by Tom Callahan
The sun was so bright, it made slits of his eyes. “The arc of the ball was perfect,” he said. “It slowed down in the grass and stopped in the middle of the green [twenty feet away]. I missed it. But you can’t tell me the birdie I made there was the equivalent of the birdie I might have made the ‘pro’ way, as Drum described it, because it wasn’t. This was boldness over meticulousness [Hogan], and boldness was going to carry the day.”
He missed the second green but chipped in from 30 feet for another birdie. “I birdied the third, too, and the fourth,” he said, curling in about a 20-footer there. “Maybe it was shorter; felt longer. Birdied the sixth as well, and the seventh. [Six under par for seven holes.] When did Jenkins tell you he and Drum showed up?”
About then. They came galloping over the hill, wheezing like sportswriters. Before hitting his drive at the 10th hole, Palmer walked over to where the two men stood at the tree line, and, without a word, fished a pack of Winstons out of Dan’s breast pocket. Lighting up and striding back to the tee, he said, “Fancy meeting you guys here,” and kept the whole pack.
Palmer went out in 30. “Damn!” he said. “If I hadn’t bogeyed eight [blasting from a greenside bunker, missing a three-and-a-half-footer], it would have been twenty-nine. I’d have been the first man ever to do it in an Open.” He caught Souchak at the 10th. Soon the pars began. Move over, Walter Burkemo. Palmer shot 65. Two-eighty does win U.S. Opens.
Most of the crowd’s attention that Saturday was focused on 47-year-old Hogan, the four-time Open champion, and 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, paired together for rounds three and four. Nicklaus said, “My dad came to me Friday night and told me, ‘Guess what, Jack. You’re playing with Hogan tomorrow.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
All week Charlie Nicklaus, a Columbus pharmacist and former Ohio State and semipro lineman, had the company of his irascible friend Woody Hayes, the Buckeyes football coach, who, offended by the short shrift Charlie’s boy was getting from Hogan’s galleries, invented marshaling; also, Woody called in the birdies and bogeys each night to the sports desks of the Columbus Dispatch and the Columbus Citizen-Journal, both unable to afford the fare to Colorado.
Hogan held a piece of the lead in the late afternoon when he reached the 17th hole, a par 5 with a moat guarding the green. In his impeccable manner, he had hit all 34 greens in regulation that day. But for some reason—perhaps because he hadn’t been putting especially well for a considerable while (it was beginning to take him 12, 13, 14 seconds just to draw the putter blade back from the ball, and the tentative prod he employed in bungling a 10-foot birdie putt at 16 actually made young Nicklaus shiver), or maybe because Ben knew Palmer was somewhere behind him and wouldn’t be playing safe at 17—he took a chance at spinning his third shot close and screwed a half wedge off the far bank into the front of the moat. Removing his right shoe and sock, rolling up the one pant leg, he stepped down into the water and, teetering like an uncertain flamingo, manufactured a commendable recovery but just for a two-putt bogey. Following a crooked tee-ball into another water hazard at 18, he was done. The three putts that topped off a triple-bogey 7 didn’t matter.
“After he gambled and lost at seventeen,” Nicklaus said, “he just went flat. He was completely drained—of drive, energy, concentration. It was all he could do to finish the round. Everyone knew the Hogan way was never to take on the odds in pressure situations. Let the other fellow make the crucial mistake [a system Jack co-opted as his own]. What got into Hogan at Cherry Hills? Palmer, I guess.”
Sometime later, back in that 17th fairway, amateur Don Cherry stood over a perfect drive, waiting to go for the green in two. Sam Snead, who had shot his way out of contention by then, sidled up to his playing partner and drawled, “Son, you’re gonna win the U.S. Open.”
In 1976, I was playing an Ohio course called Beckett Ridge with an old National Football League flanker named Billy Gambrell. A single joined us: bald, short, 50-ish, bowlegged. After eight holes, I realized he hadn’t missed any fairways, hadn’t missed any greens, and had two-putted everything. “Give me your name one more time,” I said.
Don Cherry.
“When Sam came over to me to say, ‘Son, you’re gonna win the U.S. Open,’ I promise you, I don’t remember a single thing that happened after that.”
“He did it on purpose, you know.”
“Of course.”
Cherry said, “Can you imagine what winning the Open would have meant to me? An amateur. An amateur in show business. An amateur in show business married to Miss America. An amateur in show business married to Miss America and with a top-five record, ‘Band of Gold,’ on Your Hit Parade. ‘I’ve never wanted wealth untold / My life has one design / A simple little band of gold / To prove that you are mine . . .’” Dorothy Collins and Snooky Lanson had sung so many different variations of it, week after week for Lucky Strike cigarettes, the public had begun to think it was their hit.
“Most of all,” Cherry said, “can you imagine what it would have meant to my sponsors?”
“Who were your sponsors?”
“The Mafia.”
Cherry also hit the moat. He would have needed a 68 to tie Palmer. Instead he shot 72 to tie Hogan. With a 71, Nicklaus finished second to Arnold, two strokes back. They had begun. “If I could have done the thinking for that kid I played with today,” Hogan said, “he’d have won by ten shots.”
“If I’d have putted for Mr. Hogan,” Nicklaus said, “he’d have won by ten.” Even at the age of 20, Jack had to have the final word.
“Charge!”—once the bugle call of Teddy Roosevelt and the U.S. Cavalry—entered the lexicon of golf. The game had changed: from meticulous to bold. An 11-year-old named Skip Manning retrieved the red visor Palmer spun into the gallery in celebration. Manning returned it 48 years later.
Jerry Barber, who was in second place after each of the first three rounds but fell to ninth at the end, had the most memorable line of the inquest. “Arnold Palmer,” he said in a tone of wonder, “isn’t at all impressed with the fact that he is Arnold Palmer.” Subsequently, Herbert Warren Wind put the same sentiment slightly differently in the New Yorker:
His ability to perform wonders is based on the honest conviction that they are not wonders at all. In a recent conversation with some friends, more or less as an aside, he announced that he felt his game had progressed to the point where, as often as not, he could get a birdie on any hole where he had to. Palmer, however, hasn’t a drop of arrogance in his makeup, and when he is seen in action in the final clutch, what most forcibly impresses the spectator is his completely unfeigned confidence that almost nothing is beyond him. He moves down the fairway toward the ball in long eager strides, a cigarette in his hand, his eyes on the distant green as he considers every aspect of his coming approach shot. They are eyes with warmth and humor in them as well as determination, for this is a mild and pleasant man. Palmer’s chief attraction is his dashing style of play. He is always attacking the course, being temperamentally incapable of playing it safe instead of shooting directly at the flag. His addiction to this sort of gambling, coupled with his love of hard hitting, can make Palmer’s rounds, when his timing is off, one long, enervating sequence of sprayed drives and hazardous recoveries from trouble.
Drum’s terser account for the Pittsburgh Press ran not on the front page of the sports section but on page one of the paper: “DENVER, June 18—Arnold Palmer, who had wrestled with the Cherry Hills golf course for three rounds, caught it in a stranglehold on the final 18 today and pulled off one of the most unbelievable victories in National Open history. . . .” While inserting extra facts in the story and generally dulling it up for page one, copy editors inadvertently dropped Drum’s byline. But drinkers at Dante’s or in the Travel Bar at the Pittsburgher Hotel recognized their friend’s voice. He had signed it with his style. “Do you know how many Arnold Palmer stories I wrote?” Drum said years later. “Five thousand, quoting him in every one. And half the time I couldn’t find him. Pal
mer still thinks he said all those things.”
A month later, with the Masters and U.S. Open in his pocket, Arnold felt obligated to make his first bid for an Open Championship, what only America calls “the British Open.” “That explains the timing of my first trip over,” he said, “but I always knew I’d be going eventually. The reason was my father. [He was the reason for almost everything.] Pap told me, ‘Boy, if you’re going to be a golfer, you have no choice but to be a world golfer, because golf is a world game.’” In that spirit, Palmer flew to Ireland directly from Denver to partner with Snead in a Canada Cup at Portmarnock, which they won. “Drum was along,” Arnold said (on a busman’s holiday, after his paper recoiled at the estimated cost). “Bob and I were drinking on the plane, big surprise. We were talking about Bobby Jones and his amateur Grand Slam, the Impregnable Quadrilateral [British Open and Amateur, U.S. Open and Amateur, all in 1930]. One of us, I think it was me, said, ‘Why don’t we invent a new, professional Grand Slam [the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, and PGA]?’ We drank to it.”
No one is exactly sure where or when golf was born, though the Romans, Dutch, Chinese, and a few others have been willing to accept partial responsibility. The consensus is, it came from Scotland. So, whatever their ancestry, golfers are disposed to believe that, in some essential way, they did, too. Palmer certainly thought so. Pap was Scotch-Irish.
For the Open Championship’s centenary renewal in 1960, the pinwheel had spun back around to golf’s capital, St. Andrews, in the county and kingdom of Fife. St. Andrews is a windblown and pewter-gray university town with Baskervillean spires, ruined turrets, and students wearing tattered red academic gowns by the North Sea. It smells like Cape Cod. The stations of the cross are the Swilcan Burn and Bridge, the Principal’s Nose, the Beardies, the Coffins, Granny Clark’s Wynd, Hell Bunker, Strath Bunker, the Road Hole, and the Valley of Sin. On the 18th green, the ghost of Doug Sanders is frozen forever in a magenta sweater over a 30-inch putt.
At first glance, the Old Course at St. Andrews (the New Course turned 100 years old in 1995) is an unimpressive muni congested and clogged with bracken and broom. At a 100th glance, a 1,000th, it’s a basilica. By the likes of Mary Queen of Scots, golf has been perpetrated there for 600 years.
“Snead won his Open Championship at St. Andrews,” Palmer said. “To Sam it looked like an abandoned golf course. That’s what he told the Fleet Street press, pissing off all the locals. But I could see what he meant.”
The first thing Arnold did was hire a second-generation St. Andrews caddie named Tip. Tip Anderson.
“Excuse me,” Tip said several years later, tilting back a 16-ounce can of McEwan’s Export ale at 7:00 in the morning, “I’m just having my breakfast.” He was a tall man, slender as a 1-iron, white-headed under a cap with a beak instead of a bill that suggested a fisherman before a golfer. Anderson wore a tan windbreaker with a military cut of the kind TV anchormen rock on location. Under tufted brows, he had attentive eyes. His nose was a veiny purple masterpiece.
Palmer seemed partial to caddies whose noses could light the way back to the clubhouse in the dark. One of his domestic bagmen, Creamy Carolan, had a red rubber ball in the center of his face like the sorrowful Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey clown Emmett Kelly. Tip was the opposite of sorrowful.
“My father,” Anderson said, “was a caddie before me who packed for Walter Hagen and Henry Cotton—Sir Henry Cotton—but never won an Open Championship [though those two, between them, won seven]. He was ‘Tip,’ too; that is, he wasn’t ‘Jim,’ either. I was an observant kid. I listened. They don’t listen, these boys. That’s the way in all trades now, all over the world, I suppose.”
Once a junior champion, Anderson carried a 3 handicap in 1960. “It was funny,” he said, “but I was exactly two clubs shorter than Arnie. To the foot, maybe even the inch. My three-iron was his five-. We didn’t chart yardages back then. We eyeballed it. He and I got along brilliantly.”
They made a ragged start, though. “Oh, dear, disastrous,” Tip said. “Our first practice round in bad weather. He shot eighty-seven. Bloody hell! You know, until the wind whips up off the Firth of Tay, Americans are forever mistaking this for an easy golf course. Arnie did, too. But now it was blowing a hoolie, at least fifty, maybe sixty miles an hour. No exaggeration. We were playing with Roberto De Vicenzo, the Senor, and Arnie was full of temper and wanting to quit mid-round. ‘C’mon, stop your crying,’ I said. ‘You’ve come all the way to St. Andrews to win the Open.’ He took that from me. What a grand man he is.
“Well, we got beat one shot by Kel Nagle [an elegant Australian, who required nine fewer putts, four to Palmer’s 10 at the Road Hole alone. “Three three-putts,” Arnold said contemptuously. “I should have played that hole in an ambulance.”]. But we would win the next two Opens, at Royal Birkdale and Troon. From day one at Birkdale, a Wednesday start back then, we were locked up with Dai Rees [the Welshman, runner-up to Hogan at Carnoustie in 1953 and to Peter Thomson at Birkdale in 1954]. As usual, the last thirty-six holes were scheduled for Friday.”
But what Tip called “a Brobdingnagian gale” blew the froth off the Irish Sea, and the R&A postponed the final two rounds until Saturday with a flat proviso: “The Championship Committee of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club have decided that the 1961 Open Championship must end on Saturday whether four rounds have been completed or not. If it is impossible to complete the four rounds, the 1961 Championship will be declared void, and neither the cup nor the medals will be presented.”
“So even as it was continuing,” Tip said, “nobody knew if the tournament was going to count. Our tournament, Arnie’s and mine, seemed to take place entirely on the sixteenth hole, a three-hundred-seventy-yard par four. In a greenside bunker the second day, Arnie had already twisted his nails into the sand and was halfway into his swing when a puff of wind hit the ball. Not only was the shot ruined, a penalty stroke had to be added later, turning a double bogey into a seven. But, considering we caught the worst of the conditions, seventy-three was still a hell of a score. That tied us with Nagle a shot behind Rees and Harold Henning at the halfway point.”
At the sixteenth again, the rain was lighter but the wind was severe. Tip said, “Arnie tried to hit an even lower drive than his usual, but the wind swept it away like a leaf, nearly out of bounds.”
Palmer beat Tip to the ball, blinking out of the underbrush, only 125 yards from the green but with a wall of gorse blocking the way. “Too tall to go over,” Anderson said, “too thick to go through. I asked him, ‘Is there an opening?’
“‘Tip,’ he said, ‘there’s always an opening—if you can see it.’
“‘Shouldn’t we play safe and try to punch out to the fairway?’
“‘No,’ he said, ‘we shouldn’t.’
“‘Coming out of that tangle, the ball could go anywhere.’
“He didn’t say anything to that. After what seemed like five minutes’ deliberation, Arnie yanked out a six-iron—nearly clouting me in the face with it. He choked up considerably. With just the proper degree of loft, the precise amount of dig, coiling and uncoiling every grain of his power, he smashed the ball through the smallest little stained-glass window I’ve ever seen in a bush—in fact, I didn’t see it. But I heard the click, followed by the roar. Hitting the wet green, the ball stopped dead. We’d two-putt it. Simultaneously our eyes went to the scar on the ground and then to each other. There’s a plaque there today. There is. Truly. You could go find it.”
Wind-worn, sandblasted, and as mossy-green as the neglected headstone of a forgotten man, it reads:
ARNOLD PALMER
The Open Championship
14th July 1961
(The wrong date, by the way. The rained-out day was the 14th.)
“Executing a golf shot is the craft,” Palmer said, seated at his desk. “Seeing it is the art.”
Tip continued:
“I know in the end we pipped Rees by only the solitary stroke. [The Welshman
had to come home in 31 to make it that close.] Still, after our miraculous six-iron, I didn’t for one second think we were going to lose, and neither did Arnie.”
Palmer said, “I can’t tell you exactly what I did to make that shot come off, because I don’t know. I really don’t. First, I imagined what it would look like in flight. Next, I felt it in my hands. It’s a hard thing to explain to people, but, from all the golf shots I had hit in my life, my hands just knew what to do on their own.”
A year later, Troon.
“Oh, I’ve never witnessed golf like that at Troon,” Tip said. “I don’t think anyone has. The first day, on his way to an eighty, Nicklaus carded a ten at the eleventh hole, the Railway. Par five [at the time, par four now]. Four hundred and eighty yards. Short as par fives go, but with a landing area off the tee too pinched in for any kind of safe wood shot. One day Arnie reached the green with a pair of one-irons—or maybe it was a one-iron and a two-iron. Either way, the second was longer than the first, and he holed a twenty-five-footer for eagle three. I told him, ‘Now, that’s just not fair.’ What a smile he gave me. We built a ten-shot lead in the final round, then took the commercial road home for a sixty-nine.”
Palmer won by six strokes over Nagle. “Winning the Open Championship, and then winning it again,” Arnold said, “you don’t even dare to dream things like that.” No American had done it since Hagen in 1928 and ’29. The Haig. First Yank ever to win an Open Championship. “Winnie told me about Hagen before I teed off in the final round,” Palmer said. “One of the writers had told her. She always figured I could use a little added incentive. You know, I ended up receiving a congratulatory phone call from Hagen, who was seventy.” From his Michigan home, Hagen told Golf World magazine, “Palmer is one of the best players we ever had. Troon is a tricky course, and you have to have great knowledge and ability to beat it. You can’t say enough about his ability, his will to win, his concentration. He’s worthy of everything that is going to come to him now.”