Last grandfather to win - TV golf commentator Johnny Miller - Interview

Golf Digest, June, 2000 by Tom Callahan

Even when he was great, Johnny Miller was annoying. The Elizabethan manner in which he waved his gloved hand to the crowd was annoying. He walked in an annoying way. He minced. Miller wasn't the only golfer who minced. Ray Floyd minced. But Floyd minced like a man.

Even when Miller is right, he is annoying, and he is right an annoyingly high percentage of the time. For instance, speaking off the air, he is probably right about this:

"If Tom Lehman had done what he did at the Ryder Cup 10 years ago, he would have been banned from the Ryder Cup for life, or at least for one Cup. He was off the charts. He was out of control."

Miller isn't saying this just to make the back of Lehman's neck glow like crepes suzette, although it certainly should do the trick. He is merely illustrating the change golf has been undergoing as an entertainment. Ten years ago, professional golfers wouldn't have thought of stampeding across a green in the middle of play, showering each other with champagne and kisses, or otherwise wetting their pants in public.

"We're on a different train, man," Miller exclaims. "This is not the quiet little game of golf anymore. It's mass appeal. This is the time of circus, rodeo and wrestling. Everything's changing, you know? Golf is the game of choice now for the Michael Jordans and Charles Barkleys, who never would have picked up a golf club before. I don't necessarily want to say controversial things on TV. They just come out. But then, deep down, maybe I don't mind a little controversy, if it gets the public talking golf."

A decade behind the microphone

For 10 years now, Miller has been talking golf into an open mike for NBC and has grown comfortable enough to say, "If there was a choking meter, I wouldn't hardly register anymore."

"Choking" has long been a fascination of Miller's ("I've done my doctoral thesis on choking") and it wasn't until his very first broadcast, the 1990 Bob Hope Classic, that he applied that word to an opportunity facing Peter Jacobsen. (This is what so endears Miller to the players.) "Peter's a good friend of mine," Johnny says, "and he didn't talk to me for five months." Not until he saw the tape, according to Miller, and understood the context.

The context is the first problem. The wives are the second. "The wives," he says, "are always watching. 'Hey, did you hear what Johnny said?' It was Laura Norman who got me in trouble with [caddie] Tony Navarro. The wives don't always get it exactly right."

Miller, on the other hand, almost always does. "I'll make some bogeys, some doubles," he acknowledges, "but if you're accurate and do your homework and you're honest with yourself and the game, you can't care about that. I've become almost a journalist."

He thinks now it may have been "a bit of a bogey, maybe a double bogey," to suggest Captain Ben Crenshaw should have left Justin Leonard home from the Ryder Cup. "I meant in the clubhouse just that day," Miller says, "not in Texas the entire week. Then, Jim Furyk was mad that I called him the underdog against Sergio."

The truth is, in two Ryder Cups and counting, Leonard has yet to win a single game. And, on their form at that moment, Furyk was the underdog to Garcia. Lost in Davis Love III's plaintive post-game wail, "He didn't believe in us" ("It's not my job to believe in anybody," Miller says), was the fact that, before a ball was ever struck on Sunday, Miller had first-guessed (not second-guessed) European Captain Mark James for his Rookies' Row and, going over the singles lineups with a fine-toothed Telestrator, laid out exactly what could happen exactly as it did.

Reading people and greens, Miller does act as if he's the only one in the world who knows that everything breaks toward Darren Clarke. In the supernatural sharpness of his eyesight and hearing, Miller is the heir to Dizzy Dean and the other old color men who, even in the days before closeup lenses, professed to be able to tell a curveball from a slider at 500 feet.

"I've always had a good eye," Miller says. "I'm observant about everything, right down to the little piece of lint on the floor." By the sound of a shot, he can usually tell the groove on which it was hit, fat or thin. "My earpiece is better than you guys," he says. "If I'm wrong, it doesn't matter to me." He's seldom wrong.

"Ever since I first joined the tour, I've studied players. I look for the choke factor, the taking of an extra waggle, the smacking of the lips. After 10 years, I could be the most middle-of-the-fairway announcer you've ever seen. But if I don't say what I see and hear and know, why am I there?"

Robert Gamez told him recently, "I can't believe you can guess all the time and be right so often." Incredulously, Miller thunders: "He was serious!"

Other players regard Miller as a flimflam man, and the meaner ones call him names for ducking the senior tour. But no one has been more forthright than Johnny about his putting yips. Watching Brad Faxon's stroke not long ago, Miller whispered into the microphone, "Thou shalt not covet."