The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (25 page)

John Laurence Miller was born on April 29, 1947, the couples’ third of four children—all spaced two years apart. He would become the first Baby Boomer golf star. To his dad, he was “John” or “Champ.” To his mother, he was “Johnny.” Later, to local golf writers, he was “Little Johnny Miller.”

In the fall of 1952, Larry Miller decided to introduce golf to the entire family. He had not taken up the game seriously until after marriage in 1942, but he now played regular Saturday games and had fallen in love with it. Soon, he began shooting rounds in the 70s and wished that he had started playing sooner. He wanted to pass the game on to his children at an early age.

The Millers had recently moved into a new house on Keystone Way near the southern city limits, not far from Lake Merced. The home featured a full basement that Larry Miller turned into an indoor golf practice facility. He purchased a half dozen canvas tarps
from an Army Surplus store and layered them in a corner. He placed down a mat and hung up an oversized mirror. On a table, he laid out the top instruction books from the game’s greats:
How To Play Golf
by Sam Snead,
Power Golf
by Ben Hogan,
Winning Golf
by Byron Nelson, and
Hit ’em a Mile
by Jimmy Thompson. With a set of cut-down clubs, he began to teach his children golf’s basic fundamentals.

The oldest child Ronnie liked swinging the clubs at first, and their two daughters showed some proficiency. But Ronnie enjoyed tinkering more with carpentry and mechanics, and his sisters’ artistic talents were more advanced. Their brother, however, was different.

Little Johnny appeared as if he was put on Earth for the sole purpose of hitting a golf ball. Right from the beginning, he had a knack for it, and his father noticed immediately. He approached his bosses at RCA and asked to take the night shift from 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. so he could sleep while his children were at school and then work with Johnny when he came home in the afternoon. They would start at 4:00 p.m. and hit balls until dinner. The fundamentals came first. They would practice grip, set up, and posture. Although naturally left-handed, Miller swung right-handed. He used the mirror to mimic the swing positions of Nelson, Hogan, and Snead. He learned ball flight—deciphering exactly where each club should hit on the canvas—and could detect a solid strike of the ball versus a poor one solely by feel and the sound of the clubface colliding with the ball. “I could never hit enough balls for him—in a nice way,” he says.

The Larry Miller teaching method, though, went well beyond the game’s basics. Long before sports psychologists tutored the top professionals, Larry Miller was preparing his son mentally. He instilled self-esteem. Everything was a positive. After his son hit each ball, his immediate response was either “good shot” or “good swing.” He instilled attitude. He taught his son how to look and act like a pro. He taught Johnny how to put on a glove and how to squint his eyes. He instilled work ethic. Prepping for any eventuality, he
instructed his son to hit balls left-handed, from up against lips of bunkers, from behind trees. Shots were practiced from every place imaginable, even from ice plant—the thick, tangly ground cover West Coast golfers dreaded most. Johnny didn’t see anyone else doing those things. As he got older, his father created a checklist of exercises to do: push-ups, pull-ups, squeeze grips, and running. Miller ran to school most days and, by the fourth grade, was running five miles a day.

“He would give me ten things to try,” Miller says. “One out of ten was fantastic. The other nine, I had to figure out why it was a stupid idea. I had to get my brain in all these strange rooms that you normally wouldn’t get into of thinking why something would work or wouldn’t work. Now whether he knew to do that, I don’t know. But he had some strange, weird things he would try.”

The thought process stayed with him. “That guy, I couldn’t believe what runs through his mind,” says Jack Nicklaus.

On a daily basis, Miller was making multiple deposits into the Johnny Miller Golf Account. Of his father’s teaching, he explains, “His theory was if you’re willing to do things no one else is doing, you’re going to be better than the rest of the kids. If you want to be the best, you got to be willing to do what no one else is willing to do. I was just doing things no one else was doing.”

When Miller began entering junior contests, the outcomes were never in doubt. “I knew when I went into tournaments, because of this deep training, I was going to win,” Miller says. Of the thousands of ideas and inventions that Larry Miller came up with during his life, this was his greatest—the shroud of confidence that he cloaked over his son. The tour players should have known that it wasn’t a plastic arm patting Johnny’s back, it was Larry Miller’s arm.

As Johnny’s game progressed, his father knew that a more knowledgeable golf mind was needed to handle the game’s technical intricacies. He heard that the head professional at San Francisco Golf Club was a Mormon, and that was good enough for him. So in the
fall of 1954, he put Johnny in the family’s 1951 Chevrolet and drove two miles to the private club whose A.W. Tillinghast designed course was considered one of the country’s best. They parked in the gravel lot, and Johnny waited in the car while his father stepped inside the tiny pro shop. After a few minutes, he returned with a middle-aged man. Whatever his father had said worked. John Geertsen instructed his young assistant pro, Tony Lema, to tend the shop. He was going to take a look at this boy.

The unassuming Miller picked the clubs out of the trunk, and he and Geertsen walked to the practice area. This time, it was dad who stayed in the car. Geertsen, forty-five, must have thought that this was a practical joke. Even at age seven, Miller was small. He had the body of a four- or five-year-old. He had suffered sickly spells as a youngster—his father thought he might be anemic—and was a regular at the doctor’s office. Even in ninth grade, he was barely over five feet and 100 pounds—the smallest person in his class. Miller didn’t experience a significant growth spurt until age seventeen—sprouting from five feet, two inches to five feet, eleven inches in one year. And it didn’t stop until age twenty-five, when he fully topped out at nearly six-feet-three.

There, on the practice range, it was Little Johnny Miller, hitting balls for half an hour. He went through virtually every club in his bag, and Geertsen did not utter a word. After he had seen enough, they walked back to the car. Geertsen told Miller that the boy had potential. He would like to work with him. Their relationship lasted nearly forty years.

In addition to sound principles, Geertsen taught Miller to do something most others didn’t at the time—an early hinge of the wrists on the backswing. Not only did this promote a solid position at the top, but it resulted in a downswing that was led by a ninety-degree wrist-cock to the right hip and a solid impact position with the shaft perpendicular to the ground. This action became the foundation for Miller’s precise iron play, which was imperative growing
up since, being undersized, he didn’t hit the ball very far. Geertsen was also an expert at trouble shots and showed Miller how to work the ball any way he wanted. Another plus was hanging out in the pro shop at San Francisco Golf Club, where Miller learned how to fix clubs and regaled in hearing Geertsen’s stories of playing with the authors of his father’s instruction books: Snead, Hogan, and Nelson.

“It was a heck of a one-two punch,” Miller says of his father and Geertsen. “If there was a way of rating the opportunity to be a champion because of a teacher and a father, I know I’d be in the top-three. I think it might be number one, and it has nothing to do with me.”

Miller dabbled in other sports at school such as baseball and track. No one was faster in grammar school, but any aspirations of track stardom were squashed when he ran up against a kid named O.J. Simpson in junior high. His father also arranged lessons in a variety of vocations: swimming, piano, ice skating, singing, and guitar. Larry Miller wanted his children to have all the things he didn’t. But with Johnny, eventually it always came back to golf. “My dad said when you’re in school, you’re in school,” Miller says, “but when that bell rings, you’re a golfer.”

When Miller was eight years old, a voice from within spoke to him. It would be one of many times this spirit would visit. According to Miller, it told him: “Don’t worry, your destiny is chosen. You’re going to be a champion golfer, just like your dad says. Continue working hard.” From then on, Miller never questioned his future. It was such a clear voice, such a strong confirmation, that Miller had no doubt where it came from: “It was really the Holy Ghost if you want to know the real truth.”

His older brother Ronnie hadn’t needed a voice to tell him that golf wouldn’t be a good career move. When the children ventured out to play the nine-hole Fleming Course at Harding Park for the first time in the spring of 1955, Johnny soundly beat Ronnie. “That didn’t go over too good,” Miller says. It was no fun having a brother four years younger that much better at something. Ronnie stuck to
his passion. “He was a fishing nut, and I was, too,” says Miller, who started fishing with his father and brother even before he began playing golf. “Give me the choice if my dad wasn’t around, I’d probably go fishing.” Rods in hand and lines in the water—that’s how he and his older brother connected. Ronnie even made their own lures and weights. They fished a lot at Lake Merced. They went to the beaches to fish for striped bass when they were running. Surfperch under the Golden Gate Bridge were another favorite target.

On October 11, 1958, fifteen-year-old Ronnie and two of his best friends took their gear down to a favorite spot on the Pacific near the famous Cliff House restaurant. It was a dangerous area. No swimming signs warned of the severe undertow ever present in the water. Standing on the rocks, Ronnie never saw the rogue wave that arose suddenly out of the ocean and pulled him under. The Coast Guard and police spent days searching for him. Even when they gave up, his father never did. Every day, Larry Miller walked the shore from sun up to sun down. Finally, after seventeen days, he found his oldest son’s badly decomposed body.

For eleven-year-old Johnny, it took months for the loss to soak in. “As a kid, I just couldn’t believe he really died,” Miller says. “Every night I went to bed thinking, okay, he’s going to come home.” The one comfort for the family was their faith. Three years earlier, the Millers had been sealed together in the Los Angeles Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It was an ordinance they believe unites children and their parents for eternity. Eventually, the family knew they would reunite with Ronnie in Heaven. Still, it hurt, and Miller never stopped thinking about him. The tragedy made everyone prioritize the most important things in their lives—an understanding that would take an even greater hold of Johnny years down the road.

JOHNNY CONTINUED
with his golf, pouring himself into the game increasingly more. Harding Park was his first playground.
Considered one of the nation’s premiere public facilities, Miller would get dropped off there at 7:00 a.m. in summer, play the back nine, and then practice his short game for four to five hours. In between, he hustled grown-ups in putting games for a nickel until he had pocketed thirty-five cents, which was all he needed for lunch. Adults fared no better against Miller on the course. During one match in the San Francisco City Amateur at Harding, twelve-year-old Miller faced off against a strapping six-foot-five man accompanied by several of his friends who were confident of an easy win for their buddy. As the match progressed, the friends vanished. After nine holes, Miller was 5 up. On the way to the 10th tee, his opponent veered toward the parking lot and said, “Be right back.” Miller watched as the man opened the trunk of his car, put his golf clubs in, and drove off. “What’s he doing?” Miller asked his dad, who answered, “I believe he’s had enough.”

From San Francisco Golf Club members to friends from his church, people could clearly see Miller’s talent and determination, and many extended helping hands to him and his middle-class family. Leon Gregoire was one of those people. A member at famed Olympic Club, Gregoire became acquainted with Miller through his son Steve, who played with him in junior tournaments. Along with Jack Flanagan, whose son John was also a junior golfer, the Gregoires invited Miller to play as their guest on occasion, and Miller later began caddying at the club. In 1961, Gregoire helped Miller become the first merit member of Olympic Club—a junior membership for someone whose parents weren’t club members. A private club was like another world to Miller, but he earned his stripes quickly, both off and on the golf course.

“Those were crazy kids,” says Miller. “There were about twelve to fifteen junior golfers at Olympic Club, and to survive, I had to blossom verbally to handle myself. That group, man, you said what you thought. You had to stand up for yourself.” The bunch not only forced Miller to sharpen his linguistic jabs, but they stoked Miller’s
competitiveness. They constantly played games, whether it was a putting contest or a race from the tennis courts to the junior locker room. The boys also tested Miller’s discipline and faith. To no avail, his club friends introduced him to alcohol (he was always the designated driver) and smoking (which Miller tried for all of two days). But above all, Miller took full advantage of the first-class practice facilities and honed his game on the sloping, tree-lined fairways and small greens that had tested the game’s best during the 1955 U.S. Open. It all helped Miller become invincible among his Olympic peers.

“They were good players—San Francisco City Junior champions, Northern California Junior champions. They never beat me one day in ten years,” Miller says of his junior cohorts. “I was competitive in a funny way. I would not allow anybody to beat me.”