by Tom Callahan
McCormack paired Palmer and Player in a black-and-white TV series called Challenge Golf, pitting them against the likes of Nicklaus and Phil Rodgers. “Those matches took eight hours to film,” Player said, “and inevitably we’d have to go back and do retakes, because I was a giggler. My schoolteachers used to say, ‘If you don’t compose yourself, Mr. Player, you’ll have to leave the room.’ Arnie would look at me a certain way, and I’d start to laugh, and then he’d laugh, and the director would remind us how much money we were wasting. Arnie and I played thirty-three Challenge Golf matches, losing three of them.”
In the 1962 (Palmer), 1963 (Nicklaus), 1964 (Palmer), 1965 (Nicklaus), and 1966 (Nicklaus) Masters, Jack and Arnie monopolized the green jacket unequally. When Nicklaus became the better player but Palmer remained the more salable product, Jack quit McCormack in a huff. A pettiness developed between the two golfers (exacerbated by business clashes) that wasn’t worthy of either man. A sportswriter wearing a Golden Bear–brand golf shirt in Palmer’s presence was liable to have what Arnold called that “yellow pig” logo and the skin beneath it pinched by his strong hand. Quietly, Nicklaus had the bear redrawn into a less-ambiguous shape.
As rival golf course architects carving their initials into mountainsides, each damned the other’s creations with the faintest praise, still savaging shins under the table. Nicklaus sent his regrets to Arnold’s Bay Hill tournament in Orlando, explaining that one of his sons had a basketball game that weekend. Palmer responded that he wouldn’t be able to play in Jack’s Muirfield Village event near Columbus, either, because Riley had something going on that week. Riley was Arnie’s golden retriever.
In the 1967 U.S. Open at Baltusrol, where Palmer and Nicklaus were tied after 54 holes, Arnold shot 69 to Jack’s 65 in the final round to finish second alone. They were 1–3 at the Pebble Beach U.S. Open in 1972. On Sunday afternoon, each had 10- or 11-footers at almost the same instant, Palmer for birdie at 14, Nicklaus for par at 12. Had Arnold made and Jack missed, Palmer likely would have won. The opposite happened.
During this time, Nicklaus’s regular gun bearer was a sorrowful-looking Greek with a mushroom cloud of gray hair, Angelo Argea, whose motley mustache was an amalgam of hair and nicotine. “He never read a putt in his life,” Jack told me. “He never got a yardage in his life.” What did he do then? At just the right moment, when his boss was looking a little forlorn, Angelo would say, “Isn’t it about time for a song?” Under his breath, Jack would start to sing. “He was a con man,” Nicklaus said fondly, “but a genuine one.” And once in a while, for no particular reason, he’d say, “Fuck Arnold Palmer.”
“I think of Baltusrol as the place where the torch started to be passed,” Palmer said, “or the putter—‘White Fang.’ Nicklaus birdied three, four, five, and six with that thing. Do you remember White Fang?”
White Fang was a Bulls Eye putter that belonged to a friend of Deane Beman, the future commissioner. The brass blade had been painted white to minimize glare. In a putting funk for weeks leading up to the Baltusrol Open, Nicklaus was trying everybody else’s putters and for some reason just liked the look of the center-shafted one with the snowy head. Practicing with it on the Tuesday before the tournament, Jack shortened his long and languid stroke into a brisk pop. “Orchestras began to play,” he said, “and angels to sing.”
“I was at Baltusrol the other day,” I told Nicklaus quite a long time later, “and I saw White Fang. It’s on display there in a glass cabinet.”
“That’s a replica,” he said. “I have White Fang at home.”
Then he told a father’s story:
One of his boys had flung a rock through a neighbor’s window, and Jack had to go next door to apologize. He was still shaking when, looking out the kitchen window, drinking a cup of coffee and trying to calm down, he saw little Mike, his youngest, digging happily in the backyard. OK. Relax. Everything’s all right. Hmm, what’s that he’s digging with?
WHITE FANG!
The vinegar between Palmer and Nicklaus didn’t spill out publicly until the 1975 U.S. Open at Medinah in Illinois, where both were in contention. Playing as a twosome in the fourth round, each became preoccupied with the other and lost track of Lou Graham, John Mahaffey, and the rest of the field. “That happened a lot,” Nicklaus said. “When two guys spend as much time together as Arnie and I did, their competitive juices flow. They just want to whip each other.” “There were times,” Palmer said, “when Jack and I took ourselves completely out of the tournament, because he tried so hard against me and I tried so hard against him.”
In the Medinah press tent, during a rare joint postmortem, Nicklaus was bemoaning his three closing holes so pitifully that Palmer finally had enough. “Why don’t you just sashay your ass back out there,” he said, “and play them over.”
Jack looked stunned, as if he’d been slapped. Palmer tossed a muscular forearm across Nicklaus’s scalded neck, and Jack tried to smile. But the friction between them was now plain to see.
Dan Rostenkowski, the former U.S. congressman from Illinois, said, “I was shocked to see the level of discomfort between Arnie and Jack. They were like a couple of high-tension wires. I knew Arnie fairly well. We had been pro-am partners at the Kemper Open. I was like a sixteen handicap and, watching me hit balls before our round, his eyes opened wide and he said, ‘Oh boy, we’re going to do some good here!’ He called me once on the Hill. The guys in the cloakroom were thrilled. ‘It’s Arnie Palmer!’ they kept saying. ‘Arnie Palmer!’ He was about the only thing Democrats and Republicans had in common.”
The former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee was speaking on a telephone in the warden’s office at a federal correctional institution in Wisconsin, where he was serving 17 months for mail fraud.
“‘Congressman,’ Arnie said, ‘we’ve got to do something about the tax code,’” the chairman recalled. “‘What do you mean we,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got to fix it,’ he said. ‘It’s ridiculous!’ ‘I’ll fix it when you get me on the golf course and give me a free lesson.’ He laughed like a son of a gun. ‘So that’s how Washington works,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know it?’ I told him.
“It was Arnie who said to me, whenever he met a man on a golf course, he knew that man’s character by the third hole. He was so right. I followed Arnie every step of the way at Medinah. Do you remember the terrific storm that came up Saturday night, all those lightning crashes on the seventeenth hole?”
“Not really,” I said, “but I remember the lead story in Sunday’s Trib was Sam Giancana getting whacked in his basement.”
“Yeah, Tommy,” the chairman said, “maybe we better not go into that on a tie-line to a penitentiary.”
In the 1980 Masters, Nicklaus and Palmer were so far out of the hunt, they found themselves paired together at the back of the field. The night before, Winnie telephoned the club to check on Arnie’s tee time and came skipping into the kitchen, singing, “Guess whom you’re playing with tomorrow?”
“I’ll beat his ass,” Palmer said, and did, 69 to 73.
Not until Palmer was 60 and Nicklaus 50 would the tension start to ease. Arnold made the first move. At a senior event, the Tradition, he knocked Nicklaus over by asking him to have a look at his swing. “Can you imagine?” Jack said in his office. “Me? We’d played thirty years and that’s the first time he ever asked me.”
They began having meals together again and playing practice rounds. At Augusta in 1996, Tiger Woods’s last Masters as an amateur, the three of them went out together Wednesday morning. On the par-5 13th, Woods popped up his drive and for once was away. Nicklaus had his back turned to Tiger. Peeking over Jack’s shoulder, Palmer saw the 20-year-old pull out an iron for his second shot and whispered, “He’s laying up.”
“Oh, Arnie,” Jack said affectionately. “He’s not.”
Woods slammed a blue darter over the creek and onto the green.
“I love that story,” I told Nicklaus in his office. “I think
of that as the moment Arnold realized his class had graduated.”
Jack laughed and said, “My class has graduated, too.”
Nicklaus named Palmer the honoree of his Memorial Tournament, the playing honoree, and Jack returned to Orlando that year to participate in Arnold’s tournament as well. Palmer made the cut at Muirfield Village; Nicklaus missed it at Bay Hill. “We didn’t always see eye to eye,” Jack said, “but there’s one thing I’ll always be proud of. In the important matters, when it came to the tour and the game of golf, we always stood together.”
Such as when touring players in 1968 broke away from the Professional Golfers’ Association of America, run mostly for and by club pros, to take control of their own show. They called themselves the Association of Professional Golfers at first, then the Tournament Players Division of the PGA, and finally just the PGA Tour. McCormack favored something short of the complete rupture Nicklaus advocated. Palmer argued Mark’s position for a while but ultimately sided and voted with Jack.
“We didn’t do everything perfectly,” Nicklaus said. “You try for perfection in golf, but you never get there. Not even close.”
“My nature is to compete,” Palmer said, sitting beside Jack at the Memorial press center in Dublin, Ohio. “It always has been and it always will be. Jack had nothing to do with that except he was there a lot.” He turned to Nicklaus and said, “For ten years in a row, I had a chance to win the U.S. Open. You won them, but I had a chance.”
(“At the end of the day,” Player said, “the three of us played not for money, not for trophies, not for history, but for each other.”)
“Jack and I were just different,” Palmer said. “He was always slow, but he didn’t do it because of his opponent. He did it for himself. That’s just the way he played. Me, I’m the other way. I like to move, in golf and in every other thing. I like to go fast, particularly in my plane. I got where I got—wherever that is—by doing it my way. I was maybe too aggressive in certain instances, and maybe it cost me some tournaments. Jack was maybe too conservative, and maybe it cost him a few. But you are what you are. I never mimicked anybody. That was the real me.”
Nicklaus said, “Arnold and I have had differences of opinion on some golf matters, which is only natural. When he was thirty, I was twenty, and that’s a difference. So is fifty and forty, because he went to the senior tour while I was on the regular tour. There’s not a whole lot of difference, though, between sixty and fifty or seventy and sixty. We play a lot of golf together now, and we still try to beat each other’s brains in.”
“We continue to have the needle out,” Palmer said, “but we know now that we love each other, and we always did.”
The needle was still glistening when a Canadian writer approached the two of them as the session broke up to ask Nicklaus if he would be returning to Glen Abbey for the Canadian Open, Arnold’s first professional victory, just about the only blue ribbon to elude Jack.
“Barbara says she’s going to keep sending me back there until I get it right,” Nicklaus said.
To which Palmer inquired innocently, “Are you sure she’s talking about golf?”
10
1963
WINNER:
Los Angeles Open
Phoenix Open
Pensacola Open
Thunderbird Classic
Cleveland Open
Western Open
Whitemarsh Open
Australian Masters
Canada Cup (with Jack Nicklaus)
“Hell, I could have kicked that one in.”
IN 1963, FOR THE second consecutive year, Palmer found himself on a 73rd tee with 18 holes yet to play, merely tied for the lead in the U.S. Open. With two others this time: old Julius Boros (the U.S. Open champion from 11 summers earlier) and young Jacky Cupit, at the Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. Forty-three isn’t old for most work, but only one man more seasoned than Boros (Ted Ray, by 82 days) had ever won a National Open.
Julius was a Hungarian American with a gentle way and an easy swing who didn’t leave the accounting profession for tournament golf until he was nearly 30. “Moose,” as the players called him (for the same reason they would call Craig Stadler “Walrus”), never stopped seeming like a CPA. He was as burnt brown as a tobacco leaf and unfailingly considerate to caddies. His bag wasn’t the one I was carrying at the 1961 Eastern Open in Baltimore, when I was a high school sophomore. I was working for an amateur paired with Boros the first two rounds. After my man missed the cut, I stayed in the caddie T-shirt, “Eastern Open” on the front, “Mr. Boh” (National Bohemian beer) on the back, because it was my only ticket in.
Palmer told me, “I won the Eastern Open in nineteen fifty-six. I’d been playing so much golf leading up to that tournament, I was exhausted before I even got to the first tee. Paired with Doug Ford, I hit my opening drive so far out of bounds that the ball went bouncing down a highway in the general direction of downtown Baltimore. ‘I think I’ll withdraw,’ I told Ford, who said, ‘I don’t blame you, nobody can make up two strokes in just seventy-one holes.’ At one point I led by twelve.”
Doug Sanders won the ’61 tournament by a stroke over Ken Venturi. As play was winding down, I bumped into Boros near the scorer’s tent, we shook hands, and he said, “Walk with me a minute, son, I want to show you something.”
We went over to the practice putting green, where, sweating out Venturi’s finish, Sanders was putting with his foot. That is, he was rolling 10-footers with the left side of his rainbow-colored right shoe straight into the cup.
“What’s he doing?” I asked Boros.
“‘Dougie,’ he said, ‘my friend wants to know what you’re doing.’”
“When I play in pro-ams,” Sanders said like a proud child, “sooner or later one of the amateurs will miss a ten-footer and I’ll say, ‘Hell, I could have kicked that one in.’ Before long the wallets come out, and let’s just say I’ve made a hell of a lot of money over the years with this foot.”
Boros laughed and we walked away. But halfway to the clubhouse, he stopped, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Dougie’s a great player and a unique talent, but he’ll never win a major. Do you get the message?”
Twice Sanders finished second to Nicklaus in the British Open, both times by a single stroke, including that devastating 30-inch putt missed at St. Andrews in 1970. Gene Littler beat him by a stroke at the U.S. Open. Bob Rosburg beat him by a stroke at the PGA. By two strokes, Sanders missed a playoff at a Masters won by Nicklaus. When golfers and golf fans talk about the mythical “best player never to have won a major,” don’t they know it’s Sanders?
Growing up a Georgia field hand, he had been the kind of boy who slipped stones or melons into his cotton sack to improve the payoff ($2 per 100 pounds). As a caddie, he specialized in restoring desolate golf balls salvaged from hawking the course, filling in their nicks and cuts with soap, covering them over with white shoe polish, and selling them as gamers. Sleeping through most of his schooldays, he unconsciously majored in metaphors.
“I have always taken care of my cover,” he said with breathtaking honesty, “better than my core.”
His closetful of old golf shoes, as shiny and bright as hard Christmas candy, represented no mystery. Sanders didn’t have shoes of his own until he was 8. “One left,” he said, “and one right.”
To the barefoot boy tramping two and a half miles home from the golf course, the lightning bugs looked like ghosts. They would go with him to all the big cities of the world. “I never got tired of walking up that road,” he said. “I just got tired of walking up that road broke.”
In 1999, behind the home in Houston where Sanders lived with a white cat, I stayed in his guesthouse, a tired place with old bedding where at different times Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin. and Spiro Agnew slept. In Doug’s living room, I told him my Julius Boros story. Setting a record for non sequiturs, he immediately launched into an account of how he and a girl from the seventh grade made love stand
ing up behind a Hammond Map of the World after the teacher left the classroom. He didn’t get the message.
“I arrived at the Country Club at Brookline in nineteen sixty-three,” Palmer said, “imbued with all things Francis Ouimet, just as the USGA intended.” Fifty years earlier, Ouimet, a 20-year-old amateur (and commoner) who resided on Clyde Street across the way from the 17th hole, defeated the British aristocracy, Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, in an 18-hole playoff that redrew the economic image of golf and redefined amateurism. Ouimet and his 10-year-old caddie, Eddie Lowery, became the new image of the sport and, eventually, a postage stamp. “Then, wouldn’t you know it?” Palmer said. “For the first time in the history of the U.S. Open, not one amateur made the cut.”
The defending champion, Nicklaus, missed it, too. Invited into the press tent Thursday, Jack opened the questioning by asking a question of his own: “What do you guys want to know from a seventy-six shooter?”
“Nicklaus or myself might have been the Las Vegas favorite,” Palmer said, “but the players saw Boros coming from a great distance that spring. He had won at Colonial with an amazing score for Colonial—what was it? [279]—and the Buick at Grand Blanc [Mich.] with an even more impressive total [274]. There were some in the locker room who thought those four rounds of golf could well have been the best ever played. But I liked Brookline and my chances. Old-style driving course. Small greens. And I had just won a playoff with Paul Harney in the Thunderbird Classic at another old-style, tree-lined course, Westchester.”