Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont Read Online Free PDF

trophy.
    “I hope,” Palmer told his audience, “it’s not as long before my next win.”
     
    PALMER’S TRIUMPH IN THE DESERT, especially in such dramatic fashion, helped to quash some of the “Arnie is through” talk that had naturally grown during his winless 1972 season. Two days afterward, famed columnist Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times best captured the joy sports fans everywhere felt in Palmer’s rejuvenation:
    Call the florist and tell him to cancel the wreath. Call the stoneyard and tell them never mind the headstone, the one which was to read “Here Lies the Golf Game of A. Palmer Which Died of Natural Causes in the Left Rough of a Par-5 Sometime in 1971. R.I.P.”
    Cancel the wreath, for sure, but the win unfortunately didn’t provide a catalyst for Palmer after the players left the West Coast in mid-February of 1973. He did no better than eighteenth in the next seven events. And while a fifth Bob Hope title had proved he could still win against stiff competition, Palmer still burned for another major championship, starting, of course, with a fifth Green Jacket at Augusta National. An ugly opening round buried his dream from the start.
    “I’m not upset, but I’m disgusted. I’m not upset because I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised I shot 77. And that’s what upset me,” he said afterward. “I think the only thing to do is get away from it, maybe for a month, and just practice. I think I’ll do that—just pack it in until I start playing better or ...”
    But Palmer, as the world’s most famous golfer, could not retreat from the limelight that easily. With Palmer obligated to play in New Orleans the following week in the Tournament of Champions, his mood stayed sour, after he failed to break par in any of the four rounds.
    “I’ll play Byron Nelson next week and if I don’t do any better than I have been, I might not play again until the U.S. Open. I really don’t know, but I might just take the time off and try to get ready for the Open.”
    Palmer stayed true to his word. A final-round 77 the next week in Dallas hastened his hiatus from the weekly grind in order to revamp his game and prepare his mind for the rigors of the next major championship—the U.S. Open, just six weeks away.
    To every touring pro, amateur, or club pro who is fortunate enough to qualify, the National Open brings about a harsh self-reckoning. The U.S.G.A. toughens up each site to the point where it can forever erode the confidence of a player not in command of every aspect of his game. For Palmer, the Open had been the stage for both his greatest triumph—the comeback at Cherry Hills—and several of his greatest disappointments. Since his only U.S. Open win in 1960, he had finished in the top five seven times, without a title to show for it. Most agonizingly, he had three times found himself on the losing end of an eighteen-hole play-off.
    But the 1973 U.S. Open meant so much more to the man who hadn’t won a major title in nine seasons.
    This year, the Open was returning to Oakmont. There he would receive a hero’s welcome, the beloved western Pennsylvania son returning to play before his hometown fans. For each of Palmer’s fifty-nine individual PGA triumphs, none had come in the Pittsburgh area (twice, Palmer, playing a four-ball tournament with Nicklaus as his partner, had won PGA events at Laurel Valley in Ligonier, Pennsylvania). To win the National Open on his own turf—sacred turf, both he and his dad fervently believed—would culminate a lifelong quest. And the thousands of local soldiers in Arnie’s Army—those who knew him well long before he became the King—desperately wanted their idol to win on Pittsburgh soil, rather than among the palm trees of Orlando, his winter home, or the dogwoods of Augusta.
    But a U.S. Open win at Oakmont offered an additional incentive that no other venue could match: redemption. It was there on June 17, 1962—Father’s Day—that Palmer, the world’s