Authors: Gil Capps
Hole number 2: driver, 5-wood (into front bunker), sand wedge to a foot.
Hole number 3: 3-wood, pitching wedge to fourteen feet.
Hole number 4: 2-iron to ten feet.
Hole number 5: driver, 4-iron to fourteen feet.
Hole number 6: 5-iron to one foot (with applause even from Player).
Hole number 7: 3-wood, pitching wedge to thirty-five feet just off the left edge of green.
Six consecutive birdies was a new Masters record, besting the previous mark of five by Player and Hale Irwin in 1974. “Shoot, I might shoot nothing today,” Miller thought at that point. When he put his second shot right in front of the green on the par-five 8th, a seventh in a row looked nearly certain until he saw that the ball had rested in a divot. His pitch shot with a pitching wedge came out thin and carried thirty feet past the hole. He was unable to convert the putt.
When he handed in his scorecard to the rules official behind the green after parring the 9th, the numbers read: 443 232 354. He was out in 30—another Masters record. Officially, he took only ten putts
in nine holes, but most importantly, he was back in the tournament at four under par with a course-record 64 in sight.
It caught everyone’s attention. “I could hear the hollering in back,” says Heard, who was playing in the group directly in front of Miller and Player. Amateurs Gary Koch and Craig Stadler, who had stayed on Saturday to hang out and watch golf on the second nine, scurried back up to the 9th after seeing Miller’s score and followed him for a few holes. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s come out of the pack’,” says Vin Scully, who was still waiting to go on the air at 4:30.
Mark Eubanks had been waiting four years to witness one of these runs. He had been on Miller’s bag at the Masters since 1972 for just this reason. Miller used Eubanks to read some of the greens. But like Nicklaus, Miller calculated his own yardages, picked his own clubs, and made his own decisions—quickly. On this day, Eubanks’s excitable nature would even cause Miller to pull clubs out of the bag himself. “He would get so nervous, his hands were like Niagara Falls,” says Miller. “Water would just pour out of his hands. My clubs would be so watery by the time he gave them to me.” Miller found himself calming his caddie instead of the other way around.
Miller already had enough water to deal with as he made the turn. There isn’t a visible water hazard on the first nine holes at Augusta, but there are five on the back: holes 11, 12, 13, 15, and 16. “I don’t think I ever got comfortable with water hazards,” says Miller, who saw very few growing up playing on Northern California courses. “I learned how to treat them and had enough shots. I always respected water maybe too much.”
Whether it was the water on the bag or on the course, Miller’s putter cooled on the second nine. He made birdie at the 13th, fortunate that his 5-wood second shot stuck in the creek bank. He pitched up to six feet and made it to go seven under on the round at that point. But he would get no lower. He failed to convert birdie putts of
ten feet at the 10th, fifteen feet at the 12th, and six feet at the 17th. On the 18th, forty-five feet above the hole, he eased a putt down the slope that slid inches by the hole. Miller came home in 35 and shot a bogey-free 65—one off the course record. It was eight shots lower than Gary Player’s 73.
“If it wasn’t the Masters and I wasn’t so nervous... Normally when I’d shoot 30 on the front nine, we weren’t talking about 65. But that was the sign of a major. If that had been anywhere else that would have been a 62 or 63, even if it was the same course,” believes Miller.
When asked afterward if his round was his best ever, he responded: “No way it was as good as Oakmont. The round at Tucson was the best in my life. Eleven under par on that course is super. I should have had a blood test after that round.”
With just twenty-eight putts, Miller’s Bullseye putter was back in good graces. “Maybe my old one just needed to be threatened a little,” he said. Miraculously, he was back in contention, excited and relieved at the same time. “I just wanted to come in the top-twenty-five. I thought if I shoot 63, he still might run off and leave me. I wanted to play a good tournament so you guys wouldn’t say I was a dog this week. I also wanted to let those guys (the other players) know I’m here,” he said.
When Miller finished more than two hours in front of the last group, he had already jumped into 3rd place by himself.
“All the players know I’m an explosive player. I don’t know if that bothers them, but they know it. Deep down inside them, they know that I might go berserk again,” said Miller. “But Nicklaus isn’t worrying about me. He’s worrying about Jack Nicklaus.”
OR ARNOLD PALMER
. All along, Nicklaus knew the second half of a golf tournament could be the longer half. He said as much in the media center the previous evening: “This is a hard course to hold the lead on. It’s not so bad on the front nine, but on the back there is
so much water. The par five holes have the potential to be ‘3’ or ‘7’ holes.” It had happened before. In 1972, he built a five-shot lead during the third round only to have it completely erased.
“Being ahead won’t affect my play,” he admitted, “except maybe at the danger points.”
Having seen Miller’s low number brought some concern, and not just because it was a hot Johnny Miller who had found his mojo. He also saw the course conditions changing as mid-afternoon approached. Augusta was getting its teeth back. “Back in those days,” says Weiskopf, “the weekend is when it brought out the best of Augusta. They didn’t quite get it there early in the week.” After the overcast skies and occasional rain shower the first two days of tournament play, the course was beginning to dry out. “The greens are getting so slick your ball marker will slide off of them,” joked Hubert Green following his round. Some greens with full exposure to the sun, such as the 9th, would speed up quicker than the 13th, which stays in the shade much longer. The sky would remain sunny all day with highs reaching the upper 60s. The ten to fifteen mph winds from the east and northeast would turn to the west by the end of the afternoon, making the swirling gusts through the pine trees at ground level even more confusing to judge. Birdies could be made, but Nicklaus knew he would have to proceed cautiously.
Nicklaus had enough to think about. Now the distraction of playing with Palmer factored in as well. Hoots and hollers of “Go Arnie!” and “Get ’em, Arnie baby” rang out when they arrived on the first tee. Then, ever the club aficionado, Arnold had to have a look at Jack’s new driver before they began.
“It seemed like everybody was with that group,” says Koch, still a Palmer guy, who walked a few holes with the twosome after watching Miller. With the large gallery, he eventually gave up and drove back to Florida Sunday morning.
The afternoon got off to a bad start right away for Nicklaus. His approach shot found a greenside bunker on the 1st, and he missed a
six footer for par. When Nicklaus made the bogey, someone in the gallery yelled, “That’s one, Arnie, now get the rest.”
At the 2nd, he picked the shot back up. Leaving his second in the greenside bunker, he used his new sand wedge to blast to four feet for birdie. But Nicklaus couldn’t get anything going. He lipped out a birdie putt at the 8th. On the next hole, with the wind having turned from the north and whipping the red flag marked with a large white “9”, he ran his birdie putt twelve feet by. Before it had a chance to roll off the front of the green, he hustled to mark it, using one of the three pennies he always carried in his pocket when playing. He failed to make the par putt. The greens were getting faster, and the wind was picking up as well. On the 11th, it was against him on the tee and with him on the approach shot, causing him to leave it on the right front edge of the green. The fifty-foot putt came up three feet short, and he couldn’t hole the tricky curler he left himself. It was a three-putt green and another dropped shot.
After no bogeys in his first thirty-five holes, Nicklaus now had made four in his last twelve. His five-shot lead at the day’s start was no more. “On this course, you have to get it over the hump to get the scoring going,” he said. “If you get it going you can keep it going. If you can’t, it gets harder and harder to get it going.”
With the flagstick cut on the left side of the 12th green, which meant the hole played its shortest distance, Nicklaus hit a towering iron shot ten feet left of it just as the wind died down. He holed the birdie putt to retake the outright lead briefly at eight under—his left hand flicked his putter toward the hole as the ball went in. On the 13th, he hit the green in two shots but left a sixty-foot eagle putt from the back of the green some ten feet short on the shaded, and therefore slowish, putting surface. He missed the birdie effort—his third of three, three-putt greens on the day.
Nicklaus’s success on the par fives had been startling. To this exact point in his career, he had played the par fives at Augusta National in a combined 99 under par, while being 11 over on the par
threes and 48 over on the par fours. He was six under on them this week. But Nicklaus knew the dangers of their give-and-take nature. “All the par fives are designed as four and a halves,” said Nicklaus “If you miss-hit the ball, you’ll find out what they are. They become sixes right quick.”
After over-shooting the green at the 14th and making par, Nicklaus strode to the tee of the par-five 15th. Curtis Strange thinks what many do about Nicklaus on this hole: “Ever remember him not hitting the fairway at 15 or not hitting the ball on the green in two there.” In reality, the hole was not kind to him as an amateur. He played it eight times before making his first birdie. In the last three Masters, it had cost him one title and nearly another. On Friday in 1972, one day after making eagle, Nicklaus hit a fairway wood long and into the pond behind the green, resulting in a double bogey. On Saturday in 1973, with his ball lying on the upslope of a mound, he gambled and hit a 3-wood thin and into the front pond. After taking his penalty drop, he lost his patience and compounded the error by hitting his wedge fat and into the water as well. The triple-bogey eight matched his highest score in the Masters and, in the end, was the difference between winning back-to-back titles and finishing tied for 3rd two shots behind champion Tommy Aaron.
With the wind now coming from the west and against him, Nicklaus gave his tee shot an extra lash, but the ball tailed off to the right and missed the fairway. He then hit his lay-up shot too hard, running it through the other side of the fairway. From there, he struck a wedge to seven feet but couldn’t make the putt. Walking off with tightened lips and a shake of the head, he glanced at the leaderboard and knew he had given up a lot on the holes that had given him so much in the past. He had birdied only one of the four par fives on this day.
Arnold Palmer fared no better. He hit only six of eighteen greens in regulation. He salvaged what he could of the round by one-putting nine greens. “If I had not scrambled extremely well,” he said, “I
would have shot an 80. Every ball I hit went left.” Palmer’s only birdie all day came on a scrambling effort on the par-five 2nd that epitomized his round: drive left into the trees, punch-out with a 3-wood, 7-iron from 150 yards to four feet, and conversion of the birdie putt.
The headliners had played more like the undercard. Dan Foster of the
Greenville (S. C.) News
wrote, “It had the nightmarish effect on their galleries of two guys staging a fistfight while their boat was sinking.”
Walking up the 18th fairway, they turned to each other and said, “We did it to ourselves again, huh?” A raucous ovation didn’t mask that once more they hadn’t played well when paired together. Palmer shot a 75. Nicklaus stumbled around the course with a 73. They combined for a grand total of three birdies.
Nicklaus, who usually excelled at blocking out emotions and distractions, thought he had an answer to their struggles: “Arnie’s gallery is hoping for him to beat me, and mine is pulling for me to beat him. This makes us want to beat each other, and we forget about the field. It’s detrimental to both of our games. We would probably play all right if everybody else stayed at home.”
“We were kicking ourselves, but we laughed it off, too,” recalls Nicklaus. “I laughed it off a lot more than he did because he was gone.”
Palmer was disheartened to fall further behind and to have his chance for an elusive fifth green jacket become more remote. The day marked the end of an era for the two foes. It would be the last time that they would be paired together in the final group on the weekend of a major championship. Palmer would turn fifty years old in just a little over four-and-a-half years. The oldest person to win a major had been Julius Boros, age forty-eight, at the 1968 PGA Championship.
Meanwhile, his archrival was still in position to win that fifth Masters. After starting the day with a five-shot lead, he now trailed
by one. So much for a runaway Nicklaus victory. Playing the best golf of his life, he had frittered away some of his edge and wasn’t happy.
“I felt like I had a good chance to extend the lead,” he said. “The third round is important. I had a chance to make a runaway, but you often probably can make up more in the fourth round. Why?” Nicklaus asked as he turned the question to himself. “It’s because some just can’t quite finish the tournament.”
NICKLAUS’S STRUGGLES
had left the door open for others, but few took advantage. Miller’s 65 was an anomaly. The course average was the highest of the week at just over 73.8. Only nine of forty-six players broke par with just three rounds in the 60s, the first of the day being Ralph Johnston’s 69. Frustrations were particularly high in the two pairings next to last.