COVERAGE: Back at Oakmont, Miller Delivers Familiar Blunt Insights

OAKMONT, Pa. — It comes up any time someone goes deep at a men’s major championship: Johnny Miller’s 63 at Oakmont in 1973.

It happened this week, of course, in the run-up to the U.S. Open, as it should. And then again when Sam Burns fired a 65 on Friday that shot him to the solo lead at the midway point.

So it was that Miller was invited to speak to the press prior to Saturday’s third round, alongside another man who had his big breakthrough at Oakmont Country Club: Jack Nicklaus, who grinded out his first major in a playoff against Arnold Palmer in 1962.

While Nicklaus continues to have a platform in the sport, Miller hasn’t been heard from much at all since he stepped down as NBC’s lead golf analyst in 2019. A man known for his bold, sometimes-unpopular insights on television showed Saturday he’s still got an edge, even at 78 years old.

“It’s still all about hitting the ball in the fairway,” Miller opined when asked about what qualities will be paramount this weekend. “You see the guys that don’t — like Bryson DeChambeau, he was living in the rough there this last couple days. Of course he gets to watch it on TV today.”

That comment about the defending Open champion who missed the cut by three strokes elicited a chuckle from Nicklaus, seated next to him at the dais. (Nevermind that DeChambeau actually gained strokes on the field with his driving this week, but I digress.)

The barb pointed at Bryson reminded of a classic Miller call, when watching Phil Mickelson blow it all over the yard at Winged Foot in what will go down as Lefty’s most excruciating of six Open runner-up finishes. On that Sunday in 2006, Miller seemed almost offended that Mickelson hung in there as long as he did.

I suppose when you make your name as one of the best ball-strikers of all time, we can understand and appreciate the passion.

“Johnny Miller is obviously a really good player,” Nicklaus said, when asked to analyze the man next to him. “I loved his swing arc. I loved the way he played. Johnny carried that sort of, I suppose when you’ve got that thing going, a little bit of a swashbuckling attitude, and into broadcasting, too.

“I think you admire a guy for, sometimes he’s going to take a little bit of a hit for sometimes what he said, but for the most part that’s what he thought. I can’t criticize somebody for saying what they thought. Johnny did a really good job of that through the years of his broadcasting. He was probably the most insightful guy out there.”

It’s a paradox that a man who was first known for excellence in his craft actually became just as well known for calling out imperfections in others, but to hear Miller tell it, he knew all about nerves in golf because of his own experiences.

“If a guy duck-hooks it on the last hole and hasn’t hooked a ball in the last month, he might be choking,” Miller said. “I was the first guy to use that word (on TV), which is not a very nice word, but I thought the greatness of golf was the choke factor. I just still think that that’s the greatness of golf is to be able to handle pressure.”

Miller went on to say that he knew Nicklaus leaned on his mental fortitude in those close-and-late situations, whereas Miller was more comfortable when he was running away with a tournament, as he often did when he won.

“I was more of a guy that didn’t like it to be close,” Miller said. “I wanted to win it by … when I won the Phoenix Open by 14 shots, I liked it. If that ball is going in the hole, I’m going to fill it up until the round is over if I can. None of this fancy stuff about hitting away from the target. I wanted to have the thrill of going for knocking down pins out of the hole. That was my fun.”

Believe it or not, Miller said he felt his sphincter tightening even during that magical Sunday here 52 years ago. After he birdied the first four holes to start his winning rally, he started to think about the implications.

“I got ahead of myself like a lot of golfers do when they think they’re going to play the best round of their life,” Miller said. “I got a surge of adrenaline and started to be very tentative. My weakness in golf was my putting. I could putt good at times, but after the fourth hole, I thought, I’ve got a shot here if I can keep it up.”

Of course, Miller swung it so well in that final round — he missed one fairway by a couple of foot and hit all 18 greens — that the putting didn’t matter as much as it usually does around Oakmont’s treacherous surfaces.

When Miller signed for that 63, he had to wait roughly an hour for Palmer and other leaders to finish, so he had more time than most to grasp his accomplishment. But even more than a half century later, with time having added some gravel to his voice and a hitch to his cadence, the former king of telling it like it is can’t help but marvel.

“In the last round it was like, my guardian angel out there said, ‘OK, we’re going to put together a perfect round of golf,” Miller said.

“And it was literally a perfect round of golf.”