Read Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont for Free Online

the thought of redemption had driven Palmer throughout his career—he regularly recycled past defeats in his mind as a spur to future achievement—and in 1973 he wanted to remind the world that, not so long ago, major championships and Arnold Palmer heroics were synonymous.
    “Ever since I lost in 1962, I’ve been waiting for the Open to come back to Oakmont,” he admitted two days before the 1973 championship began. “This is my country; I am very eager to redeem myself.”
    No one was better suited to help Arnold Palmer achieve that lofty goal than the man who had taught him everything he knew about golf: his sixty-eight-year-old father, Deacon Palmer.

    PALMER DID NOT PLAY ANOTHER event in the four weeks following the Byron Nelson tournament at the end of April. He did, however, maintain much of his typically harried, around-the-globe golfing schedule, including a hospital charity exhibition at Hidden Valley Country Club in Reno and the filming of The Best 18 Holes in America, a three-part television series featuring courses all over the country. Even when he “took off” from the tour, he didn’t shun the obligations (or financial rewards) of celebrity. He happily met public expectations-just as long as the demands centered on golf.
    At a press conference to promote the Reno exhibition in early May, a reporter asked Palmer what made him so successful. His answer was simple, his personal identity crystal clear.
    “A great amount of desire to play golf,” he responded. “It’s been a life’s ambition since I’ve been a youngster. It’s never fluttered. It never went away. It’s still there.” In between business ventures, Palmer flew back to Latrobe, parking his private plane barely a mile from his home and playing regularly on the course where he had grown up. In mid-May, the power brokers at Oakmont offered him a nonresident membership (though even he had to pay a $5,000 membership fee). Now eligible to play in the club’s intraclub competition known as the SWAT (invented by H. C. Fownes) while tuning up for the Open, Palmer jumped at the opportunity.
    Although Oakmont made for a second home as a teenager, Palmer had actually not played the course since losing the 1962 play-off to Nicklaus. There had been only a few changes to the course over the past decade.
    In the weeks prior to the Open, Palmer played in the SWAT a handful of times and reinforced his memories of each hole. But his major preparation was back home in Latrobe, hitting practice balls under his father’s sharp eye.
    Early in the 1973 season, Gardner Dickinson, a tour regular and a Hogan disciple, told Deacon (or “Pap,” as Arnold called him) that a bad habit had crept into Arnold’s swing and undermined his consistency. Arnold acknowledged the problem and tried various corrections while still on tour, but each piecemeal “fix” not surprisingly generated new difficulties.
    Now back in Latrobe for an extended stay, father and son—as only they could—reevatuated every aspect of Arnold’s technique. Working more effectively together as adults than their conflicting personalities had allowed during Arnold’s youth, the two concluded that Arnold had become so “out of position” that major swing surgery was necessary. Together, they took apart his swing and rebuilt it.
    “[We changed] the whole ball of wax—the address, the swing, everything.”
    It was no wonder Palmer felt so comfortable in drastically reshaping his technique, even this close to a U.S. Open: Deacon was the only man he’d ever trusted with his homemade swing.
    “Almost from the moment he put that cut-down club in my hands, Pap would tell me in no uncertain terms to permit nobody to fool with or change my golf swing.”
    Even after earning dozens of victories and tens of millions of dollars, Palmer had returned to his father’s side during the 1960s and let him toy with his swing. Weeks before the U.S. Open in 1969, in the midst of a terrible slump, Palmer