Carmel Magazine

Carmel Magazine, Winter-Spring 2019

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114 C A R M E L M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 1 9 Miller hits out of the rough on the third hole at Pebble Beach during the final day of the 1994 AT&T National Pro-Am. He is the only winner of the tournament in three different decades. worked dark, and through the years, plenty of players chafed at his pessimism. But they should have been thanking Miller all along—he was helping them by illuminating to the viewer the exquisite torture of tournament golf. Miller wasn't a critic, he was a serial empathizer. Yes, there were times when Miller could seem like a kid in the front row of a classroom frantically waving his hand, eager to show how smart he is. Whenever a player faced a straightfor- ward chip, Miller liked to say, "He can chip this in," so if the player did, our man in the booth looked like a sage. Of course, 99% of the time the player didn't chip it in. But we forgave Miller his indulgences because he made us much smarter fans. He was an obsessive preparer. During tournament weeks, he would spend as much time on the putting surfaces as any caddie, searching for his beloved fall line, a skiing term that revealed the pitch of the green and thus the break of any given putt. (Many a weekend golfer now employs the term 'fall line,' for better or worse.) He was an ace illuminator of swing flaws and course management blunders and you could learn a heckuva lot if you paid attention. Of course, Miller was also an entertain- er, and he seemed to know how much we all delighted in his pleasing get-off-my-lawn critiques. One of my favorite barbs came at the 2008 BMW Championship, when Miller bitingly described a low round by dour Jim Furyk as the "first time in history someone's shot 62 and never smiled." The irony is that during his Hall of Fame play- ing career, Miller was brutally self-lacerating. He has admitted that throughout his historic f inal The tiny greens brought out the best in maybe the greatest iron player of all time, and Miller would go on to win three Crosby Clambakes. Photo: Al Bello/ALLSPORT

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