Arnie

by Tom Callahan

  With a 276 total, Palmer trimmed two strokes off the tournament record. For the rest of his life, at any time of the night or day, he had it in his power to call back the sensation of being engulfed by what seemed like all of Scotland as he walked the last hole in their company. Breaking out of the crush and into the clear, he staggered like a happy drunk, almost going to his knees a couple of times.

  “I was at Royal Troon in sixty-two,” said the Scottish journalist Renton Laidlaw, then of the London Evening Standard, later of the British Broadcasting Company. “Well, it wasn’t Royal Troon then, it was just Troon. I was in the middle of that mob scene. Poor Kel Nagle was trapped in the tide, too. So many people wanted to touch Palmer that day. He was like the Pied Piper, struggling to push his way through the masses and loving every minute of it. All of the United Kingdom embraced him, many literally. They thought he could do anything. He played golf just the way they themselves wanted to. As everyone knows, you’ve got to be hard to win these tournaments, and a wee bit selfish at times. But he was such a pleasant character, so humble, that the Scots in particular were happy to see him as one of them. From then on, he didn’t belong only to America. He was ours, too.”

  “Good old Tip,” Palmer said, “did more than just lead me around all the courses over there; he marched me through all the history at the same time. In St. Andrews, I stayed at the Rusacks Hotel right off the eighteenth fairway, just a short walk from the cathedral bell tower and the graveyard where Old Tom Morris and Young Tom Morris [winners of eight of the first 12 Open Championships] are buried. Tip took me up and down the rows of tombstones, pointing out the monuments for the likes of Allan Robertson [the estimable player and nonpareil club maker], and telling me everyone’s stories as vividly as if Tip had been there in the early eighteen hundreds. Maybe he was. How can a golfer not be moved by all of that?”

  In 1964, when next the rota twirled around to St. Andrews, Palmer was feeling exhausted back home (“fried” was his word) and reluctantly sent regrets. “But he also sent me Tony Lema,” Anderson said. “That is, he lent Tony two of his most valuable possessions: one of Arnie’s favorite old putters, and me. Lovely Tony. He and I [and the enchanted putter] beat Nicklaus by five. So, over a stretch of five years, I had three gold medals and a silver in the tournament my dad never won. They can’t take that away from me, can they?”

  No, they can’t.

  “As I keep telling Arnie, ‘You’ve won two Open Championships; I’ve won three.’ He takes that from me. What a grand man he is.”

  In a way, Palmer’s pal Lema was a creation of Arnold’s aide, Doc Giffin, going back to Doc’s public relations days with the tour. At the Orange County Open in Costa Mesa, looking for his first official PGA victory, the 28-year-old Californian Lema dipped into the press cooler, raised a bottle of beer to the four or five reporters present, and said, “If I win tomorrow, men, we’re having champagne.”

  A lightbulb came on over Doc’s head. “I got ahold of the club manager,” he said, “and he got ahold of the wine.” The next day Bob Rosburg was defeated in a playoff and “Champagne Tony Lema” was born. (Shortly Doc secured him an endorsement deal with Moët.) Lema and his wife, Betty, died in 1966 when a small airplane crashed into the Lansing Sportsman’s Club golf course in Illinois. They were on their way to an outing that paid him $2,000 and came with a complimentary plane ride.

  “Lovely Tony,” Tip whispered. “All that champagne down the drain.”

  In the fourth leg of the new Grand Slam, the 1960 PGA Championship at Firestone Country Club in Akron, Palmer shot a 3-under-par 67 to lead the first round and Snead by a stroke. But a three-footer he had missed for eagle at two was still in his craw when he double-bogeyed three. In fact, it was still there when he triple-bogeyed 16 on Sunday. Palmer tied for seventh place five strokes behind the winner, Jay Hebert. By a total of six shots, he missed the Slam.

  Arnie’s final port of call for the year was the Hickok Belt banquet in Rochester, New York, where the professional athlete of 1960 would be named and awarded $10,000. Nominee Roger Maris of the New York Yankees was expecting to see teammate Mickey Mantle and football players Sam Huff, Kyle Rote, and Johnny Unitas but was surprised to find a golfer among his competition. Looking Palmer up and down, he said, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Later, the Masters and U.S. Open champion just happened to be standing next to the outfielder when the winner was announced—Arnold Palmer. “I leaned over,” Palmer said with a twinkle, “and whispered, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’”

  Maris won the Belt in 1961 after beating Babe Ruth’s home run record. “We ended up friends,” Arnold said. The way almost everyone ended up with Arnie.

  Sports Illustrated looked past Bill Mazeroski, Norm Van Brocklin, Bill Russell, Gordie Howe, Joe Bellino, Jerry Lucas, Pelé, Neale Fraser, Bill Hartack, Floyd Patterson, and all of the Olympic heroes from Wilma Rudolph and Rafer Johnson to Cassius Clay and Oscar Robertson and Carol Heiss, crowning Palmer Sportsman of the Year. The presentation was made on a Sunday night, live on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  For dominating the game of golf with a bold determination while adding to its splendor with genuine graciousness and charm, the editors of Sports Illustrated award the Grecian amphora, a classic symbol of pure excellence. . . .

  Staffer Ray Cave wrote in the magazine:

  Nowhere did a 1960 sports personality command his field with quite the overwhelming ability and natural charm of that 31-year-old golf professional from Latrobe, Pa., Arnold Daniel Palmer. Early in the year he won three tournaments in a row, the first time that has been done since 1952. [The Texas Open, the Baton Rouge Open, and the Pensacola Open, three first-place checks that totaled $6,800.] Then in April he came from behind to win the Masters by getting birdies on the last two holes in one of his typical final-day rushes to victory. Having hit, Palmer is down the fairway at a pace that leaves followers panting behind. He is literally racing to the next shot. His stride as much as says, “You think that shot was something? Watch this one.”

  In June he won the National Open, starting the last 18 holes with a prodigious 346-yard drive to the first green at Colorado’s Cherry Hills Country Club . . . lost the British Open at St. Andrews by a single stroke when another driving finish fell just short. [Four shots behind Nagle with six holes to play, Palmer all but got there.] The British were as much impressed with his graciousness after what must have been a disappointing loss as they were with his excellent play. . . . Thus he has ended his sport’s long wait for a fresh, vibrant personality, bringing a new age to golf: The Palmer Era.

  Winning eight tournaments (40 years would go by before someone—you might be able to guess who—won nine), Arnold earned a record $80,738 in official prize money (some $30,000 more than second place, bettering Ted Kroll’s $72,836 from 1956). At the same time, he became a staple in the top five. With Heinz ketchup (headquartered in Pittsburgh), L&M cigarettes, Munsingwear sports shirts, and (just as odd as it sounds) a string of laundry and dry-cleaning franchises, super-agent-to-be Mark McCormack boosted Palmer’s total income for the year to around $190,000.

  Arnie appeared on What’s My Line? Because his name was thought to be a bigger tip-off than his face, he signed in on the chalkboard as “X.” “Frankly, had he had a hat on,” panelist Martin Gabel later told moderator John Daly (not the golfer), “I would have known him.” After Bennett Cerf narrowed the inquiry to sports and then golf, Gabel, Arlene Francis, and Dorothy Kilgallen sang out together: “Are you Arnold Palmer?”

  Almost.

  2

  1929

  “Taking the honey out, putting the sugar back in.”

  “LATROBE ISN’T JUST THE place where I’m from,” Palmer said. “It’s who I am.”

  He made his entrance on September 10, 1929. The Roaring ’20s and Jazz Age were going out, the Great Depression was coming in. And Bobby Jones was just about to win everything.

  Palmer was really from two places: Latrobe and, thre
e or four miles south, Youngstown, where he went to grade school (in a two-room schoolhouse) and did most of his adolescent carousing; three places, if you count Pittsburgh, 40 miles to the west, where the main exports were steel and quarterbacks.

  Johnny Unitas, Joe Montana, Dan Marino, Joe Namath, Jim Kelly, George Blanda, Babe Parilli, Johnny Lujack . . . Palmer shared traits with all of them. “Arnie plays golf,” Johnny Miller said, “like others play football.” Palmer played a little football himself, in junior high, unconventionally marrying the positions of offensive halfback and defensive tackle, until golf preoccupied him.

  He seemed to favor every Pittsburgh sports legend: the light-heavyweight boxer Billy Conn, a steamfitter’s son (clocking in at five ten and a half, 175 pounds in his prime, Palmer had the easy grace and natural slouch of a prizefighter); the burly tight end Mike Ditka, a welder’s boy; the resolute shortstop Honus Wagner, whose father and brothers were coal miners. Palmer was as indigenous to the region as the Mellons, Carnegies, and Rooneys. He was loamy meadows and smoky skies. He fit right in with the dancer Gene Kelly; the historian David McCullough; Sean Thornton, hero of The Quiet Man (“Steel, Michaeleen, steel in pig iron furnaces so hot a man forgets his fear of hell”); and Bob Drum.

  “Pittsburgh was hard work, hard work, hard work,” said Jim Kelly on the telephone. “My father held down three jobs at a time. He worked in the mills. He was a machinist. He did pretty much everything. If you checked his hands, you’d know what I’m talking about. Those sandpaper hands.” Namath said, “All of Western Pennsylvania was blue-collar territory, certainly in the forties and fifties, when the steel mills and the coal mines were going full blast.” “The kids got out of the mills and mines,” Parilli said, “but they stayed mills and mines kids.”

  Montana and Kelly joked that it was the beer. “Joe says Rolling Rock,” Kelly said. “I say Iron City.” (Palmer’s brand was Rolling Rock.) Their folks drank one or the other, and out of all those suds came all of these quarterbacks. “From Lujack to Marc Bulger,” said Kelly. “Don’t forget Bulger. And Notre Dame would say don’t forget Terry Hanratty, either.”

  If it wasn’t the beer, might it have been something just as golden and even more homegrown? Like an entire community founded on a single proposition, that what you get out of anything depends on what you put into it. “We were all raised on that,” Kelly said. Arnie, too.

  His father Milfred (Deacon to most, Deke to some, Pap to Arnold) was a workingman like the others—same as his own father, a housepainter. Arnie’s paternal great-grandfather, who married for a third time at the age of 70, was a farmer who settled the Palmers in Latrobe. Most visitors took it for an exceedingly unremarkable black-and-white town of work-a-day people and honest grime. But a few could see a full-color cover painting by Norman Rockwell for the Saturday Evening Post. At Strickler’s drugstore, the banana split was invented in 1904. In 1974, 80-year-old Rockwell painted a portrait of Arnie.

  With his own sandpaper hands Deacon built first a golf course and then a golfer in the shade of the Alleghenies. Latrobe is usually described as “nestled in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains,” though there is no sensation of a mountain, or even a foothill, just a leafy and rolling green expanse of lush countryside and riotous red pheasant colors in the fall. During the tightest years, for an additional paycheck, Deacon put in some nights and off-seasons dodging molten sparks in the factories, but far preferred moonlighting as manager of the poolroom at the Youngstown Hotel. He liked running things. He liked the rough-and-tumble of the billiard parlor. He liked bouncing the occasional idiot. And he loved boilermakers. Arnie’s father had a bit of a thirst.

  As a boy, Deacon was bedridden with polio. Small towns weren’t overflowing with medical specialists or rehab centers for invalids. So, on his own, he just got up one day and, for the second time, taught himself how to walk. With torturous calisthenics, chinning himself first with one arm and then the other, he retooled his upper body into an engine block while ignoring a deformed foot. He bobbled gently, like an uneven table, but nobody ever looked at him and saw a cripple.

  He had a corkscrew golf swing entirely of his own design that minimized his legs and produced low, hard draws that a tall center fielder might have caught. And he knew how to get the ball in the hole.

  At the age of 16, Deacon was one of the original roustabouts who dug out the boulders and helped shape the routing of the nine-hole Latrobe Country Club course that opened for play in 1921. Civic leaders conceived the course in response to and out of admiration for Jones. Five years later Deacon was appointed greenkeeper; seven years after that, greenkeeper/pro (though still mostly greenkeeper). He was much more fairway tractor driver than pro shop shirt salesman. “They hired me for both jobs,” he told Drum in 1962, “because they had to cut expenses during the Depression. They said it was just until things got better. It’s funny, though—I still hold both positions. Guess the Depression is still on.”

  From Pap, Arnie learned many important things, like integrity and how to hold a golf club. Pap installed English professional Harry Vardon’s overlapping system and bolted it down before a baseball bat could corrupt the boy. Arnold said, “He put my hands on the club, well, just the way they are now, and told me in no uncertain terms, ‘Don’t you ever change this,’ and I never really did. To most people, a proper golf grip is awkward as hell at first. But I was lucky. My hands were placed on the club so early that it always felt second nature to me. Thanks to Pap, I never had to unlearn anything.”

  The contribution of his mother, who came from railroading stock, made all the difference. Doris Morrison was as light and delicate as a scarf, ready company, and a natural communicator. She liked people and they liked her. (“She was a ham,” Winnie Palmer said. “Arnie’s a ham.”) Pap was always prodding his son to be tougher and try harder and succeed more. But whatever the boy did pleased Doris, provided he was kind. “No player ever had a more nurturing golf mom,” he said. “Her mellowness, willingness to feel things and to show her feelings, was a salvation for me. She was a gentle, generous person, but I never felt as if I was being soft by going to her. I sought her out because she was the counterbalance I needed to Pap, who was tough and hard-core and refused to give me a compliment. I was always afraid to lose because of my father’s reaction, but I never felt that way about my mother. No matter what, she was the one who understood. She always took up for me. All that was so important—much more important than I realized at the time.”

  In the earliest days his waist and hips were so narrow they could barely sustain his trousers. Evenings, after dinner, he trailed behind Doris as she played twilight golf (not particularly well) with two neighborhood friends. She would chide her son as they walked, “Yank up those britches now before they fall off.” The way Arnie hitched at his pants in mid-stride became a nervous habit, and a trademark.

  “I used to get so tired of hearing my father telling me what to do,” he said, “how to hold my knife, fork, and spoon, and leave the table if you’re going to sneeze. You don’t sneeze at the table! I used to think, Isn’t he ever going to get off my back? And, at the same time, all of those things at some point made me love him more.”

  Arnie didn’t have to be taught to love golf. “Arnold never caught the golf bug,” said the British writer Peter Dobereiner. “He was born with it like a hereditary disease.”

  Using a sawed-off women’s brassie (2-wood) he began to play at the age of three and turned pro at seven when Latrobe member Helen Fritz offered him a nickel to hit her drive over a ditch at the sixth hole, not too far from the small first white- and then green-frame house (only two rooms with heat) that the club provided the Palmers. After adjusting a cap pistol strapped to one hip, he took a whirling cut that brought to mind a finish-line flagman or a revolving lawn sprinkler. High forehead. Dented nose. Look of eagles. Mrs. Fritz’s ball floated down like a paratrooper onto the fairway. Every Tuesday morning thereafter (Ladies Day at Latrobe), leaning against a tree in his
backyard, he was available to belt dowagers’ drives for five cents. “Some of them,” he said, “were slow to pay.”

  He sat in his father’s lap as Deacon steered the tractor, dragging multiple mowers. Then, almost before he was big enough or strong enough to manage it, Arnold drove the machine alone. He had to stand up for leverage and wrangle the wheel like a rodeo bulldogger twisting the horns of a rank steer. As a result, his arms puffed out into parts of a much larger boy.

  A sister, Lois Jean (called Cheech), followed him by a couple of years. They weren’t Jem and Scout, but as she said appreciatively, “Arnie took care of me.” He included her in as many of his adventures as possible. Living on a golf course where you’re not a member carries with it a definite feeling of isolation and loneliness. “We played cowboys and Indians,” Cheech said. She was the Indians. After a gap of a decade and a half, a brother and another sister came late. “Arnie was fifteen years older than I,” brother Jerry said, “so our parents in effect had two families.” Because of that timing, and because of his connection to Pap, Arnie operated like an only child, or at least a special son.

  “Just where we are now is a history in itself,” Palmer said in his office, spinning his chair around and gazing out the window. “When I learned to shoot a shotgun, my father and I—he taught me—we walked that hillside over there and shot pheasants and rabbits and squirrels, and took them down and cleaned them in a stream right over here about two hundred yards away. My mother would soak them in salt water overnight, and we’d have them for supper the next day.

  “Right here, right on the edge of this rise, an old oak tree fell over, like that one over there. See the squirrel climbing up? The trunk was rotten—I’ll never forget this. A bunch of honeybees had moved in. Have you ever seen a honeycomb? Well, this one was full of honey. I mean, absolutely, like that . . .” Mimicking an exaggerating fisherman, he spread his hands wide, massive hands right out of Winesburg, Ohio or Of Mice and Men. “A blacksmith’s hands, a timber cutter’s arms,” Deacon would say years later. “There are only two ways to get hands and arms like that, swinging an ax or swinging a golf club.”