The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (10 page)

From the outside, 1975 appeared to start just as 1974 had for Johnny Miller, the game’s hottest—and winningest—player the previous year and a half. But a swing thought Miller had gleaned from his rivals meant his game was even better.

“What changed in ’75 was I started compressing the ball a little more,” says Miller, the unanimous player of the year in 1974 with eight wins on Tour. “I was watching Nicklaus and Weiskopf, and I noticed the way their hip action worked. They weren’t sliding as much as I was. And they were turning their left hip like there was a knife against it. They would just cut the pant, but they wouldn’t stab
themselves. I was sagging my hip into the knife blade. So I started to turn my hips a little more and snap—a little more speed in the hips. And I started hitting down on it more.”

Miller, who never hit the ball well on the practice range, was now striping it all the time. “In ’75 I played absolutely the best golf of my life,” he says. “Everyone thinks that it was ’74, but it was really ’75.”

After some significant time off, Miller began each year invigorated, and 1975 was no different. The first full week of January in Phoenix, Miller consistently hit his approach shots so close to the hole that he was actually upset at the end of the tournament that he hadn’t holed an iron shot. He shot a course-record 61 in the second round and coasted to a fourteen-shot win with a then-record 24 under par total. The “Desert Fox”, as he had been nicknamed, traveled down Interstate 10 the next week and produced another near-flawless performance, shooting a 61 in the final round at Tucson National for a nine-shot win at 25 under par. “I went out and birdied six of the first seven holes that Sunday, and I’d lost a shot to him,” says John Mahaffey of that final round. “He was awesome.” After finishing tied for 6th in defense of his title at Pebble Beach, Miller returned to desert golf and dominated the field at the Bob Hope Classic in early February, winning by three over Bob Murphy. At the end of that evening’s NBC Nightly News, Tom Snyder sarcastically pointed out, “He’s now played in four tournaments this year, and he has only won three.”

“I don’t know that you can play any better than he played,” says Murphy. “He was just incredible.” Miller refused to let up either. The further under par he got, the more he attacked.

“When Johnny Miller got to hitting it at the flag—‘flagging it’ is what we called it—no one hit it closer to the hole,” says Tom Weiskopf. “It didn’t matter what club it was—3-wood, 2-iron, wedge, 6-iron. Hole after hole, he was straight at the flag.”

“I had a good run of putting, and I was the best ball-striker on Tour,” says Miller. “If I was on at all I could pretty much blow away fields. I was not afraid of anything in 1975.”

Miller’s sudden success made him one of the hottest properties in sports.
Newsweek
magazine splashed Miller across the cover of its February 3, 1975, issue with the headline “Golf’s New Golden Boy.” “Best in game,” claimed
Golf Digest
in its 1975 Masters preview issue, installing him as the favorite. The week before the tournament,
Golf World
magazine superimposed him walking on water at Augusta National’s 16th hole with the title: “Will the Miller Magic Work at Augusta?”

For a cover story in February 1974,
The Sporting News
had asked, “The New Nicklaus?” By 1975, that headline wasn’t a question.

“In ’74, I was sort of a sensation winning the first three tournaments, but I wasn’t the favorite over Nicklaus in anything,” says Miller, who went into the 1975 Masters having recorded eleven PGA Tour wins in the last fifteen months against Nicklaus’s four. “A lot of the announcers were saying I was better than Nicklaus by then.”

The prospect of a Nicklaus–Miller duel at the Masters to settle the world golfing order had media and fans alike salivating. It was a long way from the first time the two blonde-haired golfers had met during the 1966 U.S. Open, when Nicklaus was the young gun dominating golf and Miller was a scrawny nineteen-year-old amateur.

Through Johnny Swanson, an Olympic Club member and a mutual friend, Nicklaus and Miller played a practice round together that Tuesday at the Olympic Club. The naïve Miller, who used such days for quick light-hearted play, was shocked at what he witnessed. “What I couldn’t understand was how serious he was on every shot,” says Miller. “Every shot was like he was playing in the dang U.S. Open on Sunday. I’d never seen anybody put so much effort into every shot in a practice round. He was intense in his concentration. Everything had a purpose.” It took Miller many years before he correlated the benefits of practicing like you play.

Another surprise greeted Miller the following day when Nicklaus asked him to join in another practice round—not at the Olympic Club but instead at nearby San Francisco Golf Club. He couldn’t
believe they were playing another course the day before the U.S. Open, and he never asked Nicklaus why. But Nicklaus had never played there and figured he’d had enough preparation at Olympic. Nicklaus remembers Miller’s play, though. “He didn’t carry it 180 yards, little skinny kid just bunted it along the ground, but he chipped and putted fantastic,” says Nicklaus. “I just didn’t think he had enough strength.” They came to the par-five 18th hole, one Miller had never reached in two shots. “[Nicklaus] took out this 3-wood—must have been about 260 yards into the wind—and flew it on the green,” says Miller. “That was a shot I’d never seen before.”

In the championship, fate intervened and paired Miller and Nicklaus together for the third round. Both were tied for 5th, but in reality it wasn’t a good break for Miller. “In his mind, I was like his little brother or something. There was an affection there that he sort of guided me along,” says Miller. On national television, he shot 74 that day to Nicklaus’s 69. After the round, Nicklaus complimented him on his temperament and observed that he’d hit it farther when he filled out. Miller would finish tied for 8th and low amateur. Nicklaus would shoot a 74 in the final round and finish in 3rd place, seven shots out of a playoff between Billy Casper and Arnold Palmer.

They wouldn’t play together in the limelight again for six years, and by then Miller was a different specimen. “Once he grew up, he grew up to be a big strong guy,” says Nicklaus. In primetime on the East Coast after most of the country had watched Roger Staubach and the Dallas Cowboys defeat the Miami Dolphins in that afternoon’s Super Bowl, the two battled one another in the final round of the 1972 Crosby Pro-Am. A Nielsen rating of 13.1 made it one of the highest rated golf broadcasts ever, and all those people watched NBC as Miller, tied for the lead, faced a sidehill lie for his approach shot in the 16th fairway at Pebble Beach. He proceeded to hit a dead shank into the gallery on the right—a golfer’s most dreaded miss. Nicklaus eventually defeated Miller in a playoff with a birdie on the
first extra hole, but Miller, and many watching at home, never forgot that shot on the 16th. It lingered in the back of his mind for the rest of his career. Whenever he encountered a similar scenario, he always asked himself: “Am I going to shank this?”

Three years later, Miller had become known more for his sound-bites than shanks. “I was sort of outspoken when I talked about Jack,” says Miller, “I said, ‘Hey, I can beat Jack.’ I said, ‘I might be the best player in the world.’ It was a little bit hearsay I guess. But at the time I really thought that every time I play with Jack I do well, and I was winning a lot of events.”

Leading into the Masters, Miller had said: “Jack has been on top so long people are beginning to look for someone to beat him. Now people are starting to say, ‘Maybe, right now, Johnny Miller is better.’ Right now, I might be.”

Inadvertently, Miller had stirred the conversation, and the Nicklaus–Miller showdown was all anyone wanted to talk about and see. By the 1975 Masters, Nicklaus and Miller had received seven different propositions from promoters wanting to stage a winner-take-all televised match. Two of them offered $1 million to the victor at a time when the average first-place winner’s check on Tour was a mere $35,000. Nicklaus declined. He thought such a match shouldn’t line the pockets of those outside the game and questioned what such a spectacle would prove. Miller thought why not.

For weeks leading into the tournament, Miller was asked nothing but questions about Jack Nicklaus and displacing him as the game’s preeminent player. Nicklaus heard nothing but questions about Johnny Miller and his three wins on the year.

At Doral, Nicklaus responded to a question about Miller by saying, “Yeah, how about him? He’s obviously a very fine player. He’s won a lot of golf tournaments in the last year or so and he’ll win a lot more.”

Nicklaus, who always gave honest and thoughtful answers to any question, wasn’t upset by Miller’s mouth as much as his position
above him on the leaderboards. “I never try to beat one man. I try to beat the field,” he said. “Of course, you can always figure that if you’re beating Arnold or Gary or Lee or Miller or Weiskopf, you’re going to be right up there. I’m no more aware of him than I am any good player. I’m aware of him if he gets on the leaderboard. Any player who is on the leaderboard obviously is playing well and is a challenge, a player to be reckoned with. But really, I look at numbers not names.”

As for Johnny Miller, Nicklaus said: “I read the papers just like everyone else. He has shot some fantastic scores. But I think it’s good for me and good for the game to have someone playing well. It’s probably good for you to have someone beating your brains out once in a while.”

Once at Augusta, Nicklaus didn’t sugarcoat his view of Miller’s standing in the game. “I think Gary (Player) and Lee (Trevino) are better golfers than Johnny,” he said during his pre-tournament press conference. “As far as I am concerned, winning the major tournaments are the real test. Gary’s won eight, Lee five, and Johnny only one.

“For sheer ability, Miller and Tom Weiskopf probably have more going for them than anybody out there today, but neither of them approaches what Player or Trevino have done.”

Miller counters, “He knew that Weiskopf had the horsepower and I had the horsepower to beat him at times. We were more of a threat because Billy (Casper) and Gary and Lee were short hitters.”

Miller had loads of respect for Nicklaus and found himself acquiescing to Nicklaus’s position as the Masters drew near. “Jack Nicklaus is better than I am,” he said at Doral. “He has more capability and more experience. You’re not going to catch me low-rating a guy who’s won twelve major tournaments. If Jack were at his best I wouldn’t want to play him every day. I’ve been the best for a spell, now, because I have these streaks where I can do anything. But right now the variance in Nicklaus’s game is smaller than the variance in
mine. His bad tournaments are better than my bad tournaments. When he plays well, he wins. When he plays badly, he finishes second. When he plays terrible, he finishes third.”

At Augusta, Miller compared his fire-at-the-flag style of golf to that of Nicklaus’s disciplined approach. “I play differently than he does,” he said. “When he’s playing well, he’s consistent. I may go crazy and beat him, but he’s a better player. He’s stronger, and he has more experience. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve played hot and cold, but I’d rather do that than play cold all the time.”

So far in 1975, Nicklaus had had a Jack Frost effect on Miller, who hadn’t finished ahead of Nicklaus in any of the four events they had both played: the Crosby Pro-Am, L.A. Open, Doral Open, and Heritage Classic. In fact, Miller had bettered him in only three of the last eighteen events that they’d played. Miller’s sudden struggles were more pronounced against Nicklaus, none more so than the first round at Hilton Head when Miller shot a 78 to Nicklaus’s 66. After missing the cut for the first time in two years, Miller added Greensboro to his schedule at the last minute. “Jack’s going in as a winner,” said Miller. “I don’t want to go in as a loser.” He finished tied for 6th there and pronounced himself ready: “With me, playing good is about 90 percent inspiration. There’s no problem getting inspired about the Masters.”

After arriving in Augusta Sunday evening, Miller played eighteen holes each day. His practice round partners included Jerry Heard, Sam Snead, J.C. Snead, Grier Jones, Lee Trevino, and Billy Casper, who had taught Miller his strategy for playing much of the course. He played with Casper Monday and was so relaxed that upon coming across a baby turtle by the 11th green, Miller decided to pick it up and take it home for his kids to see.

Surprisingly, Miller was not included in the feature pairings released Tuesday. He was on NBC that night, receiving an award for best men’s golfer from Bob Hope during the Gillette Cavalcade of Champions 1974 that had been taped earlier in the year.

With three victories heading into the year’s first major, Miller had been the clear Masters favorite a month earlier. Now with his hot streak in March, Nicklaus had taken that honor, and by the day before the opening round of the Masters, bookmakers in Las Vegas had moved another player’s odds lower than Miller’s as well.

MILLER HAD FLOWN
down from Greensboro Sunday night on a private plane with Tom Weiskopf. While Miller hadn’t planned on playing competitively the week before, Weiskopf had. He didn’t follow the Nicklaus prescription, preferring to play his way into Augusta. Only once had he come a week early. That was in 1974 because he was playing so poorly and felt he needed the practice. This year following Hilton Head, he did sneak in one day of practice at Augusta before hiring a helicopter to transport him the 250 miles northeast to Greensboro.

Weiskopf’s year in 1975 had gotten off to as slow a start as Miller’s had quickly. He missed the cut in the season’s first two events at Phoenix and Tucson and broke 70 only twice in his first five starts. His game gradually rounded into form, and at the Greater Greensboro Open everything clicked. He opened with a bogey-free round of seven-under-par 64 at Sedgefield Country Club—the low round of the day by three shots in blustery conditions that produced twenty-three rounds in the 80s.