Johnny Miller's orange yardage book from the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage Black follows a famous golf obsessive's journey into ball behavior on the course's greens. Lines drawn by Miller, NBC's star golf analyst, show the variety of breaks on the greens; some of his diagrams inadvertently depict a sunburst, a bird's beak and an absurd tic-tac-toe board. His asterisks are trick putts. 'I don't even know how they'll break,' he said Wednesday at the NBC compound at Bethpage Black, where the Open has returned. '5L' means a putt will move five inches to the left. '10R' is a 10-inch break to the right. 'S' is a straight putt. 'RC' expresses Miller's certainty that a putt will take a right-of-center direction. And he has drawn fluffy-looking trees on the edge of the eighth hole. Miller's yardage books are products of his play on the course and surveys to divine what is likely to happen when a club face strikes a ball. He calls himself a greenaholic. He claims to have a stimpmeter, to measure green speed, in his head. He used to carry a surveyor's tool to assess how putts would break, but last year he downloaded the Break Meter application to his iPhone. He demonstrated his toy in an NBC trailer, showing the angle and slope of a table and the linoleum floor. 'This thing is Johnny Miller, it's totally Johnny Miller,' he said cheerfully as the iPhone registered its findings. 'I don't really need it, but it verifies things for me.' Miller peppers his yardage books with various judgments. In the 2002 Bethpage Black book, some are terse, some ready-made for on-air use. On the book's cover, he wrote: 'Rude greens, 8, 11, 12, 15.' ('Rude is a Johnnyism,' he said. 'It's an unwelcome shot.') On hole No. 1: 'A lot of balls suck back to lower level.' On No. 2: 'Flattish.' On No. 3: 'False edge. On No. 4: 'Left is dead' and 'green was built backwards, F to B slope.' On No 6: 'Small green ... bunkers everywhere ... rough in front.' On No. 7: 'No B to F tilt.' On No. 11: 'Rude. Superfast.' After field work Wednesday morning, Miller determined that 90 percent of his judgments from 2002 are valid today. But with rain expected for much of the tournament, Dan Hicks, NBC's host, said, 'Even Johnny's book might be out the window.' (Hicks does not peer at Miller's books too often, he said, lest he become confused.) Miller said his goal was to use his research to let him know courses better than the players. 'Whether I can pull it off, I don't know,' he said. 'It might be a tie now. But when I say it's a right-edge putt -- and I've been doing this for 20 years -- I do not misread too often. I'm not bragging. This is my homework.' He began to annotate the (already annotated) yardage books when he started at NBC in 1990. 'And every year, I'd throw them away, like a dumbbell,' he said. 'And after 10 years -- it takes me 10 years to figure this out -- why am I throwing away these hard-earned breaks so the next year I don't have to do them again?' His homework, he said, is designed to eliminate on-air guesswork. 'I might write down about a certain bunker, 'dead,'' he said, 'because you can't get inside 20 feet of it because the green is running away from you.' He is proud enough of his oeuvre to proclaim that no other golf analyst has ever done the sort of coursework he has, which may be unverifiable. Gary Koch, one of NBC's analysts, said he annotates his yardage book for the holes he is responsible for following. 'But Johnny's a little more detailed and anal than the rest of us,' he said. Tommy Roy, NBC's golf producer, does not need to look at Miller's yardage books. 'He seems prescient, like he knows things will happen,' Roy said. 'But he's studied it so intensely, he knows what will happen.' Miller confessed to one weakness: 'I don't sit on the range all day and talk to players. My thing is to be more of an expert on the holes, to know what to watch out for, what not to hit, how the putts break and to know every bunker.' He also knows that Nick Faldo, the lead golf analyst at CBS and the Golf Channel, has something he will never have: a knighthood, which was announced last week. 'Is CBS going to call him Sir Nick now?' Miller asked. 'Jim Nantz might.' Would he like to be Sir Johnny? 'As long as it doesn't take three divorces to get it,' Miller said, referring to his friend Faldo's marital history. He smiled and said, 'I guess that wasn't a cool thing to say.' 