A late swing key
fter a third- round 76 that left him discouraged, Miller found a swing key late in his warm-up before the final round after he heard a voice in his head say clearly, “Open your stance up.”
“It wasn’t a suggestion, it was a command,” says Miller, who has a mystical streak he says emanates from a long line of artistic people on his father’s side. On the other hand, after the round he said he had used the same thought before shooting 63 in the fourth round of the Bob Hope Desert Classic four months earlier, when he finished T-2 with Nicklaus in Palmer’s last PGA Tour victory.
“I had a tendency to close my stance,” Miller says, “and that adjustment did two things: It restricted my backswing, which could get a little long, and freed up my downswing so that I started firing my body much faster. I let my feet point way left, but my shoulders and the club were aimed right at the flag.”
Miller missed only two fairways—his pulled tee shot on the 603-yard 12th hole was his sole encounter with deep rough, and he made an improbable birdie there after hitting a 4-iron to 14 feet. But otherwise playing from short grass, one of history’s supreme iron players hit all 18 greens, many with long irons. Nine of his full iron shots finished within 15 feet of the hole, four of them getting inside six feet. He had 29 putts—leaving him only 34 tee-to-green shots; he hit the then-par-5 ninth in two—including a threeputt from 30 feet on the par-3 eighth hole.
Amazingly, after the round Miller said the memory of a 7-iron shank he had hit on the 16th hole at Pebble Beach in a playoff with Nicklaus the year before had preyed on his mind. “I was thinking that on almost every iron shot,” he said. Still, it was indeed an easy 63. taking on the doubters lenty of contrarians have sought to diminish Miller’s round through two common but erroneous assumptions. The first is that Oakmont played inordinately easy because it stayed soaked by rain and a malfunctioning sprinkler system that was, depending on the account, either left on all night before the start of the tournament or before the last round.
Author Adam Lazarus and Steve Schlossman, a professor in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University, have refuted those claims with research for their 2010 book 2016
The authors point out that Oakmont, which lies in a valley near the Allegheny River, is often damp but because of superb drainage and conditioning rarely stays soggy for long. The only appreciable rain occurred on Saturday morning, causing the third round to be delayed by two hours. A malfunction did cause a new sprinkler system to go on accidentally, but it was sometime in the pre-dawn hours of Friday. Frantic USGA officials directed workers to use every towel available to try to blot the moisture. By Friday and Saturday afternoons, Oakmont was back to playing close to normal, and the scores reflected as much. Bottom line, Miller played a full-blooded U.S. Open setup on which only three other players broke 70 in the final round: Lanny Wadkins with a 65, and Nicklaus and Ralph Johnston with 68s.
The second charge is that Miller was so far back starting the fourth round he could freewheel without pressure. That might have been true at the start, but when he walked off the fifth tee after birdies on the first four holes, Miller knew he was only two strokes behind the leaders as they prepared to tee off.
The television analyst who introduced the word “choke” to golf commentary concedes that as a player, “pressure was my weakness,” and he began putting tentatively on the next four greens, leaving four birdie putts short, the final one leading to the three-putt at the eighth. “That was good, in a way,” he says, “because it got me mad and changed me from nervous to determined.” The rest of the round, Miller remained a ball-striking machine who putted assertively, starting with a two-putt birdie on the ninth.
“I’m proud of the way I finished,” says Miller, who birdied the 11th, 12th, 13th and 15th holes—the last three with 4-iron approaches—to shoot 31 on the more difficult nine. His totals for the day: nine birdies, eight pars and the lone bogey.
“It wasn’t like I was unconscious on the greens or chipping in,” he says. “I admit I choked a lot on the greens, but I never choked tee to green. Down the stretch, it wasn’t like I started hitting weird shots and scrambled to make par. I just kept hitting it at the flag. And on 18, which is a great driving hole, I wasn’t trying to milk it down the fairway. That was my best drive of the day, over 300 yards, my most aggressive swing, 120 miles per hour with a D-9 driver.”