more polite and “affectionate,” he hadn’t yet changed many of his colleagues’ minds.
“[You’re] asking a leopard to change its spots. That’s a tall order,” Dickinson said. “He’s winning now. It’s easy to act in a socially acceptable manner when you’re winning. I’ll reserve my judgment until he loses a few, the kind that really hurt. It happens. We all lose. Let’s see what he does then.”
That spring, Crampton confided to a friend/physician that he was “desperately unhappy,” and admitted that though his life goals were success, health, and happiness, achieving the first two were “not worth a thing without the third.” Years later, Crampton would reveal he had been fighting a lifelong battle with depression.
For all the pros, journalists, and fans who were repelled by Crampton’s mean streak and holier-than-thou attitude toward the rules of golf (he harbored no regrets about turning players in for minor violations), his most outspoken critic was also his complete opposite.
Arnold Palmer hated to be paired with Crampton, and often reached “near rage” when he learned of another nasty Crampton episode. In a 1971 four-ball tournament at Laurel Valley Golf Club, not far from Palmer’s hometown of Latrobe, Crampton complained to a reporter about the behavior of the gallery, presumably Arnie’s Army.
Palmer’s response upon hearing the quote: “Why doesn’t he quit bitching and play golf!”
For his part, the raucous galleries were not the only reason Crampton wasn’t a fan of the King. In more than a decade of coexisting with him on the PGA tour, Crampton claimed that Palmer “never gave me the opportunity to putt out, never told me I had a nice round.”

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