by Tom Callahan
Jacklin believed McCormack settled on what Arnold’s legacy should be long before he had to, selling him thereafter as something better and more important than just a winner, merely a winner, which was true enough. “Premeditatedly,” Jacklin said, “Mark took the emphasis off winning, knowing winning is always temporary. And, as a new business model—the most money for the longest time—he was proved right, wasn’t he? But the campaign cheated the competitor, maybe the all-time competitor. I think it’s completely understandable that Arnold stopped winning so soon—too soon. After all, what he was, who he was, didn’t depend on winning. It didn’t really matter if he won, except to him. Desperately. I blame McCormack for that.”
By the ’60s, McCormack was already telling the Wall Street Journal haughtily, “Arnold has reached the point where his on-course successes aren’t terribly important to his enterprises anymore.” Which was where McCormack had been going all along. Of those enterprises, Sports Illustrated said, “The way he has been expanding, everyone may soon be flying to the moon in an Arnold Palmer rocket and staying in an Arnold Palmer motel overlooking the Arnold Palmer crater.”
The depiction of McCormack in Jacklin’s autobiography was unsparing. “I got a note from his first wife, Nancy,” Tony said, “who read my book. She wrote, ‘I don’t think Mark gave either one of us his best shot.’”
Palmer wanted to quit smoking in the early 1960s, “not because he hated the taste or smell of tobacco,” McCormack said, “though he did come to feel that way, I think. What he really hated was the idea that there was something he couldn’t control. He hated that on the golf course and he hated that in life.” Naturally, Mark encouraged him to hold off until the contract with Liggett & Myers was up.
Most pro golfers smoked then. Hogan represented Chesterfield on beaming subway billboards that, absent the flat white linen cap and the dour expression, looked only faintly like him. Sometimes the Hogan ads were posted near a grinning Beau Jack, the two-time lightweight boxing champion and onetime Augusta National bootblack and caddie, saying, “I read Red Smith’s column every day in the Herald Tribune.” (“Everybody,” Red said with an affectionate sigh, “knew poor Beau was illiterate.”)
Because Jack Nicklaus was self-conscious about his squeaky voice (when Nicklaus yelled “Fore!” in Columbus, dogs as far away as Cincinnati jumped), he took dulcet-toned ABC broadcaster Chris Schenkel’s facetious advice on how to lower his register, and began puffing chains of Marlboro Reds. “I’d had a few smokes at Ohio State,” Jack admitted, but his fingers didn’t turn yellow until he was a rookie on tour. “Looking at a highlight film, I saw myself with a cigarette dangling from my lip, tossing it to the ground so I could putt, then picking it up and jamming it right back in my mouth. Ugh. Then and there, I quit smoking on the golf course, but I’d still mooch a cigarette from Jim Murray or some other writer in the interview room, until I stopped for good when I was forty.”
For Palmer, quitting smoking was a tedious, miserable, on-and-off process. The cigarette was part of his equipment and image, a workingman’s emblem and prop, and he at least had to consider the possibility that its tranquilizing effect in the heat of competition was a factor in his success. “I smoked pretty heavily from about the age of fourteen or fifteen,” he said, “on the sly, of course, out of Pap’s view. He knew I smoked, but he didn’t know how much.”
At the Crosby Clambake early in 1964, the weather on the Monterey Peninsula was atrocious even for a Crosby week, and Arnie’s sinuses were screaming. “Bob Hope liked to call Bing’s tournament ‘The Pneumonia Open,’” he said. “Crosby didn’t even smile at that. I went to San Francisco straight from there to see a sinus specialist, who knew I was a smoker. Who didn’t? I’d flick my cigarette and then hit my shot. I don’t think I ever had one that lasted two holes.” (English Ryder Cupper and raconteur Peter Alliss said, “Palmer didn’t smoke a cigarette so much as burn it to the ground. One long drag and a five-inch ash appeared.”)
“With a sinus condition like yours,” said the doctor, “you should think about quitting.” Also, warnings from the surgeon general were increasing in volume. “‘OK,’ I told Winnie, ‘that’s it. Cold turkey.’ ‘Well, if you’re really serious,’ she said, ‘I’ll stop with you.’” It was a pact.
But she had misgivings:
“What about in the mornings? What about after a good dinner? What about at a party? When your hands have nothing to do and the room is full of smoke?” Then, finally, the clincher: “And what about three-foot putts?”
As he stopped, restarted, and stopped again, his weight, mood, and golf fluctuated accordingly. McCormack, a nonsmoker, inevitably argued for his client’s return to what Arnold hatefully called “those coffin nails.”
At a London tournament run by the Piccadilly Tobacco Company free samples showed up in Palmer’s hotel suite, and Mark said, “I think I’ll have a cigarette,” the first of his life. Soon Palmer was puffing along. “Only in England,” he resolved. Later, “Only in Australia.” “Only out of the United States.” “Only off the golf course.” “Only when the cameras aren’t watching.”
In 1969, just before the PGA Championship in Dayton, Ohio, Palmer tossed his L&Ms into the trash once more and went straight out and shot 82. “Arnold,” Dave Marr told him, “you’re the only guy I ever knew who gave up smoking and golf the same week.” Two years later, on New Year’s Eve, motivated by a betting pool pitting a dozen or so friends (including Dow Finsterwald), he quit again and made it stick. Palmer said, “When I see some of the old film clips and how silly I am with that thing hanging out of my mouth, how obnoxious I looked, I could just cringe. My dad tried to convince me of that when I was younger, but, like all kids, I knew more than he did.”
In the 1959 Masters, Palmer had a decent chance of repeating. But at the 12th hole, where he had played two balls in 1958, he played two again, the first one into the water. The next was just starting to rise as it roared like a 707 over the green. Unable to get it up and down, he barely got it up, up, and down, making a triple bogey 6 and losing by two strokes to Art Wall Jr. “My first majors catastrophe,” Palmer called it, with more to come.
On the back nine that Sunday, he looked up at a scoreboard and saw this message:
GO ARNIE
ARNIE’S ARMY
Since the early ’40s, khaki-clad soldiers from nearby Camp Gordon (now Fort Gordon) had been admitted to the National free of charge (provided they wore their uniforms) and eventually were given parts in the play. German POWs incarcerated at the camp, engineers from Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, were put to work constructing a wooden bridge over Rae’s Creek that preceded a stone one ultimately named for Byron Nelson. By the ’50s, swarms of GIs covered the grounds, posting the birdies, bogeys, and pars. “I never got picked for that duty,” said Doc Giffin, who in an exquisite coincidence was a corporal stationed there at the time. As was McCormack, an officer. Arnie’s Army could have been a PR brainchild of Doc’s or a marketing ploy of Mark’s, but wasn’t. It was a spontaneous expression of love.
“Among Palmer’s other assets,” wrote Herbert Warren Wind, “Arnie’s Army should not be discounted. Some golf actuaries [McCormack?] estimate that the support of this faithful legion is worth five shots a tournament to him—at least two of them in the last round—but whatever the validity of such metaphysical computations, Palmer unquestionably derives enormous sustenance from the knowledge that thousands of people are pulling for him and will not suddenly desert him to chase off after some other player who, according to the grapevine, is really pouring it on.”
It shocked Palmer to say it, but the advent of Arnie’s Army was his overpowering memory of 1959, “even more than the triple bogey,” he said.
8
1961
WINNER:
San Diego Open
Phoenix Open
Baton Rouge Open
Texas Open
Open Championship
Western Open
“We just
call him Dent.”
PALMER, DWIGHT EISENHOWER, BOBBY JONES, and Bob Hope made up the first foursome of American golf. This quartet sold the U.S. game in the middle of the 20th century. “Ike doesn’t get nearly as much credit as he should,” Palmer said, “but the World Golf Hall of Fame is about to take care of that.” Just then Doc Giffin coughed, and Arnold asked, “Am I speaking out of turn?” A little. “Well, wait until Doc gives you the go-ahead to say so, but the president is being inducted into the Hall this year, and it’s about time.”
On September 10, 1966, Palmer’s 37th birthday, he looked up into the Latrobe sun and saw a Jet Commander just like the one he owned. But because Arnold’s airplane had never ventured anywhere without him, he took the one in the sky for a look-alike. A few minutes later, when Winnie asked him to get the door—“It’s the TV repairman,” she lied—there stood Eisenhower with a suitcase and a question: “You wouldn’t have room to put an old man up for the night, would you?” Along with a weekend’s kit, the former president carried an oil canvas of a barn, a horse, and a corral he had painted on his farm as a birthday present for Arnie, initialed in the lower right-hand corner “D.D.E.” (“You won’t believe this,” Palmer said, “but I had a teacher once who thought I could become a painter. Not a housepainter, either.”)
To set up the birthday surprise, Winnie had dispatched the plane to Gettysburg and made the many necessary Secret Service arrangements. Mamie Eisenhower, who was terrorized enough by large aircraft, followed overland. “It was my gas; I paid for the gas,” Palmer said, “but what an unbelievable gift. We didn’t play golf. He couldn’t play anymore. We just hung out. Talked about everything, watched a football game together in the back while Winnie and Mamie watched the Miss America Pageant. We played bridge the next night. He always laughed and teased me, saying I bid a little too much like I play golf. He was the greatest.”
They took a short drive to Laurel Valley in Ligonier and resumed where they left off in their dangling conversations on generals: George S. Patton, Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, Omar Bradley, Bernard Montgomery, and Fox Conner (you’ll have to look him up). Flying and the space program were on the docket, too, as Eisenhower told Palmer: “I insisted on test pilots for astronauts. NASA said they didn’t need them and didn’t want them. Too temperamental. But I was adamant. I wanted men like you.”
“He was just being nice,” Palmer said, but Arnie was dancing inside.
Eisenhower once said of Palmer, “How I admired that man. He lived the kind of life everyone dreams of. It always stirred me to play in his group, and those days always will rank among my fondest memories.” Imagine the commanding general of the Allied Forces in World War II and a president of the United States looking at someone else’s life as the one “everyone dreams of.”
“Who’s a bigger winner than I am?” Pete Rose asked before his fall. “I played in more winning games than Joe DiMaggio played games.”
“Eisenhower,” I replied. “He never lost any of those wars or elections.”
Pete thought it over for a moment.
“OK, besides Eisenhower, who’s a bigger winner than I am?”
Arnold and Ike first bumped in Augusta the day after Palmer was measured for his original green jacket. (Arnie had been led to believe they would play golf then, but they didn’t until a later time at Augusta.) Though Eisenhower was a member at the National, it was his habit to stay out of the way tournament week and arrive on Monday. A letter he wrote to Palmer kicked off their association:
Dear Mr. Palmer,
Because of the general confusion the other day, I failed to realize when Ben Fairless [a steel mogul from Pittsburgh] introduced us that you were Arnold Palmer of 1958 Masters fame. I hope you will forgive my lack of reaction and accept, even this belatedly, my warm congratulations on your splendid victory.
Ben suggests that sometime we might have an opportunity to play at Augusta. This I should like very much though, judging from the brand of golf I have recently been displaying, I would be more than embarrassed.
Sincerely,
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The popular ’50s and ’60s assertion that “Arnold Palmer sold golf to the American public, and his number one customer was Eisenhower,” was only half-true. Eisenhower was sold on golf before Palmer was born. In her book “Don’t Ask What I Shot”: How Eisenhower’s Love of Golf Helped Shape 1950’s America, Catherine M. Lewis illustrated Ike’s dedication to the sport by quoting from a letter written by his wartime caddie, Lieutenant Jimmy Preston, to a sister in 1943. At the time, Eisenhower and Preston were serving together in Italy:
When I rolled out the map of the golf course, the general got that slight frown on his face and walked around the table two or three times. This [course] was designed by the Special Corps and yours truly; he hadn’t seen any of it. Then he said we had a problem. He and General Marshall were going to play on Friday, teeing-off at 0900 hours. I said we’d be ready. He said, “No, you’re not reading me. This is a shot General Marshall can easily make. There has to be one helluva bunker right here.” He called in an Army Air Force general and asked him who was the best low-altitude pilot in Italy? I don’t know who the pilot was or if he ever wondered what he was doing, but the bunker his bomb made was as near to perfect as any I ever saw in the States. General Marshall just about wore out his sand iron and General Eisenhower won.
So Ike was calling in air strikes to win golf matches long before he knew Palmer. But, in league with television, they were certainly coconspirators in the promulgation and popularization of American golf. During his eight years in the White House, President Eisenhower openly and unapologetically played no fewer than 61 rounds a year and as many as 122, largely at Augusta, Cherry Hills near Denver (Mamie’s hometown), and Burning Tree in Bethesda, Maryland. When he wasn’t playing, he was practicing on the White House lawn and leaving spike marks on the Oval Office floor. (President Kennedy told 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt, “Look what that son of a bitch did with his golf cleats.”) Democrats tried to make something of it, dispensing campaign buttons that read: “BEN HOGAN FOR PRESIDENT! IF WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A GOLFER, LET’S HAVE A GOOD ONE!” But the people sided with Ike.
During that period, Herbert Warren Wind quoted a man from New York City as saying, “Before Ike came in, every time I carried my golf bag down to Grand Central and boarded a train for a golfing weekend, I could count on running into disapproving faces and at least one slur carefully delivered so I could hear it—you know, something like, ‘Don’t strain yourself, Reginald.’ Now it’s all changed. Strangers look at me as if I were a member of the 4-H Club. And when they speak to me, they give me a warm smile and a cheery word: ‘Looks like a grand weekend to get out of doors.’ All of a sudden, I’m on the same level with the Fourth of July and Mom’s apple pie, and I like it.”
Looking up at Eisenhower’s picture on his wall, Palmer said, “The president and I eventually did play at Augusta,” where the local caddies all seemed to have been christened by Damon Runyon. For example, Burnt Biscuits Bennett served amateur Tiger Woods. Eisenhower’s regular bearer was Cemetery Perteet, whose heart rate was said to be so faint that he was forever waking up in the morgue. Ironman Avery trailed along after Palmer, wondering incredulously, “Are you chokin’, boss? Tell me somethin’, are you chokin’?” Dave Marr, runner-up to Palmer in the 1964 Masters, said, “I’d be thinking to myself, ‘Shut up, Ironman!’ Because Arnie would invariably grit his teeth, hitch at his pants, and go make a birdie.”
Palmer’s most memorable game of many with Eisenhower took place in 1964 at the stately Merion Golf Club outside Philadelphia, where Hogan won the 1950 Open. Ike wanted to be introduced on the first tee (and he was) as “a dirt farmer from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.”
“I had been trying to cure his flying right elbow,” Palmer said, “which wasn’t working for him as well as it was for Nicklaus. So intent was the president on keeping that wing tucked in, he rubbed it raw. His shirt was all b
loody. But when I said, ‘You’re bleeding, Mr. President,’ he shrugged and said, ‘It’s only a scratch.’ He was so determined to play his best game, which meant eighty-one or eighty-three with a birdie or two. Damn, I respected that. And at seventeen he holed a cross-country putt for our side, taking all the money from Jimmy Demaret and actor Ray Bolger [the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz].”
Because of a stiff knee left over from the football fields at West Point, Eisenhower had no choice but to overuse his upper body—not unlike Pap, which was appropriate. “I loved him like a second father,” Arnold said.
Palmer knew many presidents and kings (or ex-kings, like Mrs. Simpson’s husband, Edward, a particular chum), and played golf with most of them. But he was close with only one. From Palm Springs, site of the Bob Hope Desert Classic (which Palmer won five times), President Nixon had Hope and Palmer flown by Marine helicopter to San Clemente to join Vice President Gerald Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and a roomful of top advisors for what was labeled a “mini-summit” on the Vietnam War.
When the matter was put to Palmer last, he proposed, “Why not go for the green?”
“Everybody laughed,” he said, “but I was dead serious. Stop laying up.”
(“Here lies Arnold Palmer,” Bob Drum once proposed for his friend’s tombstone. “He went for the green.”)