“Taking the honey out, putting the sugar back in.”
“LATROBE ISN’T JUST THE place where I’m from,” Palmer said. “It’s who I am.”
He made his entrance on September 10, 1929. The Roaring ’20s and Jazz Age were going out, the Great Depression was coming in. And Bobby Jones was just about to win everything.
Palmer was really from two places: Latrobe and, three or four miles south, Youngstown, where he went to grade school (in a two-room schoolhouse) and did most of his adolescent carousing; three places, if you count Pittsburgh, 40 miles to the west, where the main exports were steel and quarterbacks.
Johnny Unitas, Joe Montana, Dan Marino, Joe Namath, Jim Kelly, George Blanda, Babe Parilli, Johnny Lujack . . . Palmer shared traits with all of them. “Arnie plays golf,” Johnny Miller said, “like others play football.” Palmer played a little football himself, in junior high, unconventionally marrying the positions of offensive halfback and defensive tackle, until golf preoccupied him.
He seemed to favor every Pittsburgh sports legend: the light-heavyweight boxer Billy Conn, a steamfitter’s son (clocking in at five ten and a half, 175 pounds in his prime, Palmer had the easy grace and natural slouch of a prizefighter); the burly tight end Mike Ditka, a welder’s boy; the resolute shortstop Honus Wagner, whose father and brothers were coal miners. Palmer was as indigenous to the region as the Mellons, Carnegies, and Rooneys. He was loamy meadows and smoky skies. He fit right in with the dancer Gene Kelly; the historian David McCullough; Sean Thornton, hero of The Quiet Man (“Steel, Michaeleen, steel in pig iron furnaces so hot a man forgets his fear of hell”); and Bob Drum.
“Pittsburgh was hard work, hard work, hard work,” said Jim Kelly on the telephone. “My father held down three jobs at a time. He worked in the mills. He was a machinist. He did pretty much everything. If you checked his hands, you’d know what I’m talking about. Those sandpaper hands.” Namath said, “All of Western Pennsylvania was blue-collar territory, certainly in the forties and fifties, when the steel mills and the coal mines were going full blast.” “The kids got out of the mills and mines,” Parilli said, “but they stayed mills and mines kids.”
Montana and Kelly joked that it was the beer. “Joe says Rolling Rock,” Kelly said. “I say Iron City.” (Palmer’s brand was Rolling Rock.) Their folks drank one or the other, and out of all those suds came all of these quarterbacks. “From Lujack to Marc Bulger,” said Kelly. “Don’t forget Bulger. And Notre Dame would say don’t forget Terry Hanratty, either.”
If it wasn’t the beer, might it have been something just as golden and even more homegrown? Like an entire community founded on a single proposition, that what you get out of anything depends on what you put into it. “We were all raised on that,” Kelly said. Arnie, too.
His father Milfred (Deacon to most, Deke to some, Pap to Arnold) was a workingman like the others—same as his own father, a housepainter. Arnie’s paternal great-grandfather, who married for a third time at the age of 70, was a farmer who settled the Palmers in Latrobe. Most visitors took it for an exceedingly unremarkable black-and-white town of work-a-day people and honest grime. But a few could see a full-color cover painting by Norman Rockwell for the Saturday Evening Post. At Strickler’s drugstore, the banana split was invented in 1904. In 1974, 80-year-old Rockwell painted a portrait of Arnie.
With his own sandpaper hands Deacon built first a golf course and then a golfer in the shade of the Alleghenies. Latrobe is usually described as “nestled in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains,” though there is no sensation of a mountain, or even a foothill, just a leafy and rolling green expanse of lush countryside and riotous red pheasant colors in the fall. During the tightest years, for an additional paycheck, Deacon put in some nights and off-seasons dodging molten sparks in the factories, but far preferred moonlighting as manager of the poolroom at the Youngstown Hotel. He liked running things. He liked the rough-and-tumble of the billiard parlor. He liked bouncing the occasional idiot. And he loved boilermakers. Arnie’s father had a bit of a thirst.
As a boy, Deacon was bedridden with polio. Small towns weren’t overflowing with medical specialists or rehab centers for invalids. So, on his own, he just got up one day and, for the second time, taught himself how to walk. With torturous calisthenics, chinning himself first with one arm and then the other, he retooled his upper body into an engine block while ignoring a deformed foot. He bobbled gently, like an uneven table, but nobody ever looked at him and saw a cripple.
He had a corkscrew golf swing entirely of his own design that minimized his legs and produced low, hard draws that a tall center fielder might have caught. And he knew how to get the ball in the hole.
At the age of 16, Deacon was one of the original roustabouts who dug out the boulders and helped shape the routing of the nine-hole Latrobe Country Club course that opened for play in 1921. Civic leaders conceived the course in response to and out of admiration for Jones. Five years later Deacon was appointed greenkeeper; seven years after that, greenkeeper/pro (though still mostly greenkeeper). He was much more fairway tractor driver than pro shop shirt salesman. “They hired me for both jobs,” he told Drum in 1962, “because they had to cut expenses during the Depression. They said it was just until things got better. It’s funny, though—I still hold both positions. Guess the Depression is still on.”
From Pap, Arnie learned many important things, like integrity and how to hold a golf club. Pap installed English professional Harry Vardon’s overlapping system and bolted it down before a baseball bat could corrupt the boy. Arnold said, “He put my hands on the club, well, just the way they are now, and told me in no uncertain terms, ‘Don’t you ever change this,’ and I never really did. To most people, a proper golf grip is awkward as hell at first. But I was lucky. My hands were placed on the club so early that it always felt second nature to me. Thanks to Pap, I never had to unlearn anything.”
The contribution of his mother, who came from railroading stock, made all the difference. Doris Morrison was as light and delicate as a scarf, ready company, and a natural communicator. She liked people and they liked her. (“She was a ham,” Winnie Palmer said. “Arnie’s a ham.”) Pap was always prodding his son to be tougher and try harder and succeed more. But whatever the boy did pleased Doris, provided he was kind. “No player ever had a more nurturing golf mom,” he said. “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.”
In the earliest days his waist and hips were so narrow they could barely sustain his trousers. Evenings, after dinner, he trailed behind Doris as she played twilight golf (not particularly well) with two neighborhood friends. She would chide her son as they walked, “Yank up those britches now before they fall off.” The way Arnie hitched at his pants in mid-stride became a nervous habit, and a trademark.
“I used to get so tired of hearing my father telling me what to do,” he said, “how to hold my knife, fork, and spoon, and leave the table if you’re going to sneeze. You don’t sneeze at the table! I used to think, Isn’t he ever going to get off my back? And, at the same time, all of those things at some point made me love him more.”
Arnie didn’t have to be taught to love golf. “Arnold never caught the golf bug,” said the British writer Peter Dobereiner. “He was born with it like a hereditary disease.”
Using a sawed-off women’s brassie (2-wood) he began to play at the age of three and turned pro at seven when Latrobe member Helen Fritz offered him a nickel to hit her drive over a ditch at the sixth hole, not too far from the small first white- and then green-frame house (only two rooms with heat) that the club provided the Palmers. After adjusting a cap pistol strapped to one hip, he took a whirling cut that brought to mind a finish-line flagman or a revolving lawn sprinkler. High forehead. Dented nose. Look of eagles. Mrs. Fritz’s ball floated down like a paratrooper onto the fairway. Every Tuesday morning thereafter (Ladies Day at Latrobe), leaning against a tree in his backyard, he was available to belt dowagers’ drives for five cents. “Some of them,” he said, “were slow to pay.”
He sat in his father’s lap as Deacon steered the tractor, dragging multiple mowers. Then, almost before he was big enough or strong enough to manage it, Arnold drove the machine alone. He had to stand up for leverage and wrangle the wheel like a rodeo bulldogger twisting the horns of a rank steer. As a result, his arms puffed out into parts of a much larger boy.
A sister, Lois Jean (called Cheech), followed him by a couple of years. They weren’t Jem and Scout, but as she said appreciatively, “Arnie took care of me.” He included her in as many of his adventures as possible. Living on a golf course where you’re not a member carries with it a definite feeling of isolation and loneliness. “We played cowboys and Indians,” Cheech said. She was the Indians. After a gap of a decade and a half, a brother and another sister came late. “Arnie was fifteen years older than I,” brother Jerry said, “so our parents in effect had two families.” Because of that timing, and because of his connection to Pap, Arnie operated like an only child, or at least a special son.
“Just where we are now is a history in itself,” Palmer said in his office, spinning his chair around and gazing out the window. “When I learned to shoot a shotgun, my father and I—he taught me—we walked that hillside over there and shot pheasants and rabbits and squirrels, and took them down and cleaned them in a stream right over here about two hundred yards away. My mother would soak them in salt water overnight, and we’d have them for supper the next day.
“Right here, right on the edge of this rise, an old oak tree fell over, like that one over there. See the squirrel climbing up? The trunk was rotten—I’ll never forget this. A bunch of honeybees had moved in. Have you ever seen a honeycomb? Well, this one was full of honey. I mean, absolutely, like that . . .” Mimicking an exaggerating fisherman, he spread his hands wide, massive hands right out of Winesburg, Ohio or Of Mice and Men. “A blacksmith’s hands, a timber cutter’s arms,” Deacon would say years later. “There are only two ways to get hands and arms like that, swinging an ax or swinging a golf club.”
“. . . and my dad says, ‘Now, Arnie, we’re going to take this honey home and give it to your mother, and we’re going to eat it. But we’ve got to get two five-pound bags of sugar. When we take the honey out, we’re going to put those two bags of sugar right there, so the bees can have their food.’ By God, we did it. I was about seven or eight years old.”
Palmer would spend his entire life taking the honey out and putting the sugar back in.
“My father taught me discipline,” he said, “before he taught me golf.” Deacon was fanatical about good manners, deportment, honesty, and good manners again. Tyrannical isn’t a bad word, either. Largely out of loyalty to Pap, young Arnie loved and loathed Latrobe Country Club. That is, he loved the golf course and loathed the club. Deacon was treated like an employee, and he treated himself that way. He took his lunch in the kitchen. Arnold said, “My father never set foot in the locker room, dining room, or bar without the expressed permission of a member.” (Until 1971, that is, when Arnie bought the course and club—lock, stock, and a subdivision of houses. Everything from the airport to the phone book came to bear his name. Like Mr. Potter in Bedford Falls, but a benevolent version, he seemed to own the whole town.)
“I wasn’t permitted to swim in the club pool or to play with the members’ children,” he said. Instead he swam (with the snakes) in a rocky creek that was the source of the pool’s water, “and peed in it, too,” he said, “a little present for the country club kids.” He could caddie, even compete in the caddies’ tournaments—and he won more than a few of them. “But my father wouldn’t let me take the trophies home. ‘They’re for other men’s sons,’ he said.”
Palmer’s favorite boyhood memory was of a day in the pro shop when one of the club’s grandees was chewing him out for being underfoot, and assuring Deacon that any number of servile positions could be arranged for Arnie in the mills. “Pap lit into this guy, taking up for me—and, the way I looked at it, taking up for himself.” More than one member expressed the view that Deacon was making a mistake teaching his son to hit the ball so hard. (Sometimes both feet left the ground.) Deacon’s philosophy was: Knock the hell out of it, go and find it, then knock the hell out of it again. Arnie said, “He told all of the critics the same thing: ‘You take care of yourself, I’ll take care of my boy.’” That phrase, my boy, meant everything to Arnie. “Funny, I never did hit the ball hard enough to suit Pap,” he said.
On Mondays, when the course was closed, he was cleared to play, and at the age of 12 he broke 40. (“I was seven when I broke fifty-five. Then I went after fifty, then forty-five, and finally forty.”) On the other days, before the members arrived and after they departed, he could practice, but exclusively in the rough (“in among the elms and oaks,” as he said). Pap didn’t allow pitching or chipping to the greens, and at that time the course had no bunkers to speak of. Sand was too expensive to maintain. “Because of the course he grew up on, I’m sure,” Gary Player said, “Arnold was an incredible driver of the golf ball and a tremendous iron player, but a crappy wedge player. Crappy! And a terrible bunker player. But, oh, man, what a great driver! Maybe the best driver the world ever knew. I remember a number one wood he had, the most wicked-looking thing you ever saw in your life. It must have had eleven degrees of loft, and of course he needed it—he was a very shut-faced player. I tell you, he could hit that thing so straight and so far. Such a magnificent driver. Such a wonderful putter, too. I’ve seen other players who weren’t afraid to knock the ball five and six feet past, who trusted themselves to hole those comebackers one after another after another. But none of them could touch Palmer. He was the inventor.
“Just as he won some tournaments taking unnecessary gambles, he lost some tournaments taking unnecessary gambles. But that was Arnold. That was the endearment. He did absolutely everything the same damn way. It wasn’t his nature to lag a putt because it wasn’t his nature to lag period. He woke up charging, charging, charging. He fell out of bed with this tremendous charisma, just fell out of bed with it. And I’ll tell you something else: the rough was his friend.”
Palmer made up games in the Latrobe rough, like Phil Mickelson in his backyard in San Diego, concocting unplayable lies and then playing them. “I’d have two or three balls going at a time,” Palmer said, “make a tournament of it. One ball would be Byron Nelson’s, my favorite golfer, another would be Ben Hogan’s, and the third would be mine. You might not be surprised to hear, mine was usually the best.”
Thinking of radio but eerily anticipating television, Arnie delivered a hushed play-by-play as he zigzagged through his father’s rough, copying the staccato, mile-a-minute delivery of the political commentator H. V. Kaltenborn: “Now, Palmer-settles-into-his-stance. He can’t-even-see-the-ball, yet-he-must-get-down-in-two-to-win-the-UUUU-nited-States-OOOO-pen.”
“Watch me, Pap!” he pleaded. “Look at me hit this one!” But Deacon didn’t have time for watching and wasn’t that kind of instructor anyway. He believed in snappy lessons, and now go work it out for yourself. “I hired Arnie as caddie master when he was a teenager,” Deacon told Drum, “but I was forced to fire him. He was the worst caddie master I ever had. His mind was always someplace else. I knew where it was, if I wasn’t always sure where he was. His thoughts were on his own game.”
Arnie wasn’t overly successful as a caddie, either. He never meant to show disrespect to his clients, but that expressive putty face of his couldn’t hide his disagreement with club selections—even from the club champion—or his disgust with wrongheaded strategies. It couldn’t hide anything. This turned into a plus later on.
Deacon taught him how to install fresh grips and repair or renovate old shafts and club heads. Arnie enjoyed working with his hands and knew even touring pros were expected to be artisans in the off-seasons. “Whenever Arnie wanted help with his game or anything to do with the game,” Deacon said, “he always came to me. I never went to Arnold.”
As land became more available and affordable, Latrobe’s par of 34 stretched out to 36, and then to 18 holes. Deacon planted every pine, starting with none and ending with thousands. To Arnie, the course was a living, breathing, agronomical edition of his dad. The snowy months in Latrobe, as glorious as they could sometimes be, depressed Arnie. He liked Christmases well enough, especially the mixed aroma of hot chocolate for the children and warm whiskey for the adults, but he couldn’t wait for the ice to melt and the slope of the 7th hole to stop doubling as a ski run and get back to being a fairway. “I played golf in my head,” he said, “if I couldn’t play it any other way.”
Always Deacon, occasionally the entire family, accompanied 14-year-old Arnie to his first junior and schoolboy tournaments. Bill Yates, Palmer’s high school golf coach, said, “I didn’t teach him anything. He knew more about golf as a freshman than anyone in school. He taught the team; I managed it. If he hit a bad five-iron shot in practice, he’d let everybody go ahead. Then he’d get a bag of fifty balls and bang away with a five-iron until the problem was solved.”
Arnie’s first formal opponent was “a lefty, kid by the name of Danko, Bill Danko, from Jeannette [sixteen miles west of Latrobe], who became a doctor.” The uncanny way chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer had of pulling out a miniature magnetized set from his inside breast pocket and replicating white-piece-by-black-piece boyhood speed matches from years before (inconsequential “skittles” games dashed off by the hundreds at summer camps), Palmer was able to re-create stroke by stroke every one of his formative rounds, like the 71 he shot to beat Danko.
At age 15 or so, while playing another match he had reason to remember, Arnie pulled a Rumpelstiltskin over a botched putt that climaxed with him whirlybirding the putter over a poplar tree. “I won that match,” he said, “but on the car ride home nobody would talk to me until Pap finally growled, ‘If you ever throw another club like that in my presence or while you’re living in my house, you’ll never play another game of golf.’ Period.”
It’s remarkable how many pros tell the equivalent story. Mickelson’s father had one overriding commandment on the golf course (which described his son’s game forever): “Whatever else golf can be, it has to be fun.” After eight-year-old Phil Jr. slammed his club against the ground in a fury, Phil Sr. demoted him to spectator for several holes until the boy spoke up in a contrite whisper, “Dad, I think I can have fun now.” Almost universally, golf is a father’s game. If TV cameras zoomed in on golfers the way they do football players, nobody would say, “Hi Mom.”
Around Youngstown, Palmer was a two-fisted boy who had his share of fights. Truth be told, he enjoyed them. (“I was a hell-raiser,” he admitted.) Like many a two-fisted boy (Bill Clinton comes to mind), he eventually raised his hands to the old man, who, under the influence of shots-and-beers at the pool hall and firehouse was being ugly to Doris. “Leave her alone!” Arnie shouted in the kitchen. No punches were landed, but the two of them crashed into a stovepipe, flattening it. That night, Arnie ran away from home (without his golf clubs), but after walking the course for hours in the dark, he let himself back in the house and went to bed. The incident was never repeated or referred to again. It was his 16th birthday.
Among Arnie’s neighborhood friends was Fred Rogers, who would grow up to be a television host, Mister Rogers, with his own “Neighborhood.” “Fred was a year ahead of me in school,” Palmer said, “but we knew each other pretty well. He was a good guy.” His mother—or maybe it was his grandmother—knitted those cardigan sweaters he would become famous for. Because they owned a piano, Arnie marked them down as wealthy. But they probably weren’t. “Fred took a couple of golf lessons from Pap,” he said.
Rogers was hardly athletic, but he traveled in the sporting circle because of a typical good turn he paid the star high school quarterback, Jim Stumbaugh, when Jim was hospitalized with an injury. Fred took notes for him in class and shuttled his homework back and forth. After Stumbaugh recovered, he persuaded the other jocks to give Fred a chance. “But Arnie was always friendly,” Rogers said, “even during my fat phase, when I was pretty lonely. He and I had airplanes in common, the love of them. With another friend, Rudy Melichar, we were forever assembling balsa wood and plywood and construction paper and lacquer model kits. Some that you could throw—and crash—others that just sat there. The more intricate and authentic, the better. Painting them green, silver, or gray and carefully applying the decals and so forth. Arnie and I smelled faintly of paint, glue, or varnish most of the time.”
Whenever they could, they’d race down the country club road to Latrobe Airport, formerly the Longview Flying Field, a gaping stretch of open land with a grass runway, no control tower, no instrument landing, no radio direction. They passed their hands over the few biplanes parked there and imagined themselves aviators like Wiley Post. They sat in the flight room by a potbelly stove and listened to the grizzled pilots dramatizing their closest calls. Arnie would become a pilot in time. (“Did Fred?” I asked him at the desk. “No, he didn’t,” Palmer said, “but you know the tremendous success Fred made of himself, so he had occasion to log lots of flying time in private planes. Both of us just loved the sky.”)
Arnie’s thickest confederate was an adult, Charlie Arch, a pro shop worker born without elbow joints and with only four fingers on each hand. But his heart was perfect. Throughout Palmer’s boyhood, Arch served as cheerleader and occasional angel, furnishing the compliments Pap withheld and tiding the boy over with small loans for cowboy movies and model airplane parts, the mounting sums of which Arnie kept meticulous track. “During the Depression,” he said, “Pap was making a meager salary and sometimes had to go to a friend to borrow money just to make ends meet. I remember how intent he was on repaying that debt. It became a part of my early life that you must pay back. It’s been with me all my life.” Almost the first check Palmer wrote as a professional golfer was for $1,000 to settle (over-settle) his long-standing tab with Charlie.
Twelve-year-old Palmer was with Arch in the pro shop when the bulletin came over the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. “I just wish I was older,” he told his friend bitterly. “I just wish I could fly.”
Arch’s brother, Tony, who would become a glider pilot in the war, took Arnie up in a Piper Cub, a two-seater, for his first flight. Palmer said, “I should have been scared to death, especially the way Tony flew the airplane, damned near stalling it a couple of times, but I wasn’t. I liked it. It thrilled me more than anything ever had. After that, I didn’t just want to fly. I had to fly.” He recounted for Rogers every second of the experience. “It felt as real to me,” Fred said, “as if I had been up there with him.”
They did not have religion in common. Rogers attended First Presbyterian and was devout. (He would become an ordained Presbyterian minister.) Arnold dutifully accompanied Cheech to Youngstown’s Lutheran Church, but his faith was informal. Like golf, he practiced it outdoors. Milfred’s nickname, “Deacon,” a family mystery never fully explained, had something to do with religion. But characteristically Pap wouldn’t talk about it. Arnie believed it referred to some service his father had performed for a black minister. (“That was the story, anyway,” Doc Giffin said.) “Pap did favors for everyone in town,” Palmer said. “But the simple fact is, he wasn’t a Milfred, and he wasn’t a Jerome. He was a Deacon.” A deacon of his own secular church. “I prayed for compliments from my father, but they never came, which was good in a way. Because I never got satisfied. I never stopped trying to please him. I think he knew that.”
Player said, “Arnold and I were waging a series of exhibition matches against each other in South Africa, and his father was along. We were driving back to the hotel in Cape Town, after I shot sixty-eight to his eighty, when he said, ‘I’ve had a terrible head cold all day.’ To which Deacon said, ‘Yeah, if I shot eighty and got whipped like that, I’d have a terrible head cold, too. Don’t give me that bullshit. You just played lousy.’ I got such a shock. I think Arnold wanted nothing so much in life as his father’s approval, and, for all that Arnie accomplished, I don’t believe he ever completely got it.”
In 1992, I was on the phone with Palmer. I had called to ask about a young South African comer named Ernie Els, who in his first American major had been paired with Arnold for the Thursday and Friday rounds of the PGA Championship at Bellerive in St. Louis. Neither man scored his best; both missed the cut. But the 22-year-old impressed the 62-year-old. “Right on the spot I extended an invitation for him to play in my tournament at Bay Hill,” Palmer said. “I don’t remember ever doing that before.”
“I can’t tell you how much it meant to me,” Els said. “It was like he opened the door to golf and invited me in. Arnold Palmer. I felt so glad and so lucky when I came to win his tournament eventually.” Twice.
What did Arnold see in Els?
“This kid has a real confidence in himself,” he told me, “and, as someone once said, he doesn’t have to talk about it. He’s one of those ‘I’ll show you’ types. I guess I kind of like that.”
By any chance was the “someone who once said” that a tough guy on a tractor?
Palmer didn’t answer. He just laughed.