Arnie

by Tom Callahan

  The memory of young Palmer delighted Bolt. “In those days Arnie seemed to own only two pairs of pants,” he said, “the pair he was wearing and the pair at the dry cleaners, and they were both too big for him. I think that’s the real reason why he hitched at his trousers all the time. I showed him a few tricks, but never the meat and potatoes of the game. His dad gave him all that. What Arnold had that was absolutely his own was emotion. I’m not talking about temper, either. I mean the emotion he carried in his heart and on his sleeve. He was different from other golfers that way. He showed up different.”

  Don January, who first encountered Palmer in collegiate golf and followed him by a year to the profession, said, “Most of the good pros back then were purposely stoic. They wanted to hide their feelings. Arnold threw his out there for everybody to see. He’d hitch up his pants with his elbows. He’d hit and have that finish with everything twirling, and his nose would be snorting like a bull in heat. He was always a player with a great set of nerves. He’d get in that funny, knock-kneed stance, putting on a green that was half-grass and half-dirt, and run a thirty-footer six feet by and just climb on the other side and pour it back in there.”

  “You’d have to ask Arnie,” Bolt said, “but I believe I helped him with his temperament, just a little, if only by bad example. The top of Arnie’s head used to come off, too, you know, now and again.”

  “It’s true,” Palmer said. “When Bolt won the Open, he harnessed his anger. He went into Tulsa with a feeling of peace and serenity that, he told me, he wished he always had. I don’t think Tommy knew where it came from that week—not really. He said it came from the television preacher, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. But wherever it came from, he birdied the first hole of the tournament and calmly asked himself, ‘I wonder who’s going to finish second.’ [The answer: 22-year-old Gary Player.] It helped me get control of my own temper, which wasn’t in his class but was still considerable.”

  Bolt said, “One time, during Palmer’s first pro season, a guy in his threesome was nettling him, sort of hazing the rookie, if you know what I mean. And if you knew the guy I’m talking about, you’d understand exactly what I mean. When he wouldn’t lay off, Arnold dragged him into the trees and kicked his ass. I won’t tell you the player’s name.”

  “It was Marty Furgol,” Palmer said, referring to a New Yorker 16 years his senior, a Ryder Cup player who won five PGA tournaments in the ’50s and posted top 10s in the U.S. Open and PGA plus an 11th at the Masters. “But Tommy’s exaggerating. I didn’t kick Furgol’s ass, though I sure as hell wanted to. It was in Portland. I don’t know whether he was just giving a newcomer the business, but he kept placing himself in my line of sight. Addressing the ball, I’d look up and see him standing there in the fairway directly between me and the green. I asked him to move. He moved a few feet. I asked him again. He moved a few more feet. I ended up going over the green, chipping back and missing the putt. On the way to the next tee—in front of more than a few spectators, too—I grabbed him by the collar.

  “‘Listen Marty,’ I said, ‘if you ever do that to me again, I’m going to beat the hell out of you, if not with my fists, with a golf club.’ My hands were shaking.”

  At dinner that night Winnie told him, “So Marty Furgol’s the reason you shot seventy-six today?”

  “No, you’re right,” he admitted after a moment. “I’m the reason I shot seventy-six. I lost my composure and learned a lesson.” The next day he shot 66. Doug Ford, the third member of their group, whispered to him, “You’re growing up, aren’t you?”

  Traveling with the Bolts in 1955, Palmer scored his first top five in Vancouver, finishing third as Tommy won. By Toronto in the Canadian swing, it was Arnold’s turn. After shooting 64, 67, and 64 again, he entered the final round with a six-stroke lead, paired with Burke and Bolt.

  “I duck-hooked my drive on the sixth hole,” he said, “and found the ball in the woods beside a fallen tree. I was entitled to remove a broken limb without penalty as long as the ball didn’t move, and I was delicately doing just that, looking for a window to the green, when Tommy came up behind and said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Arnie, you’re leading by six shots!’ He wanted me to chip out sideways into the fairway. ‘Shut up!’ I said. I know Tommy cared about me, but under the rules only your caddie can give you advice.”

  With a 6-iron, Palmer sent the ball veering through a latticework of upper branches onto the green and into the path of his inaugural pro victory. “I’m shutting up,” Bolt said humbly. Tommy didn’t do much winning after his National Open in Tulsa, for which he received $8,000. (Twenty-third place at Southern Hills earned Palmer $200.) “I guess I had got to where I was going,” Bolt said. Still, he would finish third alone behind Jack Nicklaus and Billy Casper in the 1971 PGA Championship, at the advanced age of 54. A perfect 5 and a perfect 4.

  Palmer brightened at his desk. Then he smiled. Then he chuckled. “Tommy and Mary Lou were ‘The Bickersons,’” he said. “You know, the battling couple on the radio, Don Ameche [and Frances Langford]. The night of my first win, at a fishing camp where we were staying in adjoining cabins, the pots and pans started flying out their screen door shortly after dinner, followed by the dishes, the glasses, and eventually the steak knives. ‘Winnie,’ I said. ‘I think our time with the Bolts has come to an end.’ She and I headed on to Montreal alone. Tommy and I stayed pals, though. I loved him.”

  As Palmer was winning his U.S. Open at Cherry Hills in 1960, Bolt was depositing two balls and finally the driver itself into a lake at 18. Herbert Warren Wind wrote, “Considering the size, beauty and beckoning nature of the water hazard, there was something classic about Bolt’s performance, like Hillary scaling Everest or Stanley finding Livingston.”

  6

  1958

  WINNER:

  St. Petersburg Open

  Masters

  Pepsi Open

  “For some reason he was at his meanest with Arnold.”

  “ARNIE AND I FIRST met at George S. May’s old Tam O’Shanter in Chicago,” Gary Player said. “Jimmy Demaret introduced us.”

  May was a snake oil impresario and door-to-door Bible salesman with the accumulating paunch of a sportswriter and the entrepreneurial instincts of Phineas T. Barnum. He paid an unheard-of $50,000 to the winner of his self-proclaimed “World Championship” that carried an additional guarantee of 50 paydays, $1,000 a toss, for exhibitions spaced out over the year at obscure locations throughout the globe, which helps explain why many of May’s champions were never heard from again. Almost every pro golfer, young and old (except of course Hogan, too dignified for carnivals), was drawn to the song of the calliope and the smell of the midway.

  “I’m a young guy from South Africa,” Player said, “and Demaret, a Texan, three-time Masters champion, and a wonderful, wonderful man, always smiling, always laughing, always joking, said, ‘C’mon, there’s another young fellow here you have to meet.’ Today’s players might not have even heard of Demaret, but he was a hell of a player, a hell of a player. Would more than hold his own with anybody now. And he was the most colorful performer, dresser, and talker in the game.”

  Palmer was slamming drivers on the practice tee, spinning those helicopter blades over his head. But the uniqueness of Arnie’s swing wasn’t what jumped out at Player. “It was those forearms,” he said. “I thought, ‘Man, this guy is strong.’” The balls were rocketing down the range.

  “It was quite a breezy day, and he bent down, yanked out a few bits of grass, and tossed them up in the air. But he didn’t look to see which way the wind took them. I asked him, ‘Why do you do that?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘All the good players do it, so I do it, too.’ Jimmy stood there, in his purple socks, laughing like crazy.”

  Player was born in 1935, six years after Palmer, but as Arnold got his start in the profession relatively late, at 25, Gary’s came astonishingly early, at 17. His mother, Muriel, from whom he inherited his miniature features, died when he was eight
following the cruelest siege of cancer. “She never saw me hit a golf ball,” he said with a sadness that could still call him to the edge of childhood. Unlike a lot of tough guys, Player was utterly unafraid of sentiment.

  If he didn’t look like a tough guy at five feet six, consider the experience of a six-three Ohioan who during a round with Player replied to a sincere compliment by saying, “I’m not having any of that gamesmanship today, Gary.” Player stopped in his tracks. “If you say so much as one more word to me the rest of this round,” he told the man, “I’m going to fuck you up.”

  His father, Harry, was a gold miner with corrugated hands but a smooth disposition. “‘The best friend I have in the world,’ my dad used to say, ‘is a rat.’ Down in the hole, he would break off little pieces of his sandwich and feed them to the rat. You see, that rat knew when the cave-ins were coming. Never in his life did my father make more than two hundred dollars a month. We lived in a crummy little house. One day in nineteen fifty-two, Dad rolled up with a set of Turfrider clubs from Wilson. He shrugged and said, ‘I had a bit of money.’ Eight years later the bank manager told me how an overdraft had to be taken to buy those clubs. When I began to win golf tournaments, my dad would put his arms around me and just cry.”

  At one of Player’s earliest competitions, nobody could understand why the grim boy in the oversize sweater hadn’t jettisoned his heavy wool as a chilly morning turned into a scorching afternoon. The reason was, under Harry’s old sweater, Gary was wearing Harry’s old trousers, and the belt line washed up practically to his armpits.

  Player said, “When I told my father I was turning pro at seventeen, he said, ‘That’s crazy, son. You can’t. You just can’t. I promised your mother you’d get an education.’ ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I’m going to get an education, a world education. See these hands? They’re going to hit more golf balls, and I’m going to travel more miles to do it, than any man who ever lived.’”

  What Harry didn’t know was that his son had been practicing signing his autograph for two years, since a teacher inquired, “What do you intend to do with your life?” “That was my art teacher, Mr. Miller, an Englishman,” Player said. “‘Professional golfer,’ I replied. ‘Well, I don’t know what that will get you, my boy, but if you’re any good, you’re going to be signing a lot of autographs. Always keep this in mind: beauty of curvature. It’s important. Here, cup your hand. No, a little more. There, there, there, there, and there. Now go practice that.’”

  Player said, “Take a look at my autograph, and then set it down next to Palmer’s and Nicklaus’s, and Hogan’s as well, for that matter. Every letter perfectly legible. Now, don’t tell me those guys didn’t practice, too.” (Palmer did; the one who set him to practicing was his first-grade teacher, Rita Taylor. She taught him the Palmer Method. No relation.)

  Before the spring of 1957, Harry Player wrote Augusta National autocrat Clifford Roberts to ask if 21-year-old Gary might be included in the field at the Masters. The young South African tied for 24th that year. He would be the first international golfer to win the Masters (1961) and to win it (1974) and to win it (1978).

  Like everyone else on tour, he was mesmerized by Hogan. “They called him ‘the Hawk,’” Player said, “because of those piercing eyes that looked straight through you. He came over to me once in a locker room, wanting to know how much I practiced. [”Hogan invented practice,” Demaret said.] I answered him at some length. And the fact was, with the possible exception of Hogan himself, I practiced more than anybody. ‘Double it,’ he said gruffly, and walked away.”

  At an exceptionally weak moment—in Brazil, actually—Player put a call in to Fort Worth to solicit Hogan’s help. He was that lost. Gary was suffering from just the sort of hook Ben had cured. In his follow-through Player was actually crossing his right foot over his left to try to head off the hook. “I hate a hook,” Hogan had said. “It nauseates me. I could vomit when I see one. It’s like a rattlesnake in your pocket.”

  Player got right to the point: “Mr. Hogan, I’ve been fighting this awful hook, and if I could just talk with you for a few minutes about my swing. Next to you, nobody has worked harder than I have. But I’m in trouble. I just don’t know what to do.”

  “I’m going to be very curt with you,” Hogan replied.

  (“I didn’t know what that word meant,” Gary said. “‘Curt’?”)

  “Are you affiliated with a club manufacturer?”

  “Dunlop.”

  “Call Mr. Dunlop,” Hogan said, and hung up.

  “I suppose he was a little like that with everybody,” Player said. “You know, ‘The secret’s in the dirt. Dig it out of the dirt, like I did.’ But for some reason he was at his meanest with Arnold. At a Ryder Cup, when Hogan was the U.S. captain, Palmer started to go over with him what he thought might be a favorable pairing that afternoon, and Hogan responded, ‘What makes you think you’re playing this afternoon?’ Talk about mean, man. That’s mean as crap.” As a matter of fact, Arnold didn’t play that afternoon.

  In 1958, some weeks before the Masters, Palmer, Player, and Hogan were at dinner together with a gang of other tour pros in New York City. Bill Fugazy, the limousine mogul, was their host. “I’m surprised Hogan went,” Player said. “He didn’t go to many functions like that. During dinner, Ben was very, very rude to Arnold. We were all talking about swings, and Arnold was in the middle of saying something when Hogan cut him off. ‘What do you know about the goddamned swing,’ he said, ‘with that swing you’ve got?’ The whole table went quiet.”

  “Ben had to be joking,” Dan Jenkins said, “and was probably a little over-served. In those days, everybody joked about Palmer’s swing.”

  But Player and Palmer didn’t think he was joking.

  “Arnold just swallowed it,” Gary said. “He could have reached over and snapped Hogan in half. I admired him for not doing so. Not retaliating when he so obviously could. I respected that immensely. It became my model later on, when I was blamed in America for supporting South Africa’s system of apartheid, and blamed in my own country for not supporting it.”

  To loud criticism in the States, Player accepted an invitation to play golf with South African prime minister (and president-to-be) John Vorster (a white supremacist with bushy eyebrows), but Player had an ulterior motive. “Once I had established a relationship with Vorster, I was able to go to him later and say, ‘I’d like to invite the black American golfer Lee Elder to come to South Africa and play.’ He stared at me under those stupid eyebrows like I was a crazy man. But then he said just two words: ‘Go ahead.’ Activists in America pressured Lee not to come, but he came. It took a lot of balls. He did it to change lives. How I admired him.”

  Player paused a moment to look at the sky.

  Then he said, “Whenever I got picketed on a golf course in the U.S., whenever a cup of ice was thrown in my face, whenever a telephone book slammed me in the back, I thought of Palmer at that dinner in New York, and I took it.”

  At the Masters a few weeks later, Palmer and Dow Finsterwald played a Tuesday practice match against Jackie Burke and Hogan. Weary and disappointed from an 18-hole playoff loss (78 to 77!) to Howie Johnson at the Azalea Open the day before, Palmer was still searching for his game against Burke and Hogan. But Dow carried him, and they won their bet, $35 apiece. “Afterward,” Player said, “Arnie and Finsty got to the lunchroom first. The other two came in, and Hogan went to a different table. Arnie heard him say to Jackie, ‘How the hell did he get in the Masters?’”

  (“Just loud enough to make sure I heard it,” Palmer said, seated at his desk.)

  “Well,” Player said, “you know what happened next, don’t you? That was the first year Arnold won the Masters.”

  “There was a tremendous rainstorm Saturday night,” Palmer said. “I reached the twelfth tee Sunday with a one-stroke lead over Ken Venturi, my playing partner. That’s when everything hit the fan.”

  The 12th hole, a par 3, represented the middle of
“Amen Corner” on the far end of the course. The expression was coined at that tournament, maybe at that instant, by Herbert Warren Wind, borrowing from a 45-rpm jazz recording (“Shouting at the Amen Corner”) by Chicago clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow. As Wind reckoned it, the corner began with the approach to the par-4 11th and ended after the drive at the par-5 13th.

  Only players, caddies, and officials were permitted inside the ropes surrounding the 12th tee. From their tee shots at 12 until their second shots at 13, the golfers broke off from the crowd for a quiet interlude of relative privacy.

  “My tee shot at twelve [155 yards, six-iron] flew the green,” Palmer said, “and embedded itself in the mud between the fringe and back bunker. To me, an obvious drop without penalty. But the official standing there, Arthur Lacey, said, ‘It’s only half-plugged.’ I said, ‘That’s like being half-pregnant.’ Because of the heavy rain, just for the Sunday round, we were playing wet-weather rules ‘through the green’ [taking in all parts of the course except the tees, greens, sand bunkers, and water hazards]. I knew I was right. ‘I’m going to play two balls,’ I told Lacey. He said, ‘You don’t do that here.’

  “‘Huh?’”

  Palmer barely moved the indented ball, into a puddle of casual water, from where he received an uncontested free drop. But he required a chip and a couple of putts from there for a double bogey 5. Returning to the embedded scratch, he dropped another ball over his shoulder. Rolling nearer the hole twice, it was eventually placed, and this time he got up and down for 3. “We’ll let the rules committee sort it all out when we get in,” he told Venturi.