A Golfer's Life

by Arnold Palmer

  Though I probably would have killed to swim in that pool, I don’t think we resented the kids who got to swim there, some of whom I would later compete against on the golf course and others who would soon become some of my best friends. Many of them, like my friend Ken Bowman, hailed from the prosperous “Hill” section of town.

  Any resentment we may have felt at being excluded, I’m convinced, like so many things in our lives, was softened considerably by the presence of our mother. People were drawn to her, and because of her almost consistently upbeat temperament, she had a way of placing the proper perspective on any situation, good or bad.

  In some ways she was a complete and welcome contrast to Pap. Where he was pure discipline, she was complete generosity; where he was hard work and almost no play, she was playful and life nurturing. She encouraged, by her actions, the development of the gentle side of our personalities. She was good for Pap that way, too.

  Pap had what might be termed classic “Scottish” ideas about a club professional’s place in the world. When he wasn’t overseeing maintenance on the course or giving a lesson, he stayed put in the shop. He would take meals either in the clubhouse kitchen or at home, and he would enter the clubhouse locker room, dining room, or bar only upon the explicit invitation of a member. The members wouldn’t have lifted an eyebrow if Deacon Palmer ventured into these places on his own, but to him that breach of personal protocol was unthinkable. This policy naturally extended to his family.

  Thanks to my mother, though, I had the opportunity to play on the golf course at Latrobe Country Club, learning to wield my women’s brassie (a 2-wood) and a set of cut-down irons well enough to break 100 for eighteen holes before I turned eight. The course in those days was just nine holes, no par 5s, two par 3s, and the rest a bunch of surprisingly tough par-4 holes, a par-34 layout few players were good enough to get around twice and break 70. The fact that I could hit the ball over 150 yards pretty quick gave me the opportunity to make some unexpected movie money.

  On summer days, I’d hang around the ladies’ tee near the sixth hole waiting for Mrs. Fritz to come along. An irrigation ditch crossed the fairway about a hundred yards out, and Mrs. Fritz could never quite carry it. “Arnie,” she’d call over to me sweetly, “come here and I’ll give you a nickel to hit my ball over that ditch.”

  I did, too. I can’t recall ever failing to get her ball safely across the ditch. The nickels mounted up. I made my first money playing golf that way.

  Going to the movies in Latrobe was our big Friday-night event. Pap drove us in his ’39 Chevrolet to see Roy Rogers movies or other western cowboys at the Manos and Olympic Theaters, and we often stopped for ice cream at Strickler’s Drug Store (which claims to have invented the banana split in the 1920s) or visited my other set of grandparents in Latrobe, Charlie and Inez Morrison, who lived on Fairmont Street. My mom’s father worked as an engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad most of his life, and if I wasn’t as close to him as I was to my father’s father, I nevertheless enjoyed Grandpap Morrison’s company a great deal. He wasn’t a “physical” man the way the Palmer men were, but he did take me hunting once in a while and he spent a fair amount of time with both me and Cheech.

  I remember this period, roughly between ages five and twelve, as a surprisingly social time for my family. My father was working hard at the club—even then there were discussions about expanding the course to eighteen holes, and he was forever tinkering with the existing nine he’d helped build—and my small world felt safe and secure. On Friday nights after he took us to the movies, my father hosted a big poker game at the house. In the beginning, his old friends from the pool room or firehall in town came to these late-night card games, but, increasingly, so did many of the club members—a measure of how welcome and comfortable they felt in our house, thanks to my mother.

  Saturday-night get-togethers at Deke and Doris Palmer’s place also became fairly commonplace, except on that night it was mostly couples. My mother would cook a big dinner, and couples from the club would come to play cards. Someone would always bring a bottle of good whiskey, and there would be a great deal of discussion about politics and a lot of laughter.

  For a man who held such rigid ideas about right and wrong—and seemed almost puritanical at times—my father was remarkably liberal minded about the consumption of alcohol. As I explained with the stovepipe incident, that confrontation led to its own set of problems and complicated feelings I eventually had to work out for myself, about his—and later my own—drinking habits. When we were young, he would allow Cheech and me a sip of beer or wine if curiosity got the better part of us. I suppose some would say that was encouraging a bad habit.

  I think, in fact, it was just the contrary. He had an extremely practical sensibility about it. He often commented that if he and my mother attempted to hide their own social drinking from us, that would all but guarantee we’d grow up to abuse alcohol. Though he was as human and real in his failings as any man, as the stovepipe incident revealed, Pap basically believed honesty and moderation were the best policies. There was no question he sometimes drank more than he should have, but over the years I’ve come to realize that drinking alcohol in a social setting served a very useful function for my father. His belief systems were so tightly formed and his attitudes about proper behavior so rigid, I think the drinking genuinely relaxed him and allowed him to lower his guard just a bit. For all of his exterior toughness, I would eventually learn, my father’s emotions ran deep, and he had a sentimental side that rarely revealed itself—perhaps because he thought people would think he was weak. In any case, drinking allowed him to display that side of his personality, good or bad, but I think that release was beneficial for him.

  Not surprisingly, my attitude about drinking has always been pretty much the same. When our girls came along, Winnie and I followed a similar pattern of allowing them to taste an adult beverage if curiosity got the better of them. By not hiding our belief in moderate drinking, we hoped to demystify the attraction of consuming alcohol and send a proper message. It must have worked, because Peg, our oldest, will only have the occasional beer, and Amy never touches alcohol in any form.

  These family social rituals, I see now, were critical to the formation of my attitudes about life and meeting people, for all sorts of people were forever coming to our house. My father kept chickens and pigs in a side yard, and every autumn we made a kind of ritual of slaughtering pigs and making sausage. I loved the sausage but hated seeing the pigs killed. I loved hunting rabbits and pheasant with my father up on the forested ridges above our house. As with golf, there was a right way and a wrong way to hunt, and my father was fanatical about safety and proper behavior in the woods. And yet, at these moments, I was sometimes given the opportunity to see the deep-feeling man inside him. One afternoon while we were hunting, for example, we came across a big oak that had fallen over. The air was swarming with honeybees, and inside that oak was the most stunning honeycomb you’ve ever laid eyes on. Before we took the honey, Pap sent me to the store for two twenty-five-pound sacks of sugar, which we placed in the tree for the bees. That was the Pap few people got to see—a man who insisted on giving something to the bees in exchange for their fabulous honey.

  In winter, when the snows came, my parents’ house was also a gathering spot for folks out sledding and skiing down the hill from the seventh hole. My father turned a small maintenance shed at the club into a place to wax the skis of club members with paraffin, using an old laundry iron to melt it. Mother always made hot chocolate for the piles of kids who showed up, and there was warmed whiskey for the adults.

  These gatherings were very festive, but one snowy night a near tragedy occurred that took the shine off the sledding outings forever. My mother and aunt Hazel were riding a toboggan down the hill in the darkness, racing my father, who was on skis. They ran straight into a guy wire holding up some of the new trees my father was always planting on the course. The guy wire caught my mother just below the no
se and nearly tore off her upper lip. She was lucky—it could easily have snapped her neck and killed her instantly. Fortunately, a doctors’ meeting was going on at the club at the same time, and the fact that Pap was able to fetch one of them fast probably saved her life. That night Cheech and I were both at home in bed at the time of the accident, completely unaware of what had happened. In the morning, Mother attempted to downplay the potential tragedy. But Pap’s furrowed brow and alert eyes told us how serious the consequences could have been for us all. Maybe it was that sledding accident, or perhaps less dramatic things that happened shortly afterward, that slowly made Cheech and me aware of the harsher realities of what until then had seemed an almost perfect childhood.

  Unquestionably the glue that held us together as a family, Mother somehow made the fact that Cheech and I were excluded from the pool and other places at the club seem … well, not such a big deal. But I do remember listening to the easy banter of the club’s golfers as they came and went, watching members and their families coming and going to dances and dinners and such, and secretly wishing that we could be part of that larger world, too.

  I was forever peeking in windows at the club, and one winter evening just before Christmas, I witnessed a very strange sight: all of the guests at a holiday dinner were dressed up in flowing white gowns of some sort, participating in some kind of formal ceremony. The scene was startling and a little bit upsetting to me. After all, I knew most of the people in the room—the club’s top members and a lot of Latrobe’s leading citizens. The club had nothing like the social diversity it enjoys today, no Jewish or Catholic members, no black members, and few or no other ethnic minorities to speak of. Today, it’s highly tempting to make more of the gathering than it was—a holiday party built around the theme of celebrating the dominant Anglo-Saxon heritage of the membership. I remember shooting straight home to report to my mother that something kind of spooky was going on up at the club, and I remember how she smiled and assured me it only meant those people were simply proud of who they were and where they were from. No more, no less.

  As usual, she was right, of course. My mother had a gift for being able to look at any situation and see the essential truth. In time I would come to know many of the older people in that room, and some of them would provide great support to my budding golf career. I wouldn’t discover people who harbored secret racist views, though I suspect there were some who had them. On the contrary, for the most part I would find people who were, as my mother said they were, decent and proud of who they were and where they came from.

  Several other remarkable things happened about that time that would have a lasting influence on me. One thing was my first ride in an airplane. Tony Arch, Charlie’s older brother, hoping to go to the war brewing in Europe, had come home after washing out as a fighter pilot. He had his pilot’s license and had volunteered instead to fly glider planes. That should have been some kind of tip-off to me about Tony’s recklessness in the air. After all, the mortality rate among glider pilots was frighteningly high. But I was young and cocky and planning to live forever and, please pardon the pun, almost dying to fly. So Tony took me up in his Piper Super Cub and flew so low over the golf course, the rudder tail actually dragged on the ground. In a nutshell, he scared the blazes out of me.

  After an experience like that, some people would vow to never fly again. On the contrary, that hair-raising stunt made me realize how much I really wanted to learn to fly an airplane. Building model airplanes and flying them with Rudy Melichar, the club manager’s son, had been one of the great pleasures of my childhood. Flying with Tony simply made me vow to learn to fly a real plane the proper way.

  The arrival of war in 1941 brought great changes to America in general and Latrobe in particular, with acute shortages of manpower and material. The supply of local labor, in fact, was so diminished that there seemed to be no shortage of jobs around the golf course my father wanted me to do.

  In the summers, I worked at the golf course full time, days that started before dawn and ended after dark, cutting fairways with the gangmowers and greens with a push mower in the mornings, then working in the pro shop in the afternoons. I also served as the club’s caddie master and often caddied for members myself. When I started winning golf tournaments many years later, some members would comment to the press that I was so full of myself I couldn’t resist telling them which club to hit, and actually got a little sulky if they rejected my advice. Perhaps I did. If so, it was because I was beginning to learn more and more about the game and know that golf course my father built like the back of my own hand. I’m happy to add that many of those same members were careful to note to reporters that I was usually right about my advice on a particular shot or choice of an iron.

  Many years later, Pap told a reporter that the worst “hire” he ever made was placing me in charge of the pro shop, because I was always running off to hit practice balls from the ladies’ first tee when nobody was looking. Also, in those days a pair of slot machines sat in the clubhouse entryway, and when things got slow I’d sometimes sneak over there as well to plug dimes—dimes, I must confess, I took from the pro shop—into those one-armed bandits. Once, to my complete astonishment and sudden horror, I hit the jackpot and twenty dollars’ worth of dimes flooded out. I frantically scooped up the money and took it to Johnny Shirey, Berkey’s older brother, the locker room attendant, and begged him to keep it for me. I was scared to death that my father was going to find out about it, but Johnny agreed to keep my windfall—and keep mum. I waited nearly forty years to tell my father this story, and he was not too pleased to hear it even then.

  I’ll never forget the December afternoon we learned that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese. It was a cold day and I’d just caddied nine holes for Pap and Dr. Mather. They’d gone into the pro shop to warm up, and I was dearly hoping that was all they planned to play that day. Latrobe winters were difficult and extra-lonely times for me; I hated the cold because it kept me from being out on the golf course, playing.

  The radio in the pro shop was on, and I remember how still everybody became as the announcer described the devastation at Pearl Harbor. I remember my father shaking his head and swearing softly, and I thought that meant there would be no more golf that day. Unfortunately, my father told me to go get the bags because they were going to play another nine. In retrospect, it wasn’t an unpatriotic gesture on his part to go out and play golf after hearing such awful news. He was helpless to do anything about the sneak attack and the arrival of war, and knowing him as I did, I can say that he was probably spitting nails about it and wishing he could personally have a crack at the Japanese. In any event, I made fifty cents for my trouble that afternoon, double my usual rate for carrying a bag.

  Being a caddie had other perks. Among them, I was allowed to play the golf course on Mondays with the other caddies, when the course was officially closed. My game, as a result, progressed rapidly. The course had small but moist (or heavy) greens that received a low, hard shot best, so I grew up hitting low-liners that would land and roll rather than high lofted shots that would settle where they landed. Because the course had several demanding tee shots that required almost pinpoint accuracy, I became pretty adept at swinging a 1-iron, a club few if any players carry today and manufacturers never even bother to include in “matched” sets of clubs anymore. Because of its extremely low loft, I found I could get anywhere from 210 to 230 yards from a 1-iron shot. It was often easier to maneuver than a comparable fairway wood, and it helped me bend or shape a shot as needed. As a result, the 1-iron became very useful in my “training” at Latrobe Country Club, a tool I didn’t hesitate to reach for when a shot required deadly accuracy.

  Some things never changed, though, like my father’s attitude about proper boundaries. I won the club’s caddie tournament five times, beginning at about age eleven. But I never got to take the trophy home with me, a fact that deeply disappointed me at the time. Trophies were for other kids, even for o
ther kids who were employees of the club. But they were never for me, and I secretly stewed about that for years.

  Even so, with Latrobe’s fairways as my laboratory, my old Walter Hagen driver and Patty Berg brassie, and either a set of Tommy Armour irons or Wilson Top Notch flat-backed blades I got just before high school, I began to experiment with all types of shots, learning how to move the ball by putting a certain spin on it. One area remained a problem for me, though: the short game, chipping and sand shots. For reasons of economy, Latrobe didn’t have many bunkers in those days (sand traps require a lot of attention and are expensive to properly maintain). Also, Pap was a tyrant about people chipping around his greens, and he sure wasn’t going to tolerate my endlessly practicing chip shots. As a result, my chipping and sand shots were the weakest parts of my game for years.

  I became obsessed with the idea of practicing, and there’s a little anecdote about this evolving passion that also helps to show the respect my father commanded from the members at Latrobe Country Club. On another hot afternoon when no one was around, I locked up the shop and went to practice hitting balls. Unfortunately, just about then, J. R. Larson, the chairman of the grounds committee—the same man who worried that I swung the club too hard—showed up at the shop, anxious to get his clubs and play a little. He found the place locked up and went to find my father, and soon all hell broke loose.

  As Larson looked on, my father chewed me out good, describing my stubborn unreliability and warning me about the dire consequences of future mistakes, and so on. When he paused for a breath, Larson said to my father, “Tell you what, Deacon. Send him down to the steel mill to work. We’ll straighten him out fast.”