Record-breaking golf win by Johnny Miller

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33653, 1 October 1974, Page 30

Record-breaking golf win by Johnny Miller

(New Zealand Press Association—Copyright) NAPA (California). Johnny Miller scored his eighth victory of the season and set a professional golf tour record of $346,933 in winnings with an easy, eight-stroke victory in the Kaiser International Open.

The victory margin matched the largest on the tour this year.

Miller scored a final round of 66, six-under-par, on his home course, the 6819-yard north layout at the Silverado Country Club, and had a 271 total for 72 holes. The victory enabled him to claim $30,000 from the purse of $150,000. Miller, easily the outstanding player in the game this year, smashed Jack Nicklaus’s single-season moneywinning record of $320,542 set in 1972. His total of eight tournament triumphs is the highest since Arnold Palmer won eight tournaments in 1960. Only two men have won more—Sam Snead with 10 in 1950, and Byron Nelson with 18 in 1945. None of the other great golfers—Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Gary Player, or Tom Weiskopf—has reached the victory total achieved by the “all American boy” Miller, a non-drinker, non-smoker and an elder of his church. And Miller, who is 27, has

two more chances to add to his total in the Sahara Invitational in Las Vegas, Nevada, next week, and in the national team championship at Bay Hill, Florida, in November. The win in the Kaiser Open, Miller’s third victory in (our starts, came with the ease of an afternoon nap. Hole-in-one All the drama of the tournament was wrapped into one magnificent stroke in the third round. That one produced a hole-in-one for Miller on the 197-yard second and pulled him into a tie for the top. He birdied the next hole and was not headed again. Miller started the final round in brilliant Indian summer weather with two strokes in hand over the portly Billy Casper, aged 43, who led the

first two rounds. That was the closest Casper ever got. Miller birdied three in a row, beginning on the fifth hole, made the turn in 31

and, when Casper made twoover from the pond on the eleventh, Miller led by five.

Fast finish After that, it was no longer a question of who, but how much. The P.G.A. champion, Lee Trevino, made a fast finish for a 67 and tied with Casper for second at 279. Casper had a final round of 72. Leonard Thompson, the winner of the Jackie Gleason tournament earlier this year, was fourth with a 69 —280. Bob Stanton, of Australia, who had shared third place, four strokes off the lead in the third round, had a disastrous 78 after his previous rounds of 73-73-64 and finished on 287. Nicklaus, Palmer, Player and the United States Open winner, Hale Irwin, did not compete.