by Tom Callahan
The wind and the scores at Brookline were up. Palmer shot 73, 69, 77 (missing three putts under 3 feet), 74; Jacky Cupit, a 25-year-old Houstonian, 70, 72, 76, 75; and Boros, 71, 74, 76, 72. Among the three men, they had exactly zero birdies in the third round, and nobody in the entire field managed to shoot par on the last double day. Boros said, “Saturday morning, when Cupit and I shot seventy-six and Palmer seventy-seven, I pretty much despaired of all of our chances in the afternoon. I was already packed up, ready to go, when news of the triple tie reached me. Cupit gave back a two-stroke lead with a six at seventeen, then missed a very makable birdie putt at eighteen that would have won. I lost track of Palmer, who had been fighting an intestinal bug all week, but I could hear the roar when Arnie’s last putt went in for a par. Three to play off, just like Ouimet, Vardon, and Ray. But who was who?”
“In the playoff I bogeyed the first,” Palmer said, “Boros bogeyed the second, and Cupit double-bogeyed the third, but then Ol’ Man River [as Arnold rechristened Julius] put a couple of birdies together and said, ‘See ya.’ On the tee at the eleventh hole, I reached back for a little something extra and found my ball perched in the middle of a rotting tree stump. Remember those honeybees outside this window? Already four shots behind, I couldn’t afford either to take a drop or go back to the tee, so I had to lash at the ball as hard as I could with a four-iron.” Three lashes later, like a bite of steak following a Heimlich maneuver, the stump spat the ball out. “I made a seven and a seventy-six,” he said, “losing by a million [Boros 71, Cupit 73, Palmer 76]. I had dropped a second U.S. Open playoff in a row [with one to come].”
By the way, if it seems like he’s losing a lot of playoffs, consider that he still holds the PGA Tour record for playoffs won, 14, tied with Nicklaus.
“Arnold birdied three of the last four holes in our playoff,” Boros said, “and I thought to myself, ‘He just doesn’t quit, does he?’ For a while then, I called him ‘pigeon,’ but I shouldn’t have. I didn’t mean it. It wasn’t true.”
Herbert Warren Wind wrote, “Boros moves his cigarette and his phrases around in a way that recalls Humphrey Bogart,” but Palmer said, “He reminded me more of Boris Karloff.”
By 11 strokes, Doug Sanders missed the Brookline playoff, but he picked up $525, or 26.25 tons of cotton. Cupit, who went on to win tournaments but didn’t come close in a major again, never could shake quite loose of that 12-footer he had at the 72nd hole to win the U.S. Open. Hell, he could have kicked that one in.
11
1964
WINNER:
Masters
Oklahoma City Open
Piccadilly Match Play
Canada Cup (with Jack Nicklaus)
“How many of them could I have won?”
THE LEAST PUBLICIZED MADDENING thing about golf is the doubt that attends winning, not losing. When he was a boy in Latrobe, the tournament Palmer always dreamed of, fantasized about, pretended to be leading, was the U.S. Open. Winning it was the obsession. “What if I hadn’t won at Cherry Hills in nineteen sixty?” he asked. Won so soon. “Might I have won four others, or five? How do you ever know?” Did he lose his edge? Did he spend too much of his edge too early? “The only thing harder than trying to keep your edge,” he said, “is trying to get it back once you’ve lost it.” (Ask Tiger Woods.)
The 1964 Masters, a practically perfect week for Palmer, left in its wash a similar kind of doubt.
Wednesday’s rainstorm softened and lengthened the National course; Arnold didn’t mind. As a result, only the longest drivers had much of a chance. What annoyed him, when the skies cleared, was a peppy little airplane chugging over the property Thursday towing a banner that read, “Go Arnie Go.” Had he not been a flier, he’d still have been the principal suspect. “If I knew it was someone working for me,” he assured the writers, “I’d fire his ass.”
On the subject of decorum, Palmer lectured five-foot-seven, 116-pound Puerto Rican playing partner Juan “Chi Chi” Rodriguez to keep the Panama hat on his head, stop using it to sweep the crowd into frenzies, and, for God’s sake, quit dropping it on the cup. “I love Chi Chi,” he said that night, “but at times I want to kill him.” Rodriguez said, “I thought when you hit it inside the other guy, the claps were for you. I was too naïve to realize it was his stage.”
Sitting at his desk, Palmer said, “After any tournament, a player can always look back and count up the wasted shots. But that week, except maybe for one at four (par 3), one at twelve (par 3), and one at fifteen (par 5), I honestly felt like I didn’t waste any shots. Every day I started off the exact same way. Steady as you go. [Four 4s at the first, four 5s at the second, four 4s at the third.] I was never exactly Gene ‘the Machine’ Littler, you know. But I was pretty close to it that week. I couldn’t have walked around and placed my ball any better.”
“I played with him the first day,” said Labron Harris Jr., a 22-year-old amateur at the time. “I couldn’t believe how precise he was. That wasn’t his reputation, you know. He was very protective of me, which was his reputation. He always marked the short second putts, knowing the crowd wouldn’t be waiting for Harris to putt out before running to the next hole. I was just a punk kid from Oklahoma who could play some. Golf was Arnold Palmer’s kingdom, but he knew how to make you feel a part of that kingdom. People don’t realize now how big he was then. He was it.”
Opening with a 69, Palmer was tied with Player (who, for some reason, had lost his voice) and three others for the lead, two strokes ahead of Nicklaus. In that crowd of first-round leaders was Davis Love Jr., whose wife would give birth to Davis Love III the Monday after the tournament. Palmer shot 68 Friday (now seven ahead of Nicklaus) and 69 Saturday (a full nine up on Jack).
“Sunday morning on the range,” Arnie said, “I was warming up between Dave Marr and Bruce Devlin [the Australian], six strokes ahead of both of them. I looked over at Devlin’s driver and chuckled.” Overnight, a new silver weight strip had been taped to the back of its head. “I recognized the fingerprints on the Band-Aid,” said Palmer, a proponent of lead adjustments himself. “I thought, ‘Von Nida must be around.’”
Norman Von Nida, whose absence from the World Golf Hall of Fame is a mortal sin, dominated the Australian game during the ’40s and had a benevolent hand in the success of countless young Aussies to come. For three consecutive years (once he got out of World War II alive, a considerable upset), Von Nida finished top six at the Open Championship. On the European Tour, he won 13 times in a 17-month stretch, 70 or so tournaments in all, just about everywhere in the world. But he came over for only one U.S. Open, and the biggest noise he ever made in America was in 1948 when a Texas Ranger had to pry five-foot-six, 120-pound Von Nida off a much larger Houston and Ryder Cup pro named Henry Ransom after Ransom allegedly cheated. “Sure enough,” Palmer said, “I looked up at one point Sunday and there was old Von Nida smiling at me in the gallery.”
That sputtery little plane buzzed the course again. This time the banner read, “GO FOR 67 ARNIE,” a reference to the score Palmer needed to break Hogan’s Masters mark of 274. But, for once—maybe for the only time—Arnold didn’t take the Hogan bait. Without giving Ben a thought, he shot an intelligent 70.
Palmer’s playing partner the last day was Marr, who would win his major championship, the PGA, the following year. A Texan with a dry way of looking at and celebrating life, Marr was wonderful company on and off the course (for the players and the writers alike). “My first Masters,” he said, “I played a practice round with Hogan, who didn’t say a word to me, not even ‘You’re away,’ until the [par 5] eighth hole. I was in the fairway bunker a couple of miles from the green, taking too much time, I’m sure. Hogan finally said impatiently, ‘So, do you think you can reach the green from there?’ Then he didn’t speak to me again until the back nine, when he turned and said, ‘Hold on a minute, this is your first Masters.’ He went over to a concession stand, came back with an egg salad sandwich, and handed it to me. After I peel
ed off the green wrapper and took a bite, he asked, ‘Is that any good?’ and shut up for the rest of the day.”
At the 15th hole, Palmer didn’t have to go for the green with a three-wood, but did, of course, and started to panic a little as the ball disappeared into the glaring sun. “Did it get over the water?” he asked Marr. “Hell, Arnold,” Dave said, “your divot got over.”
As Palmer and Marr arrived at the last tee, Arnie had a five-stroke lead over Nicklaus (who closed with a 67 to climb all the way to second place) and a six-stroke lead over Marr. “I have to make a birdie here,” Dave told him, “to catch Nicklaus.” Nodding, Palmer said, “Is there anything I can do to help you?” “Yeah,” Marr said, “you can make a nine.” In most retellings, the number is 12, but Marr told me nine.
Both of them birdied. Marr and Nicklaus shared second, six strokes back. “Over the seventy-two holes of the tournament,” Herbert Warren Wind wrote, “Palmer went over par on only six holes. He birdied eighteen holes, and he parred the rest. This is the equivalent of bogeying only every twelfth hole and birdieing every fourth hole, and that is something!”
“To finally walk the eighteenth fairway at Augusta with no pressure at all, no chance of losing,” Palmer said with a sigh. “I wonder what that cost me.”
The next day Mrs. Love had the baby out in Charlotte, North Carolina, and, at University Hospital in Augusta, Player had his tonsils out. It was Palmer’s seventh major championship, and his last. At the callow age of 34, he was done winning majors. But nobody noticed for 10 years, mostly because nobody wanted to notice, but also because he stayed so relentlessly competitive at U.S. Opens: 1966 (2nd), 1967 (2nd), 1969 (6th), 1972 (3rd), 1973 (4th), 1975 (9th). “How many of them could I have won?” he wondered.
“Nicklaus won majors for twenty-five years,” Player said. “I won them for twenty. Arnold for just six. But if you asked the average golf fan, he’d say Palmer did it the longest, and I’m never offended by that. It’s fantastic. The people loved him so dearly because he was so charismatic. As Snead said, ‘He went to bed with charisma and woke up with more.’ It came out of him like sunlight. Because of what he did for golf, the people thought he was still winning majors. And you know what? He was.”
“Never saying ‘No’ cost Arnold something, too,” Lee Trevino said. “I don’t think he’d change it, though.”
Leaning back in his chair, with a faraway look, Palmer said, “Tee to green, I played better golf from the late sixties through the middle to late seventies than I played at any other time in my life. Won less, but played better. If my clubs were right, I thought I could do whatever I wanted to do with the golf ball. That’s kind of how I felt about playing. The actual shot-making was better from sixty-five to seventy-six, seventy-seven, but I didn’t make things happen like I did in the early years.”
Had he lost his edge?
Maybe so, his expression said.
12
1966
WINNER:
Los Angeles Open
Tournament of Champions
Australian Open
Houston Champions International
PGA Team Championship (with Jack Nicklaus)
Canada Cup (with Jack Nicklaus)
“Go ahead, Arnold. You’re hot.”
“NOBODY EXCEPT ARNIE AND I remember,” Billy Casper told Jack Murphy of the San Diego Union, Casper’s home paper, “but we were paired at Augusta when he birdied the last two holes to win the nineteen sixty Masters, the year everything started for him really. After two men go through something like that together, they’re connected forever. Then nineteen sixty-six came along. The Olympic Club. Yeah, you could say Arnie and I know each other.”
Nineteen sixty-five had been an off year for Palmer, and a disconcerting time, though he won the Tournament of Champions in Las Vegas and contributed four points to helping Captain Byron Nelson and the U.S. Ryder Cup team retain the trophy in England. (Palmer’s all-time Ryder Cup record was 22–8–2 as a player, 2–0 as the captain.) Alongside Gary Player, he tied for second at the 1965 Masters, but an awfully distant second, nine strokes behind Nicklaus, who played a game with which Bobby Jones was not familiar.
At 36, Palmer didn’t feel old exactly; he just didn’t feel young anymore. Lingering bursitis in one shoulder contributed to that. More painfully, his natural advantage—what he called “indifference to consequences”—left him for a time. A certain softness came over him, a slowness, a caution. Perhaps as a delayed reaction to losing the two Open playoffs, Palmer became something he had never been before: careful. As he slipped to 10th on the money list, writers and fans were asking themselves, What’s wrong with Arnie?
“I still don’t know what it was, all these years later,” he said. “Was it too much fame, too many business distractions, too great a pressure to please too many people? All I know is, I lost who I was there for a while. I suddenly got to worrying about disappointing everybody. The old me never thought about hitting a putt way by. Hell, I’ll make it coming back.” But the new Palmer didn’t want to risk three-putting, didn’t want to risk anything. Under maximum pressure, his hands began to shake. “For the first time in my life,” he said, “I guess I was afraid.”
But he started 1966 much more like his old self with a string of seven birdies and a comfortable win in the Los Angeles Open, followed by a run of good seconds and thirds at the Crosby and the Hope and in the Lucky International (at public Harding Park across Lake Merced from San Francisco’s Olympic Club). Not victories surely, but, as golfers and gamblers like to say, “well-meant.” He finished fourth at the Masters, again to Nicklaus, but was competitive this time: back in the game. And his hands had stopped quivering.
Palmer looked forward to the U.S. Open at Olympic, and drew up an aggressive game plan. He knew the golf course well. While it was near enough to the coast to hear and smell the sea, Olympic had no water hazards on it and only one fairway bunker. The challenge was in its claustrophobic tightness. “They pruned a limb off a tree one time,” he said, “and more than a hundred golf balls fell out.” At Olympic in 1955, his inaugural Open as a professional, he posted a top 25 as Iowa municipal pro Jack Fleck beat Hogan in an 18-hole playoff still counted among the biggest upsets in the history of sports.
Looking at the front nine especially, Palmer decided it was worth the extreme measure of changing his “shape” temporarily, trading in his normal draw for a subtle fade. Left to right, more than right to left, was the order of the week. And this adjustment served him well—for a while.
In the first round, he shot a one-over-par 71, same as Nicklaus and Tony Lema (a month away from his fatal plane crash). A second-round 66, which on a sharper putting day might have produced an Open record of 64 or lower, tied Palmer at the top with Casper. Playing together in the third round (and in the fourth and fifth, as it turned out), Arnold shot 70 to Billy’s 73 to build a three-stroke lead. In the pressroom, he was asked prematurely if it pleased him to be out of the shadow of another Open playoff. “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “I’d just as soon not be in another one.” Palmer’s shimmering 32 on the front nine of the “final” 18 fluffed his cushion to seven shots with just nine scheduled holes to play. Everyone, including Casper and Palmer, believed the tournament was over.
“I wasn’t thinking of Bill then, to be honest,” Palmer said. He was thinking of Ben.
While Arnold was adamantly the un-Hogan, Billy wanted nothing so much as to be Hogan. “When I was sixteen,” he said, “I followed Ben around at an exhibition in San Diego. That changed everything for me. Course management. Course management. Course management. From then on, I was purely a percentage player. It’s not an exaggeration to say, at every crossroad in every round, I’d ask myself, ‘Which way would Hogan go?’”
Palmer and Casper were opposite characters by almost every measurement. Billy’s shirts and personality were buttoned snug to his Adam’s apple. He grew up a plasterer’s son in Chula Vista on the edge of Mexico, putting alone
in the dark, postponing his return to a broken home. Casper was a Notre Dame Catholic who converted to Mormonism. He and wife, Shirley, eventually had 11 children, six of them adopted; they forgot which six.
“Our David,” as Billy called one of his sons, turned first to drugs and then to guns. “I had a dream one night,” Casper said. “In it, David was pacing outside our home. ‘Come on in, David,’ I said, ‘it’ll be all right.’ But he said, ‘No, I’m going the other way.’ He committed thirty-five felonies, including armed robberies, and got a hundred and five years in a Nevada prison. Forever. The day they took David away, he left through a door with a small window. I remember looking through that little window and waving good-bye.”
Casper hid his considerable human side from the spectators. He played neither to the galleries nor for them. He kept the top button buttoned. He didn’t romance the press, either. When in an interview room a reporter asked him why he hadn’t removed his sweater as the day heated up, Casper replied in a singsong voice, “Start in a sweater, finish in a sweater.” Years later he said, “If I was a little hypnotic on the golf course and in the pressroom, it was because I had to be to play my best golf.” The only things the public and press knew about him were he ate buffalo meat and hippopotamus (“a little watery,” he said, “just like you might expect”), had a slice of bear Sunday morning at Olympic, and was a hell of a putter.
“I never played for history, either,” he said. “I played for money, for my family. That gave me a significant advantage over Arnold, Gary, and Jack. The good player who chokes usually does so because he dwells on what it all means to him. I never did that. I had my share of failures, maybe more than my share, but it was never because I choked.”