OAKMONT, Pa. — As great as a golfer as Johnny Miller was in his day, winner of two majors and 25 wins, he was an even better TV personality and golf announcer for NBC for 29 years. I once asked him in a Golfweek Q&A what he thought of NBC reacquiring the U.S. Open broadcast rights and he gave this response: “If I had known that, I might have gone another year,” he said.
It revealed how much he loved broadcasting the U.S. Open, the tournament he won at Oakmont in 1973 with a final-round 63.
On Saturday, during a news conference with Miller and Jack Nicklaus, who won it here in 1962, I asked Johnny another TV question and it produced this fantastic response:
“Do I wish I kept announcing? That was my 50th year in golf when I got to 29 years with NBC. It seemed like a nice time to leave. I still had my wits about me and had my own way of doing things. When I played on the East Coast especially, they’d go, ‘Hey, Johnny, we love you, keep telling it like it is.’ What people liked about my announcing was that I just said what I’d say to my best friend in my own house and talking to the TV,” he said. “If a guy duck hooks it on the last hole and hasn’t hooked a ball in the last month, he might be choking. I was the first guy to use that word, 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. If you can handle pressure — Jack liked to hang around the first three days and then just feel like on the last day he had a huge advantage. He believed in himself, and not only believed in himself, he could produce on that last round and handle the putt or the shot.
“I was more of a guy that didn’t like it to be close. He liked it to be close. 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 green. That was my fun. I liked to drive fast and hit hard with the driver and that kind of stuff.
“I don’t know, everybody does it differently. But that’s just the way I thought.”
I was looking for an answer about TV, which he addressed, but he gave so much more — talking about the ‘choke factor’ was classic Johnny — including this line that may sum up Miller better than anything that has been written: “I wanted to have the thrill of going for knocking down pins out of the green. That was my fun. I liked to drive fast and hit hard with the driver and that kind of stuff.”
Yes, he did and golf was better for it.
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