WINNER:
Los Angeles Open
Phoenix Open
Pensacola Open
Thunderbird Classic
Cleveland Open
Western Open
Whitemarsh Open
Australian Masters
Canada Cup (with Jack Nicklaus)
“Hell, I could have kicked that one in.”
IN 1963, FOR THE second consecutive year, Palmer found himself on a 73rd tee with 18 holes yet to play, merely tied for the lead in the U.S. Open. With two others this time: old Julius Boros (the U.S. Open champion from 11 summers earlier) and young Jacky Cupit, at the Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. Forty-three isn’t old for most work, but only one man more seasoned than Boros (Ted Ray, by 82 days) had ever won a National Open.
Julius was a Hungarian American with a gentle way and an easy swing who didn’t leave the accounting profession for tournament golf until he was nearly 30. “Moose,” as the players called him (for the same reason they would call Craig Stadler “Walrus”), never stopped seeming like a CPA. He was as burnt brown as a tobacco leaf and unfailingly considerate to caddies. His bag wasn’t the one I was carrying at the 1961 Eastern Open in Baltimore, when I was a high school sophomore. I was working for an amateur paired with Boros the first two rounds. After my man missed the cut, I stayed in the caddie T-shirt, “Eastern Open” on the front, “Mr. Boh” (National Bohemian beer) on the back, because it was my only ticket in.
Palmer told me, “I won the Eastern Open in nineteen fifty-six. I’d been playing so much golf leading up to that tournament, I was exhausted before I even got to the first tee. Paired with Doug Ford, I hit my opening drive so far out of bounds that the ball went bouncing down a highway in the general direction of downtown Baltimore. ‘I think I’ll withdraw,’ I told Ford, who said, ‘I don’t blame you, nobody can make up two strokes in just seventy-one holes.’ At one point I led by twelve.”
Doug Sanders won the ’61 tournament by a stroke over Ken Venturi. As play was winding down, I bumped into Boros near the scorer’s tent, we shook hands, and he said, “Walk with me a minute, son, I want to show you something.”
We went over to the practice putting green, where, sweating out Venturi’s finish, Sanders was putting with his foot. That is, he was rolling 10-footers with the left side of his rainbow-colored right shoe straight into the cup.
“What’s he doing?” I asked Boros.
“‘Dougie,’ he said, ‘my friend wants to know what you’re doing.’”
“When I play in pro-ams,” Sanders said like a proud child, “sooner or later one of the amateurs will miss a ten-footer and I’ll say, ‘Hell, I could have kicked that one in.’ Before long the wallets come out, and let’s just say I’ve made a hell of a lot of money over the years with this foot.”
Boros laughed and we walked away. But halfway to the clubhouse, he stopped, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Dougie’s a great player and a unique talent, but he’ll never win a major. Do you get the message?”
Twice Sanders finished second to Nicklaus in the British Open, both times by a single stroke, including that devastating 30-inch putt missed at St. Andrews in 1970. Gene Littler beat him by a stroke at the U.S. Open. Bob Rosburg beat him by a stroke at the PGA. By two strokes, Sanders missed a playoff at a Masters won by Nicklaus. When golfers and golf fans talk about the mythical “best player never to have won a major,” don’t they know it’s Sanders?
Growing up a Georgia field hand, he had been the kind of boy who slipped stones or melons into his cotton sack to improve the payoff ($2 per 100 pounds). As a caddie, he specialized in restoring desolate golf balls salvaged from hawking the course, filling in their nicks and cuts with soap, covering them over with white shoe polish, and selling them as gamers. Sleeping through most of his schooldays, he unconsciously majored in metaphors.
“I have always taken care of my cover,” he said with breathtaking honesty, “better than my core.”
His closetful of old golf shoes, as shiny and bright as hard Christmas candy, represented no mystery. Sanders didn’t have shoes of his own until he was 8. “One left,” he said, “and one right.”
To the barefoot boy tramping two and a half miles home from the golf course, the lightning bugs looked like ghosts. They would go with him to all the big cities of the world. “I never got tired of walking up that road,” he said. “I just got tired of walking up that road broke.”
In 1999, behind the home in Houston where Sanders lived with a white cat, I stayed in his guesthouse, a tired place with old bedding where at different times Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin. and Spiro Agnew slept. In Doug’s living room, I told him my Julius Boros story. Setting a record for non sequiturs, he immediately launched into an account of how he and a girl from the seventh grade made love standing up behind a Hammond Map of the World after the teacher left the classroom. He didn’t get the message.
“I arrived at the Country Club at Brookline in nineteen sixty-three,” Palmer said, “imbued with all things Francis Ouimet, just as the USGA intended.” Fifty years earlier, Ouimet, a 20-year-old amateur (and commoner) who resided on Clyde Street across the way from the 17th hole, defeated the British aristocracy, Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, in an 18-hole playoff that redrew the economic image of golf and redefined amateurism. Ouimet and his 10-year-old caddie, Eddie Lowery, became the new image of the sport and, eventually, a postage stamp. “Then, wouldn’t you know it?” Palmer said. “For the first time in the history of the U.S. Open, not one amateur made the cut.”
The defending champion, Nicklaus, missed it, too. Invited into the press tent Thursday, Jack opened the questioning by asking a question of his own: “What do you guys want to know from a seventy-six shooter?”
“Nicklaus or myself might have been the Las Vegas favorite,” Palmer said, “but the players saw Boros coming from a great distance that spring. He had won at Colonial with an amazing score for Colonial—what was it? [279]—and the Buick at Grand Blanc [Mich.] with an even more impressive total [274]. There were some in the locker room who thought those four rounds of golf could well have been the best ever played. But I liked Brookline and my chances. Old-style driving course. Small greens. And I had just won a playoff with Paul Harney in the Thunderbird Classic at another old-style, tree-lined course, Westchester.”
The wind and the scores at Brookline were up. Palmer shot 73, 69, 77 (missing three putts under 3 feet), 74; Jacky Cupit, a 25-year-old Houstonian, 70, 72, 76, 75; and Boros, 71, 74, 76, 72. Among the three men, they had exactly zero birdies in the third round, and nobody in the entire field managed to shoot par on the last double day. Boros said, “Saturday morning, when Cupit and I shot seventy-six and Palmer seventy-seven, I pretty much despaired of all of our chances in the afternoon. I was already packed up, ready to go, when news of the triple tie reached me. Cupit gave back a two-stroke lead with a six at seventeen, then missed a very makable birdie putt at eighteen that would have won. I lost track of Palmer, who had been fighting an intestinal bug all week, but I could hear the roar when Arnie’s last putt went in for a par. Three to play off, just like Ouimet, Vardon, and Ray. But who was who?”
“In the playoff I bogeyed the first,” Palmer said, “Boros bogeyed the second, and Cupit double-bogeyed the third, but then Ol’ Man River [as Arnold rechristened Julius] put a couple of birdies together and said, ‘See ya.’ On the tee at the eleventh hole, I reached back for a little something extra and found my ball perched in the middle of a rotting tree stump. Remember those honeybees outside this window? Already four shots behind, I couldn’t afford either to take a drop or go back to the tee, so I had to lash at the ball as hard as I could with a four-iron.” Three lashes later, like a bite of steak following a Heimlich maneuver, the stump spat the ball out. “I made a seven and a seventy-six,” he said, “losing by a million [Boros 71, Cupit 73, Palmer 76]. I had dropped a second U.S. Open playoff in a row [with one to come].”
By the way, if it seems like he’s losing a lot of playoffs, consider that he still holds the PGA Tour record for playoffs won, 14, tied with Nicklaus.
“Arnold birdied three of the last four holes in our playoff,” Boros said, “and I thought to myself, ‘He just doesn’t quit, does he?’ For a while then, I called him ‘pigeon,’ but I shouldn’t have. I didn’t mean it. It wasn’t true.”
Herbert Warren Wind wrote, “Boros moves his cigarette and his phrases around in a way that recalls Humphrey Bogart,” but Palmer said, “He reminded me more of Boris Karloff.”
By 11 strokes, Doug Sanders missed the Brookline playoff, but he picked up $525, or 26.25 tons of cotton. Cupit, who went on to win tournaments but didn’t come close in a major again, never could shake quite loose of that 12-footer he had at the 72nd hole to win the U.S. Open. Hell, he could have kicked that one in.