Free Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont by Adam Lazarus

bunkers are unfair. Other than that I like this course. But the traps make it awful.”
    Player’s conciliatory double-talk afterward hardly undid the damage.
    “Still I don’t throw any clubs and get mad. Because it was a wonderful tournament. I never saw such tremendous crowds before. It was a great moment. I was privileged to play in the Open.”
    However Player felt about the course, he competed splendidly: With a little luck, he could have delayed Nicklaus’s launch toward golf immortality. Player matched Nicklaus stroke for stroke at the thirty-six- and fifty-four-hole marks, two behind the front-running Palmer. He even held the lead at one point during the third round. Only a disappointing final round of 74 prevented a magical Sunday play-off that would have pitted the emerging Big Three against one another.
    Then again, Player may have been acting coy in the lead up to the 1973 championship. Palmer knew his longtime friend and competitor well.
    “I played a practice round with Gary on Wednesday,” he told reporters as the tournament got under way. “And he was putting awfully well. He had a lot of confidence in his putting.”
    Palmer, the resident Oakmont expert that week, was again dead-on. From Player’s first stroke of the tournament, he looked brilliant. A long, straight drive and a crisp seven-iron, followed by a delicate fifteen-footer, gave Player a birdie on the especially difficult first hole. He rolled in another fifteen-footer on the second, bolting to two under par. With back-to-back drivers (testimony to Oakmont’s immaculate turf), Player reached the par-five fourth hole in two shots and carded a two-putt birdie. An hour into the championship, Player glistened at three under par.
    Thus far, Player showed no signs of his winter illness or recent fatigue. Never a long hitter, he still had the length to attack the course when it played fast and firm, as it did on Thursday. Player’s fourth birdie came on the par-five ninth, where his fairway wood landed in the sand and he exploded close enough to the pin to roll in a short putt for a breathtaking thirty-two on the front side.
    Player was widely recognized as one of the world’s great bunker artists, so his fine recovery on number nine was no surprise; but his command of the greens was. He had played just twelve rounds of competitive golf in six months, and none on courses whose greens even approached Oakmont’s in difficulty. Yet he putted flawlessly. Twice he needed just two strokes from over sixty-plus feet to save par, and he continued his attack by sinking a twenty-foot birdie putt on the tenth hole.
    “I putted as well as I could. It was fantastic. It would be impossible for me to putt any better,” Player said. “This course is a pleasure to play.”
    When he dropped a three-foot birdie on number eleven, Player’s scorecard not only amazed; it was historic. In the eight previous major championships at Oakmont—where revered players like Sarazen, Jones, Armour, Turnesa, Snead, Hogan, and Nicklaus had won major championships—no one had ever reached six under par in a medal-play round. Ben Hogan in 1953 and Deane Beman in 1962 shared the course record of 67, and Hogan had to birdie the final two holes to achieve his mark.
    If Player could shoot par over the final seven holes, his 65 would establish a course record that might last forever. More immediately, he would surge into a huge lead; no one even approached Player’s mastery of Oakmont that day.
    Unfortunately, Player’s torrid pace cooled on the par-five twelfth, where he made bogey by driving into the thick rough; he also bogeyed the par-three sixteenth, bunkering his three-wood. Nevertheless, pars everywhere else completed a tremendous, record-tying round of 67 that was almost ten shots under the average score for the day—a true anomaly.
    When the last man on the course finished up, Player owned a three-stroke lead.
    “Someday you’ll realize what a good round it was,”