Authors: Gil Capps
“It knocked me to the ground,” says Nichols. Startled, he was able to run 100 yards to a tent along with the group’s standard bearer, who had a heavy metal standard ripped from his hands. Officials asked him if he was okay, but his breath smelled like burnt wire. With a headache and burns on his head, he was taken to the hospital where the doctor
on call kept him forty-eight hours for observation. Nichols felt no lasting physical effects, but that first-round lead at the Masters would be his last ever on the PGA Tour and the tie for 4th his last top-five finish. He never won again. Nichols stayed at Firestone until the company sold the club in 1980. In a decade-and-a-half on the Champions Tour, he won once and eventually settled at Fiddlesticks Country Club in Ft. Myers, Florida. As a former major champion, he still enjoys returning each year to the Masters as an honorary invitee.
Across the lake, Lee Trevino was sitting by the water under an umbrella, waiting for the storm to pass, when he was struck. Trevino was also admitted to the hospital and held overnight for observation, but soon after leaving, immense back pains began. He conferred with a specialist, who believed fluid around his discs had been burnt by the electrical shock, and had surgery in late 1976. That decision probably saved his career. He won another nine times after 1975, including one more major championship at the 1984 PGA. Once he turned fifty, he dominated the Champions Tour in the first half of the 1990s with twenty-nine victories. But he would never contend in another Masters, that tie for 10th in 1975 remaining his best finish. He never completed the career Grand Slam and is the only player in the modern era to win the U.S. Open, British Open, and PGA and not the Masters. Long after he retired, Trevino would wonder what his career would’ve been like if he had learned the game somewhere other than the public tracks in Texas and developed a swing like Nicklaus or Weiskopf or Miller—a swing in his mind that could have won that tournament in Augusta, Georgia.
Jerry Heard had been beside Trevino. When the bolt struck, it went up the umbrella he was leaning against, right into his groin where the tip had been resting. Of the three, Heard was the only one who wasn’t held for observation at the hospital. When play resumed the next day, Heard actually completed his round with a 74 and went on to finish tied for 4th. Little did he realize the strike would affect him the most. Once one of the young guns, Heard’s
career was virtually over. “Until I got hit by lightning, I never had a problem with my golf game,” says Heard, who suffered severe back pain from a ruptured disk. “When I got hit by lightning, that shut me down for a while. I couldn’t swing.” He could no longer stay behind the ball to fade it and managed only one more win by slapping a hook around and holing putts in Atlanta in 1978. Unlike Trevino, he put off surgery for five years. “That was the biggest mistake I made,” he says. “Looking back I should’ve been cut on, gotten well, and continued on. I quit way too early.” Off the Tour by 1983, Heard now owns Silverthorn Country Club in Brooksville, Florida, where his body still feels the aftereffects four decades later.
For Heard, one of the most frustrating effects of that strike has been the crazy, vivid dreams he experiences. Heard gives one example: “I’m on the last hole playing with Ray Floyd. It’s uphill. The pin’s back on the left. It’s a perfect 9-iron shot, and I’m going to win the tournament. I look down, and there’s a trailer hitch right over my ball. Where’d that come from? I can’t hit this ball with a trailer hitch over it. That’s the kind of dreams I have. No matter what happens, I never get to win in my dreams.
“In John’s dreams, probably, he’s holed it out.”
YEARS LATER
, John Miller finds reliving his 276th stroke too tough. “I can’t watch almost,” he says of that final birdie putt that still doesn’t go in. Had it, the fate of Johnny Miller’s golf career may have been reversed. Part of Johnny Miller feels if he had won, maybe he would have been spurred to work a little harder at golf, and maybe his passion and resolve would have been rekindled as both a U.S. Open and Masters champion.
Instead on that Sunday night, Johnny Miller’s time as golf’s best player came to an end. “I started to get a little burned out around the middle of ’75, right after the Masters,” says Miller. “Maybe that Masters took something out of me.” It was the zenith of his career. Going forward, there was no more talk about being the game’s best
player. No more talk about being better than Jack Nicklaus. Miller’s reign as golf’s “it” player was nearing its end.
His next close call at a major came at the British Open in July. Standing on the 72nd tee at Carnoustie one shot back, Miller hit his drive at the edge of a right fairway bunker, thinking the wind would carry it back in the fairway. Only it didn’t, instead landing right in that bunker. Still aggressive, Miller tried to hit a 6-iron out of the pot bunker, but it hit the top of the lip and fell back in. Miller tried the same shot, this time extracting it toward the left side of the green. He made bogey and finished tied for 3rd, one shot out of a playoff for the second time in three majors. Since then, the hazard has been known as “Johnny Miller’s bunker.” He won only one more tournament in 1975 successfully defending the Kaiser tournament on his home course at Silverado that fall.
A series of events had catapulted Miller to the top of the golfing world in 1973, and another series would precipitate his downfall. It began just after the Masters with a decision Miller calls, “the biggest mistake I ever made in golf.” Nicklaus, Weiskopf, and Miller (and Watson, too) had been carrying the Kelly green bags of MacGregor in the 1975 Masters. “The Greatest Name in Golf” was the company’s slogan. They were contracted to play MacGregor irons and the Tourney golf ball. Miller’s agent Ed Barner sold him on the idea that although the three biggest names in golf were all with MacGregor, the manufacturer wasn’t big enough to properly utilize all three players. So Barner pursued other club deals, and later in the year while Nicklaus and Weiskopf remained with MacGregor, Miller signed a lucrative endorsement with Wilson. “I dropped my magical Tommy Armour irons and Tommy Armour woods and went to these crappy Wilson clubs,” says Miller, who had to play a Wilson Staff ball he didn’t like either. “That adjustment was like a shock to the nervous system.”
At the same time, Miller’s putting stroke, which hadn’t been totally smooth at the Masters, was getting increasingly yippy. He won the 1976 British Open at Royal Birkdale by painting his wife’s red
nail polish on top of his putter. That allowed him to concentrate on the red dot going back and through at the same speed. He managed a total of three wins in 1976, but the nail polish trick didn’t last long. The stabbiness in his stroke and rebound of the putter resurfaced.
A millionaire by now, Miller longed to be home. In Napa, he had purchased a 100-acre ranch and put all his efforts into restoring the property. “I couldn’t believe how much I loved it,” says Miller of his work. “I guess the pioneer part of me came out.” Even ranching had passed golf in importance, and it showed. Miller returned to the Tour much bulkier in 1977 and couldn’t swing the club like he used to. For the first time ever, he was in a slump. After six consecutive years in the top-twenty on the money list, he finished 48th. And it got worse. In 1978, he fell to 112th and, in his words, was “hitting it like a popcorn machine.”
His press became a little more unfavorable. One of the most scathing stories came in the November 7, 1978 issue of
Esquire
. There on the cover was the line “Golf Johnny Miller: The Selling of a Loser.”
“It was almost a relief to go into that slump,” says Miller, who lost his Wilson contract in 1979 because he didn’t play enough events. With five children now at home (and a sixth to arrive in 1980) and some money saved up, Miller thought about retiring. Then, a realization struck him. “It’s not so much what you accomplish in life that matters as it is what you overcome that proves who you are,” says Miller, who had never had to overcome anything. “Now the first thing that goes wrong, I’m just going to give up.”
So Miller decided to work a little harder and rededicate himself. Even Jack Nicklaus offered words of encouragement. In the fall of 1979, Miller shot a 63—his lowest round in three years—and lost in a playoff to Tom Watson in the Hall of Fame Classic at Pinehurst. After three winless seasons, he triumphed again in 1980—the first of five victories in the next four years. He had one more close call at the Masters, finishing second in 1981 which was the first year in which the greens were bentgrass. “If they would have been bentgrass
(in 1970s), I would have had more chances to win no doubt about it,” he says. At age forty-seven, Miller won as a grandfather at the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am in 1994. That came after he’d all but given up playing competitively in 1990 to serve as NBC Sports’ golf analyst. As of 2014, it was a position that he’d held longer than his playing career, and one that earned him eight Emmy nominations and critical praise for his candor and insight.
Miller reached the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1998, the same year the boy who watched him at the 1973 British Open was inducted—Nick Faldo. Soon after the 1975 Masters, Faldo turned professional. He earned his first Masters invitation in 1979 and went on to win three green jackets in 1989, 1990, and 1996.
Miller remains good friends with Nicklaus. “Even to this day we’re like younger brother, older brother,” says Miller. Maybe Nicklaus is looking for the younger brother he never had; maybe Miller is longing for the older brother he lost. “He needles me,” Miller continues. “There’s something about the two of us. If I lived near him, we’d probably be best friends, fishing and hunting and messing around together. There’s something there. I haven’t figured it out. Sort of like Forrest Gump, peas and carrots.”
When Miller runs into Weiskopf on occasion, a mutual respect surfaces. They were two players who in retrospect were more similar to each other than to Nicklaus. They were seekers, players whose flames burned too bright to last long, but whose brightness still cast a shadow over the game today.
“I don’t think the Masters has ever had three guys at the very top of their game go down the wire like that,” says Miller. “That’s why that tournament is so revered. It doesn’t get a lot better than that. To be included, I get a thrill that people still talk about that Masters.”
“
YOU CAN NOW
, if you will, go to the blackboard and write 100 times, ‘Jack Nicklaus is the greatest golfer in the world’,” wrote Jim Murray in Monday’s
Los Angeles Times
.
Nicklaus, however, had little time to read or celebrate. In victory or defeat, the schedule had been set. Monday morning, he was off to Columbus for a little work on Muirfield Village. From there, he was flying to Birmingham, Alabama, for another site visit. He was designing a new private course there for a man named Hall Thompson. It would be called Shoal Creek. Then, he would be home for the weekend in Florida before his next competitive stop at the Tournament of Champions in California. After that, some fishing in Mexico was on the calendar before going back to Columbus again.
Once again, he stood as the undisputed king of golf. His confidence was bolstered; the psyches of his rivals were dented—some beyond repair. It was the first time in his career that he won three consecutive starts. This was the best golf of his life, and preparations began immediately for the next major in ten weeks—the U.S. Open at Medinah Country Club outside Chicago.
“It’s a possibility, not a probability,” said Nicklaus of the Grand Slam. “One thing, there were seventy-six who could do it at the start of the week and now there’s one.” He had said he wanted to get some of that ’72 talk going again, and for the next two months he got his wish. Nicklaus went to the Open feeling confident, but once there he didn’t play particularly well. Going into the final round, he was seven shots behind. On the final day, he teed off two hours in front of the final group with, of all people, Arnold Palmer, the last man to come from that far behind and win. Nicklaus turned it around. By the time he walked on the 16th tee, he was two under for the round and just a shot out of the lead. Then, similar to four years earlier at the British Open, his Grand Slam aspirations dissipated on the final three holes. Unable to consistently fade the ball all week, Nicklaus tried to force a cut on a dogleg-left par four, but he pull-hooked it left into the woods. He bogeyed the final three holes to finish tied for 7th, two shots out of the Lou Graham/John Mahaffey playoff. Three pars would have given him the outright victory. “That absolutely killed me,” he says.
At the British Open in July, he began the final round four shots out of the lead. As the field fought blustery conditions, he soon climbed up the leaderboard. Unlike at the Masters, the par-three 16th hole at Carnoustie was unkind, making bogey. Standing on the 17th tee, he thought to himself a birdie on one of the final two holes could be good enough to win. He nearly holed a chip shot on the 17th and couldn’t get close enough for a good birdie look on the 18th. He was right. His tie for 3rd was just one shot out of another playoff. “I didn’t finish it properly,” he says.
In August, he won the PGA Championship at Firestone by two shots over Bruce Crampton and three over Weiskopf. Roger Maltbie, starting in his very first major championship, was grouped with Nicklaus in the first two rounds. Firestone was the hardest course he’d ever seen, so when he saw a scoreboard posting Ed Dougherty at six under, Maltbie was flabbergasted. Nicklaus looked at him and said, “It doesn’t matter. Four under par will win.” And that’s what Nicklaus finished on.
Nicklaus was only three shots from a possible Grand Slam in 1975—stroke-wise, no one has come closer since then. The Player of the Year with five victories, he would never again come close to winning all four majors in a year. He would never win three tournaments in a row again. And he would never play golf as well as he did in April 1975.