Johnny Miller was a hugely talented golfer, but he never reached the heights he was capable of.
Miller won 25 PGA Tour titles throughout his career in the game, including two major championships.
The US Open Miller won in 1973 came after he fired a scintillating final-round 63 at Oakmont. When he was on form, he was arguably the best iron player in the game.
Johnny Miller’s iron play was what made him stand out from the rest. Unfortunately, though, his aggressive playing style also cost him numerous titles.
It’s fair to say that Miller should have won many more tournaments than he did. His course management skills were certainly not on par with those of Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Tom Watson.
However, the 79-year-old believes that his biggest problem was the sheer strength in depth of world-class players he came up against every single week.
Johnny Miller thinks he would’ve won more majors playing in Nick Faldo and Greg Norman’s era
Miller was playing during the prime years of Jack Nicklaus, while he had to compete against the likes of Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Tom Watson and Lee Trevino as well.
He believes he would have been a truly dominant figure, had he come along 10-15 years later and competed against the likes of Nick Faldo and Greg Norman.
While speaking to Forbes back in 2009, Miller highlighted how there were a lot more great golfers during his prime than there were in the group that followed him a decade or so later.
“They’ve got it really good,“ Miller claimed.
“The Tour is a fantastic place to be right now. I don’t look back and say I got hosed. I think our era, if you don’t count money, was maybe the most exciting era. You had Palmer, Nicklaus, Player, Trevino, [Raymond] Floyd, [Hale] Irwin, [Tom] Weiskopf, myself and Hubert Green. It was a golden age of golf from 1970 to 1980. I don’t know if there will ever be one quite like it.
“Every era has two or three great golfers. Our era had six to 10. I probably shouldn’t say this, but if I had played in the [Greg] Norman-[Nick] Faldo era, instead of winning 25 times with two majors, I probably would have won 40 times and had six majors.
“That era had [Fred] Couples, Norman, Faldo and [Curtis] Strange, but it didn’t really have guys who could play on Sunday. We had the great era of Sunday players. There’s a lot to be said for that.
“I played the game super aggressively, more aggressively than Tiger does now, very similar to the way Phil Mickelson and Arnold Palmer play. Most guys now have a 5-iron, and they’re aiming 15-20 feet on the safe side. I almost never played to the safe side. If I had to do it over again, I probably would have played safer at the majors because I was always playing Tucson at Oakmont. It didn’t work too well, you know.
“I was seduced by wanting to hit my driver hard and knock the pins down with my irons, and I just didn’t have the wisdom to resist that temptation. In my career my average win was probably by three or four strokes. I hardly ever won by one stroke. I separated myself. But when things weren’t going well, I’d be blown out.“
Those comments from Miller were extremely unfair.
He only mentioned Faldo, Norman, Couples and Strange. What about Seve Ballesteros, Bernhard Langer, Sandy Lyle, Nick Price and Jose Maria Olazabal?
Looking back at his quotes, Johnny Miller himself would surely agree that he was well wide of the mark, and that isn’t belittling his talent. He just significantly underestimated the quality of the players during the era that followed his prime years.