WINNER:
Union Mutual Classic
“I don’t think you can know me if you don’t know Doc.”
“FOR AS LONG AS I’ve been with Arnold,” Doc Giffin said, “I’ve never stopped thinking of myself as a newspaper guy.”
Doc’s first paper was the Pitt News at the University of Pittsburgh, where, his junior year, he served as sports editor and, his senior year, as editor in chief. That earned him a scholarship at Pitt and later a starting position in the profession with United Press International in Pittsburgh ($47.50 a week). Ordinarily the Pitt News sports editor penned the column, but Giffin deferred to a pint-sized dynamo a semester behind him, Myron Sidney Kopelman, who wrote under the byline Myron Cope.
“‘Cope, you’re gonna write the column,’ I told him, because I knew he could write rings around me as a columnist.” In later years, when Cope was dropping indefinable terms like yoi and double yoi into Steeler broadcasts while devising something called the Terrible Towel to the enormous enrichment of children’s charities, Pittsburgh forgot what a splendid writer Cope was. But the evidence can still be found in the archives of Sports Illustrated and the Saturday Evening Post.
“Doc’s a good writer, too,” Palmer said. “I correct his stuff, but that’s all right. No, to hear him tell it, everyone else is better. But that’s Doc.”
It was Bob Drum who put Arnold together with Doc, a fellow scribbler at the Pittsburgh Press. Giffin was the man in the composing room who with a radio and a typewriter got out the “extra” when Bill Mazeroski’s homer in the bottom of the ninth inning beat the New York Yankees in the 1960 World Series. “We were on the street in ten minutes,” Doc said, the excitement still bubbling in his voice. And it was Drum who closed the deal when the tour offered Doc the position of press secretary in the ’60s. “Doctor, if you don’t take this job,” Bob told him, “I’ll never speak to you again.”
Giffin gave the tour a shot of humanity. Any time Lionel Hebert was in the hunt, for instance, Doc made sure a trumpet was handy. “One year at Memphis,” he said, “Hebert, Gene Littler and Gary Player played off. Lionel birdied the first playoff hole to win, and at the awards ceremony, just before he put the horn to his lips, he turned to Gene and said, ‘Hey, Lit, do you want me to play you some blues?’ Gene laughed. They could get away with things like that in those days because they loved each other.”
Doc said, “I’ve been called Arnold’s ‘handler,’ but while he’s trusted my input into places he should go or people he should talk to, I’ve never been his handler. He doesn’t need a handler. I’ve been asked, ‘Why is Arnold Palmer so popular?’ The answer is simple. He likes people, and they know it. His public face and his private face are exactly the same. He’s not one of those guys who turns it on in public and turns it off in private. He’ll tolerate fools that most of us won’t, myself included. He just likes people. There are vice presidents and everything else in the company now, but I’m still ‘assistant to Arnold Palmer.’”
“Maybe Doc’s real title,” Palmer said, “should be ‘friend,’ or ‘everlasting friend.’” Ten months Arnold’s senior, Doc had similar perspectives and the same memories. At the end of every workday, they convened, just the two of them, for a cocktail and what they called “debriefing.”
“We’ve done that every day, every year,” Palmer said, “since the sixties. We enjoy it. They’re just bull sessions, really. We start off discussing the tasks at hand but end up talking about everything. Old victories. Old losses. Life. Before he married, I used to call him ‘the highwayman.’” In those days, Doc patrolled Route 30 sweet-talking Latrobe’s eligible women and teaching its bartenders how to mix a proper Manhattan.
“Doc is someone you can trust with your life,” Palmer said, “a good guy who always steers you in the right direction. I can think of a player or two—so can you—who could have used a Doc Giffin. Along with everything else he does around here—and he does a lot—he’s been a guardrail for me, and I don’t think you can know me if you don’t know Doc.”
In 1986, Gary Player was lingering beside a par-3 green where he had just putted out, at a senior tournament in a Maryland suburb of Washington. Looking back at the tee, he watched Palmer, playing in the group behind, make a hole in one. “As I was getting ready to swing,” Arnold said, “I saw Gary standing there. I got to thinking about him, and us, and everything. You know, I wanted to hit a good one.”
“That’s it! That’s it!” Player said later in the locker room. “He always knew how to share a moment of triumph, yours or his. Sometimes in life, it can be very hard to find someone to share your moments of triumph.”
The next day, at the same hole, with the same 5-iron, Palmer made another ace. Not surprisingly, then, on the third day, he drew a media crowd at that tee. It was a little like going to a random airport just on the chance Amelia Earhart might land. The third shot did not go in the cup. Stop the presses.
In fact, it airmailed the green. A 5-iron was too much club for the new day’s conditions, but he was too sentimental to change. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, the fifth human being to walk on the moon, and the only person ever to play golf outside of the atmosphere, brought his collapsible 6-iron and the sock he used to smuggle it aboard Apollo 14 into a tournament pressroom at Winged Foot. “If you had it to do over, Alan,” a comedian wondered, “would you still go with the soft six or change to a hard seven?” “I was committed to the six,” he said with a grin, as Palmer was to the five.
When the shot went long, Arnold looked over at the witnesses and said sheepishly, “I didn’t want to leave it short.”
“Doc,” I whispered to Giffin, “Time is holding a page for me. I can’t wait for the end of the round.”
“OK,” he said, running to Palmer and back again.
“Can you do it in two walks down the fairway?”
“I’ve hit my share of unusual golf shots,” Palmer said as we walked, itemizing a number of them, like a backhanded wedge out of a gum tree in Melbourne. He slammed drivers off of department store roofs in Japan (where the Japanese regarded him as John Wayne), anthills in Africa (“man-eating ants, now”) and volcanoes in the South Seas. Wearing a three-piece pin-striped business suit, he punched a ball down a narrow corridor of Wall Street, and, from home plate at Fenway Park, lifted a short iron over the Green Monster.
“In Paris,” he said, “I drove a ball off the top of the Eiffel Tower. It must have carried four hundred yards, straight down mostly, putting a hell of a ding in a passing bus.” His eyes were dancing.
“But when that second ball went in the cup yesterday, I don’t know how to describe the feeling. I’ve never felt anything like it. Idiot that I am, I just kept muttering, ‘Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness. Holy mack’rel, Andy.’”
Sometime later I told Palmer, “You know, every one of the writers has the equivalent story of Doc and a deadline.”
“I hope so,” he said.