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He nods. "I'm trying to give the pro a free lesson. I'm hoping he'll watch it that night and say, 'Johnny's right, that's exactly what I'm doing wrong.'" His straight face begins to crack. "But that doesn't go over too well, I've found."
After all, who wants advice from a 16-year-old?
THE SECOND hole of the Olympic Club's "Animal House" course is an 85-yard par 7. You tee off from an alcove in the men's locker room and chip through a door and up some steps to a landing, where a wellplayed ricochet off the wall kicks your ball outside and across the sidewalk to a flower bed. That leaves you a delicate approach of 45 yards up a clubhouse hugging, cliff-edge sidewalk to the practice putting green.
Miller honed his short game on this hole. He also practiced at the nearby Harding Park municipal course, where he played the flag game. The rules, set down by his father, were simple: Hit your ball within the length of the flagstick, roughly seven feet, on all 18 greens. Miller's friends remember how dejected Johnny would get when his string of flags ended — usually around the 10th hole.
"Johnny's dad was his first golf coach," Gregoire says, "and as good a teacher as he was about the swing, he was twice that good between the ears."
It was Larry Miller's idea to turn the basement of his house on Ocean Avenue into a golf academy for Johnny. The basement had mirrors, mats, nets and instruction books by the likes of Ben Hogan and Cary Middlecoff. The basement also had a vibe — a very positive vibe, because Larry Miller believed you built a champion through encouragement and support, not bullying.
"His dad always called him Champ," Gregoire recalls. "There was never a negative word. If Johnny hit a bad shot, his dad would praise his setup or something. By the time he was 12, Johnny believed hook, line and sinker that he was going to be a champion."
By the time he was 17, Miller was a champion, winner of the 1964 U.S. Junior Amateur in Eugene, Ore.
"My dad was my turbocharger," Miller says. "That's what gave me the edge, his positive thinking and affirmation ofgreatness." The elder Miller also bequeathed his iconoclasm — the quality that makes established swing gurus puffup with rage when Miller claims, for instance, that he can wait until the moment of impact to put draw or fade spin on the ball. "Dad would give me crazy ideas," Miller says, "things that didn't work, but stuff I could learn from. I carried a left-handed 5-iron. I hit balls out of iceplant and up against cactus, the craziest stuff you could imagine. So when I entered a tournament, it was a foregone conclusion I was going to win."
Miller's friends are quick to point out that he had great parents, plural, which made the Miller home a haven for spirited kids with time to kill. "Mrs. Miller was an extraordinary cook," O'Connor recalls. "She'd bake blackberry and apple pies, and she'd say, 'If you can get here in 15 minutes, you can have a quarter of the pie.'" He shuts his eyes and smiles. "Her crust was killer crust."
ANOTHER kitchen scene. The year is 1993, and Johnny's wife Linda is fixing breakfast at the Miller's hilltop hacienda in Napa, Calif. "Mom, were you a hippie?" asks her 19-year-old daughter, Casie.
Linda, who has raised her six children without the benefit of liquor, tobacco, coffee, tea, soft drinks or profanity, is surprised by the question. "I was kind of straight back then," Linda replies.
"I would have gone to Woodstock," Casie says.
"Yeah, she would have," Linda says later.
"She's more like her father. John is a gypsy and a horse trader."
Time has validated Linda's assessment of her husband, whose blend of Mormon devotion, bluntness and sass confounded observers in the '70s. Implicit in Casie's question, though, was the understanding that people — even parents — are influenced by historical forces, that today's Rush Limbaugh might be yesterday's Abbie Hoffman. There is a scene in All the President's Men where Robert Redford, as Bob Woodward, reads a note from Deep Throat while a radio drones: "In sports, in Muirfield, Scotland, Lee Trevino and Tony Jacklin share the lead in the British Open golf tournament, both at 141. Johnny Miller is..."
And the scene shifts. We never learn what Johnny Miller is.
Today, his colleagues at NBC simply accept that Miller has his enigmatic side, that he will enliven their lives for three or four days and then disappear. "I've worked with the guy for 15 or 16 years, and I've probably had dinner with him twice," says course reporter Roger Maltbie, an unabashed Miller fan. Course reporter Gary Koch remembers the last time he played golf with Miller — the week of the 2003 U.S. Women's Open at Pumpkin Ridge — but adds, "Most of the time he doesn't even have his clubs with him."
Miller is the favorite uncle who brings toys but doesn't spend the night.
"I'm not the chummiest guy," he concedes. "I could hang around more, spend more time with players on the range." It's an anemic resolution, one he's been making for years.
His Olympic Club pals didn't consider Miller a loner; he was in and out of their homes all the time. "Then we had a little tournament here," says Gregoire, alluding to the 1966 U.S. Open, won by Billy Casper. "We all signed up to caddie — except for Johnny, 'cause that silly sucker qualified." Miller was 19 at the time, a loose-limbed sophomore from BYU, and he shook up the golf establishment by coming out of sectional qualifying to tie for eighth, low amateur by three strokes. "Johnny was upset," Gregoire recalls. "It was his home course. He thought he should have won."
