WINNER:
Marlboro Senior Classic
Denver Post Champions of Golf
“I live that moment still in my mind.”
TO WARD OFF THE senior malaise, Palmer gravitated toward younger players, like Peter Jacobsen and Rocco Mediate (“Arnold Palmer is timeless,” Rocco said, “that’s all there is to it”), and several generations of Arnold Palmer and Buddy Worsham golfers at Wake Forest, from Lanny Wadkins and Curtis Strange to Webb Simpson and both father Jay and son Bill Haas. They were all recipients of one of the two golf scholarships Wake established for Palmer and Arnold established for his best friend.
“I know I like to think young,” he said. “I’m not much for sitting around and thinking about the past or talking about the past. What does that accomplish? If I can give young people something to think about, like the future, that’s a better use of my time.”
“I first met Arnold my first year on tour, nineteen seventy-seven,” Jacobsen said. “Trying to Monday qualify, I missed out three straight weeks; then, on the fourth Monday, played my way into a field at the AT&T, the old Crosby. I was so excited, nervous. I went back out with just my caddie to play ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen at Monterey Peninsula Country Club. Now it’s, like, five thirty in the afternoon. I jumped across to sixteen to play in, and had hit three drives off sixteen tee, when, out of nowhere, around a corner, came this caravan of four hundred or so people led by Arnold Palmer and Mark McCormack.”
Jacobsen suddenly realized he had cut in. “He could have big-timed me,” Jake said. “He could have called me out. ‘Step aside, kid, I’m coming through.’ But instead he walks up to me, tucking in his britches, sticking out his hand, saying, ‘How are you? I’m Arnold Palmer. May we join you?’ He introduces me to McCormack, who later became my manager for twenty-five years. Then he hands me a sleeve of golf balls. ‘Here, these are in the developmental stage,’ he says, ‘let me know what you think of them.’ After we play sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, he says, ‘You’ve got your card, you’re on the circuit, good for you. We’ll be seeing each other every week from now on.’ And, just like that, I felt accepted. A kid out of Oregon who dreamed of playing golf. I don’t have to tell you, golf isn’t the most inclusive sport. In all games, for that matter, the stars tend to be exclusive. ‘Stay away. Get away. I have my inner circle.’ But he included me. He made me feel I belonged. I think he made everyone feel that way.”
Jacobsen won the AT&T in time and a score of other tournaments. He served two Ryder Cup teams and played presentably in the majors, finishing as high as third place at the PGA Championship twice, along with a personal best of seventh in a U.S. Open, if you don’t count the Open he won in “Tin Cup.” Jake was a logical character to portray himself in a movie, being a natural entertainer. He made a lounge act out of practice tee impersonations, dumping a bucket of range balls down his shirt before doing Craig Stadler. Palmer always came last.
“First I’d make sure I unbuttoned my collar and spread the flaps. Then go: ‘Huh? Huh?’ Snort a bunch of times. Tear out a few chest hairs and toss them into the wind. ‘Did you see that lady over there by the tee, Arnold?’ ‘Talked to her already.’ Waggle. Two or three club dips, a neck dip. Then you had to go to the pants with your elbows. Finally that whirligig of a swing. Always followed by ‘Where’d it go?’”
Palmer and Jacobsen became regular partners in Fred Meyer Challenges and Shark Shootouts, doubles events in the so-called silly season. But Palmer didn’t think they were silly. “I can’t add up the number of times I played golf with Arnold,” Jacobsen said, “but we were partners in seventeen Fred Meyer Challenges, my tournament in Oregon, and probably ten of Greg Norman’s Shootouts. We had a good chance to win Greg’s event one year at Sherwood. On the sixteenth, a reachable par five, we were two back and I hit a nice drive and had a long iron or a hybrid into the green. He walked up to me and grabbed me by my shirt. He got that look in his eye and said, ‘Do you know how much it would mean to me for us to win this tournament? Knock it on there and make an eagle.’”
Jake did both, “more because of him, less because of me,” he said. “But we still lost in the end, and he was so deflated. ‘That competitive fire,’ I thought to myself, ‘it never goes out.’ Not in him anyway.”
Well beyond his prime, Palmer remained a useful teammate, “because Arnold was still just about the best driver of the golf ball anyone ever saw,” Jacobsen said. “It’s nice when you can depend on your partner to hit it straight down every fairway with no side spin. A year finally arrived, as I was calling him to another Fred Meyer, when he told me, ‘You know, my game’s not what it used to be.’ And I replied, ‘Arnold, is that why you think I’m playing with you?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, why are you playing with me?’ The true answer is we had become a team. But the answer I gave him was ‘The reason I want to play with you is you’re the only one I can outdrive anymore.’ ‘Screw you!’ he said. They punched each other in the arm and played on.
“The hell about a golfer growing older,” Palmer said, “is it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process over a period of years. You have that moment after a long lull when you hit a two-iron just right and say to yourself, ‘OK, it’s back again.’ I used to consider myself a realist as a golfer and a romantic as a pilot. I don’t know when I became a romantic as a golfer and a realist as a pilot. I just know I did, involuntarily.”
In all their many collaborations, never once did Jacobsen see Palmer bristle under the responsibility of being Palmer. “Not a single time, in all the places we went,” he said, “when people were falling all over themselves to get a picture or autograph or just shake his hand, did I ever hear him say, ‘Geez, get me out of here. This is ridiculous. Get me away from this guy.’ And whenever tournament organizers offered him security, say, to escort him to his car, he declined. He’d go with the people, no matter how long it took. And he never hurried them. ‘What’s your name? Great to see you. Oh, is this your wife? How did you get a wife so good-looking? What do you do? You must be rich.’ Everyone felt like they were part of his group. Come on in, join the conversation. He let the whole world inside.”
Jacobsen had a theory: “When you’re in a position like Arnold Palmer and Muhammad Ali—maybe we should stop with them, though I guess there are a few others. But when you’re in that position, I think you have an innate ability to read the people standing in front of you. Not only members of the media, the press, but also everyday fans. It could be an asshole media question—sorry—or a well-thought-out question from just about anyone. He would craft every response specifically to the individual, with graciousness. He was just so accepting. He might be the most accepting person who ever lived. Some people walked up to him a little afraid, others not the least bit intimidated. But, whoever was standing there, Arnold knew how to make it easier for them, and did. Whether it was a five-year old boy, or a forty-year-old trembling woman, or somebody in a wheelchair, or a fellow who actually thought he could outdrive Arnold Palmer. To whomever it was, Arnold adjusted.”
It’s a natural grace.
Jacobsen’s best memory was from a game he had with Palmer, Ben Crenshaw, and Bruce Lietzke. “Arnold jumped on a drive,” he said, “and popped one past the three of us. ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh,’ he said. ‘Let me see, now. There’s one. There’s two. There’s three. Looks to me like you boys are away.’ We had caught ours pretty good, too, but he was three or four steps out in front, and I’ll tell you something, we were just as thrilled as he was. I’d give anything to see that again today. I live that moment still in my mind.”
In 1982, Arnie got boiling mad at Curtis Strange, whom he loved.
“I misbehaved a little bit,” Strange said, “at the Bay Hill tournament.” Curtis doused a photographer with a thousand-gallon flume of profanity and then turned the hose on a female scorekeeper, a long-standing volunteer. “Of course my language got back to Arnold,” Strange said, “and he made a public example of me—made me apologize to everyone concerned. The reason he was so goddamned mad at me, I think, was because he did like me. I loved him. If Arnold just gives you that wink or grin, or ‘Do well,’ or whatever, it means everything to you. Then, if you disappoint him, oh, man.”
Palmer and Worsham scholars Strange, Wadkins, Haas, Billy Andrade, were all Arnie’s boys but, for some reason Curtis was especially. His father, Tom Strange, was a Virginia club professional who could really play: a five-time winner of the state open, a five-time qualifier at the U.S. Open. He died of cancer when his twin sons, Allan and Curtis, were 14.
“My dad competed against Arnie as an amateur,” Strange said, “and served on his equipment staff as a pro. I played Arnold Palmer clubs all through my junior career. Pretty early on, I came to know him and tried to be like him. Arnie played golf with a certain edge. I played with a certain edge, too. We had a conversation about it once. He told me you have to be on edge in order to play well.”
When Curtis married Sarah in 1976, they spent their first night as husband and wife at Arnie’s house in Latrobe. Strange said, “I was playing an exhibition in Pennsylvania the next day, where he of course was the headliner. I was getting fifteen hundred dollars. I needed it. But being with Arnie and Winnie meant so much more than the money. I say it like this: we all have idols, people we respect as kids, and very few of us are lucky enough ever to meet those people. And many, many times when we do, they don’t quite live up to what we hoped they’d be. But Arnie did. That and beyond. For a younger guy, he was a good man to hang out with. He was real. He cared about you, cared enough to get mad at you. When Palmer looked you in the eye and said ‘How are you?’ he really meant it. Almost everybody says that, but almost nobody really means it.”
After Strange won his consecutive U.S. Opens in 1988 and ’89—making a commendable run at a third one, too—he and Sarah had dinner with Arnie and Winnie the following week at the Canadian Skins Game. “We talked about our Opens,” Strange said, “about all the Opens.” Tom Strange’s dream at his five Opens had been to play well enough to get into a Masters, which he never did. Curtis qualified for 20 Masters, finishing second in 1985, the year he won his first of three PGA Tour money titles and took a turn as the world’s best player. In 1989 he won three tournaments besides the Open and became the first man ever to earn an official $1 million in a season.
Palmer had been the first to win $100,000 in a season, and was the first to win $1 million in a career. It took him 13 years to do it. “When I started out,” Arnold said, “we were getting twelve hundred for first place and only fifteen places paid out. I’m pleased to see what has happened to the game and to think that I might have had something to do with it.”
Jay Haas and Strange, Wake teammates as devoted to each other as Arnie and Buddy, regularly sought Palmer out at U.S. and British Opens for practice rounds. They knew enough not to give him the dean treatment; instead, to give him their best games, and the business. “We all had the needle out,” Strange said, “because that’s the way he wanted it and, I think, needed it, to still be one of the guys.” Haas, almost the last person you’d associate with off-color humor, collected dirty jokes all year to regale Palmer. “We’d play for five dollars, ten dollars,” Strange said, “and never pay. If Jay or I laid up somewhere, he’d say, ‘You pussy!’ And, let me tell you, he’d rip your heart out to win. Talk about competitive. He just couldn’t wait to beat Haas and Strange. He didn’t go in for the modern fist-bumping, either, if his opponent holed a putt. Not while the match was still undecided. Uh-uh. Afterward, maybe.”
In 2016, when Palmer was 86, Strange dropped by his office at Bay Hill and they talked away an afternoon. “He was giving me a lot of grief,” Curtis said, “telling me, ‘You might not have been the worst actor on tour, but you were the second-worst.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘and you were a piece of cake, too, a rosebud, weren’t you?’ He loved it. ‘How many times,’ I asked him, ‘have you gotten so goddamned mad on the golf course that you couldn’t spit?’ He laughed. I loved to hear him laugh.”
Strange said, “Think how normal he seems to you and me. Yet presidents and kings wanted to be Arnold Palmer.”
On the second day of 2007, Palmer, Strange, Haas, Wadkins, Andrade, and others—a stunning assembly of gold-shirted Demon Deacons—congregated at the Orange Bowl for about the least likely occurrence any of them had ever imagined happening: Wake Forest’s appearance in a Bowl Championship Series football game. The opponent was the University of Louisville. Wearing jersey number 66 (for six-under-par presumably, certainly not for the ’66 U.S. Open), Palmer was Wake’s honorary captain.
Muhammad Ali, a Louisville native, wore 19 for the Cardinals, presumably a nod to Johnny Unitas, though Unitas’s Louisville number was 16. When the Baltimore Colts signed him off a Bloomfield, Pennsylvania, sandlot, 16 was available. But John being John, he took the number the equipment man handed him and said nothing. “That was Unitas all right,” Palmer said of his fellow Pittsburgher, whom of course Arnold knew well.
The kickoff was delayed a few minutes because Ali, sitting in a cart, was talking to Palmer about golf. He spoke softly, slowly, and with that horrible palsy, but enough of him was still there. The only two golf swings Muhammad ever tried, splay-legged with an 8-iron at the Stardust course in San Diego’s Hotel Circle, came while Ali was training for the first Ken Norton fight, which he lost. Muhammad was trying to tell Palmer something about that, and about lovely little trainer Eddie Futch’s belief that it was a fascination with golf that doomed Joe Louis in the first Max Schmeling fight.
“I didn’t completely get what Muhammad was telling me,” Palmer said, “but I knew that, whatever it was, it was important to him, and I wouldn’t let anybody stop him. I was in Ali’s company a number of times through the years. He was my friend.”
Wake alum Ernie Accorsi, the former Colts, Browns, and Giants general manager, was also at the game, sitting with the golfers. “I’ll never forget two things,” Accorsi said. “Curtis turning to Andrade, saying, like a twelve-year-old kid, ‘Billy, did you ever dream we’d be here in the Orange Bowl?’ A guy with two U.S. Open championships. Then the way Arnie’s boys followed him with their eyes as he made his way up through the stands . . .”
Louisville won.