WINNER:
Southern Intercollegiate
West Penn Amateur
Greensburg Invitational
Medalist, National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)
“Then I’d remember he was gone.”
PALMER’S FIRST GOLFING HERO was golf’s first television star, Lew Worsham, whose time in the light at two events lasted only seconds but stayed in Arnold’s memory permanently (for a reason). Worsham was the head professional at historic Oakmont Country Club in suburban Pittsburgh, just down the road from Latrobe, back when most tour players were club pros somewhere.
In the 1947 U.S. Open at St. Louis Country Club, the first televised Open (just locally, on KSD-TV), Worsham and Sam Snead played off over 18 holes. Still tied on the 90th green, both players had tap-in second putts under three feet for pars. A measurement was called for to see who was “away.” Lew was 29 inches from the hole, Sam 30½. Snead missed; Worsham made. Lew was the National Champion.
And the klieg lights weren’t through with him yet.
In the first golf tournament televised across the entire nation (by ABC), the Tam O’Shanter of 1953, he won again, even more abruptly. Standing in the final fairway, trailing clubhouse leader Chandler Harper by a stroke, Worsham struck a 110-yard pitching wedge that landed 40 feet from the hole, tumbled, skidded, reared back, wriggled, ran, and rolled straight into the cup for an eagle 2 and victory. It was the first golf shot that ever lifted anybody off a couch.
Bud Worsham, Lew’s kid brother, graciously shared him with Arnie, who met “Bubby” Worsham (“I couldn’t handle ‘Bubby,’ so I renamed him ‘Bud’”) at a Hearst newspapers tournament in Michigan, the biggest week on the junior calendar. Twelve months later, they rode a train together to and from the same event in California, 48-hour rides that solidified their alliance. Through an open hotel window in Hollywood they chipped golf balls to the crown of the Brown Derby restaurant and on a tour of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer met the bugle-nosed comedian Jimmy Durante and jointly fell in love with the aquatic movie star Esther Williams. “Bud had a game leg, like Pap,” Palmer said. “In a lot of ways, he reminded me of Pap. Bud could stand on just his good leg and hit the ball almost as far as I could on two. He was an indomitable character, a little dangerous but in an innocent way—fun. By the end of that trip, we were best friends.”
That was the summer after Palmer’s senior year in high school, and his plans were murky. Pitt and Penn State offered partial golf scholarships, tuition without room and board. But he couldn’t think of any way to swing the rest. So he was looking into business colleges or maybe the Army.
“Riding the train, Bud told me he had just accepted tuition, board, and books at a little Southern school called Wake Forest College, which of course I had never heard of. ‘It’s in Wake Forest, North Carolina,’ he said. ‘You can play there all winter long and barely need a sweater. You wouldn’t be interested in coming with me, would you? I’ll bet I could get you a full ride, too.’ And I’ll be darned if he didn’t.”
Arriving that autumn, they went straight to the Carolina Country Club in Raleigh, where Palmer shot 67 and Worsham 68, the first time either of them ever saw the course. For three years they were inseparable, rooming together and lateraling Wake’s number one and number two playing positions back and forth without rancor. Even though each lived to beat the other, neither ever rooted against his friend. For supplemental recreation, they wrestled in the dormitory. It took two men at a time, like Bud and Coach Johnny Johnston, to give Palmer a respectable match. “He still never lost,” said another team member, Dick Tiddy, who someday would be the head pro at Arnold’s Bay Hill Club in Orlando.
There haven’t been many better generations of collegiate golfers, counting Mike Souchak and Art Wall Jr. at Duke, Harvie Ward at North Carolina, Ken Venturi at San Jose State, Gene Littler at San Diego State, Don January and Billy Maxwell at North Texas State, and Dow Finsterwald at Ohio University.
“I’m four days older than Arnie,” Dow said. “Can’t you tell? Four days wiser, too, as I tell him all the time. When he and I were freshmen, our schools played a series of games all around the Carolinas. The first time out against me, he shot twenty-nine on the front. That was my introduction to the son of a gun.”
As sophomores, Bud and Arnie persuaded the athletic director, Big Jim Weaver, to let them convert the sand greens on Wake’s nine-hole course to grass. Weaver gave them a dollar an hour (to split), a wheelbarrow, two shovels, and access to a landscaping manual. Now Arnie was Pap at Latrobe in the 20s. These may have been his happiest days.
At the time, the Wake Forest campus was some 65 miles closer to Duke than it is now, only about 20 miles away then. On a Homecoming weekend, Bud urged Arnie to accompany him and basketball player Gene Scheer to a dance in Durham, a “mixer.” Worsham had a 1939 Buick. It wasn’t like Palmer to pass up a dance anywhere (as it combined two of his favorite things, pretty girls and discreetly palmed bourbon-and-Cokes). But instead he and Jim Flick, Scheer’s roommate, went to a movie. Flick was an athletic hybrid, part basketball player and part golfer, who would eventually achieve renown as a swing doctor for the likes of British Open champion Tom Lehman.
The following morning, Arnold looked over at Bud’s bed and saw it hadn’t been slept in. Neither had Scheer’s, across the hall. Palmer sat on his own bed for over an hour, full of dread. When Flick and Coach Johnston came to his door, the looks on their faces only confirmed what he already knew. “Heading to Durham in Johnny’s car,” Arnie said, “I think he told me they were dead. I’m not sure.” They passed the bridge where the car had run off the road and flipped over in a stream.
Then they started going to funeral parlors in Raleigh, a dull buzzing blur of funeral parlors. “Finally, we walked into one where a highway patrolman asked me, ‘Are you family? Can you make an identification?’ I said, ‘Best friend,’ and he took me into a back room [where both broken bodies were laid out together on one table. The shock of it, like a bomb going off, left him deaf and floating]. For some insane reason, we went looking for the Buick next.” They found it in a junkyard, crushed.
That night, undoubtedly with the best intentions, Flick moved Bud’s stuff out and his own stuff in with Arnie.
“You knew Flick, right?” Palmer asked me, sitting at his desk.
“Yes, I first met him in Cincinnati,” I said. “He was a teaching pro at the Losantiville club. Billed himself as the inventor of the ‘square-to-square’ method.”
“Square-to-square was old,” Arnold said, “when my father was young. I’m not proud of this, but I could never be close to Jim after he moved Bud out so soon. It’s not his fault, it’s mine. We were in the same business, but I just couldn’t know him. We’d say hello through the years, but I wasn’t able to say much more than that. He telephoned me now and then; I’m not sure I ever called him. We spoke on the phone just before he died [of pancreatic cancer in 2012, at 82], and you know something? He didn’t say a word about his illness. We just talked about golf. Some things, you never get over.”
Flick worked with Nicklaus late, after Jack turned 50.
“Oh, I know,” Palmer said, “I was there at the Tradition, Jack’s first senior event, when he turned to Jim on the practice tee and asked, ‘What do you see?’ Jim replied, ‘I see a feel player who’s become too technical.’ Jack won that tournament and thanked him afterward. Flick knew his stuff.”
Arnie came home from Bud’s funeral outside Washington, D.C., and, in a heartbroken fog, ghost-walking to classes, learning nothing, finished the semester at Wake, whose very name seemed to stand now for the vigil he was keeping. Then, essentially, he ran away. He didn’t want to go to college anymore. It’s not true, as people later said, that he didn’t want to play golf anymore. He longed to play golf, just not there.
“I was going crazy,” he said. “I kept turning around to tell Bud something, then I’d remember he was gone. If I’d have been with him that night, maybe I would have been at the wheel on the way home. I probably would have been. Everything might have been all right.”
To the puzzlement of Pap and with the understanding of Doris, Arnie joined the Coast Guard. As a yeoman.
He spent three years guarding coasts, first in Cape May, New Jersey (slipping over to Wildwood occasionally for nine holes of golf); later in Cleveland, playing a lakeside course where the flag sticks were sometimes frozen solid into the cups. In his dress whites, Palmer must have been presentable, because he was selected to be part of an honor guard at the Washington premiere of the movie Fighting Coast Guard, starring Brian Donlevy, attended by President Truman. But air-sea rescue intrigued Arnold more than Hollywood glamour. He still had a photograph of himself with Esther Williams, but flying beguiled him more.
The move to Cleveland was facilitated by an arm he broke (not his own) in a jujitsu class where his steel hands, powerful upper body, and wrestling experience from Wake Forest held him in better stead than his opponents. He was summoned to a captain’s mast—for punishment, he presumed—but instead was offered a transfer to whatever station in the country had an opening. For its proximity to Pennsylvania and for its golf courses, he chose Cleveland.
Hitchhiking home from Cleveland, wearing his uniform, carrying his golf clubs (a foolproof prop for hitchhiking), he was picked up by a large man heading to Harrisburg in a Cadillac. “You drive,” said the man, who immediately put his hand on Palmer’s leg after they settled into the front seat. “I knew about women,” Arnold said, “but I didn’t know about men.”
After being set straight (so to speak), the man decided he wasn’t going to Harrisburg after all. “The hell you aren’t,” Palmer said. “You said Harrisburg and we’re going to Harrisburg.” At the first Harrisburg exit, Arnie pulled over, grabbed his clubs and duffel, and said, “Thanks for the lift.”
An officer who was a keen golfer set Palmer to ramrodding the construction of a driving range and tried to talk him into applying for officer candidate school, with an additional two years’ commitment. Arnie was flattered but not tempted. Still, he wondered what he would do after his discharge. He wound up selling paint supplies in the morning and playing what he called “salesman’s golf” with potential customers in the afternoon. Palmer’s employer campaigned for him to return to Wake Forest to complete a business administration degree, and he did go back for a semester, taking over as interim coach (player-coach) from Johnny Johnston, who had inherited the A.D. job from Big Jim Weaver, now the commissioner of the new Atlantic Coast Conference.
Playing majestically, Palmer won the ACC individual championship but fell a few credits shy of a diploma and never did graduate. (“I must say,” he told a graduating class many years later, “that I was not a budding Rhodes Scholar during my undergraduate years—and you don’t need to giggle at that—but, thanks to some of my professors and the young man who quickly became my best friend when we entered Wake Forest together, I acquired my education—an education that has played an important part in the success I have had in life. Bud Worsham was that friend. Many of you do not know who he was. Let me tell you about him. He was more than a brother, closer than any brother could be . . .”)
Palmer resumed selling paint in Cleveland.
The choice between turning pro and remaining an amateur wasn’t as automatic then as it is now. Bobby Jones had proved a bigger fortune could be made serving on boards and with banks than on tour, and Jones hoped Jack Nicklaus, in particular, would follow his example. At the bottom of a last-ditch letter, Jones wrote Nicklaus, “But if you’re bound and determined to turn pro, I have had a very fine relationship over the years with the Spalding company. . . .”
There weren’t really any amateurs.
“I think of Palmer,” Finsterwald said, “as the greatest amateur-professional who ever lived. By that I mean he never stopped playing the game for the love of it, like an amateur. Sure, he liked making a nice living. But he loved to play. Arnie and I enjoyed a lot of the same things, like cowboy movies. Remember Bob Steele? Ken Maynard? Sunset Carson? Arnie will watch anything with manure in it. I can’t prove it, but I think Arnie dreamed of riding horses, strumming guitars, and shooting bad men. Except for Roy Rogers pictures, I know his favorite film of all time was Northwest Passage, starring Spencer Tracy, because Tracy reminded him of his dad.
“But the thing we truly had in common, the thing both of us cared about most of all, was playing golf. That may sound funny, but you’d be surprised how many good players, how many pros, weren’t able to enjoy it nearly as much as Arnie and I did. To us, it was more an avocation than a vocation. Check out his face after he pulls off a tough shot. The look of pure joy that comes over him. He’s alive.”
(Lee Trevino once said, “Arnold and I are the same. We have to slap rubber every day. Slap rubber. Nicklaus also likes to fish, ski, play tennis, and go to his kids’ football games. Player also likes to ranch and breed thoroughbreds. I’ve heard Gary say he’d rather win a Derby than a Masters. But Palmer and I have to hit golf balls every day. Slap rubber. It’s the only thing we really care about.”)
Finsterwald paused for a second, and then laughed.
“You know that PGA Tour slogan?” he said. “‘These guys are good.’ Well, I wish they’d make a new commercial showing Retief Goosen missing the little putt at Southern Hills and then winning the U.S. Open playoff the next day. ‘These guys are human.’ That’s Arnie more than anything. Human.”