Chasing Greatness by Adam Lazarus & Steve Schlossman

Author:Adam Lazarus & Steve Schlossman [Lazarus, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: NAL
Published: 2010-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

JUST AFTER TWO P.M. ON Saturday afternoon, Miller joined Bob Charles on Oakmont’s opening hole to begin the third round, just three shots off the lead.

In the press tent following the second-round 69 that had wowed his partner, Arnold Palmer, Miller had been asked to gauge his prospects of winning the Open, under the inevitably tremendous late-round pressure.

“If it’s somebody like Jim Colbert, I feel I’m as good [as] or better than he is, so there’ll be no problem. If it’s Jack Nicklaus, well ... it’s like a Volkswagen and a Corvette in a race. The VW doesn’t win unless the Corvette breaks down.”

From the first tee box, Miller could see Nicklaus strike an approach from the rain-soaked fairway that sailed far beyond the green—the first of several “nondescript shots” that led to a 74 and frustrated the usually unflappable defending U.S. Open champion.

Miller’s afternoon would be far more maddening—starting when he reached into his pants pockets, then into his golf bag, for the yardage book he had relied on heavily during the first two rounds.

“I got to the first tee and I went through the first zipper and second zipper and third zipper, and then I started panicking,” he remembered. “I got Linda. I said, ‘You’ve got to go, my yardage [book] must be back at the house! You’ve got to go back and get it!’ So she had to go back to the car and drive all the way there and back.

“Talk about stupidity!” he once said. “The biggest tournament in the world, and I don’t even double-check. I tried to play by guesswork Saturday, not knowing if I was a hundred and fifty yards or a hundred and sixty yards from the flag.”

Miller bogeyed the first hole. Then he bogeyed the second. After a pair of pars, he bogeyed the fifth and followed that with a disastrous double bogey on the sixth. He was five over par after six holes; his hopes of winning the U.S. Open seemed over.

Blindly making club selections, Miller launched his approach to the seventh green into a bunker, setting up another likely bogey. A blast from the fluffy sand ran twenty feet beyond the cup and nearly against the fringe; two putts would place him six over par after seven holes and seal his fate. But Miller stroked a perfect, par-saving putt and breathed a sigh of relief as the ball disappeared from sight; still drowning, but not officially dead.

As Linda fought traffic on her way back to Oakmont, Johnny hit a superb tee shot on the par-three eighth and sank his first birdie of the day. And on the par-five ninth, Miller—stilt without his precious yardage book—launched a high two-iron toward the front right “sucker” pin; it barely carried a bunker and settled seventeen feet from the hole. Exuberantly rolling in the eagle putt, Miller closed out the front side with a roller-coaster 38, two over par. The birdie-eagle momentum from numbers eight and nine helped ease Miller’s mind almost as much as Linda’s appearance on the tenth tee, yardage book in hand.

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