by Tom Callahan
Breaking out of a clinch with his mom, Arnie said, “Where’s my father? Let’s get Pap in here! He’s the one who really won the U.S. Amateur!” Just then Deacon broke through the crowd. He wasn’t smiling exactly, but Arnie could tell he was happy. “You did pretty good, boy,” he told his son, whose eyes filled with tears. It came over Palmer like a sunrise that he had just received a compliment from his dad.
Three months later, on November 17, Palmer wrote a letter to Dey, stating, “It is with mixed emotions that I advise you of my decision to turn professional. I feel the deepest appreciation to all USGA officers for the fine relationship I have enjoyed. Yet, I cannot overlook my life’s ambition to follow in the footsteps of my father and become a PGA pro. [Technically, despicably, his father was not a PGA pro. By the PGA’s rules, “cripples” were required to make special application, and Pap’s was denied.] We both have counted on this since I first started playing golf. My good fortune in competition this year indicates it is time to turn to my chosen profession.”
Leaning back in his office chair, he said, “Only the players seem to understand how meaningful the U.S. Amateur is. You can’t know how much it matters to us, how much it matters to me. Winning that tournament was, and still is, my proudest achievement in golf. I spent three hours one night with Tiger Woods when he was still at Stanford. More than three hours, four hours. At his request, too. It was good. I was playing at Silverado [in the Transamerica Seniors]. Among the many things we talked about at dinner were what he called [in that shorthand way young Woods had of speaking] the ‘U.S. Am.’ Winning three U.S. Amateurs in a row, and three consecutive USGA juniors before that, is absolutely incredible—all together, six straight years of match play. I think it’s his most amazing feat of all, and I think he’d say so, too. That dinner was the one the NCAA made a federal case out of just because I picked up the check. Fifty bucks. It almost cost Tiger the remainder of his college eligibility, and maybe helped nudge him into the pros.”
Nineteen fifty-four was also the year Palmer and Nicklaus first brushed, at Sylvania Country Club near Toledo. Arnold was a 24-year-old amateur defending his Ohio Amateur championship (successfully), and Jack was a 14-year-old dreamer a year away from qualifying for a U.S. Amateur, six and seven years away from winning it twice. In the clattering rain, Palmer was the lone player practicing on the range, drilling iron shots under the storm. “About quail high,” Nicklaus said, tracing the trajectory with the flat of his hand. Of course, Arnold didn’t know who the boy was who was watching from a hillside, but then, Jack didn’t know who the man was he was watching. The metronome kept clicking back and forth in the rain, and Nicklaus thought he could hear the sound of a pickaxe against the earth.
“I just saw this unbelievably strong guy,” he said, speaking in his Florida office, “beating the ball to death—he was a beater more than a swinger in those days. Knocking down nine-irons, lower and harder than you could believe. Later, someone told me who it was, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s Arnold Palmer.’”
They would end up hyphenated like Dempsey-Tunney. Nobody wanted Dempsey beaten, either.
Young Nicklaus had just come through a touch of polio, Pap’s disease. “I had polio when I was thirteen,” Jack said nonchalantly, as if this weren’t surprising. His body ached, his joints stiffened, he lost his coordination and 25 pounds. Kid sister Marilyn, three years younger, was afflicted at the same time. It took her a full year to walk again, Jack only a few weeks. But the fiery joints that accompanied post–polio syndrome stayed with him from then on. Arnold probably never knew how much Jack and Pap had in common. It mightn’t have made much difference anyway, in Palmer and Nicklaus’s complicated relationship.
In 1997, 21-year-old Masters champion Tiger Woods was sitting on the single bed in his former room at Cypress, California, surrounded by the posters (Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi), football cards (Chargers Hall of Fame wide receiver Charlie Joiner), and bumper stickers (“I’m with That’s Incredible!”) of his childhood. “For That’s Incredible!,” he said, “I sat on Fran Tarkenton’s lap, and at the end of the show hit Wiffle balls over the heads of the audience. I beaned a cameraman. Everyone thought it was hilarious, but I was mortified.”
Taped to the wall above the bed’s headboard was the famous newspaper clipping of Nicklaus’s milestones by age, yellowed from all the years Woods spent checking them off one by one.
“Age 13, shot a 69 . . .
“Age 15, played in U.S. Amateur . . .
“Age . . .”
“That top one,” I said, “was actually a day-night doubleheader.”
“How do you mean?” he asked.
I repeated for him what Nicklaus told me:
“My dad and I went out late on a summer afternoon to play just the front nine at Scioto [the Columbus course where Bobby Jones won the second of his four U.S. Opens]. We did that a lot. This time I shot thirty-five and begged Dad to play the back nine. But he said, ‘Nope. Mom and Marilyn are waiting dinner.’”
After a silent, sullen ride home, Charlie Nicklaus pulled up to the house, turned off the engine, and said, “But you know something, Jack? If we’re mindful of your mother’s feelings and still manage to eat quickly, we can be on the tenth tee in thirty-five minutes.”
When they reached the par-5 18th hole, it wasn’t just dusk, it was dark, and the sprinklers were out. Jack said, “I hit a driver off the tee and I don’t know what club second. But something on the green. In those days there were heavy hoses attached to the sprinklers, and I remember Dad and I had to pull hard to clear a path so I could putt. I had about a thirty-five-footer for eagle and sixty-nine. It went right in the center. That was the first time I ever broke seventy. I was thirteen.”
“I was twelve,” Tiger said.
Over the Labor Day weekend of 1954, the newly minted National Amateur Champion traveled to Shawnee on Delaware, Pennsylvania, to play in Fred Waring’s two-man Bill Waite Memorial Tournament at the personal invitation of the famed orchestra leader (Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians) and patent holder on the Waring blender. One of the junior hostesses was a freckled brunette college student with an upturned nose, Winifred Walzer, whose father Shube owned a canned goods company. Palmer was introduced to Winifred and Waring’s daughter Dixie on a Tuesday. He and Winnie held hands for five days, after which he asked her to marry him. As the first-place trophy was being presented to Palmer and partner Tommy Sheehan, “Uncle Fred” (as Miss Walzer called Waring) all but announced the engagement.
Arnold started to win her, she told Bob Drum years later, when he let her in on a proposition he just that second received from a dancing partner, an older golfer’s older wife (the mother of four children, by the way). “Let’s you and me run away together,” the woman whispered, nibbling his ear. In a subsequent movie about Philadelphia’s Main Line, The Young Philadelphians, Alexis Smith portrayed an equally desperate older woman, and Paul Newman played an equally petrified younger man.
“When he included me that way,” Winnie told Drum, “I got a wonderful feeling of confidence that, if I did marry him, he’d always tell me everything.” She was probably too young then to understand that whispering women might be part of the deal.
Winnie had studied at Brown University and its distaff branch, Pembroke, and she certainly seemed like a Philly Main Liner—aristocratic families in Tudor homes with old money and plenty of it. But while her parents were prosperous enough, they were far from grand. Shube was emphatically a down-to-earth character, and he didn’t consider a blue-collar golf bum, no matter how good-looking, to be a catch for his only daughter.
Out of a golf bet at the storied Pine Valley club in southern New Jersey, near Philly, Palmer promoted a diamond ring. Then or now, almost nobody playing Pine Valley for the first time broke 80. A quarter of a century after the scrub-and-sand course appeared like Brigadoon in 1913, someone finally shot a par 70 the first time out, but it took Masters and U.S. Open champion Craig Wood to do it. Pine Valley wasn�
��t a place usually associated with romance, either. “Barbara and I stopped off there on our honeymoon,” Nicklaus said. “We came from Hershey,” where Jack Grout, his boyhood teacher, had once been an assistant pro. “I always wanted to play Pine Valley and wasn’t smart enough to call ahead. In the pro shop I started to tell them, ‘My wife and I . . .’ ‘Your what!?’ they said. ‘Where is she now?’ ‘In the car right out front.’ ‘Oh, my dear Lord!’”
While Jack played the course, Barbara circled the property, being careful not to contaminate the male-only grounds with womanhood, occasionally catching glimpses of her new husband through the greenery. He shot 74.
By the terms of Palmer’s wager, for every stroke under 72 he would receive $200; for every one over 80, he would have to pay $100. So no winnings for the likeliest score (72 to 80), but with a definite potential for ruin. He opened with a bogey but closed with a 67. Winnie had her rock.
A couple of months went by.
Palmer said, “Pap and I drove to Miami, to my first tournament as a pro, staying together in the same motel room. I missed the cut and didn’t even go back to the room Friday, completely ducking him. I went out on the town with that model from Chicago [who had rematerialized]. When I eventually got back to the motel, Pap was waiting up. He read me the riot act. ‘You’re too lovesick to play golf,’ he said, ‘but not too lovesick to go out with another woman when you’re engaged? Are you ever going to stop screwing around and be a man?’”
Arnie had no answer for that.
“Where’s your fiancée right now?” Deacon demanded.
“Coopersburg [just outside Bethlehem, Pennsylvania].”
“Get your ass to Coopersburg!”
“I dropped Pap at the airport and drove all night, showing up at Winnie’s door needing a shave. No wonder her father hated me.”
They ended up eloping (“I took her out the window, as a matter of fact”), but, as elopements go, it was fairly crowded. Deacon and Doris were there, with both sets of Arnold’s grandparents, and little brother Jerry. Shube gave it a pass. Palmer said, “The hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was ask Shube Walzer for five hundred bucks to stake me on tour. Pap gave us five hundred, too. We put most of it into an old trailer shaped like a loaf of bread,” the first of two trailers (containing a toilet, a shower, a kitchen, and a bed). Towed by a weary pink Ford. Sometimes pushed up hills by Winnie.
Before the caravan pulled out of Latrobe, Pap brought Arnie to a living room window and said, “Do you see that tractor [their vintage tractor] out there? If you listen to all of the other pros on the practice tee and take their advice about your swing and your game, that tractor will be waiting for you when you get back.”
5
1955
WINNER:
Canadian Open
“You could see it, you could smell it. It was golf.”
IN 1955 THE PGA was still enforcing a six-month probation period for touring pros, before they were eligible to collect any prize money at sanctioned events. This was to thwart the hit-and-run artists who might drop by the circuit, grab a bit of cash, and leave. After Palmer’s apprenticeship was up, on May 29, 1955, he tied for 25th place in the Fort Wayne Invitational. For $5,000 a year over three years, he had signed an endorsement deal with Wilson clubs, but the $145 he cashed in Fort Wayne represented his first real paycheck. In 10 previous tour-operated events, he made nine cuts and was denied $1,144.86 in “winnings.”
Soon after becoming official, Palmer took third place in Minneapolis–St. Paul, good for another $1,300, and kept going. Finally, in August, he won the Canadian Open (and $2,400) by four strokes over Jackie Burke, one year to the day since winning the Amateur.
He also gleaned as much pro-am money as he could, “four hundred here, six hundred there, so we could hold our heads above water,” and looked for non-PGA events as far away as Panama (where second place behind the respected Argentine Tony Cerda brought him $900). “I guess I racked up seven or eight grand that year. Winnie used to keep the books for Shube; now she kept them for me.”
She did everything she could for him—and his game. George Low, the Scottish putting guru, golf hustler, card sharp, horse plunger, and fairway philosopher, said, “Leave it to Arnie to marry the first girl who would shag golf balls for him.” Low spoke like that, in epigrams. “I never bet against Ky Laffoon on the putting green because he was part Indian. He could see in the dark.”
As a cook, Winnie was unsuccessful. But as a wife, in every important way, she was a champion. Any 20-year-old woman who cheerfully spends her wedding night inside a jukebox at a trucker’s motel off the Breezewood exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike is entitled not to wait for the first year to play out before telling her husband she loved him, she’d always love him, and she’d follow him to the ends of the earth, but the trailers had to go. And, by the way, she was pregnant.
The Masters not being a PGA-sanctioned event, Palmer was allowed in 1955 to keep the $696 he won at his inaugural Masters for finishing equal 10th (alongside Byron Nelson and Dick Mayer) behind winner Dr. Cary Middlecoff, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Julius Boros, Bob Rosburg, Mike Souchak, Lloyd Mangrum, Stan Leonard, and Harvie Ward.
“Going to Augusta that first time,” Palmer said, “was the greatest thrill of my life. The atmosphere was just so nice there. Everything about it turned me on. Being on the golf course was fantastic. [One day he was paired with 53-year-old Gene Sarazen.] To me, it was like playing all those tournaments where I wasn’t eligible to make a dime.” Pure, like that.
“I still tried my damnedest to win those events, or to finish sixth, or twentieth, or fortieth, whatever.” There was something almost noble in the trying. “I’ve always liked the hardest courses the best. When I get on a hard, exacting golf course, I feel like I’m wrestling a bear.”
From the moment he turned the Ford into the Augusta property and rolled onto Magnolia Lane, “you could see it,” he said, “you could smell it. It was golf. Ed Dudley [three times a Ryder Cup player] was the head pro back then. It was a thrill meeting him, too.” In his gut, Palmer knew he wasn’t going to win the tournament that year, because he was too busy staring at everything and everybody. But he was equally certain he was going to win it eventually and that this was going to be his home.
“Why do I want to win the Masters?” Palmer would later say. “Why do I want to breathe?”
“There’s a stillness, a silence, about the Masters,” said Snead, the least sentimental of the great champions. “The players all tiptoe around like we’re in church. If we came back a week later to play the Screen Door Open, the winner would probably have to shoot two sixty-nine [nineteeen under par] and then play off with two or three others.”
The U.S. Open has a singular atmosphere, too: less lovely and clammier. Two months after that first Masters, Palmer came to his first Open as a professional (following two missed cuts as an amateur), playing four rounds this time and tying for 21st place ($180). On the way to the recommended “cheap motel” nearest San Francisco’s Olympic Club, Arnie and Winnie encountered Tom and Mary Lou Bolt.
“They were checking in just ahead of us,” Palmer said. “Tommy was already notorious for his temper, for whipping clubs into water hazards and the rest, but he should have been famous for kindness, too, and for generosity shown a newcomer. [Also for his satin swing, almost the equal of Snead’s.] Tommy was a dozen years older than I, but we became fast friends as he went about showing me the ins and outs of the trade. Before long we started traveling together with our wives.”
At the age of two and a half, Thomas Henry Bolt crossed the Red River in a covered wagon, moving from Haworth, Oklahoma, to Paris, Texas. Tommy had the face of a Choctaw Indian and a shanty Irishman having themselves a hell of a fight. His nose looked like the thumb on a boxing glove. Bolt’s specialties were long irons hit too solidly to be long irons and woods hit too straight to be woods. Unfortunately, he was never better than an ordinary putter (even at Southern Hills in Tulsa, where
he won his U.S. Open in 1958). Bolt didn’t step out on tour until he was 34. Some life had to be lived first, including in Italy with the U.S. Army. He had a carpenter’s knuckles and a sergeant’s command. His stories resounded with thunderclaps.
“I could listen to him all day,” Palmer said. “You probably know about that shouting match in the press tent when he was forty-two years old but the morning paper had him at forty-nine. The reporter apologized profusely, swearing, ‘It must have been a typographical error.’ ‘Typographical error my ass!’ Tommy said. ‘It was a perfect four and a perfect nine!’”
But Bolt had a quieter side. He tried to get Arnie to remember things, little seemingly inconsequential things, like what it feels like to take the ball out of the last cup after a victory. “Hold on to those feelings,” he advised Palmer. “You’re going to need them someday.”
“And, standing behind you, watching you swing,” Arnold said, “Tommy could see more than almost anybody.”
Standing behind 17-year-old Tiger Woods at Riviera in 1993, Bolt saw “kind of a Mule Train swing—you know, a bullwhip flip at the top. I put his left hand on the top of the club, like Ben [Hogan] showed me. Then I stood and watched him for a while, marveled at him. But I thought to myself, ‘As hard as this kid goes at it, how long can he last? Man. Seventeen years old.’”
Still wearing his flat white Hogan cap, Bolt was sitting in a cart one morning in 2001, an overcast morning, at Black Diamond Ranch in Florida, a dramatic course carved, like Tommy, out of a quarry. The members regarded him as a statue that moved. “When you throw a club,” he advised them all only half kiddingly, “always make sure you throw it down the fairway.”
“Tommy was the best ball striker I ever saw,” Billy Casper said, “but his temper was every bit as ferocious as you’ve heard. I was playing with Tommy in Michigan one year when he flubbed a four-wood shot from the rough. Then he wheeled and threw the four-wood as hard as he could where nobody was standing. A skinny post was sticking out of the ground about thirty yards from Tommy. The club wrapped around that post as neatly as if you were tying a bow. It stuck there, and that, combined with Tommy’s rage, made me laugh so hard I couldn’t play anymore. A hole would go by, I would picture the club around the post, I’d look over at Tommy, and I’d almost go to my knees. Whenever I saw Tommy after that, I’d still get tears in my eyes.”