MY FIRST YEAR AT the Masters was 1972. Only two players broke 70 on Thursday: the eventual winner, Jack Nicklaus, and Sam Snead, who turned 60 years old a month later. Arnold Palmer shot 70.
In the interview room (the Charles Bartlett Lounge) of the old green Quonset hut that housed the press in those days, a nervous reporter put an awkward question to Nicklaus, who made a little joke at the fellow’s expense, then answered it. Something similar happened during Palmer’s birdies-and-bogeys session, except, this time, when a rattled kid started to fall off the ledge, Palmer reached out with that strong forearm, steadied him, saved him, reworded the question, and answered it before anyone in the room knew what happened. I remember thinking, It’s a natural grace.
The first time I had Palmer to myself was in Cincinnati during the early 1970s at a one-day charity event.
“What’s the charity getting and what are you getting?” I asked him. His eyebrows shot up.
“You’ll have to see [agent Mark] McCormack about the charity,” he said. “I’m getting twelve thousand dollars, Gary Player’s getting eight thousand, and everyone else is getting a grand apiece [even the winner, Hubert Green]. Anything else you want to know?”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t ever apologize for doing your job,” he told me.
Throughout the years, I watched him at many tournaments on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. I was at Oakmont in Pennsylvania when, with six holes left to play, Palmer was sure he was winning the U.S. Open only to hear the thunder of Johnny Miller’s 63 up ahead. I was at Medinah in Illinois when the vinegar between Arnold and Jack finally spilled out. I was at Muirfield Village in Ohio when they reconciled. And I was at Augusta in Georgia on the Wednesday when they played their first practice round with 20-year-old amateur Tiger Woods.
For Golf Digest, I went to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, to write “Arnie turns 60,” “Arnie turns 70,” and “Arnie turns 80” pieces. Sitting at his office desk with his adjutant, Doc Giffin, on the couch, Palmer talked his life story to me in three volumes and complete chapters too detailed to fit in Golf Digest. Like the nightmare of being taken by a highway patrolman to identify best friend and roommate Bud Worsham’s body at Wake Forest College.
Giffin had been the tour’s traveling press secretary in the ’60s, driving from tournament to tournament, hauling all the decimal points in the backseat. At the Western Open in Chicago, Doc witnessed a tableau that changed his life. A college journalist weighed down by a bulky tape recorder requested a sit-down interview with Palmer, who said fine. After they finished, the student realized to his horror that he had neglected to turn on the machine. “That’s all right,” Arnold said. “Let’s start over and do it again.” Later, when Palmer asked Giffin to throw in with him, the incident of the tape recorder swayed him.
Along the way, I discussed Palmer with Nicklaus, Player, Snead, Byron Nelson, Dow Finsterwald, Ken Venturi, Tom Watson, Lee Trevino, Raymond Floyd (I think Floyd would tell you we’ve talked more about Palmer than we have about Floyd)—everyone but Ben Hogan. The only time I ever spoke with Hogan, at Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, Arnold wasn’t mentioned, which would have come as no surprise to Palmer. “Hogan never called me by my name,” he said coldly. “Never.”
After Nicklaus and I finished an afternoon-long hit-and-run conversation on a bustling workday at his Florida office (considerately, Jack had said, “I’ll keep leaving and coming back; you keep asking questions”), he kicked off a shoe to show me his hammertoe. Only Nicklaus would think anyone could find his hammertoe interesting. Too casually he mentioned “one of those old Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf things is on TV tonight: me and [Ben] Crenshaw.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You won.”
He laughed. “I suppose we’re all a little like that,” he said, “even Palmer.”
Snead and Nelson kept score by Hogan; Nicklaus and Player by Palmer.
“And Hogan was there . . . and Hogan was there . . . and Hogan was there . . . ,” said Lord Byron, recapping 1945 for me, the barely believable year when Nelson won 18 tournaments, 11 in a row. Hogan, Snead, and Nelson were all born in 1912, Byron first. “I was alive when the Titanic went down,” he said triumphantly. “Hogan wasn’t!”
I could have made my own way to Player’s farm north of Johannesburg, but, being a courtly host, he sent a car to my hotel (appropriately enough, a Volkswagen Golf). The driver was a young black man named David. Leaving the city behind, where the newspapers were throbbing with a black-on-white commando attack at the King William’s Town Golf Club (four dead, 20 wounded), we rolled into the countryside on a shiny Sunday.
“It sounds bad,” David said. “It is bad. But it’s getting better.”
This was the mantra of South Africa.
At a sign that said “Blair Atholl” we veered onto a dark path that led to a beautiful little forest, then to a creek and an entranceway where a brightly uniformed sentry popped out of a box like someone out of Joseph Conrad’s imagination. “Sometimes,” David said, “when you come to a place like this, it’s like you mustn’t go away again.”
Five hundred black children went to school every day at Gary and Vivienne’s home. It started with their workers’ children, and grew. Singing filled the property. “Listen,” Player whispered. Accompanying the song was the squeak of gumboot dancing and the smoke of learning. “Isn’t it lovely? Education is the light. South Africa is at a crossroads and the children are the key. They’ll lead, as usual. Look at them: some barefoot but all in a jacket and tie.”
With intense eyes, black as coal, Player told me, “I loved it when Jack and Arnie were partners. I hated it when they got so competitive—too competitive. But I knew they were both very good men. I just waited the cold spell out.”
In this modest account (personalized, too, I hope you don’t mind), you should know that on the frequent occasions where Palmer was simply holding forth, he was at his office desk in Latrobe, surrounded by mementos (for instance, a baseball signed by Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski) but only one loving cup, the Canadian Open trophy, representing the first of Palmer’s 92 professional victories. (He is cuddling it on the cover of this book.) It came in 1955 along with a check for $2,400, a typical winner’s share then.
On a corner of the desk crouched a silver cigarette case, a gift from the Augusta National Golf Club to all of the competitors’ wives, badly dented when Arnold threw his spikes at it in anger after blowing the tournament. He kept the bashed little box on shameful display as a perpetual reminder to himself.
A low circular table of worn and faded walnut was the room’s most distinctive furnishing, inlaid under glass with four gold medals from the Masters, two from the Open Championship, one from the U.S. Open, one from the U.S. Amateur, and none from the PGA Championship, together with a score of silver medals from all four majors (no fewer than four second places from the U.S. Open alone, three of those coming in 18-hole playoffs.) Three blank circles stood out in green. Were they ever filled, he’d have immediately drilled a few more. “Don’t you always want to leave a little space,” he told me, “for the future?”
Prominent among the photographs crowding the walls was one of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the Olympic hurdler (Gold), javelin thrower (Gold), and high jumper (Bronze), Ladies Professional Golf Association co-founder, 41-time tournament winner, three-time U.S. Women’s Open champion, six-time Associated Press female athlete of the year, and member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, who died at 45. She won all of her Opens by at least eight strokes, the last by 12, one month after colon cancer surgery, wearing a colostomy bag. The most telling and least told of her many bequests to the world was the effect she had on Palmer and therefore the effect she had on golf and sports, especially in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.
“She came to Latrobe [tiny Latrobe], believe it or not, for an exhibition,” he said. “I was about thirteen. We played golf with her, my father and I. Babe had a lot of game, but she had even more showmanship [‘Pardon me, folks, while I loosen my girdle’], which was a revelation to me. Up until then, I had my head down, competing. I just wanted to win. But, while watching her showing off—both her skills and her personality—it occurred to me that I was a showoff, too. I wanted to entertain the people and earn their cheers. Those weren’t just strangers standing there; they were part of it. Babe taught me that.”
A bathroom was handy to his left, a metal shop just a few steps away, with an iron vise clamped to a rugged workbench stacked with leaded tape, lacquer, shafts, heads, grips, epoxies, hammers, saws, rasps, wrenches, and all the other accouterments for fiddling with golf clubs.
Now and then he’d get up and do so, still talking. “This is my lair,” he said. A tablet hanging near a cuckoo clock read in part:
If you think you are beaten, you are.
If you dare not, you don’t.
If you’d like to win but think you can’t,
It’s almost certain you won’t.
Life’s battles don’t always go
To the strongest or fastest man,
But sooner or later the man who wins
Is the man who thinks he can.
Absent friends like Dave Marr, Bob Rosburg, Herb Wind, and Bob Drum were of supreme help here without knowing it. The Drummer, a perfectly named percussion instrument, was boy Palmer’s Boswell/town crier at the Pittsburgh Press. “Bob was on the case when Arnold was a freshman or sophomore in high school,” said Giffin, a Pittsburgher himself, “and by the time Arnold won the West Penn Junior at seventeen, everyone in town was convinced, including me.”
In the fedora ranks at the 1960 U.S. Open, Drum and Dan Jenkins of the Fort Worth Press were an entry, 1 and 1A. Born in December of 1929, sixty-four days after Palmer, my friend Dan was a rich source and an ideal sounding board. This book is dedicated to him.