“I’d be doing everything you’re doing.”
IT CUSTOMARILY FALLS TO the first grandchild to name the grandparents. “That’s right,” said Sam Saunders, Palmer’s grandson via Amy. “Emily, my sister, was the one who named him ‘Dumpy.’ She tried for ‘Grumpy,’ but it came out ‘Dumpy.’”
Precisely as Pap had placed Arnie’s hands on a golf club, Dumpy carefully braided Sam’s small fingers, cautioning him, “Don’t you ever change this grip, boy.” “And I never have,” said Sam, the father of two sons now. “Just about as sternly, I told my seven-year-old, ‘Here’s where your hands go. Don’t ever move them.’”
When Arnold Palmer is your grandfather, it takes courage to choose tournament golf for a life’s work. And then, when a transforming success doesn’t materialize overnight, it takes something more than courage to keep going. Not that Saunders didn’t have obvious talent: he was a decorated junior golfer and a club champion at Bay Hill multiple times, starting at the age of 15.
When did he first realize Dumpy was Arnold Palmer?
“The way you mean it,” he said, “not for a long time, until I was like sixteen or seventeen, and getting serious at amateur tournaments. I always knew he was a very good golfer, of course. I just didn’t realize exactly how good, and how important.”
At Arnold’s final Bay Hill tournament and Masters in 2004, 17-year-old Samuel Palmer Saunders caddied for him. “I had no clue what I was doing,” he said. “I wish I could remember more of the little details of those rounds.” Facing a second shot on his valedictory hole at Bay Hill, a par four, Palmer was determined to hit a driver off the deck. “I tried to talk him out of it,” Sam said, “and into a three-wood. I hated the idea of him possibly going out on a water ball in front of everyone. But he wasn’t the slightest bit afraid. Somehow he just hooked that driver right up there and ran it down the left side of the fairway onto the green to within about fifteen or twenty feet of the cup. I can still hear the roar. He two-putted it for par.”
Saunders has kept his caddie suit from the Masters, what 1948 champion Claude Harmon called “that white tuxedo” by way of ridiculing one of his sons. (“You just keep wearing that white tuxedo, and I’ll take care of the green jacket.”) “It’s one of my most precious possessions,” Saunders said.
While instructing Sam on the practice tee, Arnold was a minimalist, like Pap. Snappy lessons, then go work it out for yourself. “We don’t spend hours,” Palmer said. “We spend ten, fifteen minutes, and I give him what I think is necessary and he goes with it.” “Often,” Sam said, “I wished he’d say more, because every simple seed he planted kicked in eventually on the range. Something small about the right hand, or the elbow, would suddenly hit me as I practiced, and I’d get it.”
“He is a very polite young man,” Palmer said. “That’s one thing I’m very proud of. As long as his manners and his characteristics are as good as they are, I’ll be happy. But don’t forget, I’m not his father.” Which was a way of saying he didn’t want to poach on Saunders’s dad, Roy.
“No, certainly not,” Sam said. “Dad and I have a very good relationship. He’s the one who took me to all the junior tournaments. I’m grateful that Arnold Palmer is my grandfather. I think very highly of him. I think very highly of my other grandfather, and of both of my parents. I’m proud of my heritage and feel very fortunate to have all of these wonderful people in my life. But only one of them am I able to talk to man-to-man about the ups and downs of a pro’s career, about the toughest sides of it, the terrible disappointments.”
For a Monday qualifier, Saunders once had to borrow his caddie’s irons and shoes, shot 67, and still didn’t get in. “Hey, I know what that’s like,” Arnie told him, “and I know what it’s like when you’re out on the golf course and everything is out of control and you just want to go hide.” Sam said, “It’s neat for me to have him, you know, to be able to relate to the bad times, because he had so many good ones. I’m probably able to talk to him probably like nobody else in the family can, and we get along pretty well.”
In his support of Sam, Arnie was his mother’s son: “Her mellowness, willingness to feel things and to show her feelings, was a salvation for me. She was a gentle, generous person, but I never felt as if I was being soft by going to her. I sought her out because she was the counterbalance I needed to Pap, who was tough and hard-core and refused to give me a compliment. I was always afraid to lose because of my father’s reaction, but I never felt that way about my mother. No matter what, she was the one who understood. She always took up for me. All that was so important—much more important than I realized at the time.”
Saunders said, “As desperately as I wanted to be my own man, have my own identity—and nobody ever wanted those things more—I still needed him to believe in me, to pull for me, and he did. When I married, when I moved to Colorado, he told me all the things I had to hear. I went to see him in Latrobe [in 2013] and he said, ‘If I were you, I’d be doing exactly what you’re doing, as far as moving somewhere else, starting your own life, getting away from me. I know how hard it is to be my grandchild and to want to be a tour golfer. And I know how much more difficult the profession is today, how much longer the courses are, and how many more competitive players are out there now. But just keep at it. You’re on the right track. I couldn’t be prouder of you.’”
Sam had grown tired of playing the Web.com tour. “I was at the point of wondering if I was ever going to make it onto the PGA Tour,” he said. “I had one child already, another on the way. Was it time to do something else? But when he said he was proud of me, it gave me just that little extra bit of confidence to keep chasing my dream. He didn’t look down on me, saying, ‘You should be better by now.’ He said, ‘Go get ’em.’ The next year I had a great season and finally got my PGA Tour card.”
“I think Sam has taken the right approach,” Arnold said. “He’s come a long way in the last couple of years, and I really feel that he has a shot at it now. But he has to work. He has all the ingredients that are necessary. It’s just going to take time. Stick to the basic fundamentals of the game of golf. Sure, there’s going to be a little change here, a little change there. But don’t listen to all the instructors out there with a new way. Trust what you have, if it’s sound. Trust yourself.”
Though still a journeyman, Sam was on his way. “Of course,” he said, “I don’t expect to have a career even in the same universe as his. But I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. The players on tour know who I am, but they also know I don’t consider being Arnold Palmer’s grandson any kind of accomplishment. That’s just being born. They might ask me how he’s doing, but they treat me as one of them.”