Men in Green

by Michael Bamberger

  • • •

  Over the years, in many private dinners and eventually in public, Ken maintained that Arnold had broken a rule en route to winning his first major, the 1958 Masters. As far as I know, Ken is the only person ever to question Arnold’s fidelity to the rule book. The charge was bad enough, and the implication was worse. Ken was saying that Arnold was a fraudulent winner of that Masters, when Fred Hawkins and Doug Ford finished a shot out of first and Ken finished a shot behind them. “They were robbed,” Ken wrote. That sentence was a flat-out attack.

  To Ken, the Masters and Augusta National represented everything that was great and possible in the world, but his relationship with the place was complicated. He never won there, and after his final Masters broadcast he never went back. Arnold won four times at Augusta. In 1999 Arnold joined the club, not as an honorary member but as a full-status dues-paying one. He was at the tournament and the member events every year. He was royalty there, a “great man,” as a Masters chairman once called Arnold, who looked so comfortable in his green coat. Poor Ken. How did envy get assigned the color green?

  Still, when Ken went public with his accusation, a lot of people were surprised. As far as anybody knew, Ken and Arnold had enjoyed a good friendship on tour. In the later Eisenhower years, Ken would sometimes take over a house band’s drum kit, Arnold would step in as bandleader, other players would pitch in with other instruments, and they would bring down the house. The wives would hoot and holler, Conni Venturi especially. Arnold and Conni had an easy rapport, but that was not surprising. Conni had an easy rapport with a lot of men. All through their married life, Ken had to deal with the fact that various gents, famous and otherwise, were drawn to his wife. She had Sophia Loren’s face and hair and Audrey Hepburn’s playful spirit and lithe physique.

  Ken, like Arnold, had won one U.S. Open. When Ken made his winning putt at Congressional, he dropped his putter and uttered the words, “My God, I’ve won the Open.” Ever since, that sentence has defined the gritty nobility of the great American championship. That win, and that quote, became Ken’s calling card.

  Ken played in the Masters fourteen times—Arnold played in fifty—and contended three times. In ’56, as an amateur, he would have won had he shot a back-nine Sunday 40 instead of the 42 he did shoot. In ’58 and again in ’60, he was nipped by Palmer in events that helped sell truckloads of color TVs. (Who, man or woman, wanted to watch Arnold stalk those Augusta greens in black and white?) When Arnold first said farewell to the Masters in 2002, having played in forty-eight straight, Venturi was in the booth, making his final broadcast. Then Arnold decided to play two more.

  We got to Arnold late, but Ken went deep. He was telling us things he had already said in his book but with more flourish. No lawyers were watching him now. Out of deference to CBS and the network’s relationship with Augusta National, Ken had remained silent for decades on the subject of Arnold and the rule book at the ’58 Masters. But when he retired from CBS, Ken felt free to break his self-imposed omertà. It was obvious that the event was a fog of war that had never lifted for Ken.

  The incident happened in the last round, when Palmer and Venturi came to the twelfth hole, the little par-three in the middle of Amen Corner. The hole is famous for its fickle winds and a narrow green fronted by a murky creek. The green sits off by itself in splendid isolation.

  Palmer was leading the tournament when they arrived on the twelfth tee. Venturi was trailing by a shot and would be playing first. (He had the honor, in a telling piece of golf-speak.) The course was wet from a heavy Saturday-night rain. The hole was cut on the far right of the green, and Venturi hit his tee shot hole-high and twenty feet left.

  Palmer followed by hitting his tee shot over the green and near a bunker. About half his ball plugged into the soft turf. Palmer sought to use a local rule, sanctioned by the USGA rule book, which provided a free drop for an embedded ball. But the official on hand, Arthur Lacey, would not give embedded ball relief to Palmer.

  Here I will turn the story over to a partial source: Venturi, writing in Getting Up & Down:

  Finally, an angry Palmer played the shot. Not surprisingly, he flubbed the chip and the ball did not even reach the putting surface. He hit the next one five feet past the hole but then missed the putt, making a five. The two-shot swing put me in the lead for the first time since early in the third round. Two years after my memorable collapse, I was on my way toward a memorable comeback.

  Only Palmer wasn’t ready to give up on the twelfth hole just yet.

  “I didn’t like your ruling,” he said, glaring at Lacey. “I’m going to play a provisional ball.” (He was really playing what is called a “second ball.”)

  “You can’t do that,” I told him. “You have to declare a second before you hit your first one.”

  Ken agreed with Arnold. He felt that Lacey should have given Arnold embedded ball relief. Regardless, Ken’s position was that Arnold broke a rule of golf by not saying right from the start, in a contested rules situation, that he would be playing two balls, with the idea that the rules committee would sort through the issue later. The words he said to Palmer have almost lawyerly precision: “You have to declare a second before you hit your first one.”

  And Arnold didn’t do that. Arnold made a five on the first ball and then, according to Ken, furious at the ruling and his score, returned to his original position, dropped another ball, and made a three with that one. That’s why Ken maintained that Ford and Hawkins, the runners-up, were robbed. Ken said, “What would Arnold have done if he had made a three on that first ball? Try it again to see if he could make a two?” Ken’s point was that in golf, you don’t get to choose which score you like better. I could see that. But I could also see that the situation was confusing, and Arnold likely got stuck with a bad decision and was looking for a fair appeals process.

  At the end of that round, Ken and Arnold shook hands and walked off the green together. But moments later, Ken said, he was telling Arnold he was signing a scorecard for a lower score than he actually made. Doing that is an automatic disqualification. But Palmer didn’t get disqualified. He won. Doug Ford, the defending champion, held the shoulders and Arnold slipped into his first club coat.

  Nineteen years later, Ken told us, he was playing Augusta National’s par-three course when he saw Clifford Roberts, the club’s chairman and co-founder. This was days before the start of the 1977 Masters. Roberts was old and ill. He approached Ken.

  “He apologized,” Ken said.

  He apologized for allowing Palmer’s score of three to stand in 1958.

  “He apologized,” Mike said.

  Mike knew: Roberts was not the apologizing type. He was the ultimate autocrat.

  “He apologized,” Ken said. “He said they made the wrong decision. They should never have let Palmer’s three stand. And six months later he was dead!”

  Roberts took his own life beside Ike’s Pond, not far from where he and Ken had that fateful conversation.

  • • •

  We were in a time machine. The names! Spiro Agnew. Carol Channing. Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle. Frank Sinatra. The great DiMaggio. Bobby Jones and Cliff Roberts. Palmer this and Palmer that. Not the Palmer whom Mike and I had just seen in Latrobe, his mind sharp, his body ailing. No. This was the Palmer who left women swooning and men gasping and Venturi so mad he couldn’t see straight. Ken was talking about the Palmer who played the final two holes of the 1960 Masters with only six shots. A birdie-birdie finish to win. Bop, bop, bop; bop, bop, bop. The birth of the Palmer charge.

  In fact, Arnold made three threes to finish that year. On the par-three sixteenth, he had a long downhill birdie putt and left the flagstick in and untended, as the rules then permitted. He hit the putt too hard, his ball clanked off the flagstick and instead of going off the green, as it might have, it stopped two feet from the hole and he made par. On the seventeenth hole, with Venturi watching on TV, Palmer made a cross-country fifty-foot putt for a birdie.
When Palmer played eighteen, Venturi could not even watch. The lusty crowd roar told him all he needed to know: Palmer had made a birdie on the last to win.

  All through those final two holes, Venturi said he was hoping that he and Palmer would finish in a tie. He wanted a playoff—an eighteen-hole Monday playoff. He wanted to beat the man straight up and right in front of him.

  Ken has said many times that he left Augusta that day a defeated and broken man. To anybody watching, Ken left Augusta in ’60 as one of the preeminent figures in the game. But he felt otherwise. In his mind, he was in Palmer’s wake.

  In his book, Ken recounts this exchange with Arnold, from the awards presentation at the 1960 Masters:

  PALMER: “I wish it could have been you. I wish you had won.”

  VENTURI: “It’s two years too late.”

  If Arnold was apologizing, Ken was not accepting.

  Ken’s book takes you deep inside his head. He concludes his chapter on the ’58 Masters by describing a scene from the early 1980s. He was at Augusta and saw Nathaniel “Iron Man” Avery, Arnold’s Augusta caddie. Iron Man explains to Mr. Ken that he tried to tell Palmer that he was doing the wrong thing back in ’58.

  Venturi writes:

  “Ironman, I am so proud of you,” I said. “You did the right thing. You should have no regrets. Your family and you are the most important thing. What counts more to me is that I have you as a friend.” I gave him $100.

  Ironman walked away, still in tears.

  Incredible.

  • • •

  For Ken, the ’60 Masters will forever be linked to the ’58 Masters, and ’58 to ’56. Try as I might, I don’t think I’ll ever really understand the true toll those three tournaments took on him.

  Ken did his own psychoanalytic study of the club’s ’58 ruling in Arnold’s favor. In Ken’s mind, it was an act of revenge against Ken, for the ungracious things Ken said to reporters at the San Francisco airport after returning home from the ’56 Masters. In those interviews, Ken managed to insult the club, their tournament, and his fellow competitors. He told Mike and me the airport story. He had told it many times. I had heard it from him before, almost word for word, years earlier. The amazing thing to me was the level of emotion he still had for it, and how little it had changed.

  On the Saturday of the 1956 Masters, Ken was nothing but promise. He was a handsome, self-assured twenty-four-year-old amateur golfer who had a four-shot lead through three rounds in a celebrated tournament. He was an army veteran with a gorgeous wife at home in San Francisco with their healthy infant son. He had a job selling Lincolns for Eddie Lowery at a time when you could make money selling Lincolns and cultivate useful relationships through golf. (Just the suggestion of a future game with Ken might help make a sale.) The story of his exciting match at Cypress Point was making the rounds at your better private-club cocktail parties in Northern California.

  The Masters that year, its twentieth playing, was on national television for the first time, with a half hour of coverage on Friday, an hour on Saturday, and another on Sunday. Ken’s fame was starting to spread beyond San Francisco courtesy of that Saturday telecast. Sunday promised to be bigger yet.

  Yes, Arnold Palmer was in the process of making a name for himself. He had won the ’54 U.S. Amateur and the ’55 Canadian Open. But in April 1956 Ken was ahead of him, with Hogan and Nelson and Lowery in his corner. He had a classic swing, the slender physique of a man who did not do physical labor, a dazzling smile, a tremendous head of hair. And the third-round lead at Augusta. He was an amateur showing the pros how to play the game.

  That Saturday night, Ken was the leading man. As Ken told it, Jones and Roberts invited him in for a private conversation. Jones, the great amateur, said he had been hoping an amateur would someday win his tournament. He was rooting for Ken. He hoped that Ken would stay amateur if he won, and that club members would help Ken become an executive with Ford, so he wouldn’t have the financial pressure to turn pro. Jones envisioned Ken someday becoming chairman of the club. That was Ken’s memory of the meeting. It must have all sounded so grand to him. Ken didn’t want to turn pro. Pros were commoners. Ken wanted the elegant life of the career amateur. He wanted the status of club membership. Each member had a specialty. Roberts was a skillful banker. Ike was an accomplished soldier. Ken’s special skill would be golf.

  Jones and Roberts wanted just one thing from Ken. The previous year, Byron Nelson, with no chance to win, played on Sunday with the third-round leader, Cary Middlecoff, who waltzed to a seven-shot victory. Weekend tee times and pairings were not done by score in that era. It was all sort of hand-stamped. Jones told Ken he could pick his Sunday partner—as long as it wasn’t Nelson. Nelson had worked with Ken on his swing. Nelson, pushed by Eddie Lowery, had lobbied his fellow former champions to have Ken at the tournament by way of a special invitation they controlled. A win with Nelson would taint his victory. “Anybody but Byron,” Jones told Ken.

  “I’ve played with everybody else,” Ken said. “How about Snead?”

  And on that basis, Sam Snead was delivered. Sam Snead had the best view of Ken’s closing 80 on the Sunday of the 1956 Masters. That score allowed Jackie Burke, a grizzled Texas pro, to win by a shot over Ken.

  The next day Ken flew home to San Francisco, and that was when his life changed forever. At the airport, he was greeted by his parents, Conni, and a group of San Francisco newspapermen. Among them was a man named Harry Hayward, the golf writer for the San Francisco Examiner.

  Ken came home on a Monday, and the writers wrote him up for the Tuesday papers. Each reporter twisted what he said, but the worst offender by far was Harry Hayward. That was Ken’s take on it. Hayward had Venturi complaining about how Snead treated him as a playing partner and about his tee time. In Hayward’s account, Ken showed no gratitude to the club. He was dismissive of the pros and disrespectful toward Jones and Roberts. Hayward had Venturi claiming that the club would not allow Eddie Lowery anywhere near Ken during the fourth round, when Ken could have used some moral support. It was a hatchet job. They all were, but Harry Hayward’s was the worst. Ken despised the man.

  After the stories came out, Ken’s patron, Eddie Lowery, trying to make things better, made things worse by sending via telegram and over Venturi’s name an apology to Roberts and Jones for his remarks, with copies to the newspapers. Damage control. “I never saw that letter,” Venturi said.

  A letter that had Ken Venturi apologizing for comments he did not make with an apology that was not his.

  The high status he had enjoyed that Saturday night in Augusta was vanishing. His dream of living the life of the gentleman amateur, in the tradition of Bob Jones of Atlanta and Chick Evans of Chicago and Francis Ouimet of Boston (for whom Lowery caddied in the 1913 U.S. Open) died that week. Venturi turned pro before the year was out.

  Ken finished tenth on the 1957 money list as a rookie. He won five times on tour before the ’58 Masters. But Ken was far more focused on what his life would have been had he won the ’56 Masters as an amateur—or the feelings of redemption, over Harry Hayward and various others, that he would have enjoyed had he won the ’58 Masters as a pro. Or how, had he won in ’60, he could have had the last laugh over Palmer and Cliff Roberts and various others for Palmer’s favorable ruling. But Venturi didn’t win at Augusta in April 1960. It was Palmer who did, by a shot.

  It was Palmer who appeared on the cover of Time the following month. It was Palmer who had an intimate friendship with Eisenhower through the sixties. It was Palmer who reinvented the British Open, Palmer who piloted himself around the world in his private jet, Palmer who had a line of clothes named for him, Palmer who appeared repeatedly on the Tonight Show, Palmer who was the grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses parade.

  Only Ken could really understood the scope of the wrong Palmer had committed on that twelfth hole in 1958. The public could not be bothered with it. Not in 1958, when it happened. Not in 2004, when his book came out. Not ever. S
ome weird rules thing from a hundred years ago—who cares?

  Ken and Arnold had arrived in Augusta for the ’58 Masters with nearly equal status. But by that Sunday night, Arnold had become golf’s leading man, while Ken had been reduced to supporting player.

  Over a half century later, as Mike and I sat in the back of Castelli’s with Ken and his wife, nothing had really changed. There was no way Ken could let go of Harry Hayward or Arnold or that favorable ruling. Ken once told me, “Harry Hayward’s long dead, but I still don’t forgive him.” Forgive and forget was not in Ken’s DNA.

  The check came, and there was no fight over it. It had been a working dinner, at my behest. But it didn’t feel like work. It felt like a journey into a man’s head. The dinner group congratulated itself for going four hours without looking at a cell phone. Well, not Ken—that was not even an issue for him—but the rest of us. Ken buttoned his blazer and headed out to the valet.

  Arnold and Ken on the twelfth green of the Sunday round of the ’58 Masters: What staying power that whole thing had. At least it did for Ken. Leaving the restaurant, I didn’t know if the ancient dispute said more about Venturi or about Palmer. No matter: It was serious.

  All these rules disputes are. Reputations are on the line, on both sides of the accusation. Consider the case of Mark McCumber. At the 1978 Milwaukee Open, playing the second PGA Tour event of his career, McCumber whiffed in the woods on the tenth hole of his Friday round and didn’t count it, according to a caddie who was there that week. McCumber made the cut by a shot, but his caddie quit on him before the start of the third round. A whiff is a tricky matter because a player can always say he decided, at some point during the downswing, that he no longer intended to hit the ball. Under the rules, that is not a swing. By custom, the player’s word is accepted unless the evidence against him is overwhelming. Still, that ’78 event followed McCumber for his entire career. F. Scott Fitzgerald would understand.

  Whenever golf is played for keeps, the rule book sees all. It directs all the action. That was true long before Bobby Jones ever played, and it will remain true long after Tiger Woods has holed his final putt.