Arnie

by Tom Callahan

  “I agreed with Palmer on the original call,” Venturi said. “That ball was absolutely embedded. But he didn’t declare he was playing a provisional until after he made the double bogey. To me, that was wrong. Dead wrong.”

  Arnold said, “I did declare the second ball, to Lacey, before I played the first. Ken didn’t hear me.”

  The killer for Venturi came in the 13th fairway as Palmer was in the go-or-layup position, weighing the considerable risk of a 230-yard second shot over water to the par 5. Had he known the score, he might not have gambled. He looked across the fairway at Ken, who was either one behind or one ahead and had already laid up with his own second.

  “They’re going to give me a five back there, aren’t they?” Palmer said.

  “You’re goddamned right they are,” Venturi told him. So Arnold went for it with a 3-wood, and got it. “He met the ball squarely,” Wind wrote, “and it rose in a low parabola. There was some draw on the shot, and it curved from right to left as it crossed the creek and landed comfortably on the green.” Eighteen feet from the hole. Straight in the cup for eagle.

  Sitting nearby in his green combination wheel chair/golf cart, Bobby Jones experienced a flashback. That night, he would say, “Today I was watching Palmer at thirteen and once more Gene Sarazen was hitting from that mound at fifteen [in 1935]. As Gene followed through, I remember thinking to myself, ‘It’s the perfect golf swing.’ Of course, I had no way of knowing it was going in the cup for a double eagle. When Palmer hit his, I turned to Cliff [Augusta National chairman Cliff Roberts] and said, ‘He really got that one.’ It gave me the exact same feeling of exhilaration I felt all those years before. And this time I was surprised it didn’t go in the cup.”

  Shortly, Jones and Roberts came riding up like the cavalry. They heard Palmer out, and after conferring with several other green jackets behind the 15th green, ruled that Arnold had made a 3 at 12. In exasperation, Venturi began three-putting his head off. And when the head comes off, the turnip goes on. Playing together, both Doug Ford and Fred Hawkins had reasonable putts at 18 to tie, but each finished a stroke behind Palmer. As the defending champion, Ford helped Arnie into the green jacket, making him at 28 the youngest Masters winner since 25-year-old Byron Nelson in 1937. Palmer had his first major title.

  “The rules of golf are very touchy and troublous things to administer,” Wind wrote (troublous being a typical Herb word; he liked fillip, too, as in “an arm of Rae’s Creek, four or five feet wide, adds a nice fillip of menace”), “and my own feeling on the subject is that if a man is notified he has been appointed to serve on the rules committee for a certain tournament he should instantly remember that he must attend an important business meeting in Khartoum and tender his exquisite regrets to the tournament committee.”

  “Two years later,” Venturi said, “Palmer finished three-three-three to beat me by a shot, and I was forced to sit there at the green jacket ceremony as the runner-up. He turned to me and whispered, ‘I’m sorry it had to be you, Ken.’ I looked away and said, ‘Two years too late.’”

  Player said, “Venturi started to tell me once how Arnold had cheated him at the twelfth hole, but I stopped him right there. They always yell ‘cheater’ at the end. ‘That’s crap with a capital C,’ I told him. More than once, I’ve said to Palmer, ‘The reason I’m proud to have you as my friend is because you always do the right thing.’ Always doing the right thing was what made him Palmer.”

  Many years after the incident, sitting in a locker room at Eagle Creek in Naples, Florida, Venturi was reflecting on his interesting life. “I played baseball with DiMaggio,” he told me. “I roomed with Sinatra. I knew Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., the whole Rat Pack.” He also knew disappointment. “I had three heartbreaks at the Masters,” he said.

  The first and worst was in 1956, when he was a 24-year-old amateur and opened the tournament with a 66, the best score by an amateur still. That Saturday night, leading the tournament by four strokes, he was summoned to an audience with Roberts. In those days Masters tradition paired the Sunday leader with Byron Nelson, but Venturi’s close connections to Nelson and Hogan (“I was taught by Michelangelo and shown by Da Vinci”) worried the chairman.

  Roberts invited Venturi to pick any other playing companion for the final round. In a typical show of bravado, he chose Sam Snead, with whom he had never been paired before. “Snead’s a tough man to play with,” Roberts warned. “So am I,” Ken said.

  Sam was known for intentionally pulling the wrong club, making sure his playing partner saw the number on the back, then hooding it slightly to change the loft. If he wanted to, he could hit all of his irons the same distance. So could Hogan. So could Bobby Locke, the South African. So could Christy O’Connor Sr., the Irishman. So could a lot of the great ones.

  Venturi shot 80 and lost to Burke by a stroke. A measly stroke.

  His father was a San Francisco ship chandler who, when he wasn’t supplying twine and other supplies for the wharf, collected green fees at Harding Park, a public golf course. Ken liked baseball and was good at it, “but golf was easier for me,” he said, “because it was easier to be alone.” He was a stutterer who became a national communicator, for CBS. “I knew I was going to win the U.S. Open [which he did at sweltering Congressional Country Club in 1964 in a double round so delirious it ended the double rounds], but I never thought I’d be able to speak a whole sentence.” With a sheepish smile he said, “I guess I’m the fellow who lost the Arnold Palmer sweepstakes. But then, I was always more of a Ben Hogan guy anyway.” (Isn’t it funny how only the Hogan acolytes—Venturi, Bolt, Gardner Dickinson—were ever able to pull off those flat white linen caps?)

  Venturi won his final PGA tournament in 1966, in the Lucky International at Harding Park, where his father had collected green fees and where Ken played his first round of golf. “I guarantee you,” he said, “I wrote that acceptance speech when I was fourteen years old.” By two strokes, he beat Palmer.

  After Arnold won the ’58 Masters, did he throw his victory back in Hogan’s face?

  “What would have been the point of that?” he said. “I admit, though, I felt an extra touch of personal satisfaction, and maybe he could see it the next time he looked at me. When I first came to Augusta, peeking through all those magnificent trees, it was such a thrill. Seeing Bobby Jones there, and Gene Sarazen, and Byron Nelson, and Ben Hogan—those were the guys my dad and I used to talk about. I read Byron’s book, and Jones’s book. I remember things that happened to them. To actually know them, to see them play, to play with them, to eat with them, to have them call me by name, meant so much to me. I wanted to hear my name on Hogan’s lips, too, I’ll admit it. I ached for that. But, to the day he died, he never pronounced ‘Arnold’ and he never pronounced ‘Palmer’—it was always ‘Fella,’ or ‘Hey, you.’ I resented the hell out of it. But there was nothing I could do about it. Also, I didn’t want to spend my life being bitter, especially with all the good fortune coming my way.”

  Hadn’t Palmer always been a great one himself for momentarily misplacing names and addressing old friends as “pard” or “pro”? He once propped his arms up on the shoulders of the lovable Brit writer Peter Dobereiner, saying, “I’m worried about our friend, Peter.” “Yes, so am I,” Dobers said, “because I’m he.”

  “It’s not the same thing, trust me,” Palmer said. “Hogan had a purpose for everything he did, and he had a purpose for this. I was just never quite sure what it was. I think he wanted me to know that, as far as he was concerned, I wasn’t an ‘entity.’ I was just another player. He and Byron and Snead and I played an exhibition once at Preston Trail [in Dallas]. I played my best that day, and I got the impression it bothered him.”

  There’s a photograph of them on the tee, Palmer with his L&M, Hogan with his Chesterfield, looking everywhere but at each other.

  “I talked easily with Nelson and Snead,” Palmer said, “but Hogan? Zero. I had more conversation with Valerie [Ben’s wife]. She
was a terrific lady. The whole thing between us embarrassed her. He was a great player. He proved he was a great player. But he wasn’t a great guy.”

  To try to understand, it might help to know Hogan had a brother named Royal and a sister named Princess and he was just Ben. He was born in Stephenville, Texas, raised by a seamstress (Clara) and a blacksmith (Chester), who shot himself to death in 1922 in their home. If it’s true that Ben was present at his father’s suicide, he was nine.

  At the age of 15, playing in the annual caddie tournament at Fort Worth’s Glen Garden Country Club, he lost the finals match (normally a nine-hole game) to Nelson after Byron made a 30-footer on the ninth to tie. Hogan thought he had won a sudden-death playoff at the next hole, but the terms of the match had been redrawn in midstream, to a full 18 holes, and another long putt ultimately beat him. One junior membership was at stake. Nelson got it.

  In 2002, Byron was sitting on a park bench at Las Colinas in Dallas at 90 years old, the first born and last survivor of the class of 1912. “I never knew there was a game of golf until I was thirteen,” he told me. “I didn’t know the name, even. Do you know what it says on my birth certificate? ‘Rural Area, Ellis County, Texas.’ By fifteen I was caddying at Glen Garden. Contrary to all the stories that have been written, I never once caddied in a group with Ben. He worked mainly for a man named Ed Stewart. I had a regular, too, a judge. At the time I thought he was old. He was probably fifty. The first time I was ever conscious of Ben was at the Christmas party Glen Garden threw the caddies—turkey with all the trimmings—followed by the big caddie tournament where all our regulars caddied for us.

  “Ben quit high school to turn pro. He would go off to a few tournaments, run out of money, and come back. Go off again, run out of money again, and come back again. [Before breaking through, Hogan rammed his head against that brick wall for more than a decade, in one tournament finishing 38th and winning $8.50.] He was more determined to be great than any man I ever saw.”

  In 1949, Hogan and Valerie crashed head-on into a Greyhound bus on a foggy road near Van Horn, Texas, leaving Ben broken like china from pelvis to collarbone, ankle to rib. He limped his way to U.S. Open titles in 1950, 1951, and 1953. In 1952, two 69s gave him a two-stroke lead in the Open at Dallas’s Northwood Club, but on a 36-hole final Saturday in murderous 98-degree heat, he shot a pair of 74s for third place by himself behind Julius Boros and Porky Oliver. In 1953, Hogan played in six tournaments total, winning five of them (including the Masters, U.S. Open, and Open Championship), finishing third in the sixth. (You might want to reread that sentence.) Logistically, the British and PGA—at match play then—essentially overlapped. Everyone in the Open field at Carnoustie in Scotland was obliged to play in a qualifier, not that Hogan’s legs were up to trudging 36-hole PGA matches anyway.

  “He played his best golf,” Nelson said, “after his automobile accident, after he learned to walk again. Whatever Hogan did to Arnold that hurt Arnie so, I can’t believe he truly meant it. You know, Ben knew that people as a group didn’t like him. Ben had some friends, but most people didn’t like him. He was so driven and he was so good. I think he had, I don’t know, kind of a fear of being close to people. Ben told me finally, ‘Byron, I didn’t realize that so many people liked me.’ You could almost cry.”

  Sam Snead did cry. He was kicking back at the Greenbrier with his feet up in front of the television, pleased with his round that morning on the White Course. He had taken $300 off a sportswriter who said, “Don’t think I don’t know you could beat me playing left-handed. I’m going to put it on my expense account.” He laughed and said, “Amateurs still ask me to read their putts. What they don’t realize is I have to walk all the way to the hole just to tell if it’s uphill or down.”

  A 1953 clip of Hogan and Snead was replaying on the TV, from the awards ceremony following the U.S. Open at Oakmont. It was Hogan’s fourth and last Open victory, Snead’s fourth and last second-place finish in the only major tournament he never won. In 1937, Sam’s first U.S. Open, he needed just a bogey-6 on the final hole at the Philadelphia Country Club to tie Ralph Guldahl. He made an 8. In the clip with Hogan—Snead had seen it a hundred times—he reaches over wanly to touch the elusive trophy in Ben’s arms. Holding out the large silver pot, Hogan rubs it up and down Sam’s stomach. Rubbing it in, Sam always thought.

  “The three things in golf I feared most,” Snead said, “were lightning, downhill-sidehill putts, and Ben Hogan.”

  That was one of his stock lines. Another couple were: “If you ever received a blood transfusion from Hogan, you’d die of pneumonia.” And, by the end of Ben’s career: “He had the yips so bad, you could smoke a whole cigarette waiting for him to take the putter back.” But then, in a whisper, Sam said earnestly, “If Hogan had been guaranteed another National Open putting ‘side-saddle,’ like I do, he still wouldn’t have done it. It looks so god-awful.”

  Snead’s victim on the course that day said, “You know what he’s doing with the trophy, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “You want to touch it. It wants to touch you.”

  And Sam began to weep.

  Hogan’s final Masters, at the age of 54, was writer Dave Kindred’s first, at 26, in 1967. In Saturday’s third round, Hogan shot a course record 30 on the back nine, birdieing 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, and 18 for a score of 66 that brought him within two strokes of the leader, Bobby Nichols. “I’ve had standing ovations before,” Hogan said in the Bartlett Lounge, “but not on nine consecutive holes.” His left knee and his left shoulder throbbed like toothaches, from the new cortisone shots as much as the old injuries. He said, “I left blood out there in every cup.”

  After Hogan’s birdies-and-bogeys session, Kindred and a few others trailed him back to the locker room, where Ben said, “There’s a lot of fellas [there’s that word, ‘fellas’] who have got to fall dead for me to win tomorrow. But, I don’t mind telling you, I’ll play just as hard as I’ve ever played in my life.”

  “Palmer sat off in a corner,” Kindred said, “changing his shoes and listening.”

  Of course, nobody fell dead Sunday. Hogan shot 77 to tie Snead for 10th place, a full 10 strokes behind the winner, Gay Brewer. That morning Bob Drum and Dan Jenkins set the over/under on Ben’s score at 75, and even Jenkins took the over. Palmer shot 69 to finish solo 4th.

  Among the writers, maybe only Dan knew Hogan well. They played numerous rounds together, usually just the two of them in Fort Worth, where Jenkins was the beat writer at the old Press. “I’d be watching him practice,” Jenkins said, “and he’d say, ‘Let’s go.’

  “In nineteen fifty-six, Ben called me up and said, ‘I want you in a foursome for an exhibition at Colonial benefiting the Olympic Games.’ I said, ‘OK, I guess, but there must be somebody better than me.’ ‘No, I want you,’ he said. I worked half a day at the paper, came out, didn’t even have a golf shirt, wore a dress shirt, rolled up the sleeves, changed my shoes, didn’t hit a practice ball, got to the first tee, and five thousand people were waiting. Now, what do you do?

  “Somehow I got off a decent drive into the fairway, and proceeded to top a three-wood fifty yards—it was a par five—then topped another three wood, then topped a five iron. All I wanted to do was dig a hole and bury myself in the ground forever. As I was walking to the next shot, still a hundred yards from the green, Hogan came up beside me and said, ‘You could probably swing faster if you tried hard enough.’ I slowed it down, got calm, and shot seventy-six. He shot his usual sixty-seven. That’s the Hogan I knew.”

  In 1993, Kindred and I went to Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth to ambush Hogan, who had just turned 81. Most days he sat alone in a long-sleeved white shirt and a tie knotted to his neck looking out a grill room window at the 18th green, sipping white wine and smoking. Shady Oaks’s young pro, Mike Wright, told us, “I’ll introduce you, but I’m not making any promises.”

  Ted Williams once shook Hogan’s hand and said, “I just shook a
hand that felt like five bands of steel.” When I shook his hand, it still did. British broadcaster Henry Longhurst’s old description of Hogan was holding up fairly well, too. “A small man,” said Longhurst, “normal weight, no more than a hundred and forty pounds, height about five feet nine inches, with smooth black hair [now gray and largely gone], wide head, wide eyes, and a wide mouth which tends, when the pressure is on, to contract into a thin, straight pencil line. You could see him sitting at a poker table, saying, expressionless, ‘Your thousand and another five.’ He might have four aces or a pair of twos.”

  Rising with a bounce, Hogan said, “Welcome, welcome, it’s good to see you,” but he didn’t sit back down because he didn’t want us to sit down. He intended for this to take 10 minutes, not the entire afternoon. It was only the second time I ever saw him. At the Masters in 1977, Hogan came back to Augusta just for the Champions’ Dinner that he had started in 1952 with a letter to Cliff Roberts:

  Dear Cliff:

  I wish to invite you to attend a stag dinner at the Augusta National on Friday evening, April 4th, at 7:15 p.m. It’s my wish to invite all the Masters Champions who are going to be here, plus Bob Jones and Cliff Roberts. The latter has agreed to make available his room for the dinner party and I hope you can be on hand promptly at 7:15 p.m. My only stipulation is that you wear your green coat.

  Cordially yours,

  Ben Hogan

  Because sponsors of the upcoming Liberty Mutual Insurance Legends of Golf tournament (precursor to the 50-and-over senior tour) were tossing his name around loosely to advertisers and writers, Hogan dropped by the press barn to straighten everybody out. “I don’t know what these people have been telling you,” he said, “but I want you gentlemen to know that I will not be putting my game on public display under any circumstance.”