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The irony is that Miller is a star now, in the 21st century. Millions of his fans have never seen him hit a shot, and if you tell them that he was the first pro to shoot really low scores at Tour events, they'll shrug and turn up the volume on their iPods. Viewers don't love or hate Miller for his record. They love or hate him for saying "Verplunk!" when Scott Verplank hits one in the water at the 2006 Ryder Cup ... for flaming Phil Mickelson from 72nd tee to 72nd green during last year's U.S. Open at Winged Foot ... for suggesting that Ben Hogan, if forced to look at the ungainly swing of Australia's Craig Parry, "would have puked."
So with Miller returning to Oakmont for the third time as an announcer, perhaps it's time to re-examine his legacy as a gabber, to peer into the past to find out how he developed his practiced bluntness, caustic wit, and preternatural ability to predict the outcome of a shot based solely on how it sounds through his headphones. Miller will tell you he already had two of those gifts in 1969, when he joined the Tour, a mop-topped bag of bones out of Brigham Young University. He remembers being on the practice range at one of his first Tour events when the great Lee Trevino stepped up to watch and then, as SuperMex was wont to do, heckle. "Lee thought I was this passive lamb," Miller says, smiling at the memory. "But I gave it right back to him. I seemed quiet on the surface, but if you got into it with me, I could hold my own."
Earlier, then. Johnny's businessman father, Larry Miller, in addition to being a low-handicap golfer, was an artist and songwriter. "He wrote both the melody and the lyrics," Miller recalls, "and he'd say amazing things. He was a total one-off thinker."
That's relevant, Miller says, because "my goal on the air is to say things you don't expect me to say."
But if you press him, Miller will say his on-air persona dates to the 1960s, his teen years, when fate (and a certain skill with golf clubs) delivered him to the rarefied precincts of San Francisco's Olympic Club. Miller, at 14, was Olympic's first "merit member" — the club's term for talented juniors given access to its courses and practice facilities — and the top player on its junior golf team. "We just had a great group of guys," he says, "and we all had this Animal House mentality."
ANYONE who has been to the Olympic Club will raise a skeptical eyebrow at the frat-house reference. The clubhouse, on a landscaped escarpment overlooking the 18th green, is an Italianate pastiche of stucco walls, iron chandeliers and Oriental carpets, a place where a Medici might catch a few winks between poisonings. It's hard to imagine a foursome of 16-year-olds hitting bump-and-run shots down the hall while a jittery lookout covers the stairs to the porte cochere.
"The guy on the stairs was the flagger," Ron O'Connor says, giving a visitor a tour of the clubhouse. "He'd wave his arm if the coast was clear."
O'Connor, a real estate broker and longtime Olympic Club member, was the club's second-best junior golfer in Miller's day. (His friends call him "Rocket" — short for "RocketMan," a nickname Miller gave him.) The team captain, Steve Gregoire, was number four. More importantly, he was the son of the club member who put Miller up for membership.
Both boys caddied at the club, and Miller frequently looped for Leon Gregoire.
"My dad played with a bunch of guys who played five or six days a week, and they gambled pretty heavily," says Steve, who now owns an interior landscaping company. "Those guys would rib each other viciously, and we all picked up on it. When we played, it was difficult to tee off on the first hole because the needle was going back and forth." Putting was no cakewalk, either — not when Rocket Man assured you the line was a ball outside the hole, and Miller said, "Yeah, left edge," and you said, "Left edge? Or outside the hole?" and Rocket Man said, "Now that I look at it, it's dead straight."
"It toughened us up," Gregoire says with a smile. "Made us better."
Miller agrees. "The needling made me quick," he says, leaning on a rail outside the announcers' booth. "I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm quick. I've immediately got something to say."
The ribbing desensitized Miller, too; it led him to assume that others shared his ability to handle criticism. "I'm brutally honest, to a fault, and some players don't like that." Oddly enough, it's the older pros — the guys Miller thinks should be thickskinned — who squawk the most when he politely points out that they're choking dogs. "The young players grew up listening to Johnny Miller, they've got that X Games mentality," Miller says. "They think I'm out there, sort of with it — not the old fuddyduddy, careful announcer."
In any event, Miller insists that his on-air jibes are not meant to sting: "When Mickelson has hit only one fairway in 13 holes, I'm like his caddie. I'm thinking, 'Don't hit the driver, Phil! Don't try to hit a low slice around the tree!' I'm not trying to rip him. I'm using ESP. I'm trying to help him." And when he spots another player's swing flaw — say, a tendency to squat in the takeaway and then drive the left shoulder up through impact a la Tiger Woods — is Miller just tweeting his coach's whistle?
