Men in Green

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by Michael Bamberger


  Mike asked Arnold if there was a party in Latrobe after he won his first tour event, the 1955 Canadian Open.

  “No,” Arnold said. “It was quiet.”

  You can see clips from that win in the Arnold Palmer Room at the USGA museum in the New Jersey horse country. It also has home movies of Arnold, Arnold doing a Pennzoil ad, Arnold holing out on the eighteenth green on Sunday at Augusta in ’58, when he won the first of his four titles there. You can see skinny Ken Venturi on the green with him, warmly congratulating him. The scene, in black and white, has a certain timeless grace.

  Mike and I sat there listening to Arnold checking off all these old names. I knew most of them, and Mike knew every last one. Dutch Harrison, Dick Mayer, Tommy Bolt, Billy Casper. Ky Laffoon, Porky Oliver. Gene Littler. Hogan and Nelson and Snead. The Worsham brothers and Skip Alexander. (Mike played golf for his son, Buddy Alexander, at Georgia Southern.) Ed Furgol. Harvie Ward. Fred Hawkins. Al Besselink. Mike and I once spent half a day with Besselink, a tour star from the fifties with a loaf of yellow hair. Bessie was a habitué of the South Florida golf scene but also well known at the betting windows at Gulfstream and Hialeah. Mike had been quoting for years something Bessie told us that day: “Don’t date no brokes.”

  “I’ll never forget this,” Arnold said. “Winnie and I are driving from Baton Rouge to Pensacola. We’re watching the car in front of us. All of a sudden sparks are coming out of the back of that car. I’m watching. And I thought, I’m seeing something that I don’t understand.

  “I pulled up closer to them and there’s Besselink hanging out of the back door of the car, grinding a wedge on the highway. That’s what the sparks were.”

  You could see it like it was in a movie.

  “It really happened,” Arnold said.

  “Al Besselink’s a crazy man,” Mike said.

  “Oh, shit,” Arnold said in casual agreement.

  • • •

  Arnold’s wealth is vast. In 2000 he was worth over $300 million, despite earning only $4.4 million on the regular and senior tours over a fifty-year career. But Pennzoil loved him, and so did, at various times, Hertz, Rolex, Wilson, Callaway, Ketel One, Arizona Beverage, Lamkin grips, the Bay Hill Club & Lodge, Golf magazine, Golf Digest, Random House, Cessna, United Airlines, Sears, various auto dealers in Charlotte and Orlando and Latrobe, Golf Channel, and the long list of developers who hired Arnold as a course architect.

  That list barely scratches the surface. It also included Toro (lawn mowers), Robert Bruce (clothing), Paine Webber (money). Plus Palmer’s forays into dry-cleaning and golf-club manufacturing and, less significantly, a product called Arnold Palmer Foot Detergent. You can still find Arnold Palmer Indoor Golf, stepbrother of Bobby Hull Hockey, at your better yard sales. In that game, the toy Arnold takes the club back shut, just as the real Arnold did. Hogan hated that move.

  Mike has an abiding interest in money. He’s tried, with some success, to teach me about option trading, but it was work. Arnold is more like Mike. When he talked about money—the cost of his first house, the size of his first tour check, the expense of his first engagement ring—he was always precise. Mike was hanging on every word. One of his tests for character is how people spend and save their money.

  “At what point did you buy your first home?” Mike asked.

  Arnold’s answer took him straight to Ed Anderson, the successful Latrobe lumberman he caddied for, who gradually raised Arnold’s rate from a quarter to a half-dollar to a dollar. No wonder Arnold hung close.

  “I said to him, ‘Mr. Anderson, I’d like to buy some land from you.’ This was in ’56.

  “He said, ‘Where’s that, Arnie?’

  “I said, ‘Across the road from the course.’

  “He said, ‘You can’t afford that land.’

  “I said, ‘Yeah, well, I’d like to try to buy it.’

  “He said, ‘I’ll sell you enough for a house.’ ”

  Mr. Anderson sold just under two acres to Arnold. Nearly sixty years later that land was still home to the original Arnold-and-Winnie rancher, the new home where Arnold lived with Kit, and Arnold’s suite of offices at the end of Legends Lane. It was all impressively modest. It was right out of the Warren Buffett playbook.

  Living within one’s means happens to be a central tenet of Mike’s life. You don’t even want to hear him on the subject of young tour players with one or two wins who fly on private jets and live in coastal mansions with his-and-her Land Rovers on their Belgian block driveways. He knows what they don’t: Someday they will stop making short putts.

  Mike asked Arnold, “At what point did you feel secure, that you knew you were going to be a professional golfer for an extended period of time?”

  Mike once told me that he turned pro “to avoid getting a real job.” When he was starting out, he never expected he’d be able to make a living from his play.

  “I never took that attitude,” Arnold said. “I always remained very money-conscious.” He never allowed himself to feel secure. He never allowed himself to think he was set for life.

  They were comparing notes, pro to pro. The scale of achievement was different but the similarities were considerable.

  Arnold talked about the old tour apprentice rules, by which a player had to wait six months before he could cash his first check. Mike knew about that system, but he was appalled all over again.

  “Six months!” Mike said.

  Arnold made a sad nod.

  Mike then told Arnold about a prominent pro with a massive house in foreclosure, a player who’d had some excellent years and endorsement deals worth tens of millions of dollars. Arnold was all ears.

  He asked, “Where is that money?”

  • • •

  Arnold has two grandsons. One, Sam Saunders, grew up at Bay Hill and was in his mid-twenties. Sam had a good college golf career at Clemson and played some on the PGA Tour, often on sponsors’ exemptions with Arnold’s fingerprints on them. Most of Sam’s professional golf has been on the Web.com tour, golf’s answer to Class AAA ball. There could not have been a thousand golfers in the world who were better than Sam, but every year new ones come into the pro game and existing ones try to figure out ways to hang on. The game is actually vicious. Sam could make it on tour, but the odds are long. You have to make many smart decisions about your swing and whom to trust with it, what clubs to play, how and when to practice, whom to hire as your caddie, when to take dead aim, when to lay up. You can get all sorts of advice in golf, but when you’re standing over your ball you’re all alone.

  Arnold’s other grandson, Will Wears, was in high school. Arnold described him as the best player on his school team, breaking 80 regularly and showing interest in the game.

  Arnold spent many hours with both grandsons. Will was living near Latrobe, and Arnold said he wanted golf instruction from his grandfather. Mike asked about Sam. Was he getting from Arnold the kind of golf and life lessons Arnold received from his father?

  There was a longish pause before Arnold answered. It was his first cautious moment with us.

  “It’s a little different; I’m not his father,” Arnold said.

  Profound.

  • • •

  Before our day in Latrobe was over, Arnold turned himself into a tour guide. “Have you ever been inside the house?” he asked.

  We shook our heads.

  “Well, I’ll show it to you.”

  For the first time we could see Arnold’s age. With every step he took, his shoulders listed to one side and then the other.

  The first stop on the house tour was in front of a gentle landscape painting given to Arnold for his thirty-seventh birthday in 1966 by its painter, Dwight Eisenhower.

  It was a mountain house, really, sturdy and handsome. Mike said, “It’s a house where you can tell people actually live.” There was almost nothing golfy in it except the family dog, a golden retriever named Mulligan.

  “Where’s Mommy?” Arnold asked Mulligan.

>   Kit, who designed the house, came in, shook hands with us, and said to me, “Nice to meet you.”

  Arnold said, “You’ve met Michael before.”

  We had met, but it had been years earlier. I don’t know how Arnold could have remembered. His ability to make people comfortable is astounding.

  Arnold took us through the house. The tour concluded in his master bathroom. It was not ornate. No gold anything. Just a nice bathroom with a deep tub. Arnold showed it with pride. You can probably guess how it compared to the loo from his Depression-era boyhood home or even to the one in the rancher he shared with Winnie. That master bathroom was paid for, when you get right down to it, by his skill in golf. Everything in his life followed from that. You could tell Arnold knew that and never forgot it, not even for a minute.

  • • •

  Earlier, Arnold had taken us into his workshop, near his office. In the workshop were hundreds of golf clubs and an elaborate painting that a fan had sent, diagraming every shot Arnold hit en route to winning the 1961 British Open at Royal Birkdale.

  “When I get pissed off at everybody, I come in here and work on the clubs,” Arnold said. “Not as much as I used to, but I still do.”

  Next to the workshop was his airplane room, with models and photographs of the eleven planes he has owned. In 1976 Arnold made it into the Guinness Book of World Records by circumnavigating the globe in a Lear 36 in about fifty-eight hours. When he spoke of his planes he sounded like he was in his fifties again, when he was winning (on the senior tour), Peggy and Amy were out of the house, Winnie was busy with her stuff (hospital philanthropy), and Arnold could go just about anywhere he wanted, whenever he wanted. What freedom.

  Arnold kept a pilot’s license for fifty-five years and had given it up only recently. He told us about a “dogfight” he once had over the Atlantic with another civilian pilot, each in an F-15 borrowed from the United States Air Force. I didn’t know you could borrow planes from the United States Air Force. Arnold said that was his fee for giving a clinic at the Langley Air Force Base golf course. “I threw up all over myself,” Arnold said. “I’m just being honest.”

  • • •

  Arnold’s docent work concluded in the office lobby, where his presidential collection was assembled. The people at the World Golf Hall of Fame must have fantasies about it: filled scorecards, golf balls, clubs, bag tags, all connected to the many golf games and White House visits Arnold has had with many of the twentieth century’s First Duffers.

  Palmer hadn’t met Obama and he never met Kennedy. He and JFK had a Palm Beach golf game in the works for Christmastime 1962 but it got canceled when Kennedy’s back went out. Kennedy didn’t forget. In the summer and early fall of ’63, he had the White House photographer, Cecil Stoughton, shoot sixteen-millimeter film of his swing, with the intention that Palmer would come to the White House, review the footage, and offer the former Harvard golfer (freshman team) some tips. Then came November 22.

  The film was buried in a vault at the Kennedy Library until a reporter on Cape Cod uncovered it. Many years too late to help the man, Arnold analyzed JFK’s stylish, relaxed swing. In one round Kennedy is wearing pink pants and Ray-Bans and his shirttail is out. He looks like a preppy movie producer on vacation. The caddies are skinny teenagers in country-boy dungarees and white T-shirts they borrowed from James Dean. The motorized golf carts have three wheels. Jackie is in the background now and again. A few years earlier I had watched the film with Arnold. He said, “Look at Jackie—she’s smoking!” Arnold’s own war with cigarettes went on for years. His eye for pretty women never diminished.

  Near a corner of the lobby was a golf bag stuffed with Eisenhower’s clubs. A wall was dotted with presidential photos, spanning nearly a half century. One showed Arnold playing with Jerry Ford. They’re cracking up about something. “He was my buddy,” Arnold said. Deacon Palmer was a Roosevelt Democrat, but Arnold, like a lot of golfers, checked in early with the Grand Old Party and stayed there. There was a photo of Kissinger on a sofa with Pat Nixon and Dolores Hope. They all look sort of stuffed. The whole lobby was like a tribute to a lost world. “Jerry Ford’s turning golf into a contact sport,” Bob Hope used to say. Who’s writing golf jokes today?

  Arnold told us about a round he played recently with Bill Clinton at a course called Trump National Golf Club Hudson Valley, in New York. Mike and I played there once with Trump, who played well but didn’t stop talking. I lost a dozen balls and came off the eighteenth green with a throbbing headache. I found aspirin in the locker room, where Trump’s locker sits in a row with others bearing shiny nameplates for Rudy Giuliani, Joe Torre, and Lou Rinaldi, a scratch player and Trump’s pavement guy. Trump made Clinton an honorary member of the club.

  “Clinton can play a little bit,” Palmer said. “But he hits this one shot that goes way right. A wild shot. He looks at me with this shit-eating grin and says, ‘I promise you: You’ll never see me go that far right again.’ ”

  • • •

  Not even a mile from Arnold’s office is a giant warehouse that Arnold calls the barn. (Simplicity is one of Arnold’s chief gifts.) Arnold’s brother, Jerry, thirteen years younger and the former superintendent of the Latrobe course, gave Mike and me a tour. Evidently, Arnold’s mother couldn’t throw out anything, and Arnold was the same way. There were scores of bag tags, thousands of clubs, hundreds of books, boxes and boxes of photos, canister after canister of network film from various tournaments, the antique tractor from a famous Pennzoil ad, dozens of artworks sent to him by fans, and more leather golf shoes than you’d want to count.

  “This can’t be every pair of golf shoes he’s ever had, can it?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Jerry said.

  “It probably is!” Mike said.

  Mike loved Palmer. Being in that barn was like touring the Louvre for Mike. Jerry thought Mike was the first tour player to see it.

  “You figure three, four pair a year, for fifty years, this could be all of them,” Mike said. He picked up a shoe. “You know what I like? You feel how heavy this shoe is? It just seems like everything they made then had more quality.”

  “The amazing thing,” Jerry said, “is that we could bring Arnold in here and he could tell you what shoes he wore at what tournament.”

  “Unbelievable,” Mike said, responding not really to Jerry but to his awe at the whole scene. He picked up an old iron and said, “Look at these irons. Would you look at them?”

  The irons were old Wilson Staffs, the forebears of the club Mike used when he nearly won the U.S. Open. I looked at them. They looked tiny, obsolete—beautiful.

  • • •

  The warehouse tour was the final thing we did before leaving Latrobe, but for this report I have saved lunch for last. We ate in the Latrobe Country Club grillroom. Arnold introduced Mike to the clubhouse manager as “the guy Hale Irwin beat in the U.S. Open. They had a playoff.”

  Arnold is an expert on the subject of losing U.S. Open playoffs. He had been defeated by Nicklaus at Oakmont near Pittsburgh in the ’62 playoff, by Julius Boros at the Country Club in Brookline in ’63, and by Billy Casper at Olympic in San Francisco in ’66. In Arnold’s day, the Masters was charming and clubby and genteel, and Arnold won it four times. In more recent years, it has become the prized jewel of golf events. It gives its winners something money cannot buy: the ultimate golf time-share, complete with a parking space near the clubhouse and a green sport coat to wear inside it. But for Arnold, for Mike, for any American touring pro who grew up in a less cushy time, the national open will always be more important. They belonged to a country-first generation and they welcomed the tournament’s extreme challenge. It’s a modest link between Mike and Arnold that they both know what it’s like to lose a U.S. Open in a playoff. But it’s significant.

  We sat at a round table, Arnold, Kit, Doc, Mike, me, and Pete Luster, Arnold’s pilot. I ordered an Arnold Palmer. I’ve seen Arnold have a martini at lunch, or a beer or a glass or t
wo of wine, but on this day he ordered a Coke Zero. Mike was paying attention. He was going to order whatever Arnold ordered.

  We talked about the Congressional Gold Medal that Arnold had just received and made a list of the five other athletes who had received it. Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, and Byron Nelson came readily. The fifth name was elusive for a minute until Doc remembered it: Roberto Clemente, the Hall of Fame outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who died while doing relief work for earthquake victims.

  We talked about the results of the World Golf Hall of Fame voting and whether Fred Couples deserved his spot. Arnold said he had voted for him. That led me to ask Arnold how he would compare Tiger and Fred, just for pure golf talent. Many knowledgeable people, like Mike, will argue that nobody has ever hit a higher percentage of flush shots than Fred.

  “That’s very difficult for me to tell you about,” Arnold said. “Let me think about it some.”

  I figured it was a topic that, for whatever reason, Arnold didn’t want to get into. We moved on to other things. The Ryder Cup. Kit and Arnold’s annual trip to watch the Pirates and Cubs play. The Wake Forest–Duke football game. What happens to players when they go to the broadcast booth.

  A full fifteen minutes had passed when Arnold said, “I’ve been thinking about your question.” The table went quiet, and I realized almost immediately that Arnold was answering a question that was far different and more interesting than the one I had asked him.

  “Tiger was somewhat of a robot golfer,” Arnold said. “He was so endeared to his father and what his father had him doing that it is almost difficult to explain. I watched him practice at Isleworth when he was in the midst of it. As long as he stuck to the routine that his father had laid out for him he was going to succeed. Had he continued to do that he probably could have established a record that would never have been broken.”

 

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