Johnny Miller's 63 still looks nifty at 50

The man who set the U.S. Open standard relishes the memory of 1973.

(Note: This was written less than 24 hours before Rickie Fowler and Xander Schauffele came in Thursday with 62s in the first round of the Open at LA Country Club, breaking Miller’s record.)

Eight days after Ron Turcotte turned his head away from the upcoming wire and wondered where all the other horses went, Johnny Miller made a stretch run of his own.

Those were the most memorable Belmont Stakes and U.S. Open in the history of those two ancient endeavors, and they arrived in bang-bang fashion, 50 years ago.

Miller, now 76, showed up at Los Angeles Country Club for this year’s Open, noted that he was waiting for new hearing aids, and wandered in and out of conversational subjects like Secretariat galloping through the field. Yet he remembered the particulars of that June 17, 1973 at Oakmont Country Club, near Pittsburgh, and all 63 strokes.

A half-century later, nobody at the U.S. Open has surpassed it. Five have matched it, and in 2017 Justin Thomas shot a 63 that was 9-under-par at Erin Hills. Miller was 8-under. That isn’t as memorable a distinction, because Thomas shot that round on Saturday, and didn’t win.

“Somebody is going to shoot 61 or 62, I think,,” Miller said, “but are you going to do it on Sunday and win the tournament?”,

Miller’s Miracle, as the cover of Sports Illustrated put it, was the first 63 in any major championship. Brendan Grace of South Africa put together a 62 at the 2017 Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, but that also was a Saturday, and he finished eight strokes behind.

With all the equipment upgrades and GPS devices and fitness improvements and all the “fargiveness” the manufacturers can summon, Miller’s Sunday punch at Oakmont has somehow held up. And he did it without his yardage book for the first nine holes, having left it at the rental house, with his wife Linda scurrying to retrieve it.

At that point Miller’s career was still on the verge of….something. He had finished eighth in the U.S. Open when he was 19, at the Olympic Club in San Francisco where he and his dad had played. He played at Brigham Young, then joined the tour, blond and handsome in an innocuous way, and he and Grier Jones were supposed to be the future. He had one win in 1971, another in 1972. When he showed up at Oakmont he knew he could play well at Opens and other majors, but he didn’t know if anybody could play Oakmont well. He did know that Arnold Palmer, in the year in which he would win his final PGA Tour event, was the unquestioned King, especially in his native western Pennysylvania.

And Miller was in Palmer’s group on Thursday and Friday.

“Somehow I shot 140,” Miller said. He was two strokes ahead of Palmer, tied with Jack Nicklaus, three strokes behind leader Gary Player.

 “It was tough. It was not easy to play in front of that gallery. It’s not like they were waiting for you to putt. Arnold would make a 15-footer and they were gone, and you maybe had a 10-footer. I don’t know what to say, but they were rabid. So to do that in his backyard wasn’t bad.”

But everyone else was playing well, too, or at least surviving Oakmont, where the members are fiercely proud of its toothy reputation. Michael Block, the Orange County club pro who made such a splash at the PGA Championship, remembers qualifying for the 2007 Open there.

“I used one of their caddies,” Block said the next year. “We’re practicing on one hole and he is saying, ‘Well, don’t hit it left because that’s death, and then it’s death to the right, but you can’t be short because that’s death…’ I sat him down and said, look, I need a little more positive mojo here. Let’s come up with another word besides death.’’’

Miller’s chances went on the critical list after Saturday, when he shot 76. At that point he was six strokes off the lead, shared by Palmer, Jerry Heard, two-time champ Julius Boros and John Schlee.

“After my practice round Monday, a lady had come up to me and said, ‘You’re going to win this week,’’’ Miller said. She said, ‘I’m never wrong. Don’t even worry about it.’ Then I saw her Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Then I shot 76 on Saturday and didn’t see her at all.”

So Miller was unburdened by expectation on Sunday, and by his yardage book too. Then he birdied the first hole, the second, the third and the fourth. The putts he had to make were from five feet, one foot, 25 feet and six inches. He was one-under-par for the tournament and rolling. At times, he said, his iron shots obscured the flagsticks.

“I was knocking them out all day,” Miller said.

Unbeknownst to him, Lanny Wadkins was on a similar spree. But almost everything was unbeknownst to Miller at that point. He did 3-putt the eighth hole, but then he birdied four of the next five – a 2-putt birdie from 40 feet on the 10th, then a 14-footer on 11, a 15-footer on 12 and a five-footer on 13. A 10-foot putt on the 15th got him to eight-under, but he kept trying to charge. He two-putted 16, 17 and 18 to get in at five-under for the tournament.

Palmer, playing with Schlee, got through a stretch of the course where there were no scoreboards. When he did see one, he saw Miller’s name on top and exclaimed to Schlee, “Where the (bleep) did he come from?” Palmer then bogeyed the last three holes.

Wadkins, who was six-under-par for the day after he birdied 12 and 13, triple-bogeyed the 18th. Schlee birdied 16 to get within a stroke of Miller but couldn’t get closer. He finished an hour after Miller did. His final par clinched it for Miller, who was pretty sure he was home free, all along..

“From the beginning, the U.S. Open was way up here,” Miller said, holding his hand at eye level. “The other majors were way down there. For me the Masters was just a kind of semi-spring party. This was always the most important one.”

And 63 was almost the worst score Miller could have produced. He missed a six-footer on the 7th, a 12-footer on the 15th and a 10-footer on the 17th.

“I missed one fairway all day,” Miller said. “And most of the time my iron shots were below the hole, so I had some putts I could make.”

Miller tapped in for par at 18, held the ball aloft and heaved it into the gallery. He shook his head and grimaced as he walked off the green, and Wadkins was there to slap his back. Little did anyone know that Miller would use this championship as a career trampoline. In 1974 he won eight tournaments, and in 1975 he won four more, including a one-month stretch in which he shot 24-under, 25-under and 21-under to win in Phoenix, Tucson and Palm Desert.

Miller won three times in 1976, including the British Open at Royal Birkdale, by a six-stroke margin over Nicklaus and an obscure teenager from Spain named Seve Ballesteros.

“Then I got the yips,” Miller said. He also yearned to spend more time with Linda and the six kids. He remembered crying in the car one day because he had to leave home to play golf just when his son Todd wanted to go fishing with him. And Miller, a devout Mormon, was content with his life. There’s a lot of characteristics associated with a top golfer. Contentment is not one.

Miller settled for 25 wins, two majors and five losses in playoffs, and he’ll always be linked to Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf at the 1975 Masters, a 3-man birdie brawl that wound up with Nicklaus winning.

“I finished second at the Masters three times,” Miller said. “I never did win it, though. I never got the green jacket but I got the green vest.”

A few years ago Miller assessed his career with the same type of oblivious bluntness he brought to the NBC commentary booth, the type that wasn’t always appreciated by the target.

“I wasn’t consistent. I want to point that out,” he said. “I was not a guy you could bank on, every week. But when I was on and playing my best, I might have played as good golf as most anybody ever has. I don’t want to be the one to say it, but some of it was pretty unusual. Let’s leave it at that.

“I was never a phenomenal putter. I was pretty good from about 12 feet in but I was always mediocre on the longer ones. My 61s and 62s, if you analyze them, weren’t rounds when I was chipping in. It was a very methodical kind of 61. It was like, ‘That’s what he should have shot.’’’

Unfortunately the ESPN generation only knows Miller for his critiques, which somehow carried a sharper edge because he was so matter-of-fact.

At the 2008 Open, when Rocco Mediate took Tiger Woods into a playoff, Miller mused that “guys named Rocco don’t win Opens” and said Mediate might be confused with Woods’ swimming pool custodian. He apologized for that, but said Phil Mickelson “would be selling cars in San Diego if he couldn’t chip” and was so agitated by Andrew Loupe’s slow play that he blurted, “If everyone on Tour played like him, I’d quit announcing.”

The grumblers on tour didn’t realize (A) how good Miller actually was and (B) how many times he’d been on the course at daybreak, putting the same putts, studying the same angles. No sports announcer anywhere has been more engaged, or spoken from a standpoint of such expertise. On Wedneday, Miller still seemed mystified that players would consider the term “choker” an insult.

“I was the first one to focus in on the fact that the greatness of golf is the choke factor,” Miller said. “I don’t care if you’re playing for a milkshake or a $5 Nassau. The greatness of golf is whether you can make that putt to win, and to ignore that is sort of missing the greatest part of it.

“My very first telecast was when I said Peter Jacobsen had the perfect opportunity to choke on the last hole. People went, oh, my gosh, he’s going to talk about choking. But I talked about it even when I was playing. I knew it affected my putting. I couldn’t handle the pressure of putting. I choked a lot out there.”

The world of horse racing did not construct hurdles and water jumps in reaction to Secretariat’s Triple Crown. But the U.S. Golf Association was determined that Miller would not be a trend-setter. In 1974 Hale Irwin won the Open at Winged Foot with a bloody scorecard, finishing at 7-over-par. In 2017 Angel Cabrera nosed out Tiger Woods and Jim Furyk at Oakmont, at 5-over. None of that has wiped Miller’s name from the books, even if some folks like to smudge the Picassso by saying Miller was the beneficiary of wet fairways and the uninentional activation of the sprinklers. Neither was true.

“The members were mad,” Miller said. “They were throwing darts at my picture. People have used every kind of possible excuse to downplay that 63. But only three guys were in the 60s that day. It was sort of a lone wolf kind of round.”

Fifty years on, it’s still as rare as a horse with wings.