Jun 17, 2010 8:47:09 AM

The first round of the U.S. Open Golf Championship begins Thursday at Pebble Beach. While the action at one of the world's most famous courses will capture people's attention, a performance at another U.S. Open 37 years ago remains perhaps the most memorable of all time.

Steve Schlossman, an accomplished golfer and a noted historian at Carnegie Mellon, has published a unique look back at what many regard as professional golf's greatest round – Johnny Miller's 63 at the 1973 U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club.

Schlossman, who teaches a course on the history of golf at Carnegie Mellon (which shares a Pittsburgh address with Oakmont), teamed with graduate student Adam Lazarus to compile an ambitious recapitulation of Miller's heroics and those of his challengers – including Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino and Tom Weiskopf – through dozens of interviews and thousands of printed accounts.

"There was some controversy about the way things actually happened – which is usually the case when historians go back in time and start uncovering the story," Schlossman said. "Time erodes memory pretty regularly."

The discrepancies range from the "sprinkler incident" at the fabled course to just when and how a stance change affected Miller's final round.

The authors did all of this without interviewing Miller. While Nicklaus, Palmer and others granted requests, Miller deferred, saying he was planning a book of his own.

Along with detailing what actually happened in one of the most compelling championships in golf history, Schlossman and Lazarus provide unprecedented insight into some of golf's greatest players – from Trevino's impoverished beginning to John Schlee's anonymous ending.

All the while, Oakmont is the hook.

"I already knew I wanted to write about Oakmont, but I didn't know what, since a lot of history already had been chronicled," Schlossman said. "Should I focus on a time period, an event? And if so, which event intrinsically seemed to have enough to justify the time I would have to devote?"

He and Lazarus took about four months before deciding to hone in on the 1973 championship.

"The ‘chasing greatness' element is what we saw in this ensemble group (Miller, Schlee, Weiskopf, Nicklaus, Palmer and Trevino)," he said.

"We knew there was a problem in telling some of these stories. At the time we didn't know what the solution was, but we figured this would be the challenge. We crafted a proposal and sent it to two agents, one that ignored us and one that called back and advised us how to develop a proposal. Several months later, two totally unknown authors landed a contract with Penguin Books."

Schlossman played competitively as a youngster and was the MVP of his city-championship winning high school team in New York. He captained his college team but began focusing more on academics and less on golf during his college years.

"I stopped playing golf altogether in graduate school (Schlossman earned a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1976) – there was no way I could accommodate the intensity of postgraduate education," he said. "So I didn't touch a golf club for the better part of a decade."

But as his interest in the game rekindled as an adult, Schlossman began not only to play golf again but study it.

"What better way to force my own hand than to see if I could bring some of the broader professional skills I had developed as a historian to the study of the game," he said. "So I decided to teach a course on it.

"As a tenured faculty member at Carnegie Mellon, you have tremendous freedom to make a case for trying something new – to take an unusual approach to a traditional field of scholarship. I thought I could take the game of golf and integrate it into some of the central themes our history department tends to specialize in – social class, race, gender, urban history and suburban history, history of technology, the popularization and democratization of culture – that would go well beyond just discussing the great names and stories of the game, which wouldn't fly in an academic environment."

As far as Schlossman can discern, he's the only one teaching such a course anywhere in the world.

"Golf hasn't been well integrated into broader histories of sport," he said. "There are two prevailing presumptions: one, that golf isn't particularly athletic and therefore isn't taken seriously as a sport, and two, that it is a game only for the elite over the ages and even today. I question both."

The Chasing Greatness project had what Schlossman called "an odd beginning." He had previously attended every round of the 1994 Open at Oakmont, and because he was chair of the Carnegie Mellon history department at that time, Oakmont staffers looking to assemble their centennial project for 2004 asked Schlossman for help. In doing so, Schlossman got access to archives that enlightened him on the history of the course.

He also was fortunate enough to interview golf-great Gene Sarazen, who had spent a lot of time playing Oakmont and won the PGA there in 1922.

"He knew the founders of the course and the greenskeeper and eventually the pro there. So I was hooked on Oakmont by then," Schlossman said.

Fast-forward to 2005 when Schlossman began teaching his course, and then 2006 when Lazarus, an aspiring sports journalist working on a master's degree, entered the scene.

The two ended up conducting 62 interviews with players, club members and caddies who were at the Open in 1973, and "friends of different characters along the way," Schlossman said.

"Thirty-seven years later, Miller's 63 remains the lowest final round in the U.S. Open and one regularly termed the single greatest round in championship golf," Schlossman said. "Going into that final round, Miller had to overcome six shots and had 12 players in front of him, seven of whom had won major championships."

In effect, Miller was chasing greatness.

Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont

Authors: Adam Lazarus and Steve Schlossman

Publisher: New American Library

Publish date: May 2010

Pages: 420

Price: $24.95

http://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Greatness-Johnny-Miracle-Oakmont/dp/0451229878/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274122256&sr=8-1