The Red Smith Reader

by Dave Anderson

  “Can’t afford to miss,” he said, “or you get beat.”

  “And that’s something that’s not to be tolerated, eh?”

  “That’s right,” Ben said, unsmiling.

  GENERAL OF THE ARMY

  MAMARONECK, NEW YORK, 1974

  On the seventeenth green Arnold Palmer ran down a 25-foot putt for a birdie, and a blind man within earshot might have thought he was back in 1960 on the Cherry Hills course at Denver. It was there fourteen years ago that Palmer started the last round seven strokes back and charged through the field to the United States Open golf championship, and that rabble called Arnie’s Army came into being. The army has dwindled since those days, from thousands to hundreds, but at forty-four its leader still has that special personal quality that can move his idolators to rapture. Chances are there were no more than 500 spectators at the seventeenth—including two girls wearing buttons that read “Miller’s Killers,” identifying them as followers of the defending champion—but when the putt went down their cries could be heard clear across the Winged Foot Club’s West Course.

  “He did it and I didn’t see it!” wailed a member of the ladies’ auxiliary on the fringe of the crowd.

  Minutes later one platoon broke away from the main body of troops and gathered around a ball in the eleventh fairway of the East Course. Standing over his ball, Arnold could see a tiny patch of green and a wide stretch of sand between the spreading branches of a tree and a wooden scoreboard.

  Taking his time, he hit over the scoreboard to the green about twenty feet from the flag. Two putts gave him his par and a score of 73 for the first round of the 74th National Open. For a man who has an average score of 70.82 for 1,892 rounds over twenty years, a 73 isn’t exactly the stuff that dreams are made on. Yet such are the demands that Winged Foot makes this week, with its narrow fairways, tangled rough, slick greens and cruel pin placements, that Palmer’s score put him among the leaders.

  “I played the eighteenth perfectly,” he said later. “Duck-hooked my drive, hit a six-iron to the green and took two putts.”

  “This whole week is going to be a week of disappointments,” said Gary Player after taking the early lead with a 70. Among the deeply disappointed when he spoke were the 1961 champion, Gene Littler, with an 80; the 1963 winner, Julius Boros, 78; Ken Venturi, the last to win with a 36-hole final round, 84; and shooters like Tom Weiskopf, Dave Eichelberger, Bobby Nichols and Frank Beard, with 76 or 77.

  Obviously, the biggest thing in this tournament is the course. Nobody is going to desecrate it with a 63 as Johnny Miller did in his final winning round at Pittsburgh’s Oakmont course last year.

  “There will be some good scores before the week is out,” Palmer said, “and a lot of bad ones. The course is very good, but fair. The fairways are cut short and the greens are cut short, and it’s better that way. I think it is the best course we’ve played in a long time. I’d like to see every course we play like this.

  “It is very difficult, no question about it. You have to think on every shot and play for what you can get. You can’t get reckless. They talk about shooting for the pin. There are some pins you can shoot for, but many where you don’t dare.

  “Who does this course favor? It favors the guy who is really playing well and thinking well. Sometimes on this course you’ll have to play for bogeys. You just have to take them, and the guy who makes ten or twelve bogeys or less will have a pretty good chance.”

  The deity of the 1960’s hasn’t won since the Bob Hope Desert Classic of last year, hasn’t taken a major championship since the Masters of 1964. He has earned a shade under $2 million in competition, though, and has the appearance of well-being to go with such figures. Now he sat at ease in the press tent, amiable as always in the so-familiar postmortem routine. The short sleeves of his sports shirt were tight on his biceps.

  “I didn’t play anything well,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I played rather poor, but I thought well. For the first time in a long while I played golf. I made use of every shot I played.”

  “If your thinking was better than it has been,” someone asked, “can you explain why?”

  “I didn’t want to shoot 85,” Arnold said. “What will it take to win? I know what I’d like to have. I’d like to have 282 and just stay here all week and talk with you fellows. If the wind gets going and the greens stay slick the way they are, it could add up to anything. It’s conceivable that 290 would win; on the other hand, it is conceivable that it would take 280.

  “I think I can play aggressively and still play the way the course demands. I think I had to just shoot 73. Going for the pin when it’s five feet from sand, that’s not being aggressive. That’s being stupid.”

  He strolled out to the practice tee and started hitting irons. Even there, he drew a pretty good gallery. Between shots he unzipped a pocket of his golf bag, fished out a little plastic bottle and, tilting his head back, squirted saline solution into his eyes while the hand that wore a golf glove held the eyelid up. That’s why he looks different, a man thought. No glasses. He has switched to contact lenses.

  THE ROUND JACK NICKLAUS FORGOT

  1978

  Jack Nicklaus’s golf is better than his memory. When he came charging home in the Inverrary Classic last weekend, picking up four strokes on Grier Jones, three on Jerry Pate and Andy Bean, and two on Hale Irwin with five birdies on the last five holes, he was asked whether he had ever put on such a finish before. “I can’t imagine any other time,” he said. “It was the most remarkable thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Lee Trevino, comparing it with Reggie Jackson’s three home runs in the last World Series game and Leon Spinks’ victory over Muhammad Ali. Well, it was remarkable but it wasn’t unprecedented.

  Fifteen years ago, Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer represented the United States in the World Cup competition at Saint-Nom-la-Breteche near Versailles in France. If Jack has forgotten his performance there, perhaps he wanted to forget it. Maybe he deliberately put it out of his mind as too outrageously theatrical to bear remembering.

  The things he did on the very first hole were downright scandalous. The hole was a legitimate par 5 for club members but a trifle short for a pro with Jack’s power, measuring somewhere between 450 and 500 yards. In his four rounds, Jack played it eagle, eagle, eagle, birdie, and that was just for openers.

  Bretèche may have been a trifle shorter than Inverrary’s 7,127 yards, but this was no exhibition on a pitch-and-putt course, and the opposition was at least as distinguished as the field Nicklaus encountered last week. The World Cup, now twenty-five years old, is a movable feast that leaps from continent to continent, usually playing national capitals, matching two-man teams from virtually every land where the game is known. Though it hasn’t the prestige of the United States or British Open, it is probably the closest thing there is to a world championship.

  In 1963, Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche was a comparatively new course built on land that had been the royal farm when Louis XIV was top banana. The clubhouse, once the royal cow barn, was a splendid building of ivy-covered stone set in a terraced stableyard ablaze with roses, snapdragon, chrysanthemum and pansies.

  The galleries had a touch of quality seldom associated with, say, Maple Moor in Westchester County. Among those who followed the play were two former kings and one former Vice President—Leopold of Belgium, the Duke of Windsor and Richard M. Nixon.

  Before play started, Prince Michel de Bourbon-Parme, the club president, dispatched ten dozen fresh eggs to a nearby convent. This, he explained, was an ancient custom in the Ile de France. Anyone planning an outdoor binge like a wedding or garden party sent eggs to the poor and this assured him of good weather. The standard fee was one dozen eggs, but the Prince had laid it on to guarantee a week of sunshine.

  Morning of the opening round found the Prince glowering through a clammy fog. “So,” he said, “I am sending to the sisters to get back my eggs.”

  Soggy turf made the course play long for little guys
, but not for Nicklaus. His second shot on the opening hole was twenty feet from the pin, and he ran down the putt for his first eagle 3. After that he had five birdies and three bogeys for a 67. Palmer’s 69 gave the pair a tie for first place with Al Balding and Stan Leonard of Canada.

  Prince Michel changed his mind about reclaiming the eggs, but the weather didn’t relent. Day by day the fog thickened, until the green hills and yellow bunkers were all but blotted out. Realizing that if a hitter like Nicklaus tried to fire a tee shot into that soup the ball would never be seen again, officials postponed the final round for twenty-four hours.

  It didn’t help much. Next day a gray souffle garnished the fairways. The climate dripped sullenly from the trees. Windsor and Leopold showed up as they had for each earlier round, but the weather reduced the gallery to a minimum. Reluctantly, the committee decided to cut the final round to nine holes. At this point Nicklaus and Palmer were tied with Spain’s Ramon Sota and Sebastian Miguel for the team trophy, with Nicklaus and Gary Player all square in individual competition.

  Automobiles were driven out past the first green, where they made a U-turn and parked with headlights on. From the tee, lights were blurred but visible, giving the players a target. For the first time in four rounds, Nicklaus needed four shots to get down. Then he got serious.

  With that birdie for a start, he played the next five holes as follows: 3-3-3-3-3. When he walked toward the seventh tee, a spectator asked: “What are you going to do for an encore?”

  “Try to finish,” Jack said.

  On the first six holes he had taken 19 shots. On the last three he took 13 for a 32. It won.

  TO REACH THE UNREACHABLE STAR

  1971

  Bob Beamon, who reached an unreachable star three years ago, is about to attain another goal that sometimes seemed hopelessly remote. He will get a degree in sociology and anthropology next month from Adelphi University. After that, there must be a decision: to sell his height and speed and agility to the Harlem Globetrotters as a professional basketball player, to concentrate exclusively on some other job that would support his family, or to devote time and effort toward winning a place on the 1972 Olympic team and assaulting his own implausible world record in the long jump.

  “There’s good and bad in each,” he said the other day. “To go professional and make money, that’s good. Right now, I’m aiming for a good indoor season jumping off my left leg. If I went for the Olympics, would I be aiming to break my record or to win another gold medal? I think the fans would want to see me go for the record but I think I’d be most interested in the gold medal.”

  Perhaps there is no such thing as an unbeatable performance but for a reasonable facsimile thereof, Beamon’s leap of 29 feet 2 V2 inches at the Mexico City Olympics October 18, 1968, does nicely.

  In all of track and field, no other record has withstood attack like that in the long jump. In 1935 Jesse Owens leaped 26 feet 8 1/4 inches for a record that stood 25 years, far outlasting every other mark then in the books. Nobody touched it until i960, when Ralph Boston squeaked past by three inches, and in the next eight years the world’s best, including Boston, couldn’t add six inches. Ralph still shared the recognized mark of 27-4 3/4 when Beamon took flight. When Beamon got back to earth, the record was smashed by almost two feet.

  When Roger Bannister broke the four-minute barrier in the mile run it was like breaching a dike. Others rushed through like stampeding cattle. For a long time Cornelius Warmerdam was the only pole-vaulter in existence who could clear 15 feet. Once somebody caught him, the world record spurted off like a self-service elevator on a toot. Not so in the long jump. Since Beamon did 29 feet, nobody has done 28. In 1971, Ron Coleman and Norm Tate were the only men in the world to clear 27 feet, and each did it just once.

  In Mexico, Beamon took off from his right foot, as he always had. In the winter, he pulled a hamstring muscle in that leg. He won the national championship in 1969, jumping 26-11 off his left foot, but he says he was plagued by injury after that.

  “In one meet in Madison Square Garden,” he said, “I started down the runway and just stopped. I think the directors of indoor meets decided I’d just make a token appearance to collect expense money, so instead of doing something about me personally they dropped the long jump and substituted the triple jump. I’ve met long jumpers who told me, ‘You’re the one who killed our event.’”

  Bob played basketball one semester at Adelphi but didn’t represent the school in track and field. Before the Olympics, he attended the University of Texas at El Paso, where his athletic scholarship was lifted because he boycotted a meet with Brigham Young in protest against the racial attitudes of the Mormon church, which runs Brigham Young.

  “I had a lot on my mind in Mexico,” he said. “I didn’t know where I was going to school, things weren’t smooth in my family. I stood to lose my home in El Paso. You know I fouled out on two qualifying jumps and only made it on my last. I don’t think I could have done it except for Ralph Boston.

  “To me, Ralph is the father of the field events—and the runners, too, for that matter. I’d been having trouble with the runway in Mexico, too fast. ‘You’re tight,’ Ralph told me. ‘Just take a little extra time, walk around, loosen up. Then take it nice and easy down the runway. If you have to take off before you reach the board, don’t worry. Just be sure you don’t foul.’

  “They hadn’t measured the two jumps where I fouled, but I could tell from where I landed they must have been around 28 feet. So I did what Ralph said, and qualified.

  “The night before the finals, my wife was trying to phone me, I owed a great big telephone bill, everything was wrong. So I went into town and got me a shot of, uh, cognac. Cognac?”

  He pronounced it hesitantly: “Kahn-yak?”

  “Man, did I feel loose! I got a good sleep. I had the feeling my first jump was a good 27 feet. Maybe 27-4, something like that. They raised the white flag, meaning no foul, and then that thing, that drum that shows the distance, was turning around. I said, ‘Ralph, did I do 27 feet?’

  “Ralph was watching that thing. He’s used to reading in meters. ‘You did 29 feet,’ he told me. I could hear the crowd roaring, but I couldn’t get it through my head. Then I said, ‘Well, when you win just remember that I held the world record a few minutes.’

  “Ralph said, I’ve got news for you. I can’t jump that far.’ And just then it started to rain. Can you imagine?”

  Moral: Brandy is a boy’s best friend.

  THE HIGH JUMPER’S SIN

  1979

  Greater love hath no organization than the Amateur Athletic Union, which will sacrifice its virtue for a high jumper. The jumper is Dwight Stones, former holder of the world record, whom the A.A.U. cast into outer darkness a year or so ago for soiling his hands with money won on a television show. Branded a professional and forced to stand in the pillory with a scarlet P embroidered on his shirtfront, Stones no longer was eligible for under-the-table payments from promoters of track meets.

  This amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, violating the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, so last week the A.A.U. recanted. “Give that dirty TV loot to us,” the guardians of amateur purity told Stones. “We’ll be smirched but you’ll be scoured clean, and you can jump for a living instead of pumping gas or whatever you’ve been doing.”

  Stones had pulled down $33,663 on the TV show called Superstars and he wasn’t eager to give all that bread away. Still, we’re about to enter an Olympic year, when track and field interest and the expense accounts of star attractions traditionally skyrocket.

  He said well, all right, he would buy back his amateur standing but he didn’t want to debauch the A.A.U. with the whole bundle. He would give one-third of the TV swag to the national body, one-third to the Southern Pacific Association and one-third to the newly formed Athletics Congress.

  That way all three groups would be sullied a little bit, but $11,221 wouldn’t pollute any of them the way $33,663 would.
As for Stones, he can look upon the payments as an investment.

  In the dream world of amateur athletics, lucre is filthy if received openly. It is unselfish of the A.A.U. to begrime its own fingers in order that Stones’ may be cleansed. Unselfish and understanding, for along with the reinstatement goes a tacit promise that when and if the young man talks business with promoters, the A.A.U. will not be listening.

  As a matter of practical fact, Stones doesn’t have to talk to promoters. There is at least one prominent foot-racer in the United States who never does. His wife handles that end of the business for him. Wage scales have risen so dramatically that a top box-office attraction, lacking a spouse with business sense, could afford to hire an agent.

  “We’re all professionals, rules don’t mean anything,” Frank Shorter, the marathon runner, told the President’s Commission on Olympic Sports.

  “There are no longer true amateurs in track,” says Adriaan Paulen, president of the International Amateur Athletic Federation.

  It is encouraging when somebody in Paulen’s position talks that way, because it suggests that perhaps some in authority are beginning to face facts. This has not been so in the past. Though professionalism was probably as widespread in Jim Thorpe’s time as it is today, the waxworks always looked the other way until an infraction was forced to attention.

  Taking money didn’t cost Stones his amateur standing. His sin was taking visible money, taking it openly. He didn’t even jump for it, because participants in that TV show aren’t allowed to compete in their specialty. The format is designed to prove that someone who excels in one area can be a dub in another; for instance, Joe Frazier, the boxer, nearly drowned in a swimming race on the show.

  Stones didn’t win the money as a high jumper. Today, amateurs are permitted to endorse sports apparel and serve as “consultants” to manufacturers of equipment, capitalizing on their athletic reputation more directly than Stones did. Trouble was, whenever Dwight won a dollar he did it on a coast-to-coast hookup.