The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (2 page)

Nicklaus drove back west to Augusta and registered early for the tournament, the sixth player to do so. He would soon be joined by his family. His father, mother, sister, and girlfriend of six months, Barbara Bash, drove down in a car without air conditioning, singing songs such as “Blue Skies” and “Tennessee Waltz” to pass the time. While Jack stayed at the Crow’s Nest at the club, they checked into the Bon Air Hotel, a majestic structure that stood on top of a hill overlooking downtown. The hotel had no air conditioning as well—presenting only slight discomfort with springtime temperatures around 80 degrees that week.

Any golf fan who wanted to attend had easy access to tickets. Series badges for four days of practice rounds and four days of tournament competition were $12.50, available by mail or from more than a dozen retailers around town, such as King’s Way Pharmacy, Bill’s Barber Shop, and the Municipal Golf Club. And it was quite the local event. There was even a Masters Parade Wednesday afternoon, with 25,000 people lining Broad Street in downtown Augusta to watch a procession of bands, balloons, Cadillac convertibles, and floats, one of which carried the finalists from the Miss Golf Pageant held two days earlier in Bell Auditorium. The parade was led by the mayor and Robert Tyre Jones, Jr. himself. A dozen golfers rode in the parade, including Byron Nelson, Billy Casper, and the defending champion, Arnold Palmer.

Traditions abounded at the tournament, one of which was that each of the amateurs was paired with a Masters champion in the first round. Nicklaus got Jimmy Demaret, who at age forty-eight was three years older than Jack’s father. Demaret was the tournament’s first three-time winner, having captured titles in 1940, 1947, and 1950. The Houstonian stood out with his gregarious personality and fashionable style—quite the opposite of young Nicklaus. They teed off at 10:42 a.m., and Nicklaus couldn’t have gotten off to a worse start. He bogeyed the very first hole, and after a birdie on the par-five 2nd, three more bogeys beset him. He was three over after five holes with momentum going against him. He made a bogey on the 14th
and then another on the reachable par-five 15th. He shot 76, seven shots behind leader Stan Leonard, while Demaret managed a 78.

In the second round, Nicklaus was off at 2:06 p.m. with Roger McManus, an amateur from Cincinnati. Again, Nicklaus failed to take advantage of the par-five holes, making only one birdie on them. On the par-three 12th, after watching McManus fly the green with a 6-iron, he took a 7-iron and hit his tee shot in the water. The double bogey would ultimately cost him. He shot a 74 and missed the cut by just one shot.

“I played pretty well. I hit thirty-one greens, managed eight three-putts, and shot 150,” remembers Nicklaus. “Arnold (Palmer) hit nineteen greens and was leading the golf tournament at 141, and I was on my way down the road.” The previous week’s winner Art Wall, who was only three shots better than Nicklaus after 36 holes this time, went on to win.

The generous fairways and absence of penal rough should have been an advantage for the long-hitting Nicklaus, who received plenty of attentive stares from fellow competitors while hitting balls on the range during the week. He found out there was much more to playing Augusta National well. “I figured out, man, you better learn how to putt these greens if you want to win,” he says.

These, and others, were lessons to be learned by Nicklaus sooner rather than later. For now, Nicklaus was in a car again, returning to North Carolina for the North & South Amateur at Pinehurst the following week. But Augusta National was anything but in the rear view mirror.

94 KEYSTONE WAY SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 94127

John Laurence Miller’s first recollections of the Masters came from the headlines in the
San Francisco Chronicle
and
San Francisco Examiner
in 1956. Only eight years old, Miller had already been playing golf for more than three years, and someone he looked up to, local amateur Ken Venturi, appeared to be on his way to winning the tournament. He led after each of the first three rounds and built a six-shot lead with 18 holes to play; however, an 80 in the final round left him one shot behind Jackie Burke in the end. That was also the first televised Masters. Although disappointed for Venturi, Miller kept watching the Masters and became enamored by the great finishes of Arnold Palmer, who won in 1958, 1960, 1962, and 1964. “It was all pretty cool,” he says of watching those tournaments.

By 1966, Miller was pretty cool in his own right. Now nineteen, he was a standout golfer at Brigham Young University, and the U.S. Open was coming to his home course, the Olympic Club. He and his friends all signed up to be caddies for the championship, but Miller went a step further. He was one of 2,475 golfers to mail in an entry form—the fee was $20—to try to qualify as a competitor. He made it through the local qualifying stage at Salt Lake Country Club in Utah, chipping in during a playoff to edge out seventy-five-year-old Chick Evans, the 1916 champion, for the lone spot. A few weeks later in sectional qualifying at San Francisco Golf Club, a layout he knew well, Miller finished third to make it into the field as a contestant, not a caddie.

For the first two rounds of the Open, Miller was paired with two other first timers: a twenty-four-year-old long hitter named Harry Toscano and Lee Trevino, a twenty-six-year-old pro from Dallas. Two weeks before the championship, Miller had borrowed a 5-wood from his best friend Steve Gregoire. Miller was a skinny kid and definitely not a long hitter, but this new club would pop the ball up high and stop it on a dime with a slight fade. So he conceived a game plan. Off the tee, he would hit a 3-wood or cut a little driver, whatever he needed to reach 5-wood distance. “I started milking that 5-wood for all it was worth,” he says. Miller rode Gregoire’s club to a 70, tied for 5th after the opening round. The USGA’s press
notes reported a telling observation, “He was nervous at first about his putting, but that was all.”

With subsequent rounds of 72-74-74, Miller failed to match his opening day success, but a score of 10-over-par 290 earned him low amateur honors. “I wasn’t that excited that I finished 8th to be honest with you,” says Miller, who actually thought he should’ve won on a course he knew as well as anyone. “I was pretty disappointed.” As the weeks passed, Miller reassessed his accomplishment and the opportunities it would open. For starters, his finish meant that he was exempt for the next year’s U.S. Open. And by finishing in the top-sixteen, he was eligible for an invitation to the 1967 Masters.

“I knew I was going to play in it someday,” he says, “but not that quickly.” Miller was back at school in Provo, Utah, when his first invitation arrived at his parents’ San Francisco home in the winter of 1967. “It was surreal,” he says. “I knew I was in the Masters, but it looked so cool to get that. It was to John Miller, not Johnny Miller.” His mother filed the invitation away.

“My dad was as excited as anyone,” says Miller, “but he didn’t fly.” His father had some unnerving experiences in planes during the Second World War; therefore, Miller’s golf coach at BYU, Carl Tucker, accompanied him to Augusta. Miller had been recruited by all the big golf schools and thought he would land at UCLA, USC, Stanford, or the powerhouse Houston, which had knocked the loudest. But his family were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and his mother asked him to visit BYU, even though it was not a traditional golf school. Once there, Miller fell in love with the place and felt a spirit throughout the campus. Tucker, however, was there to win. He became paranoid Miller would change his mind and had him enroll early at the age of seventeen. Miller missed his high school graduation, even though as a freshman he wouldn’t be eligible to play on the varsity team.

Prior to his first Masters, Jack Nicklaus had traveled around the nation, playing in multiple U.S. Junior Amateurs, U.S. Amateurs,
and even U.S. Opens. Miller had not. This trip would be his first east of the Mississippi River, and the first time he’d been on a commercial plane. Provo to Augusta wasn’t the easiest of journeys either in 1967. It was an all-day adventure with multiple stops.

Once at Augusta, Miller was taken aback by the amenities and surroundings. “I’d never been where you got treated like that, old-fashioned Southern hospitality,” says Miller, who stayed in the Crow’s Nest just as other first-time amateurs did before him. “I’d never been to a course that had been maintained that beautifully.”

He played a practice round with Billy Casper, who was a mentor to Miller at the time, and Sam Snead, who imparted wisdom to the inexperienced Miller. Miller quizzed him as to what he thought about the swing. “You’re either going to hit your short shots good or your long shots good,” said Snead while they were standing on the 7th green during one such round. “Nobody hits ’em both good.” Miller thought, “Really?” He’d never heard that before.

Like many, Miller didn’t realize the course was constructed on the side of a ridge with a 150-foot drop from its highest point to its lowest. “That’s the first thing anybody says when they get to Augusta is, ‘Whoa, I didn’t know it was this hilly’,” he says. For years, Miller had watched the same holes on television—15, 16, 17, 18—and the history they produced. “I was pretty enamored by that back nine and by those charges guys would make. I wanted to see what that was like,” he says.

The state of Miller’s game was not conducive to great golf. Hardly any grass was visible in Provo during the winter. He hadn’t played any golf in months. With no place to practice, Miller had been spending his free time skiing. During the informal Par Three Contest held the day before the tournament, Miller made an ace on the 2nd hole, sucking the ball into the hole with a wedge, and finished a shot out of the playoff.

As an amateur, Miller would be paired with a Masters champion, and like Jack Nicklaus, he got Jimmy Demaret. Now sixty-six,
Demaret’s best golfing days were behind him—this was his twenty-fourth and final appearance—but his colorful demeanor wasn’t. He provided what Miller describes as “the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me playing golf.” On the 8th hole, Miller hit his drive right toward some trees, only to have the ball ricochet back into the fairway. There was a commotion as he and Demaret made their way over. A woman was lying on the ground. Demaret asked her if she was okay and where it hit her. She pointed to her crotch. Demaret turned to Miller. “Hey John,” he said, “You almost made a hole-in-one. You missed by one inch.”

“I was so embarrassed in front of all these people,” says Miller, who, as a Mormon, didn’t drink, smoke, or curse, but wasn’t naïve. “Of course they all thought it was very funny. But it was pretty embarrassing to me. I had never heard anyone say that in front of a lady before.”

But Miller persevered through the red face. He made birdie on the hole and shot a 72 in his first competitive round, matching Nicklaus’s score that day and besting other champions such as Palmer, Demaret, Gary Player, and Ben Hogan. He followed with a 78 to make the cut on the number before ballooning with scores of 81–74 on the weekend to finish tied for 53rd. “It was a miracle I even made the cut,” he says. “I wasn’t practicing for the Masters at all. No golf at all.”

Miller struggled to learn the intricacies of the course, particularly the firmness, speed, and break of the greens, which consisted of Bermuda grass, a type of warm-season grass common in the South that was coarse with a deep root structure. “I had no idea what I was doing. I’d never even seen Bermuda before,” he adds. “I had no clue how to putt and chip on it.”

“Everything was a bit of a blur for me—almost like it wasn’t a tournament to me. It was like an experience,” recalls Miller. “My eyes were big. I had no expectations. I was just taking it all in.”

But after the tournament, he had one overriding thought: “I’ll be back.”