by Tom Callahan
“Riding the train, Bud told me he had just accepted tuition, board, and books at a little Southern school called Wake Forest College, which of course I had never heard of. ‘It’s in Wake Forest, North Carolina,’ he said. ‘You can play there all winter long and barely need a sweater. You wouldn’t be interested in coming with me, would you? I’ll bet I could get you a full ride, too.’ And I’ll be darned if he didn’t.”
Arriving that autumn, they went straight to the Carolina Country Club in Raleigh, where Palmer shot 67 and Worsham 68, the first time either of them ever saw the course. For three years they were inseparable, rooming together and lateraling Wake’s number one and number two playing positions back and forth without rancor. Even though each lived to beat the other, neither ever rooted against his friend. For supplemental recreation, they wrestled in the dormitory. It took two men at a time, like Bud and Coach Johnny Johnston, to give Palmer a respectable match. “He still never lost,” said another team member, Dick Tiddy, who someday would be the head pro at Arnold’s Bay Hill Club in Orlando.
There haven’t been many better generations of collegiate golfers, counting Mike Souchak and Art Wall Jr. at Duke, Harvie Ward at North Carolina, Ken Venturi at San Jose State, Gene Littler at San Diego State, Don January and Billy Maxwell at North Texas State, and Dow Finsterwald at Ohio University.
“I’m four days older than Arnie,” Dow said. “Can’t you tell? Four days wiser, too, as I tell him all the time. When he and I were freshmen, our schools played a series of games all around the Carolinas. The first time out against me, he shot twenty-nine on the front. That was my introduction to the son of a gun.”
As sophomores, Bud and Arnie persuaded the athletic director, Big Jim Weaver, to let them convert the sand greens on Wake’s nine-hole course to grass. Weaver gave them a dollar an hour (to split), a wheelbarrow, two shovels, and access to a landscaping manual. Now Arnie was Pap at Latrobe in the 20s. These may have been his happiest days.
At the time, the Wake Forest campus was some 65 miles closer to Duke than it is now, only about 20 miles away then. On a Homecoming weekend, Bud urged Arnie to accompany him and basketball player Gene Scheer to a dance in Durham, a “mixer.” Worsham had a 1939 Buick. It wasn’t like Palmer to pass up a dance anywhere (as it combined two of his favorite things, pretty girls and discreetly palmed bourbon-and-Cokes). But instead he and Jim Flick, Scheer’s roommate, went to a movie. Flick was an athletic hybrid, part basketball player and part golfer, who would eventually achieve renown as a swing doctor for the likes of British Open champion Tom Lehman.
The following morning, Arnold looked over at Bud’s bed and saw it hadn’t been slept in. Neither had Scheer’s, across the hall. Palmer sat on his own bed for over an hour, full of dread. When Flick and Coach Johnston came to his door, the looks on their faces only confirmed what he already knew. “Heading to Durham in Johnny’s car,” Arnie said, “I think he told me they were dead. I’m not sure.” They passed the bridge where the car had run off the road and flipped over in a stream.
Then they started going to funeral parlors in Raleigh, a dull buzzing blur of funeral parlors. “Finally, we walked into one where a highway patrolman asked me, ‘Are you family? Can you make an identification?’ I said, ‘Best friend,’ and he took me into a back room [where both broken bodies were laid out together on one table. The shock of it, like a bomb going off, left him deaf and floating]. For some insane reason, we went looking for the Buick next.” They found it in a junkyard, crushed.
That night, undoubtedly with the best intentions, Flick moved Bud’s stuff out and his own stuff in with Arnie.
“You knew Flick, right?” Palmer asked me, sitting at his desk.
“Yes, I first met him in Cincinnati,” I said. “He was a teaching pro at the Losantiville club. Billed himself as the inventor of the ‘square-to-square’ method.”
“Square-to-square was old,” Arnold said, “when my father was young. I’m not proud of this, but I could never be close to Jim after he moved Bud out so soon. It’s not his fault, it’s mine. We were in the same business, but I just couldn’t know him. We’d say hello through the years, but I wasn’t able to say much more than that. He telephoned me now and then; I’m not sure I ever called him. We spoke on the phone just before he died [of pancreatic cancer in 2012, at 82], and you know something? He didn’t say a word about his illness. We just talked about golf. Some things, you never get over.”
Flick worked with Nicklaus late, after Jack turned 50.
“Oh, I know,” Palmer said, “I was there at the Tradition, Jack’s first senior event, when he turned to Jim on the practice tee and asked, ‘What do you see?’ Jim replied, ‘I see a feel player who’s become too technical.’ Jack won that tournament and thanked him afterward. Flick knew his stuff.”
Arnie came home from Bud’s funeral outside Washington, D.C., and, in a heartbroken fog, ghost-walking to classes, learning nothing, finished the semester at Wake, whose very name seemed to stand now for the vigil he was keeping. Then, essentially, he ran away. He didn’t want to go to college anymore. It’s not true, as people later said, that he didn’t want to play golf anymore. He longed to play golf, just not there.
“I was going crazy,” he said. “I kept turning around to tell Bud something, then I’d remember he was gone. If I’d have been with him that night, maybe I would have been at the wheel on the way home. I probably would have been. Everything might have been all right.”
To the puzzlement of Pap and with the understanding of Doris, Arnie joined the Coast Guard. As a yeoman.
He spent three years guarding coasts, first in Cape May, New Jersey (slipping over to Wildwood occasionally for nine holes of golf); later in Cleveland, playing a lakeside course where the flag sticks were sometimes frozen solid into the cups. In his dress whites, Palmer must have been presentable, because he was selected to be part of an honor guard at the Washington premiere of the movie Fighting Coast Guard, starring Brian Donlevy, attended by President Truman. But air-sea rescue intrigued Arnold more than Hollywood glamour. He still had a photograph of himself with Esther Williams, but flying beguiled him more.
The move to Cleveland was facilitated by an arm he broke (not his own) in a jujitsu class where his steel hands, powerful upper body, and wrestling experience from Wake Forest held him in better stead than his opponents. He was summoned to a captain’s mast—for punishment, he presumed—but instead was offered a transfer to whatever station in the country had an opening. For its proximity to Pennsylvania and for its golf courses, he chose Cleveland.
Hitchhiking home from Cleveland, wearing his uniform, carrying his golf clubs (a foolproof prop for hitchhiking), he was picked up by a large man heading to Harrisburg in a Cadillac. “You drive,” said the man, who immediately put his hand on Palmer’s leg after they settled into the front seat. “I knew about women,” Arnold said, “but I didn’t know about men.”
After being set straight (so to speak), the man decided he wasn’t going to Harrisburg after all. “The hell you aren’t,” Palmer said. “You said Harrisburg and we’re going to Harrisburg.” At the first Harrisburg exit, Arnie pulled over, grabbed his clubs and duffel, and said, “Thanks for the lift.”
An officer who was a keen golfer set Palmer to ramrodding the construction of a driving range and tried to talk him into applying for officer candidate school, with an additional two years’ commitment. Arnie was flattered but not tempted. Still, he wondered what he would do after his discharge. He wound up selling paint supplies in the morning and playing what he called “salesman’s golf” with potential customers in the afternoon. Palmer’s employer campaigned for him to return to Wake Forest to complete a business administration degree, and he did go back for a semester, taking over as interim coach (player-coach) from Johnny Johnston, who had inherited the A.D. job from Big Jim Weaver, now the commissioner of the new Atlantic Coast Conference.
Playing majestically, Palmer won the ACC individual championship but fell a
few credits shy of a diploma and never did graduate. (“I must say,” he told a graduating class many years later, “that I was not a budding Rhodes Scholar during my undergraduate years—and you don’t need to giggle at that—but, thanks to some of my professors and the young man who quickly became my best friend when we entered Wake Forest together, I acquired my education—an education that has played an important part in the success I have had in life. Bud Worsham was that friend. Many of you do not know who he was. Let me tell you about him. He was more than a brother, closer than any brother could be . . .”)
Palmer resumed selling paint in Cleveland.
The choice between turning pro and remaining an amateur wasn’t as automatic then as it is now. Bobby Jones had proved a bigger fortune could be made serving on boards and with banks than on tour, and Jones hoped Jack Nicklaus, in particular, would follow his example. At the bottom of a last-ditch letter, Jones wrote Nicklaus, “But if you’re bound and determined to turn pro, I have had a very fine relationship over the years with the Spalding company. . . .”
There weren’t really any amateurs.
“I think of Palmer,” Finsterwald said, “as the greatest amateur-professional who ever lived. By that I mean he never stopped playing the game for the love of it, like an amateur. Sure, he liked making a nice living. But he loved to play. Arnie and I enjoyed a lot of the same things, like cowboy movies. Remember Bob Steele? Ken Maynard? Sunset Carson? Arnie will watch anything with manure in it. I can’t prove it, but I think Arnie dreamed of riding horses, strumming guitars, and shooting bad men. Except for Roy Rogers pictures, I know his favorite film of all time was Northwest Passage, starring Spencer Tracy, because Tracy reminded him of his dad.
“But the thing we truly had in common, the thing both of us cared about most of all, was playing golf. That may sound funny, but you’d be surprised how many good players, how many pros, weren’t able to enjoy it nearly as much as Arnie and I did. To us, it was more an avocation than a vocation. Check out his face after he pulls off a tough shot. The look of pure joy that comes over him. He’s alive.”
(Lee Trevino once said, “Arnold and I are the same. We have to slap rubber every day. Slap rubber. Nicklaus also likes to fish, ski, play tennis, and go to his kids’ football games. Player also likes to ranch and breed thoroughbreds. I’ve heard Gary say he’d rather win a Derby than a Masters. But Palmer and I have to hit golf balls every day. Slap rubber. It’s the only thing we really care about.”)
Finsterwald paused for a second, and then laughed.
“You know that PGA Tour slogan?” he said. “‘These guys are good.’ Well, I wish they’d make a new commercial showing Retief Goosen missing the little putt at Southern Hills and then winning the U.S. Open playoff the next day. ‘These guys are human.’ That’s Arnie more than anything. Human.”
4
1954
WINNER:
U. S. Amateur
Ohio Amateur
All-American Amateur
Atlantic Coast Conference Championship
Waite Memorial (with Tommy Sheehan)
“Are you ever going to stop screwing around and be a man?”
IN HIS New Yorker profiles of major golf championships, Herbert Warren Wind opened with the rocks; moved on to the snakes, the Indians, the settlers, and the architects; detailed a half dozen or so Walker Cups contested on the premises; then recapped one by one every previous major conducted there until finally coming to the tournament at hand. The New Yorker paid by the word.
But Herb could get to it quicker if he had to. At a previous post, with Sports Illustrated in the magazine’s rookie year of 1954, he used the opening paragraph to compare the finalists in that summer’s U.S. Amateur at the Country Club of Detroit: one, “a graying millionaire playboy who is a celebrity on two continents,” and the other, “a tanned muscular young salesman from Cleveland who literally grew up on a golf course.”
Wind was an officious-looking chap in a light-brown suit (picture a homicide inspector viewing the body), nowhere near as sour and severe as his countenance. He loved words and he loved golf. (Early one Masters week, he walked up to me in Augusta’s toy airport and inquired anxiously, “The golf course, is it firm?” “Hell, Herb,” I said, “I just got here.”) “There was no need to exaggerate the personalities of the two finalists or the nature of their duel,” he wrote, “for the contrast was a highly dramatic one without gilding one blade of grass.”
The graying millionaire playboy was 43-year-old Robert Sweeny, a California-born investment banker from London, Oxford University, and the Royal Air Force’s Eagle Squadron (Yanks piloting RAF bombers before America entered World War II), who won the British Amateur 17 summers earlier and spent six months of his year making financial killings in the States while playing golf with (and occasionally beating) Ben Hogan at Hogan’s winter retreat, Seminole Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
To get to Sweeny, the tanned muscular, 24-year-old salesman had to win seven matches. He defeated Frank Strafaci, 1-up; John Veghte, 1-up; Richard Whiting, two extra holes; Walter Andzel, 5 and 3; Frank Stranahan, 3 and 1 (Stranahan, 32, a bodybuilder, once mauled him, 11 and 10, at a North and South Amateur); Don Cherry, 1-up; and Edward Meister Jr., three extra holes. Cherry was the Mafia singer who wasn’t yet married to Miss America of 1956, Sharon Ritchie, who eventually put him on the waiver wire in favor of Kyle Rote. Sweeny’s road to the finals included a 3 and 1 victory over Eddie Merrins, who would become Bel-Air Country Club’s fabled “Little Pro.”
The night before his semifinal match, the first of two 36-holers, Palmer telephoned Pap and Doris, who jumped in the car and drove from Latrobe to Grosse Pointe Farms, pausing for three hours in Ohio to nod off by the side of the road. Just before they arrived, Arnold kissed the Chicago model he had been squiring all week, patted her on the bottom, and sent her home.
His parents pulled up just as he was about to tee off against Meister, a 38-year-old publisher of trade papers for the fruit industry and a former captain of the golf team at Yale. It was an especially stifling August day in Michigan, and the match was as static as the breeze for all of the morning and much of the afternoon, until Meister seemed ready to assert himself down the stretch. He could have won their match with a 10-footer at the 35th hole, a 14-footer at the 36th, a five-footer at the 37th, or a 16-footer at the 38th, but missed them all. A slick five-foot putt Palmer had to make to send the match to extra holes was the putt that stayed with him forever. On the third extra hole, a 510-yard par 5, Palmer reached the green with a driver and 2-iron, anticlimactically two-putting for birdie to end the longest semifinal in Amateur history. It was Sweeny versus Palmer the next day for the title.
“He looked like a movie star” in pressed linen pants and an expensive haircut, Arnold said. “He was as thin as a reed” (and as high-waisted as the New York Giants shortstop Alvin Dark). Sweeny could make a blank white visor look important, and feel jaunty. He had a female companion in the gallery who was just about the most decorative young woman Palmer had seen since Esther Williams. “Let’s put it this way,” he said, “she was more than amply endowed.” At the fourth hole she squirmed through the ropes to toss her arms around Sweeny and give him a substantial kiss. He made a 45-footer at two, an 18-footer at three, and, to pay her back for the smacker, a 20-footer at four. “I was already three down,” Palmer said. “It’s not enough that he’s rich, handsome, a bomber pilot, and gets the girl, he also makes every damn putt he looks at.”
As they walked off the fourth green together, Sweeny pinched the back of Palmer’s neck (on top of everything else, Bob was six feet three, four or five inches taller than his opponent) and whispered something that was missed by Wind and the other reporters tramping behind. Smiling at the memory, Palmer said, “What he told me was, ‘Don’t worry, Arnie, you know I can’t keep this up forever.’ Bob was a real sportsman, a real gentleman. I appreciated that. Even during the nip and tuck of our match, I knew I would always have a good fe
eling about him.” And, true to his word, Sweeny three-putted the fifth.
But their game wasn’t squared until the 27th hole. “At lunch,” Palmer said, “I told myself, Stop playing him, start playing the golf course, which became my match-play strategy for the rest of my life. Bob made another long putt at the twenty-eighth hole to go one-up again, but I caught him at the thirtieth and went ahead for the first time all day at the thirty-second. I’d been outdriving him by thirty to forty yards, and finally my irons were kicking in.”
One hole in front going to the last, Palmer hit a particularly deep drive, absolutely on a string, and an iron shot hole-high that sounded like a tuning fork. It’s a myth that, if you lined up every great golfer on the same range without knowing who any of them were, you wouldn’t be able to tell the best players at a glance. The truth is, if you can get close enough, you can hear it: the crystal sound of silver on glass. Playing with Tom Kite and Payne Stewart in a practice round before the AT&T at Pebble Beach, I never had to turn to see who had just hit. Kite’s contact was only solid; Stewart’s was musical.
Sweeny hit his final drive into the wilderness, and after an extended search actually shanked his second shot. He wasn’t yet on the green in the hole he had to win. His subsequent concession was given wholeheartedly, and Palmer was the U.S Amateur Champion, 2-up. For some reason fathomable only to a USGA potentate, Sweeny was rewarded for his gracefulness with an arbitrary halve on the last hole. “Is that OK with you?” referee Joe Dey asked Arnold, who didn’t care. So it went on the board and in the books as 1-up. After a moment’s confusion, a brass band on the clubhouse terrace struck up “Hail to the Chief” and, this being Wolverine country, “Hail! to the victors valiant / Hail! to the conqu’ring heroes . . .”