A Golfer's Life

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by Arnold Palmer


  There’s no question that the tournament rose to the prominence it enjoys today because of the personal drive, conviction, and vision of Clifford Roberts. Among other things, he warned that if and when the prize money offered at the Masters—or any golf tournament, for that matter—became the primary attraction to the game’s best players, the tournament would be in danger of losing its purpose, integrity, and uniqueness. A highly astute New York banker whose private client list read like a Who’s Who of business and political leaders (including President Eisenhower), Mr. Roberts was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the major threat to the golf tournament he and Bob Jones created to celebrate the game’s finest traditions, the only factor that could really undermine the Masters, was too much money.

  I think about his concerns these days, as purses continue to spiral to unimaginable heights and an increasing number of top young players seem almost blissfully ignorant of the game’s history and traditions, the people who made the game what it is today, and above all the fact that it is at heart still a game—not a business. It’s true that my dramatic success in the 1960s and 1970s—particularly my domination of the Masters between 1958 and 1964—helped fuel the popularity of tournament golf and provided the basis for my success in the business world. But I never confused the two, the love of competitively playing the game, and the good fortune of enjoying the financial rewards that come from playing it well. It greatly distresses me to hear modern players base their decisions to play in this tournament or that one simply on the prize-money values. It angers me to think there have been name players who snubbed a Masters invitation simply because they didn’t think the money was good enough or didn’t care for the way Mr. Roberts or his successors as chairman operated the tournament.

  Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you Mr. Roberts took a while to size you up, and I, for one, was almost scared to death of the man for years. But as our friendship grew, I found him a surprisingly warm, generous, and even compassionate man who quietly did things for a broad range of people that the public had obviously never heard boo about. His close relationship with President Eisenhower, in my book, spoke volumes about the man’s character and integrity. As our own friendship deepened with the years, we enjoyed many hours of pleasant, frank conversation, either at Augusta or out at Eldorado in Palm Desert, where he went for a month or so every winter, on a host of subjects near and dear to both our hearts, everything from politics to putting surfaces, Wall Street to world war.

  The man was as tough as nails. But he was also as decent as the day is long, and brilliant. Far less known, beneath that stern headmaster exterior he possessed a schoolboy’s wry sense of humor. One year, just prior to what Augusta’s members know as “Jamboree,” a club tournament that takes place two weeks before the Masters, Mr. Roberts ordered the water level in the pond by the 16th tee drawn down by about eight inches. He then had workmen construct a small boardwalk across the pond before raising the water level back to normal. At a critical moment during the members’ tournament, Cliff strolled expressionlessly off the tee and straight out onto the pond—proving, to anyone who doubted it, that the godlike chairman of Augusta National Golf Club really could walk on water!

  I was pleased when, around 1965, Cliff invited me to make suggestions about how the golf course could be improved. My actual belief was that there wasn’t a whole lot to do—that Alister Mackenzie’s wonderful design ought not to be tampered with very much. For such a sturdy guardian of tradition, some of the changes Mr. Roberts said he wanted to make surprised me. For example, he wanted to create a new lake that would stretch almost the entire length between tee and green of the par-3 fourth. But I argued that a lake in that spot simply wouldn’t fit the tradition of the course. He accepted that argument and the lake was never built (and I hope it never is). He also wanted to switch the greens from Bermuda to bent-grass surfaces, and I wasn’t a bit keen about that idea, either, because it would drastically alter their character, in my view. Bermuda is a tougher, coarser grass that causes a ball to bounce slightly when it lands. Part of the challenge of hitting a ball onto a green at Augusta National was allowing for the tricky undulations of the putting surfaces.

  When they put in the smoother, finer bent grass, some of those undulations had to be flattened out or else the greens would have become unplayably fast. Today, the course’s putting surfaces are extremely fast, as you may know from the ritual spring chorus of gently complaining Tour players, owing to the firm bent-grass surfaces, but I’m not sure they are any better than the old Bermuda greens, which required a lot of imagination and courage to get your ball close.

  My major contribution to Augusta’s endless process of recreation, I suppose, was to suggest that the tees on holes one, two, seven, eight, nine, 15, and 18 be moved back to accommodate the longer modern game. Mr. Roberts also championed the creation of the club’s adjacent par-3 course, and I fully agreed with him that it was an excellent idea—adding a bit of useful mirth and even comic relief to the air of tension that normally precedes the high drama of Masters weekend.

  Sometimes, as the saying in golf goes, it’s better to be lucky than good, and at the Masters of 1962, I think I was a little bit of both. As someone in the press tent wrote, that particular Masters showcased the best and the worst of Arnold Palmer’s style of golf. Doggedly determined to make up for my embarrassing collapse at 18 the year prior, I played superb golf for three rounds, shooting 70, 66, and 69 to take a two-stroke lead heading into Sunday’s action.

  A record crowd estimated at 40,000 was on hand, and I began the fourth round miserably by missing a short, easy putt for par on the first hole. My problems were compounded after that by a mind that seemed to drift in and out of focus. I hit balls into the woods and missed putts I normally could have made in my sleep. As a consequence, I finished the outward nine in a dreadful 39 and after fifteen holes found myself two behind Gary Player and Dow Finsterwald. In retrospect, I was lucky to be just two back—it could have been much worse.

  Golf is a game composed of human failings, and I don’t suppose, given the way the first fifteen holes had gone, that anybody in the gallery gave me much hope of catching Gary and Dow—especially after I missed yet another green on 16 and faced a difficult forty-five-foot chip to try to get up and down for par. As the gallery was being moved and I stood looking over my dismal situation with disgust no doubt showing on my face, I happened to overhear on-course commentator Jimmy Demaret remarking to his audience that I faced a nearly impossible shot, that I’d be extremely lucky just to get down in two. The much-needed birdie was unthinkable. “This shot will perhaps put Arnold Palmer out of contention for the Masters championship.”

  I think I turned and looked at Jimmy wearing a little smirk of exasperation. I can tell you his comments really revved me up inside, and when I chipped the ball into the hole and the crowd went crazy, I felt a rush of adrenaline that seemed to have been missing all day long. The charge was now on, in my mind. At 17 I made a twenty-footer for a birdie and at 18 missed my birdie attempt and had to settle for par. The Masters championship had its first-ever three-way tie.

  Al Wright of Sports Illustrated described the drama as “characters by Saki, plot by Hitchcock” and also cheekily noted, though fairly enough, that I blew my two-stroke lead that Sunday “by hitting golf shots that would have sent a duffer scurrying over to his pro for help.”

  It was true. I was damned lucky to have made the playoff. But, once again, I’d also pulled off the miraculous shot when I had to.

  The playoff threesome provided an interesting mix of styles. Dow epitomized regal conservatism—always taking the intelligent and safe path to greens, seldom risking his gains with a chancy, low-percentage shot. Gary, as I’ve noted, was the complete grinder, the hardworking little opportunist who never seemed to back up and always remained upbeat. I suppose I was by far the most unpredictable factor in the group, prone to either charge for the green jacket or blow myself out of contention with a r
isky shot. After the first nine holes on Monday, it appeared to be the latter option. I started poorly and trailed by three at the turn. Dow’s putter utterly abandoned him, too—perhaps mental exhaustion had set in. For his part, reliable as a Swiss watch, Gary valiantly battled Augusta’s lethal greens to finish with a solid one-under 71.

  I suppose I was the really “lucky” one of the threesome that afternoon. My form of the first three rounds returned on the back nine, and I ripped off birdies on four of the first five holes down the backstretch to take the lead and held it to earn my third green jacket in five years. My 68 beat Gary by three strokes and Dow by nine.

  I admitted in the pressroom afterward that I felt very fortunate to have won the tournament and really looked forward to the day when I might walk up the 18th hole with the tournament safely in hand, actually able to enjoy the experience of knowing I didn’t have to pull off another miracle shot to win my favorite golf tournament.

  They laughed at this remark, already punching out wire stories and newspaper dispatches about how my “heroic” putting had once again saved the day at Augusta National. I suppose some of them thought I was kidding.

  The Masters of 1962 was significant and perhaps even lucky for me in a couple far less visible but meaningful ways. If you had been a part of the frenzied crowds following the playoff on Monday, you might have noticed a trim young fellow with a portable phone in hand, battling the galleries as they rushed from one vantage point to the next. His name was Donald Webster (“As in dictionary”) Giffin, but he was Doc to just about everybody on or around the Tour. Doc had just left his job that year as a sportswriter at the Pittsburgh Press to join the PGA Tour as its press secretary. His job that Monday was to phone in the hole-by-hole action on the course to the crowded pressroom, where wire-service reporters and writers sat poised on deadline.

  Four years later, after admiring Doc’s hustle and organizational skills from afar, I spotted him crossing the empty grillroom of Rio Pinar at the old Florida Citrus Open (which eventually became the Bay Hill Invitational, by the way), where I was grabbing a bite alone and doing some hard thinking. I called him over and told him that the rapidly expanding demands of my work and family life were driving me a bit crazy. I explained that even with the capable business management of Mark McCormack and his various people, my personal affairs on the road and back home in Latrobe had become almost too much for both Winnie and me to manage ourselves. What I really needed was, in effect, a traveling secretary and somebody to run my home office, and Doc Giffin was the man I wanted to do it. He agreed to take the job, and after a couple of months spent breaking in Bob Gorham, his successor as press secretary, just after the PGA Championship at Firestone, he came on board with Arnold Palmer Enterprises.

  I count that as one of the wisest choices I ever made. Ironically, on a sadder note, Doc’s arrival coincided with the death of one of the Tour’s newest stars, Tony Lema. Tony was killed in a plane crash while flying from Firestone to an exhibition in Chicago. Doc’s first duty as my assistant was to phone me in Latrobe, where I’d just arrived by my own plane, to inform me of the tragedy.

  The second change in my life that began to quietly manifest itself before the 1963 season was the realization that I probably should give up smoking on the golf course.

  Much to Pap’s dismay, I’d smoked pretty heavily since about age fifteen, first secretly with my teenage school friends, and later, by the time I reached Wake Forest, on the golf course itself. Coming down the stretch of a tournament, I found there was nothing like an L&M cigarette to steady the nerves and help me concentrate on the business at hand. One of my first business contracts negotiated by Mark McCormack, fittingly, was a deal to represent Liggett & Myers cigarettes, which I happily did for several years, puffing furiously whenever I needed the crutch of nicotine. My cardinal rule for representing any commercial product on tour was that I had to genuinely believe in the value of the product I was endorsing. My two-pack-a-day addiction spoke powerfully to that belief.

  But increasingly troubling to both Winnie and me were stories beginning to appear in the popular press about the terrible long-term health effects of cigarette smoking, particularly among people who took up the habit as teenagers. During the 1963 season, I tried off and on to kick the habit, but it wasn’t until the Surgeon General’s Office released its report in late 1963 or early 1964 officially linking cigarette smoking to various ailments, including heart disease and lung cancer, that I knew the writing was on the wall for my own two-pack habit.

  Simultaneously, the letters I received from concerned parents and teachers and physicians urging me to abandon my own “glamorous” addiction cinched the deal. I hated to think I could somehow be responsible for thousands of kids picking up golf clubs and cigarettes. Even my friend President Eisenhower advised me in no uncertain terms to kick the habit, and both he and Pap expressed their strong relief when I finally promised to try.

  When my contract with L&M expired, I decided to go “cold turkey”—at least on the golf course. That proved easier said than done, and though I only slipped up and smoked publicly during a golf tournament on American shores once or twice more, my battle against addiction to coffin nails went on behind the scenes, painfully at times, for many years yet. In fact, it wasn’t until a Christmas party at Bay Hill in 1970 that I kicked the awful habit for good. Then, on a wager with eleven other friends—including Dow Finsterwald, a non-smoker who suddenly took to wildly puffing cigarettes just to get into the wagering pool—we agreed that all of us would kick the habit for good or else pay the others in the pool $100 each for falling off the wagon.

  I’ve never touched a cigarette since, and friends still debate the effect quitting had on my career.

  Even so, by the end of 1962, the year I quietly began to quit smoking on tour, I was the Tour’s leading money winner, with $81,448 in official prize money and nine wins, which included consecutive victories at Texas, the Tournament of Champions, and Colonial. The year’s major highlights were my second British Open championship title, at Royal Troon, and a devastating playoff loss—before what amounted to a hometown crowd at Oakmont Country Club in Pittsburgh in the United States Open Championship—to a sensational Tour rookie who possessed a game for the ages and no visible fear in him. But I’ll get to him in just a bit.

  Approaching the Masters of 1963, I suppose I really was a bit mentally and physically weary, and maybe just dying for a cigarette or two when I played. My tournament and business life was booming and the media focus on my family was at its all-time high. We never had an unlisted phone number in Latrobe, and as a result, the telephone would ring at all hours of the night, with people calling and asking to speak to me, convey their best wishes, ask for favors, borrow money, sell something, you name it. I always tried my best to be courteous to people, to treat them the way I wanted to be treated, but honestly at times it made me wonder if the privacy you sacrifice for fame and fortune is really worth it.

  As I think of those hectic days, looking at old cover stories on my career in Time and Sports Illustrated and a host of others, it seems to me that someone from the national press was always camped out at our house or staying at the nearby Mountain View Inn, dining with us, probing our family life, asking us to pose for pictures planting a family Christmas tree or taking a ride with my daughters on Pap’s old tractor (the same one you see in Pennzoil commercials). Winnie, for her part, was good-natured about the constant intrusions on our family life but clearly had her limits and, thankfully, knew how to say no whenever I couldn’t or simply promised too much. Watching all the reporters around me, Amy, who was born in Augusta in 1958 and was almost five, wondered to her mother, “Why does Daddy always have all those detectives asking him questions?”

  From the mouths of babes …

  At moments, as a result of these intense distractions, both on and off the course, when I felt my concentration beginning to waver and the tournament slipping away from me, I’ll freely admit there would have bee
n nothing better to soothe my jangled nerves than a long drag on a cigarette, but there was no way to go back on my pledge. As a result, I eventually put on weight—as much as fifteen pounds at one point—but on the positive side of the ledger I started fast in 1963 by taking the L.A. Open, a tournament I always dearly hungered to win but in which I had never done particularly well. I followed that good fortune up with victory laps at Phoenix and Pensacola and top ten finishes at Palm Springs and Doral.

  I was thirty-four years old, the traditional peak of a Tour player’s performance years, with forty-two professional wins in my column, and it stood to reason that I was the logical favorite to win my fourth green jacket at Augusta. But it simply wasn’t in the cards for me that year. From the start, I felt uncomfortable—a rare circumstance for me at Augusta—and nothing I tried short of lighting up could fix the problem. I opened with a shaky 74, failed to summon the kind of concentration I always needed in order to contend, and finished a distant ninth with 291.

  That Masters belonged to a history maker named Jack. In a very real sense, though I perhaps didn’t fully appreciate it at that moment, I was suddenly staring at the future and my greatest rival in the game. Nicklaus, then twenty-two, the Tour rookie who beat me in a playoff in front of the rowdy home crowd at Oakmont nine months before, fired 286 to beat a hard-charging Tony Lema by a stroke in his first Masters, to become the youngest man in history to win the Masters. I remember slipping the green jacket onto Jack and smiling as he presented Bob Jones with his winning ball. It was an emotional moment, admittedly bittersweet for me, and I know neither Jack nor I have ever forgotten it.

  Jack Nicklaus had come of age, and professional golf would never be the same. You could almost feel that in the air. I’d known Jack since we first met at an exhibition match in Athens, Ohio, in 1956. The event was “Dow Finsterwald Day,” and Jack was a muscular, somewhat pudgy sixteen-year-old who even then could slug the ball farther than most professional Tour players. I remember that just for fun we had a driving contest and I beat him by a hair; I made a mental note on the spot to always keep an eye on this upstart kid, because with his skills and eerie composure under fire it was probably only a matter of time before he was giving us all a run for the prize money and tournament hardware.

 

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