The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (26 page)

The Olympic Club crew was just another part of Johnny’s circle of friends—from church, from school, and from the golf course. “I had different groups I was interacting with,” Miller says. “It’s interesting I didn’t go the wrong way.” In another contradiction, here he was growing up, a teenager in San Francisco in the early- and mid-1960s, just the time when it was becoming, in Miller’s words, “the craziest spot in the whole world.” Knocking right on his doorstep were the drugs, the hippies, the flower children, the riots, the racial tensions, the Vietnam War. For Johnny, they were thousands of miles away.

But Miller was influenced by San Francisco on the links. It was the fourth corner of his golfing foundation: great father, great coach, playing at great courses, and the influence of other great players. The region’s golfing talent in the 1950s and 1960s was astounding. At Harding Park, he sometimes watched Ken Venturi, whose father was the professional there, strike brand-new balls down the 1st fairway out of his Uniroyal shag bag. Miller knew Bob Rosburg, the 1959 PGA champion. He would go out at the Olympic Club with future Masters champion George Archer. He would compete in games of
sixsomes at San Francisco Golf Club with Tony Lema, who had made it as a top echelon Tour pro, and Harvie Ward, a two-time U.S. Amateur champion. He would compete against future PGA Tour players Ron Cerrudo, Jim Wiechers, and brothers Dick and John Lotz. Bob Lunn, the 1963 U.S. Amateur Public Links champion, was even his high school teammate and would go on to win six times on the Tour himself. “I was riding this tidal wave of great players coming out of the Bay Area,” Miller says. “It made me work harder and made a difference having those kinds of players to set those standards to meet.”

Just to keep up with the expectations from friends, press, and fellow golfers, Miller had to paddle faster and faster, but soon, he grew into a local legend himself. He won the San Francisco Junior Championship, the Northern California Golf Association Junior, and even the Northern California Golf Association Stroke Play. He always played well and rarely hit a poor shot. At age seventeen, however, Miller remained a golfing unknown outside a ninety-mile radius of San Francisco. Of course, it’s hard to get discovered outside northern California when the farthest you’ve been from home is Fresno.

That changed in July 1964, when Bill Powers, a Northern California Junior Golf Association official, persuaded Miller and several other locals to try qualifying for the U.S. Junior Amateur, which was being contested in Eugene, Oregon. His father sent in the entry form, and Miller made it through sectional qualifying with a 71 and medalist honors at the Olympic Club. Powers drove Miller and a handful of other kids 500 miles north to Eugene. On television, Miller had already seen Ken Venturi win the U.S. Open the previous month, and Tony Lema win the British Open two weeks earlier at St. Andrews. He couldn’t let San Francisco golf down.

At Eugene Country Club, Miller set a stroke-play qualifying record of 71–68=139—a mark that stood for thirty-two years. As the number one seed in match play, he was out first every day at 7:00 a.m. with his average match lasting just a little over two hours. His
only tough contest was a quarterfinal tussle with Floridian Bob Barbarossa, considered one of the nation’s best juniors, but he prevailed, 1 up. In the final, he faced Enrique Sterling from Mexico. On the 17
^th
hole, Miller laced a 1-iron from 210 yards to fifteen feet to seal the championship with a 2 and 1 victory. “The thing I remember most is his dad yelling at him,” Miller recalls, “how he’d let the country of Mexico down and how could he lose. It was pretty mean.” He had never seen anything like it. Mr. Sterling was the antithesis of Larry Miller.

The next level had been reached. Bye, bye “Little Johnny Miller.” Hello “John Miller.” After the U.S. Junior, people looked at Miller differently. His victory was chronicled nationally, including a mention in the “Faces in the Crowd” section of
Sports Illustrated
, whose forty-seven-word blurb called John Miller, “a San Francisco high school senior who tries to play ‘as boldly as Arnold Palmer’.”

Johnny Miller may have been better prepared than any player in the game’s history for the road that lied ahead. He had mixed the ultimate cocktail for golfing success: father, teacher, golf courses, and influences. Even Miller knew it: “There was no doubt in my mind that when I turned professional I was going to be successful.”

FOLLOWING THREE
and a half years at Brigham Young University, Miller dropped out and mailed in his entry form for the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament in April 1969. A group of members at San Francisco Golf Club put up $15,000 to sponsor Miller, who used the money for his entry fee and a one-year lease on a new Buick Riviera. He picked up the car and first drove to Provo to visit his fiancée Linda Strouse, to whom he proposed on Valentine’s Day. From there, it was on to Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. About midway through the solo, five-day, 3,000-mile journey, a shot of doubt entered his mind for the first time in his life.

“I will never forget getting to Mississippi, all by myself,” Miller admits, “and it finally occurred to me, ‘What the heck am I going to
do if I don’t make this qualifying?’ It never occurred to me that I might miss it.” Miller would be playing on a course he’d never seen and on coarse Bermuda grass greens that gave him fits during his first Masters. He had grown up playing bentgrass and
poa annua
putting surfaces. “I didn’t know what Bermuda was, that grain could make a ball go sideways,” says Miller. Plus, there were 120 players competing for a scarce 17 cards. Miller played just well enough. He earned his playing privileges by one shot on his birthday.

From southeastern Florida, he drove straight to San Antonio for his first professional event, the Texas Open. Future PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman wound up winning, but Miller made the cut and finished tied for 23rd. His initial paycheck was $810. “It never occurred to me that I could make money,” he says. “Money, really, money? I guess it was for the purest reasons that I turned pro.” For Johnny Miller, getting paid was just the start of it. For the next year, he was more Arthur Frommer than Arnold Palmer. Miller may have missed it when the world came to San Francisco in the 1960s, but now this twenty-two-year-old Bay Area kid, who had hardly traveled anywhere, was going to see the nation himself. Some kids backpack through Europe. Miller drove through America playing professional golf: Houston, Charlotte, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, New York City, Milwaukee, Boston, Hartford. In one year, he drove more than 63,000 miles by himself in that Buick.

Everything was absorbed, including the golf courses he was seeing for the first time. Although he failed to record a top-ten finish during his first season, he felt no pressure and imposed no timetable on himself to succeed. “I knew I could compete,” Miller says, harking back on his successes as an amateur. “I had a lot of confidence on Tour. I wasn’t shell-shocked to be out there.” Larry Miller’s shroud was still in tack.

The following season, Miller notched seven top-tens. He fired a 61 at the Phoenix Open to record his first top-ten as a professional, which got the attention of a lot of folks. It wound up as the lowest
round of the year on Tour. Late that season, he hooked up with a young caddie named Andy Martinez, who previously looped for Miller’s friend Grier Jones. Like Miller, Martinez had lost an older brother, who died in a surfing accident at age twenty. But it was Martinez’s work ethic that attracted Miller. They connected immediately and remained a tandem on Tour for most of the decade.

By 1971, Miller was playing practice rounds with the likes of veterans such as Trevino, Snead, and Casper, who influenced Miller with their tips, wisdom, and humor. Off the course, Jerry Heard was the player with whom he bonded most closely. A top junior player from central California, Heard was a bit more mature and worldly than Miller but just as confident. Heard liked to tell people he could fall out of a car on the 1st tee before every round and still earn $100,000 a season. “He was like the Fonz,” Miller says of Heard. “He made life look easy.” Once Heard won the American Golf Classic in August of 1971, however, Miller’s laissez-faire outlook changed completely. Heard provided Miller with his very own stimulus package. “Hey, maybe I should be winning,” recalls Miller, who believed he was just as good as Heard, if not better. “He sort of broke the ice. I wasn’t upset I wasn’t winning at all until Jerry started winning.”

Just five weeks after Heard’s maiden victory, and five months after finishing runner-up in his first Masters as a pro, Miller snagged his initial PGA Tour win in, of all places, Georgia. Originally, Miller had planned a fly-fishing trip in Montana with Heard for the second week in September, but tournament director, and Nicklaus friend, John Montgomery talked him into coming to Columbus instead. Green Island Country Club was the site of the Southern Open—a course designed by George Cobb, the man who built the par-three course at Augusta National and had helped make revisions to several holes on the regulation course. To Miller’s consternation, that dreaded common Bermuda grass covered the greens in western Georgia, and according to Miller, the ones at Green Island were “the grainiest greens ever.” Players joked that it was the only course on
Tour where the ball whistled as it rolled on the greens. “Of all the courses you’d pick I’d win at,” Miller says, “I’d figured that’d be the last place I’d win.”

Miller, though, modified his pop stroke on the greens. He decided to put his hands behind the ball in what he called a reverse-back-lock grip, which got the ball rolling quicker on top of the Bermuda. It worked. Miller blitzed the layout—he was the only player with all four rounds in the 60s—and won in wire-to-wire fashion by five shots over Beman. “A young golfer who doesn’t smoke, drink, or three putt,”
The Atlanta Constitution’s
Charlie Roberts wrote of Miller. The victory earned him $20,000—a check that he turned over at the trophy presentation to his wife Linda five days before their second wedding anniversary.

Miller won his second title the next year at Hilton Head (again in the South and on Bermuda). Soon thereafter, Ford Motor Company picked him to be one of the faces in its Five Young Thunderbirds campaign. It was Miller’s first major endorsement. Jerry Heard, Lanny Wadkins, Grier Jones, and Jim Simons rounded out the fivesome that Ford tabbed as the players to challenge the game’s established stars. They were each given a car a year and $10,000 for a few outings.

In a little more than three-and-a-half years on Tour, Miller had two wins and was pegged for stardom, but he’d let plenty of tournaments slip out of his grasp on Sunday afternoons. His confidence on the greens had declined. And he’d yet to win a top-tier tournament against the game’s biggest names. In 1973, everything changed with three seismic events that would catapult Miller to superstardom.

The first happened on February 3 at the Hawaiian Open. Miller’s putting, which had been so good as a teenager, was a source of mounting frustration as a pro. Languishing in a tie for 54th entering the third round that Saturday morning, Miller vividly recalls the idea that popped into his head on the practice putting green: “I was probably the best player on Tour tee-to-green at the time. I still wasn’t putting well, so I thought maybe I’ll copy Nicklaus, with that hunched
over posture, 90-degree right-arm bend that he locked in and used as a piston.”

He took his new stroke out on the Waialae Country Club layout and shot a 65 with it that day. A 69 followed on Sunday to vault Miller into a tie for 6th. The confidence he felt on the greens as a youngster returned. The weakest part of his game had been rectified, for now.

With his newfound putting technique, Miller recorded eight top-tens in his next thirteen starts, including two runner-up finishes. In spite of his stellar run, he entered the 1973 U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club in June without a victory. It didn’t deter a woman sitting behind the 9th green—someone Miller had never met—from telling him every day that he was going to win that week.

In the first two rounds, USGA officials paired Miller and Lou Graham with Arnold Palmer and his army on his home turf of western Pennsylvania. “It was crazy, more crazy than Tiger’s galleries, and sort of rough,” says Miller, who maintained his focus to shoot rounds of 71–69, two shots better than Palmer and just three off the lead. “When I look back, the real thing I’m proud of is somehow I was able to play with the great Arnold Palmer in Pittsburgh and still win. Seriously, it was totally cool.”

On Saturday, however, Miller’s concentration faded. He had left his trusted yardage book in the pants he’d worn the previous day. By the time his wife Linda brought it to him on the course, he was already on the way to a 76. Miller dropped into a tie for 13th, six shots behind the leaders. For the first time all week, the lady who told him after every round that he was going to win the U.S. Open was gone. So, it seemed, were Miller’s chances of winning.

The next day, Linda didn’t even go to the course, staying behind to pack and meet her husband immediately after the round to catch a flight. Once on the practice range, a funny thing happened. Miller says the voice revisited him. The same one that told him at age eight he would be a champion golfer. Now, that voice spoke clearly again:
“Open up your stance, way up.” Miller thought this was crazy, but the voice had never let him down. He did it and began hitting balls as well as he ever had. Miller, teeing off an hour before the leaders, birdied the first four holes and went out in 32. By the time ABC Sports came on the air at 3:30 p.m., he had caught the leaders. Linda rushed to the course in time to see his finish. Staying aggressive with four more birdies on the inward nine, he shot a 63—the lowest round in the history of major championship golf. Johnny Miller was his sport’s national champion.