Read Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont Online

Authors: Adam Lazarus

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

Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont (31 page)

BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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After once again brandishing his Texas mettle, Boros played only two rounds of competitive golf from mid-May to mid-June. The aptly nicknamed “Moose” spent more time fishing, traveling, and hosting a television show funded by his sponsors (
Outdoors with Liberty Mutual
)) that shot scenes in Hawaii, Ireland, Hungary, and India. Although he avoided tigers—“I’m not shooting at anything that can bite or that I can’t outrun”—Boros bagged more stags and geese in the lead-up to the U.S. Open than birdies or eagles.
In June—a few weeks after attending his firstborn son’s college graduation—the fifty-three-year-old Boros made a return appearance to Oakmont. He had last played there in 1953, as the defending U.S. Open champion, and finished nineteenth. (He did not play in 1962 because he missed the cut in the sectional qualifier.) In his twenty-third U.S. Open attempt, his back was a bit sore from fishing more than golfing during the past weeks; he candidly admitted, “My game hasn’t been good.”
Two over par in Thursday’s opening round (the damage came mainly on the first hole, as an errant tee shot into deep rough produced a double bogey), Boros joined the large under-par club on “sprinkler Friday,” posting a 69. Sinking midrange birdie putts on the first and second holes on Saturday brought Boros onto the leaderboard in another major championship. Solid putting also bailed him out on number eight, where he drove into a bunker but managed to save par by rolling in a clutch putt.
While he was best-known for accuracy and the elegance of his swing, most tour pros recognized that Boros had one of the best short games of his generation. A high school basketball player, he used powerful hands to master the “soft wedge shot”—a skill of special value on a U.S.G.A. course setup—to save par and score birdies from heavy rough around the greens.
Just before he made the turn on Saturday, Boros’s long-iron approach to the ninth drew too far left and landed in a patch of thick, short grass just off the fringe, forty feet above the cup. Unable to put backspin on the ball from the tight lie, he softly popped it forward a tiny distance, barely onto the green. From there—in classic Oakmont fashion—the ball rolled and rolled and rolled, before settling six inches from the hole. His tap-in birdie gave him a 33 on the front side and—as Gary Player imploded behind him over the same stretch of holes—a tie for the tournament lead at three under par.
Boros—either a cigarette or strand of grass in his mouth practically the entire round—promptly squandered a stroke on number ten, only to gain it back on the eleventh by holing a twelve-footer for birdie.
“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-footer 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.
BOOK: Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont
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