Arnie

by Tom Callahan

  According to Palmer, “Nixon liked golf more than he let on, but pretended otherwise because he thought that was the smart political call.” President Kennedy, with whom Palmer was scheduled to play for the first time in December of 1963, made the same call. At Pine Valley’s short 10th hole, Vice President Dan Quayle, an accomplished golfer, tried rooting his hole in one out of the cup to avoid making the evening news. He failed miserably.

  “That was the difference between Eisenhower and Nixon,” Palmer said. “Ike never pretended to be anything but what he was.”

  On March 27, 1990, the 100th anniversary of Eisenhower’s birth, Palmer was asked to join Walter Cronkite and others addressing a joint session of Congress:

  “Mr. Speaker, members of Congress, ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to be here. I feel a lot better over that three-foot putt for Nicklaus, Trevino, and Player than I feel here right now, though I’m extremely proud to be here.”

  He talked about the 1958 Masters and making his first contact with Eisenhower:

  I told my wife we were going to play golf with the president. And, in the same sentence, I said, “Winnie, I want you to write Ironman”—who was my caddie—“a check.” It was normal to do a sizeable check for the caddie working for you when you won the Masters. I made fourteen thousand dollars in that tournament, a lot of money in nineteen fifty-eight. I told her, “Make it for fourteen hundred.” Later that evening, you could tell Winnie wasn’t very excited about my playing golf with the president, because she wrote the check for fourteen thousand dollars. [When Ironman tried cashing it at the club, the mistake was caught.]

  A number of years ago, on my thirty-seventh birthday . . .

  Finishing up that story, he declared:

  I must say, not many people in America have this opportunity. But it sort of tells you about America. We spent a weekend together. We talked about things that were important to him. His interest in America, and in history, and in people all over the world. A general who all of us lived in awe of. A president who none of us could imagine sitting down at the breakfast table in pajamas and robe just talking about his life and his doings for so many years, and feeling that he wanted you to know what it was all about.

  I suppose one of the greatest things I remember about Ike—and I say Ike with great reverence because, the morning he arrived for my birthday, I asked him what I should call him. Mr. President? General? He said, “Arnie, when we’re alone, you call me whatever you want. I like just plain Ike. But when we’re in company, if you want to be more formal, it’s perfectly all right with me.” That’s another privilege that someone like Arnold Palmer—born and raised in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, son of a golf pro who raised chickens and pigs to eat—who would ever believe it?

  He and Winnie were called to Walter Reed Hospital near the end.

  We walked into his hospital room, and it’s very difficult to imagine—he was very ill—but his first words were, “By gosh, it’s great to see you kids.” Think about it. It’s something that, today, makes chills run up and down my back. . . . On behalf of all the athletes whom I think I have some right to represent here, for what he has done for the world, for America, and for what he gave us in his lifetime, thanks.

  One of the last things Eisenhower said to Arnie at Walter Reed was, “Have you quit smoking off the golf course yet?” Both Ike and Mamie had been dedicated smokers.

  The third member of America’s first foursome was Robert Tyre Jones Jr., Bobby Jones. Had there been no Jones, there’d have been no Latrobe Country Club. Had there been no Latrobe Country Club, there’d have been no Arnold Palmer. Heroically and humbly, Jones brought two ticker-tape parades to Broadway and golf, and then, with nobody left to beat, retired from tournament competition at the age of 28. Slickered down and knickered up, he was a full partner with Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange, and Bill Tilden in the Golden Age of Sport, a gentlemanly figure of widespread admiration and respect. Wind wrote, “Golf without Jones would be like France without Paris—leaderless, lightless, and lonely.”

  With the immense help of Wall Street financier Clifford Roberts (who became Eisenhower’s moneyman), Jones built the loveliest golf course in the world at Augusta, Georgia, and started a small competition in 1934 called the Augusta National Invitation Tournament. Spring and sportswriters had a lot to do with the event’s rise to a major championship. Traveling with baseball teams barnstorming their ways north from the Florida training camps, newspaper columnists including the syndicated star Grantland Rice, a member at the National, only naturally stopped off at Jones’s Invitational to tip their skimmers to Bobby.

  “There were Opens and there were Invitationals,” explained Tiger Woods, who was born in 1975, the year a black golfer first played in the tournament that, in a melancholy irony, had come to be called the Masters. “Invitationals were the ways around the Opens,” Woods said tartly.

  Jones and Roberts might not have been any more racially bigoted than the average American born in 1902 or 1894, but neither of them was a champion of affirmative action. Mr. Cliff’s cackling affection for phrases like “our dark-complected friends”—and his insistence on including in the club’s official biography drawings of bug-eyed “darkies” with thick white lips spouting dialogue like “Yes, suh,” and “No, suh,” and “We is doin’ jus’ fine, suh”—fell right in with the game of golf at the time (and 30 years later, for that matter).

  In 1961, Palmer’s sixth full season on tour, the constitution and bylaws of the Professional Golfers’ Association of America still stipulated in Article III, under the heading “Members, Section I”: “Professional golfers of the Caucasian Race, over the age of eighteen (18) years, residing in North or South America, who can qualify under the conditions herein specified, shall be eligible to apply for membership.” Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray referred to the PGA of America as “the recreational arm of the Ku Klux Klan.”

  Perhaps the biggest casualty of golf’s Caucasian clause was a short, cigar-smoking (since age 12) North Carolinian named Charlie Sifford, winner of the Greater Hartford Open in 1967, when he was 45, and the Los Angeles Open in 1969. He still holds the record for the saddest line in a press guide: “Turned professional—1948; joined PGA Tour—1961.”

  In 1974 the National Golf Association (the black USGA) presented Sifford a faux green jacket at a banquet in Cleveland and declared him an authentic master. Cornered by two young newspaper reporters, one from Cleveland and the other from Cincinnati, Charlie was drinking a Scotch and milk.

  “You know something,” he said, “I led the first pro tournament Arnold Palmer ever won, the Canadian Open of nineteen fifty-five. Canadians didn’t have any problems with blacks trying to qualify for golf tournaments. The first time I ever saw Arnie—obviously, I’d heard of him—he was staring at the leaderboard outside the clubhouse on Thursday afternoon, muttering to himself, ‘How on earth did Charlie Sifford shoot sixty-three?’

  “‘Same way you shot sixty-four, Chief,’ I replied, ‘except I did you one better.’

  “He stuck out his hand and said, ‘Well done, Mr. Sifford.’

  “‘I’m Charlie,’ I said.

  “‘Great playing, Charlie.’

  “And we were friends. Paired with Arnie once—it might have been in Dallas—we got up to the third green, and my ball wasn’t on it. It was behind the green, in the rough. ‘That’s not where you went,’ he told me. ‘I know,’ I said, and then I played it as it lie. All I ever asked of Palmer, Player, and Nicklaus was to be treated with respect, and all three treated me with the utmost respect. I didn’t want them going to bat for me. I went to bat for myself. Oh, I asked one other thing of them: Play hard against me. Play your hardest. And they did, too, just the way they always had against each other. That’s the way we all wanted it.”

  “Was it Dallas?” Palmer asked at his desk. “Or Greensboro? The story is, a marshal saw somebody in the gallery move Charlie’s ball but kept quiet about it. For years, then, that marshal f
ollowed Charlie to make sure it never happened again. I’m not certain if that’s a true story, but I hope it is.”

  Also in 1974, during his annual greeting to the Masters press corps, Roberts brought up the inevitable subject before anyone else could. Flanked by two other committeemen in green jackets, he held court in front of the big board on the stage of the Quonset hut, knowing the interview room was far too small to contain this much controversy.

  “One of our former caddies, Jim Dent,” Roberts began, “is hitting the ball so far that Jack Nicklaus told me he’s outdriving Jack twenty to sixty yards. And I’m told Jim has been improving his short game. He might win a tournament and be eligible to play here. [A criterion established in 1972.] If he does, you’ll find a lot of people around here very happy about it.”

  Asked if he remembered Dent as a caddie, Roberts said, “Very indistinctly,” but added, “I think I’d recognize him if I saw him.” Jim stood six feet two and weighed 230 pounds.

  “He’s got a brother who was a caddie here, a cousin who was a caddie, and another cousin who’s a maître d’ here still.”

  Dave Anderson of the New York Times inquired, “May we have the maître d’s full name, please?”

  After rocking left and right, consulting in whispers with the two green jackets, Mr. Cliff cleared his throat and said, “We just call him Dent.”

  A year later Lee Elder broke the color line.

  Despite his blue-collar background, despite being the son of a Roosevelt Democrat, despite growing up anti–country club in a distinctly Democratic enclave, Palmer was a Republican. Maybe this had to do with Eisenhower, but more likely it had to do with golf.

  Though Arnold described himself as “a middle-of-the-road Republican,” middle-of-the-road and moderate are softeners used on both ends of the spectrum by people who might not realize how far left or right they truly are. Pro golfers don’t just tend to be conservative. When the U.S. team wins the Ryder Cup—admittedly a rare occurrence in modern times—a quorum isn’t guaranteed at the White House if a Democrat is in office. (Intermittently Palmer was approached about running for office himself. He enjoyed the dance but never seriously considered it.)

  Masters champions were empowered as a group to vote Sifford, or anyone else, into the field. They controlled one tournament berth. In 1969 the ’59 Masters winner and ’59 PGA Player of the Year, Pennsylvanian Art Wall Jr., tried to marshal support for Charlie, who had just won his L.A. Open. Sifford received only a solitary vote: Wall’s. Old-shoe Bob Murphy was elected. Pro golfers weren’t revolutionaries.

  “What would you have had us do?” Palmer asked. “Call press conferences? Scream at the top of our lungs? I wasn’t a crusader, and neither was Jack. I wanted things to change, but I couldn’t change them.”

  Was he sure about that?

  “I think you have an exaggerated opinion of just how much influence I had.”

  I don’t think so.

  Nineteen seventy-six Masters champion Raymond Floyd said, “You have to understand, Arnold loved and respected the best of the Masters Tournament, and there was a lot of best.” Palmer wasn’t about to challenge Jones publicly, not there. That wouldn’t have been good manners, and nobody ever cared more about manners than Palmer.

  Floyd’s first year at Augusta, 1965, he sported a particularly obnoxious pair of flashy multicolored golf pants on Thursday. “‘C’mere a minute,’ Arnold called me over in the locker room. ‘Son, this isn’t just another golf tournament,’ he said. ‘This is different, special. Wear a more respectful pair of pants tomorrow.’ And I did, the next day and from then on.”

  Jones died in December of 1971, heroically and humbly, in a wheelchair and hideous pain from syringomyelia, a virulently progressive spinal disease. In late September 1977, Roberts had his hair cut in the club barbershop and sent an employee into town to buy him a new pair of pajamas. Somehow during the night, probably with help, he made his way out onto the property to the lower end of Ike’s Pond near the par-3 course (Ike had a cabin, a tree, and a pond), where he shot himself in the head with a pistol. His new pajamas peeked out from under his trouser legs. His slippers were on the wrong feet. He was 83.

  “I’ll tell you the honest truth,” Palmer said, leaning forward at his desk. “For years and years, I was scared to death of Clifford Roberts.”

  Twirling a 4-wood on the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga in the China Sea, war-touring comedian Bob Hope was the fourth great ambassador of American golf. Like Eisenhower and Jones, he also had a direct connection to Arnie.

  “After Eisenhower,” Palmer said, “Bob did more for golf, not to mention golfing charities, than anybody who wasn’t officially involved with the game. He was a devoted player [and a better one than his comedy implied]. Bing Crosby was, too. It’s a little-known fact that both of them played in the British Amateur, a major championship. Bob’s was at Royal Porthcawl [in Wales]. Somebody named Fox beat him. Don’t ask me how I remember that.”

  Hope took up the game in 1930, the year after Palmer was born, while traveling vaudeville’s “northern circuit” of Winnipeg, Calgary, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Tacoma. One morning a comedy troupe, the Diamond Brothers, jingled through the hotel lobby with golf clubs on their shoulders, and Hope followed them to the course. In celebrity pro-ams, his pro partner was often Jimmy Demaret. “Demaret knew Bob’s swing inside and out,” Palmer said—that slow, liquid, bent-elbowed, multihinged Bob Hope swing. “Jimmy would reposition Bob’s hands for him, which was perfectly legal for your playing partner to do, and then, using his regular action, Bob could hit it under one tree and over another. At his best, with Demaret along, I’d say he was a pretty strong three or four handicap.”

  Hope did his share to help make Palmer the world’s definitive golfer, casting him in the 1963 movie Call Me Bwana with Anita Ekberg. Portraying himself, Palmer shouted “Fore!” from off-camera. “Fore?” repeated Hope’s character, a big-game hunter on safari. “Pardon me,” Palmer said, entering the tent, “have you seen my ball? Oh, here it is [in an egg cup on the table, about to be peeled by Hope]. Pretty tough lie.”

  “You look familiar,” Hope said.

  “I’m Arnold Palmer.”

  Only eight takes.

  Speaking at an exhibition in Mason, Ohio, Hope said, “I sounded Arnie out on the idea of the movie in nineteen sixty-one. I just wanted him on the set, so we could hit balls together during all the waiting-around time. We did, as a matter of fact. He gave all the grips new grips.”

  By 1964, Palmer knew he had fallen down a rabbit hole when, seated in a movie theater watching Auric Goldfinger and iron-brimmed Korean caddie Odd Job cheating James Bond at golf, he heard Bond’s caddie say, “If that’s his original ball, I’m Arnold Palmer.”

  “ ’Tisn’t,” Bond said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m standing on it.”

  Grand-marshaling everything from the Tournament of Roses in Pasadena to the Miss America Parade in Atlantic City, Palmer became an omnipresent celebrity, even guest-hosting The Tonight Show for Johnny Carson. It was the most wooden performance since Charlie McCarthy. Comedian Buddy Hackett said, “He made Spiro Agnew [one of his guests] look like Shecky Greene.” For Bonanza star Lorne Greene and Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke, Hackett performed a parody of Palmer, the talk show monologuist, at an NBA All-Star banquet in Los Angeles. But he wound up by saying, “The funny thing is, the audience liked him.”

  “For a one-night stand,” Palmer said, “I wasn’t that bad. I started with a few lines, not really a monologue. I’m not funny in that way. Not a stand-up comedian. I was nervous, though. I could do it now a lot easier, because I’m more confident, more relaxed.”

  In rapid-fire riffs on TV specials, Hope played straight man to Palmer for corny exchanges that made viewers cringe and Arnold perspire. “Bob could miss a line,” he said, “but I couldn’t. Talk about pressure.”

  BH: Arnie, you’ve probably picked up as much money at golf as any man in his
tory.

  AP: Don’t you believe it, Bob. Sam Snead’s got more buried underground than I ever made up top.

  BH: I wondered why he liked to play barefoot. I thought that was just a story.

  AP: No, sir, he’s got gophers in his backyard that subscribe to Fortune magazine. He’s packed more coffee cans than Brazil.

  BH: Where does he get all that loot?

  AP: Pigeons. Amateurs who think they can beat him.

  BH: Why is everyone staring at me?

  AP: Ever play Snead, Bob?

  BH: Sure. I almost beat him. I was even with him until the last hole when we doubled the bet. Hey, wait a minute! You don’t mean he . . .

  AP: Welcome to the flock.

  “I first laid eyes on Palmer,” Hope said, “in the mid-fifties at a pro-am in Los Angeles. He was on the adjacent fairway. My partner, Gene Littler, pointed him out to me.

  “‘See that guy?’ Gene said.

  “‘You mean the one with the muscles?’

  “‘Yeah. He’s going to win everything. He makes the ground shake.’

  “He made the world shake. When I first met Arnie, I could tell he was just one of those guys you wanted to know and be around. That’s how the public felt, too. Not that I had so much of it myself, but I knew a little something about star power. And he had it. Without trying, he made you smile. I knew about smiles, too.”

  Like most clowns, Hope knew about tears as well. Have you ever listened to the original lyrics from “Thanks for the Memory”? They’re excruciatingly sad.

  Hope told Palmer a wistful story, one that Bob left out of his routines and books, like his golf memoir, Confessions of a Hooker.

  “Heading off on another Christmas tour for the USO,” Palmer said, “Bob was rushing through the house, kissing his children good-bye. Finally, when he reached the door, the youngest child shouted, ‘Good-bye, Bob Hope!’

  “‘That broke my heart,’ he told me.”

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