4

1954

WINNER:

U. S. Amateur

Ohio Amateur

All-American Amateur

Atlantic Coast Conference Championship

Waite Memorial (with Tommy Sheehan)

“Are you ever going to stop screwing around and be a man?”

IN HIS New Yorker profiles of major golf championships, Herbert Warren Wind opened with the rocks; moved on to the snakes, the Indians, the settlers, and the architects; detailed a half dozen or so Walker Cups contested on the premises; then recapped one by one every previous major conducted there until finally coming to the tournament at hand. The New Yorker paid by the word.

But Herb could get to it quicker if he had to. At a previous post, with Sports Illustrated in the magazine’s rookie year of 1954, he used the opening paragraph to compare the finalists in that summer’s U.S. Amateur at the Country Club of Detroit: one, “a graying millionaire playboy who is a celebrity on two continents,” and the other, “a tanned muscular young salesman from Cleveland who literally grew up on a golf course.”

Wind was an officious-looking chap in a light-brown suit (picture a homicide inspector viewing the body), nowhere near as sour and severe as his countenance. He loved words and he loved golf. (Early one Masters week, he walked up to me in Augusta’s toy airport and inquired anxiously, “The golf course, is it firm?” “Hell, Herb,” I said, “I just got here.”) “There was no need to exaggerate the personalities of the two finalists or the nature of their duel,” he wrote, “for the contrast was a highly dramatic one without gilding one blade of grass.”

The graying millionaire playboy was 43-year-old Robert Sweeny, a California-born investment banker from London, Oxford University, and the Royal Air Force’s Eagle Squadron (Yanks piloting RAF bombers before America entered World War II), who won the British Amateur 17 summers earlier and spent six months of his year making financial killings in the States while playing golf with (and occasionally beating) Ben Hogan at Hogan’s winter retreat, Seminole Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.

To get to Sweeny, the tanned muscular, 24-year-old salesman had to win seven matches. He defeated Frank Strafaci, 1-up; John Veghte, 1-up; Richard Whiting, two extra holes; Walter Andzel, 5 and 3; Frank Stranahan, 3 and 1 (Stranahan, 32, a bodybuilder, once mauled him, 11 and 10, at a North and South Amateur); Don Cherry, 1-up; and Edward Meister Jr., three extra holes. Cherry was the Mafia singer who wasn’t yet married to Miss America of 1956, Sharon Ritchie, who eventually put him on the waiver wire in favor of Kyle Rote. Sweeny’s road to the finals included a 3 and 1 victory over Eddie Merrins, who would become Bel-Air Country Club’s fabled “Little Pro.”

The night before his semifinal match, the first of two 36-holers, Palmer telephoned Pap and Doris, who jumped in the car and drove from Latrobe to Grosse Pointe Farms, pausing for three hours in Ohio to nod off by the side of the road. Just before they arrived, Arnold kissed the Chicago model he had been squiring all week, patted her on the bottom, and sent her home.

His parents pulled up just as he was about to tee off against Meister, a 38-year-old publisher of trade papers for the fruit industry and a former captain of the golf team at Yale. It was an especially stifling August day in Michigan, and the match was as static as the breeze for all of the morning and much of the afternoon, until Meister seemed ready to assert himself down the stretch. He could have won their match with a 10-footer at the 35th hole, a 14-footer at the 36th, a five-footer at the 37th, or a 16-footer at the 38th, but missed them all. A slick five-foot putt Palmer had to make to send the match to extra holes was the putt that stayed with him forever. On the third extra hole, a 510-yard par 5, Palmer reached the green with a driver and 2-iron, anticlimactically two-putting for birdie to end the longest semifinal in Amateur history. It was Sweeny versus Palmer the next day for the title.

“He looked like a movie star” in pressed linen pants and an expensive haircut, Arnold said. “He was as thin as a reed” (and as high-waisted as the New York Giants shortstop Alvin Dark). Sweeny could make a blank white visor look important, and feel jaunty. He had a female companion in the gallery who was just about the most decorative young woman Palmer had seen since Esther Williams. “Let’s put it this way,” he said, “she was more than amply endowed.” At the fourth hole she squirmed through the ropes to toss her arms around Sweeny and give him a substantial kiss. He made a 45-footer at two, an 18-footer at three, and, to pay her back for the smacker, a 20-footer at four. “I was already three down,” Palmer said. “It’s not enough that he’s rich, handsome, a bomber pilot, and gets the girl, he also makes every damn putt he looks at.”

As they walked off the fourth green together, Sweeny pinched the back of Palmer’s neck (on top of everything else, Bob was six feet three, four or five inches taller than his opponent) and whispered something that was missed by Wind and the other reporters tramping behind. Smiling at the memory, Palmer said, “What he told me was, ‘Don’t worry, Arnie, you know I can’t keep this up forever.’ Bob was a real sportsman, a real gentleman. I appreciated that. Even during the nip and tuck of our match, I knew I would always have a good feeling about him.” And, true to his word, Sweeny three-putted the fifth.

But their game wasn’t squared until the 27th hole. “At lunch,” Palmer said, “I told myself, Stop playing him, start playing the golf course, which became my match-play strategy for the rest of my life. Bob made another long putt at the twenty-eighth hole to go one-up again, but I caught him at the thirtieth and went ahead for the first time all day at the thirty-second. I’d been outdriving him by thirty to forty yards, and finally my irons were kicking in.”

One hole in front going to the last, Palmer hit a particularly deep drive, absolutely on a string, and an iron shot hole-high that sounded like a tuning fork. It’s a myth that, if you lined up every great golfer on the same range without knowing who any of them were, you wouldn’t be able to tell the best players at a glance. The truth is, if you can get close enough, you can hear it: the crystal sound of silver on glass. Playing with Tom Kite and Payne Stewart in a practice round before the AT&T at Pebble Beach, I never had to turn to see who had just hit. Kite’s contact was only solid; Stewart’s was musical.

Sweeny hit his final drive into the wilderness, and after an extended search actually shanked his second shot. He wasn’t yet on the green in the hole he had to win. His subsequent concession was given wholeheartedly, and Palmer was the U.S Amateur Champion, 2-up. For some reason fathomable only to a USGA potentate, Sweeny was rewarded for his gracefulness with an arbitrary halve on the last hole. “Is that OK with you?” referee Joe Dey asked Arnold, who didn’t care. So it went on the board and in the books as 1-up. After a moment’s confusion, a brass band on the clubhouse terrace struck up “Hail to the Chief” and, this being Wolverine country, “Hail! to the victors valiant / Hail! to the conqu’ring heroes . . .”

Breaking out of a clinch with his mom, Arnie said, “Where’s my father? Let’s get Pap in here! He’s the one who really won the U.S. Amateur!” Just then Deacon broke through the crowd. He wasn’t smiling exactly, but Arnie could tell he was happy. “You did pretty good, boy,” he told his son, whose eyes filled with tears. It came over Palmer like a sunrise that he had just received a compliment from his dad.

Three months later, on November 17, Palmer wrote a letter to Dey, stating, “It is with mixed emotions that I advise you of my decision to turn professional. I feel the deepest appreciation to all USGA officers for the fine relationship I have enjoyed. Yet, I cannot overlook my life’s ambition to follow in the footsteps of my father and become a PGA pro. [Technically, despicably, his father was not a PGA pro. By the PGA’s rules, “cripples” were required to make special application, and Pap’s was denied.] We both have counted on this since I first started playing golf. My good fortune in competition this year indicates it is time to turn to my chosen profession.”

Leaning back in his office chair, he said, “Only the players seem to understand how meaningful the U.S. Amateur is. You can’t know how much it matters to us, how much it matters to me. Winning that tournament was, and still is, my proudest achievement in golf. I spent three hours one night with Tiger Woods when he was still at Stanford. More than three hours, four hours. At his request, too. It was good. I was playing at Silverado [in the Transamerica Seniors]. Among the many things we talked about at dinner were what he called [in that shorthand way young Woods had of speaking] the ‘U.S. Am.’ Winning three U.S. Amateurs in a row, and three consecutive USGA juniors before that, is absolutely incredible—all together, six straight years of match play. I think it’s his most amazing feat of all, and I think he’d say so, too. That dinner was the one the NCAA made a federal case out of just because I picked up the check. Fifty bucks. It almost cost Tiger the remainder of his college eligibility, and maybe helped nudge him into the pros.”

Nineteen fifty-four was also the year Palmer and Nicklaus first brushed, at Sylvania Country Club near Toledo. Arnold was a 24-year-old amateur defending his Ohio Amateur championship (successfully), and Jack was a 14-year-old dreamer a year away from qualifying for a U.S. Amateur, six and seven years away from winning it twice. In the clattering rain, Palmer was the lone player practicing on the range, drilling iron shots under the storm. “About quail high,” Nicklaus said, tracing the trajectory with the flat of his hand. Of course, Arnold didn’t know who the boy was who was watching from a hillside, but then, Jack didn’t know who the man was he was watching. The metronome kept clicking back and forth in the rain, and Nicklaus thought he could hear the sound of a pickaxe against the earth.

“I just saw this unbelievably strong guy,” he said, speaking in his Florida office, “beating the ball to death—he was a beater more than a swinger in those days. Knocking down nine-irons, lower and harder than you could believe. Later, someone told me who it was, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s Arnold Palmer.’”

They would end up hyphenated like Dempsey-Tunney. Nobody wanted Dempsey beaten, either.

Young Nicklaus had just come through a touch of polio, Pap’s disease. “I had polio when I was thirteen,” Jack said nonchalantly, as if this weren’t surprising. His body ached, his joints stiffened, he lost his coordination and 25 pounds. Kid sister Marilyn, three years younger, was afflicted at the same time. It took her a full year to walk again, Jack only a few weeks. But the fiery joints that accompanied post–polio syndrome stayed with him from then on. Arnold probably never knew how much Jack and Pap had in common. It mightn’t have made much difference anyway, in Palmer and Nicklaus’s complicated relationship.

In 1997, 21-year-old Masters champion Tiger Woods was sitting on the single bed in his former room at Cypress, California, surrounded by the posters (Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi), football cards (Chargers Hall of Fame wide receiver Charlie Joiner), and bumper stickers (“I’m with That’s Incredible!”) of his childhood. “For That’s Incredible!,” he said, “I sat on Fran Tarkenton’s lap, and at the end of the show hit Wiffle balls over the heads of the audience. I beaned a cameraman. Everyone thought it was hilarious, but I was mortified.”

Taped to the wall above the bed’s headboard was the famous newspaper clipping of Nicklaus’s milestones by age, yellowed from all the years Woods spent checking them off one by one.

“Age 13, shot a 69 . . .

“Age 15, played in U.S. Amateur . . .

“Age . . .”

“That top one,” I said, “was actually a day-night doubleheader.”

“How do you mean?” he asked.

I repeated for him what Nicklaus told me:

“My dad and I went out late on a summer afternoon to play just the front nine at Scioto [the Columbus course where Bobby Jones won the second of his four U.S. Opens]. We did that a lot. This time I shot thirty-five and begged Dad to play the back nine. But he said, ‘Nope. Mom and Marilyn are waiting dinner.’”

After a silent, sullen ride home, Charlie Nicklaus pulled up to the house, turned off the engine, and said, “But you know something, Jack? If we’re mindful of your mother’s feelings and still manage to eat quickly, we can be on the tenth tee in thirty-five minutes.”

When they reached the par-5 18th hole, it wasn’t just dusk, it was dark, and the sprinklers were out. Jack said, “I hit a driver off the tee and I don’t know what club second. But something on the green. In those days there were heavy hoses attached to the sprinklers, and I remember Dad and I had to pull hard to clear a path so I could putt. I had about a thirty-five-footer for eagle and sixty-nine. It went right in the center. That was the first time I ever broke seventy. I was thirteen.”

“I was twelve,” Tiger said.

Over the Labor Day weekend of 1954, the newly minted National Amateur Champion traveled to Shawnee on Delaware, Pennsylvania, to play in Fred Waring’s two-man Bill Waite Memorial Tournament at the personal invitation of the famed orchestra leader (Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians) and patent holder on the Waring blender. One of the junior hostesses was a freckled brunette college student with an upturned nose, Winifred Walzer, whose father Shube owned a canned goods company. Palmer was introduced to Winifred and Waring’s daughter Dixie on a Tuesday. He and Winnie held hands for five days, after which he asked her to marry him. As the first-place trophy was being presented to Palmer and partner Tommy Sheehan, “Uncle Fred” (as Miss Walzer called Waring) all but announced the engagement.

Arnold started to win her, she told Bob Drum years later, when he let her in on a proposition he just that second received from a dancing partner, an older golfer’s older wife (the mother of four children, by the way). “Let’s you and me run away together,” the woman whispered, nibbling his ear. In a subsequent movie about Philadelphia’s Main Line, The Young Philadelphians, Alexis Smith portrayed an equally desperate older woman, and Paul Newman played an equally petrified younger man.

“When he included me that way,” Winnie told Drum, “I got a wonderful feeling of confidence that, if I did marry him, he’d always tell me everything.” She was probably too young then to understand that whispering women might be part of the deal.

Winnie had studied at Brown University and its distaff branch, Pembroke, and she certainly seemed like a Philly Main Liner—aristocratic families in Tudor homes with old money and plenty of it. But while her parents were prosperous enough, they were far from grand. Shube was emphatically a down-to-earth character, and he didn’t consider a blue-collar golf bum, no matter how good-looking, to be a catch for his only daughter.

Out of a golf bet at the storied Pine Valley club in southern New Jersey, near Philly, Palmer promoted a diamond ring. Then or now, almost nobody playing Pine Valley for the first time broke 80. A quarter of a century after the scrub-and-sand course appeared like Brigadoon in 1913, someone finally shot a par 70 the first time out, but it took Masters and U.S. Open champion Craig Wood to do it. Pine Valley wasn’t a place usually associated with romance, either. “Barbara and I stopped off there on our honeymoon,” Nicklaus said. “We came from Hershey,” where Jack Grout, his boyhood teacher, had once been an assistant pro. “I always wanted to play Pine Valley and wasn’t smart enough to call ahead. In the pro shop I started to tell them, ‘My wife and I . . .’ ‘Your what!?’ they said. ‘Where is she now?’ ‘In the car right out front.’ ‘Oh, my dear Lord!’”

While Jack played the course, Barbara circled the property, being careful not to contaminate the male-only grounds with womanhood, occasionally catching glimpses of her new husband through the greenery. He shot 74.

By the terms of Palmer’s wager, for every stroke under 72 he would receive $200; for every one over 80, he would have to pay $100. So no winnings for the likeliest score (72 to 80), but with a definite potential for ruin. He opened with a bogey but closed with a 67. Winnie had her rock.

A couple of months went by.

Palmer said, “Pap and I drove to Miami, to my first tournament as a pro, staying together in the same motel room. I missed the cut and didn’t even go back to the room Friday, completely ducking him. I went out on the town with that model from Chicago [who had rematerialized]. When I eventually got back to the motel, Pap was waiting up. He read me the riot act. ‘You’re too lovesick to play golf,’ he said, ‘but not too lovesick to go out with another woman when you’re engaged? Are you ever going to stop screwing around and be a man?’”

Arnie had no answer for that.

“Where’s your fiancée right now?” Deacon demanded.

“Coopersburg [just outside Bethlehem, Pennsylvania].”

“Get your ass to Coopersburg!”

“I dropped Pap at the airport and drove all night, showing up at Winnie’s door needing a shave. No wonder her father hated me.”

They ended up eloping (“I took her out the window, as a matter of fact”), but, as elopements go, it was fairly crowded. Deacon and Doris were there, with both sets of Arnold’s grandparents, and little brother Jerry. Shube gave it a pass. Palmer said, “The hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was ask Shube Walzer for five hundred bucks to stake me on tour. Pap gave us five hundred, too. We put most of it into an old trailer shaped like a loaf of bread,” the first of two trailers (containing a toilet, a shower, a kitchen, and a bed). Towed by a weary pink Ford. Sometimes pushed up hills by Winnie.

Before the caravan pulled out of Latrobe, Pap brought Arnie to a living room window and said, “Do you see that tractor [their vintage tractor] out there? If you listen to all of the other pros on the practice tee and take their advice about your swing and your game, that tractor will be waiting for you when you get back.”