Arnie Read online

  DEDICATION

  For his ownself, Dan Jenkins

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  1 1960

  2 1929

  3 1950

  4 1954

  5 1955

  6 1958

  7 1959

  8 1961

  9 1962

  10 1963

  11 1964

  12 1966

  13 1973

  14 1976

  15 1980

  16 1982

  17 1986

  18 1995

  19 2000

  20 2004

  21 2012

  22 2015

  23 2016

  24 September 25, 2016

  25 Tribute

  Appendix

  Index

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Also by Tom Callahan

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PREFACE

  MY FIRST YEAR AT the Masters was 1972. Only two players broke 70 on Thursday: the eventual winner, Jack Nicklaus, and Sam Snead, who turned 60 years old a month later. Arnold Palmer shot 70.

  In the interview room (the Charles Bartlett Lounge) of the old green Quonset hut that housed the press in those days, a nervous reporter put an awkward question to Nicklaus, who made a little joke at the fellow’s expense, then answered it. Something similar happened during Palmer’s birdies-and-bogeys session, except, this time, when a rattled kid started to fall off the ledge, Palmer reached out with that strong forearm, steadied him, saved him, reworded the question, and answered it before anyone in the room knew what happened. I remember thinking, It’s a natural grace.

  The first time I had Palmer to myself was in Cincinnati during the early 1970s at a one-day charity event.

  “What’s the charity getting and what are you getting?” I asked him. His eyebrows shot up.

  “You’ll have to see [agent Mark] McCormack about the charity,” he said. “I’m getting twelve thousand dollars, Gary Player’s getting eight thousand, and everyone else is getting a grand apiece [even the winner, Hubert Green]. Anything else you want to know?”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t ever apologize for doing your job,” he told me.

  Throughout the years, I watched him at many tournaments on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. I was at Oakmont in Pennsylvania when, with six holes left to play, Palmer was sure he was winning the U.S. Open only to hear the thunder of Johnny Miller’s 63 up ahead. I was at Medinah in Illinois when the vinegar between Arnold and Jack finally spilled out. I was at Muirfield Village in Ohio when they reconciled. And I was at Augusta in Georgia on the Wednesday when they played their first practice round with 20-year-old amateur Tiger Woods.

  For Golf Digest, I went to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, to write “Arnie turns 60,” “Arnie turns 70,” and “Arnie turns 80” pieces. Sitting at his office desk with his adjutant, Doc Giffin, on the couch, Palmer talked his life story to me in three volumes and complete chapters too detailed to fit in Golf Digest. Like the nightmare of being taken by a highway patrolman to identify best friend and roommate Bud Worsham’s body at Wake Forest College.

  Giffin had been the tour’s traveling press secretary in the ’60s, driving from tournament to tournament, hauling all the decimal points in the backseat. At the Western Open in Chicago, Doc witnessed a tableau that changed his life. A college journalist weighed down by a bulky tape recorder requested a sit-down interview with Palmer, who said fine. After they finished, the student realized to his horror that he had neglected to turn on the machine. “That’s all right,” Arnold said. “Let’s start over and do it again.” Later, when Palmer asked Giffin to throw in with him, the incident of the tape recorder swayed him.

  Along the way, I discussed Palmer with Nicklaus, Player, Snead, Byron Nelson, Dow Finsterwald, Ken Venturi, Tom Watson, Lee Trevino, Raymond Floyd (I think Floyd would tell you we’ve talked more about Palmer than we have about Floyd)—everyone but Ben Hogan. The only time I ever spoke with Hogan, at Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, Arnold wasn’t mentioned, which would have come as no surprise to Palmer. “Hogan never called me by my name,” he said coldly. “Never.”

  After Nicklaus and I finished an afternoon-long hit-and-run conversation on a bustling workday at his Florida office (considerately, Jack had said, “I’ll keep leaving and coming back; you keep asking questions”), he kicked off a shoe to show me his hammertoe. Only Nicklaus would think anyone could find his hammertoe interesting. Too casually he mentioned “one of those old Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf things is on TV tonight: me and [Ben] Crenshaw.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You won.”

  He laughed. “I suppose we’re all a little like that,” he said, “even Palmer.”

  Snead and Nelson kept score by Hogan; Nicklaus and Player by Palmer.

  “And Hogan was there . . . and Hogan was there . . . and Hogan was there . . . ,” said Lord Byron, recapping 1945 for me, the barely believable year when Nelson won 18 tournaments, 11 in a row. Hogan, Snead, and Nelson were all born in 1912, Byron first. “I was alive when the Titanic went down,” he said triumphantly. “Hogan wasn’t!”

  I could have made my own way to Player’s farm north of Johannesburg, but, being a courtly host, he sent a car to my hotel (appropriately enough, a Volkswagen Golf). The driver was a young black man named David. Leaving the city behind, where the newspapers were throbbing with a black-on-white commando attack at the King William’s Town Golf Club (four dead, 20 wounded), we rolled into the countryside on a shiny Sunday.

  “It sounds bad,” David said. “It is bad. But it’s getting better.”

  This was the mantra of South Africa.

  At a sign that said “Blair Atholl” we veered onto a dark path that led to a beautiful little forest, then to a creek and an entranceway where a brightly uniformed sentry popped out of a box like someone out of Joseph Conrad’s imagination. “Sometimes,” David said, “when you come to a place like this, it’s like you mustn’t go away again.”

  Five hundred black children went to school every day at Gary and Vivienne’s home. It started with their workers’ children, and grew. Singing filled the property. “Listen,” Player whispered. Accompanying the song was the squeak of gumboot dancing and the smoke of learning. “Isn’t it lovely? Education is the light. South Africa is at a crossroads and the children are the key. They’ll lead, as usual. Look at them: some barefoot but all in a jacket and tie.”

  With intense eyes, black as coal, Player told me, “I loved it when Jack and Arnie were partners. I hated it when they got so competitive—too competitive. But I knew they were both very good men. I just waited the cold spell out.”

  In this modest account (personalized, too, I hope you don’t mind), you should know that on the frequent occasions where Palmer was simply holding forth, he was at his office desk in Latrobe, surrounded by mementos (for instance, a baseball signed by Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski) but only one loving cup, the Canadian Open trophy, representing the first of Palmer’s 92 professional victories. (He is cuddling it on the cover of this book.) It came in 1955 along with a check for $2,400, a typical winner’s share then.

  On a corner of the desk crouched a silver cigarette case, a gift from the Augusta National Golf Club to all of the competitors’ wives, badly dented when Arnold threw his spikes at it in anger after blowing the tournament. He kept the bashed little box on shameful display as a perpetual reminder to himself.

  A low circular table of worn and faded walnut was the room’s most distinctive furnishing, inlaid under glass with four gold medals from the Masters, two from the Open Championship, o
ne from the U.S. Open, one from the U.S. Amateur, and none from the PGA Championship, together with a score of silver medals from all four majors (no fewer than four second places from the U.S. Open alone, three of those coming in 18-hole playoffs.) Three blank circles stood out in green. Were they ever filled, he’d have immediately drilled a few more. “Don’t you always want to leave a little space,” he told me, “for the future?”

  Prominent among the photographs crowding the walls was one of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the Olympic hurdler (Gold), javelin thrower (Gold), and high jumper (Bronze), Ladies Professional Golf Association co-founder, 41-time tournament winner, three-time U.S. Women’s Open champion, six-time Associated Press female athlete of the year, and member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, who died at 45. She won all of her Opens by at least eight strokes, the last by 12, one month after colon cancer surgery, wearing a colostomy bag. The most telling and least told of her many bequests to the world was the effect she had on Palmer and therefore the effect she had on golf and sports, especially in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.

  “She came to Latrobe [tiny Latrobe], believe it or not, for an exhibition,” he said. “I was about thirteen. We played golf with her, my father and I. Babe had a lot of game, but she had even more showmanship [‘Pardon me, folks, while I loosen my girdle’], which was a revelation to me. Up until then, I had my head down, competing. I just wanted to win. But, while watching her showing off—both her skills and her personality—it occurred to me that I was a showoff, too. I wanted to entertain the people and earn their cheers. Those weren’t just strangers standing there; they were part of it. Babe taught me that.”

  A bathroom was handy to his left, a metal shop just a few steps away, with an iron vise clamped to a rugged workbench stacked with leaded tape, lacquer, shafts, heads, grips, epoxies, hammers, saws, rasps, wrenches, and all the other accouterments for fiddling with golf clubs.

  Now and then he’d get up and do so, still talking. “This is my lair,” he said. A tablet hanging near a cuckoo clock read in part:

  If you think you are beaten, you are.

  If you dare not, you don’t.

  If you’d like to win but think you can’t,

  It’s almost certain you won’t.

  Life’s battles don’t always go

  To the strongest or fastest man,

  But sooner or later the man who wins

  Is the man who thinks he can.

  Absent friends like Dave Marr, Bob Rosburg, Herb Wind, and Bob Drum were of supreme help here without knowing it. The Drummer, a perfectly named percussion instrument, was boy Palmer’s Boswell/town crier at the Pittsburgh Press. “Bob was on the case when Arnold was a freshman or sophomore in high school,” said Giffin, a Pittsburgher himself, “and by the time Arnold won the West Penn Junior at seventeen, everyone in town was convinced, including me.”

  In the fedora ranks at the 1960 U.S. Open, Drum and Dan Jenkins of the Fort Worth Press were an entry, 1 and 1A. Born in December of 1929, sixty-four days after Palmer, my friend Dan was a rich source and an ideal sounding board. This book is dedicated to him.

  1

  1960

  WINNER:

  Bob Hope Desert Classic

  Texas Open

  Baton Rouge Open

  Pensacola Open

  Masters

  U.S. Open

  Insurance City Open

  Mobile Open

  Canada Cup (with Sam Snead)

  “Fancy meeting you guys here.”

  PALMER DIDN’T FORMALLY BECOME Palmer until the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills Country Club near Denver. There were other applicants, including Mike Souchak, a muscleman himself, and Ken Venturi, the betting favorite to succeed Ben Hogan atop golf. (Hogan’s favorite, too.) But a couple of months earlier, as Palmer was playing his final two holes at the Masters, something happened.

  Venturi had completed his round and was leading Palmer by a stroke as Arnold knelt behind a 40-foot birdie putt at 17. “Maybe it only seems that long now,” he said. “Let’s say thirty-something anyway.” It was one of those putts you had to slug to make, at the risk of wandering by and three-putting. Playing for a playoff made more sense: lagging short, accepting a par, staying alive for a birdie at 18 that would tie Venturi and force an 18-hole showdown the next day.

  Play for a tie? Palmer thought as he stepped knock-kneed and pigeon-toed into the putt. Hell. He rolled it in for birdie. In his mind’s eye, the ball clanged the back rim of the cup, jumping straight up in the air like Dick Fosbury and flopping over backward into the hole. In fact, it just made it to the hole. But now a closing birdie would win.

  After bending right to left all day, Augusta National leans left to right at the end. Toeing one foot slightly inward as an extra precaution against pine trees on the right (the bunkers on the left hadn’t yet been installed), Palmer thought of his father, whom he called “Pap,” and Pap’s formula for swinging a golf club under pressure: “Start deliberate, go slow on the backswing—slower, SLOWER! GODDAMMIT!—then on the downswing give it absolutely everything you’ve got.”

  The ball flew uphill about 270 yards, lighting on the left side of the fairway. With a 6-iron, Palmer homed in on the pin instead of the green, prompting himself: Hit through it now. Stay down. Let the crowd tell you where it goes. Five feet. He was distracted momentarily by the whispered commentary of television broadcaster Jim McKay, but he made it. He won. Incidentally, TV and golf were fairly new to each other in 1960. As photogenic as Palmer had always been in the old newspapers, he was even more telegenic in the new medium. In a manner of speaking, Arnold Palmer was delivered with the first sets.

  “You’d think any five-footer in that situation might feel a little jumpy,” he said, “but it didn’t. The six-iron was the shot, one of the best of my career. The putt felt automatic to me. Automatic. Playing the seventeenth hole, I’d heard Winnie’s voice in the gallery, saying something encouraging, keeping just ahead of me as she walked. Having tuned out Jim [McKay] and everybody else, I looked at the back of the ball and thought of the day Win and I applied for our marriage license. [Wouldn’t every professional athlete like to have a wife who answered to ‘Win?’] We forgot to bring her parents’ signed permission; she was only twenty, you know, and her father hated my ass. I was sitting in the license bureau, trying to sound confident [’Oh, she’s twenty-one all right’], praying for the clerk to hurry up and stamp the form when—I made the putt.”

  He tossed his head back and laughed.

  “If I had to have one putt for my life,” Augusta founder Bobby Jones said that evening, “I’d rather have Palmer putt it for me than anybody I ever saw.”

  “From that Masters on,” Arnold said, “I had a philosophy of golf: when you miss a conservative shot, you’re in just as much trouble as when you miss a bold one.”

  The first hole at Cherry Hills embodied this philosophy, which didn’t keep him from butchering it Thursday, Friday, and Saturday morning in that era of 36-hole final days at the Open: “Open Saturdays.” Souchak, a former football end at Duke, led the first round by a stroke, the second by three, and the third by two, despite double-bogeying 18 Saturday morning after flinching at a camera click—a camera click that might have changed everything—and hitting his ball out of bounds. Palmer stood a full seven shots and 14 players behind—tied, in fact, for 15th place. In all of the prior Opens, no one had ever made up that much ground in a concluding round, and nobody has done it since.

  In the lunchroom, Palmer grabbed a hamburger and joined Venturi, reigning PGA champion Bob Rosburg, Dan Jenkins, and Bob Drum. “What would sixty-five do this afternoon?” he asked his friend Drum, an oversized personality, a big man in every way, louder than a checkered sports jacket. As Palmer liked to say of the Pittsburgh newspaperman, “If Drum was there, you knew he was there.”

  “It wouldn’t do YOU any good!” Drum bellowed in reply. “You’re out of it! Done! Cooked! Stick a fork in yourself!”

  “That would make m
y score two-eighty,” Palmer continued undaunted. “Doesn’t two-eighty win Opens?”

  “Yeah,” Jenkins said, “when Hogan shoots them.”

  “Besides,” Drum said, “only one guy ever shot sixty-five in the final round of an Open. Walter Burkemo.”

  Jenkins was astounded Bob had this statistic at the ready. The Drummer wasn’t exactly a stats man. Actually, Dan doubted it was true. But it was.

  “I still think I can drive that first green,” Palmer said.

  “Go ahead, and make another double-bogey while you’re at it,” Drum told him. “Why don’t you play the hole like a pro for a change, tee off with an iron for placement, guarantee yourself at least a par, and still have a putt for birdie?” Leaving the hamburger uneaten, Palmer stormed out. “I was hot,” he said.

  The first at Cherry Hills, a 346-yard par 4, was the kind of hole golfers say “is right there in front of you.” You could see everything from the tee. “Elevated tee,” Palmer said, “with a severe drop. Trees on the left, ditch on the right, a trickling stream—that’s where the members usually ended up. That’s where I went on Thursday, making six. Serious USGA [United States Golf Association] rough fronting the green. A real bunker there, too, with grass growing in it. My second day, a bogey. That morning, a par. But I was still convinced it was an eagle hole. We’re at altitude, remember. Mile high.”

  He was drop-kicking his driver slightly in those days. “Just microscopically,” he said, but enough to lessen backspin. “No good on a rock-hard U.S. Open green three hundred and fifty yards away. But I’d arrived in Denver figuring if you could bounce your ball through the rough in front of that green [instead of flying it over], maybe the grass would kill it enough so it wouldn’t race away.”

  The time was 1:44 when he pulled his driver out of the bag. Not that he was wearing a watch. “Never have worn one playing golf,” Palmer said. “I see them on players’ wrists today, but I don’t get it. Just one more potential distraction while you’re addressing the ball, one more little inhibitor to the free flow of a golf swing.”