Arnie

by Tom Callahan

  Later in 1994, in the Road Hole Bar at St. Andrews’s Old Course Hotel during the Dunhill Cup, a gray-haired English lady drinking Scotch called out from a corner, “Master Els! Come over here, Master Els!”

  He walked over and said, “How’re you doing, ma’am?”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “No idea, ma’am.”

  “Have you ever heard of Henry Cotton?” she said.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am,” Ernie said. Cotton won his Open Championships at Carnoustie, St. George’s, and Muirfield where, eight years later, Els would win one of his.

  “I’m Henry Cotton’s daughter,” she said, “and I want to give you some advice. You’re going to have a long career. You’re going to be great. But let me tell you something: Don’t let anybody ever fuck you around. Do it on your own terms and at your own time. Don’t let them fuck you around.”

  “OK, ma’am,” Ernie told her, trying not to laugh. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Ol’ ’enry’s daughter was a wise, wise woman.

  14

  1976

  “I’m going to try to be your best friend from now on.”

  AMERICA, ESPECIALLY AMERICAN TELEVISION, sees only American golf. Network announcers might calculate a Sergio García or Rory McIlroy victory “drought” in terms of years, even if it had been only weeks. By their count, poor Els won just 19 tournaments, never mind the 50-some world victories he rang up away from the PGA Tour. Even Palmer performed notable feats outside the country that barely registered on home radar.

  In 1975, after a fallow couple of seasons, Arnold won the Spanish Open in April, a worthy tournament, and the British PGA in May, a big tournament, to almost no notice. Scottish journalist Renton Laidlaw was with him in Spain. “It meant so much to him,” Laidlaw said. “Right after the awards ceremony, I went down with him at La Manga to his condominium right on the course. He ran to the telephone to call Winnie in the States. It was almost as if he had won his first golf tournament. ‘Winnie! Winnie! I won the tournament!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve won again!’ He was so delighted, so elated. Like a young boy, like a twenty-one-year-old boy who had just lifted his first trophy. It was lovely to see. So natural. He was a superstar who was so completely normal. I wrote about that the next day in the paper.”

  A year later, Palmer shot 64 in Palm Springs and seemed to be on his way to winning again in America, what would have been a sixth Bob Hope. But then something happened and he had to withdraw.

  Doc Giffin’s best friend since childhood was an insurance salesman, a fellow Craftonite named Bill Finegan. One of Pittsburgh’s smokiest bedroom communities was Crafton, the suburb that shaped former Steelers coach Bill Cowher, known for making a sideline face (like a half-chewed caramel) that was a common expression in Crafton.

  Finegan married into the Flanagan family; the Flanagans’ home served as headquarters and clubhouse for all the neighborhood boys. Bill and Doc (so named, by the way, because his father worked in a drugstore) played golf together growing up and as young adults pooled their modest resources to go in on a partners’ membership at an affordable course in Aliquippa.

  In 1976 the friends planned a vacation together in Orlando to play Bay Hill. But, riding in the private jet of his richest customer, Finegan disappeared in a storm over West Virginia. The plane was missing for 10 days. Then pieces of it were found in the mountains.

  “After the memorial service for Bill,” Doc said, “Arnold told me, ‘Go take your vacation now, Doc. Go to Bay Hill.’” Deacon came to Giffin and asked, “Would you mind if I tagged along?” “I was surprised,” Doc said, “but grateful for the company. ‘I’d love that,’ I told him.”

  During the flight to Orlando, they played gin rummy. “He wasn’t a man of many words,” Doc said. “It was mostly nods and grunts.” But then he stopped dealing the cards, set them down on the tray, and looked Doc straight in the eye. “‘You’ve lost your best friend,’ he told me. ‘I’m going to try to be your best friend from now on.’”

  Accustomed to rising early, the old greenkeeper headed out before daybreak to play nine holes on Bay Hill’s short track, the Charger; then, along with Doc, he went 18 more on the big course. Twenty-seven holes in all. “Played nicely, too,” Doc said. “We finished up, had a bite to eat, and he went back to the hotel for a nap. We had adjoining rooms with a connecting door. Some of Arnold’s workers took me out for a boat ride. When I returned, around dinnertime, the connecting door was open. Something felt wrong. I went into Deacon’s room and found him on the floor. He was dead. He’d had a heart attack.” Doc called Winnie, who called Arnie, who withdrew from the Hope.

  Back in Latrobe, Giffin closed a locker and mounted a nameplate on it for the man who never set foot in the locker room without the express permission of a member. “Milfred J. (Deacon) Palmer, Golf Professional–Course Superintendent, Latrobe Country Club, 1921–1976.” It’s there today.

  “I think Arnold wanted nothing so much in life as his father’s approval,” Gary Player had said, “and, for all that Arnie accomplished, I don’t believe he ever completely got it.”

  To that, Doc said, “If Arnold didn’t know how much his father loved him, everybody else did. I did.”

  “Pap played nine holes on the Charger,” Palmer said, “had a quick snack, came back, and played a full eighteen on the championship course. Came in, had a drink, said to Doc, ‘I’m going to go back and take a little nap. I’ll see you at seven o’clock for dinner.’ Gone. Whether he was lying down—they said he was—he died. Had a heart attack and died. Now that is the way to die.”

  Doris went three years later, unluckier. “My mother had a tragic death,” Palmer said, “and that hurts me a lot.” She was tortured by rheumatoid arthritis, undergoing operation after operation, receiving artificial joints in her hands and arms, and the medication sometimes seemed more diabolical than the disease. “For a lot of years, she suffered,” he said. “It was a difficult way to die.”

  Late in his own life, Palmer would say, “I’m more afraid of how I will die than of dying. I don’t want to linger. That scares me a little. The idea of lingering.”

  15

  1980

  WINNER:

  Canadian PGA

  PGA Seniors

  “Nobody would have bought into it if he didn’t.”

  PALMER NEVER WON THE PGA Championship, and it is the PGA Championship that seems diminished. For all its fine memories of Walter Hagen and the rest, a tournament that never had Arnold Palmer on its shoulders can hardly feel complete. He considered himself the poorer, of course. “It’s a disappointment over a career, a significant missing piece,” he said, “especially since my father was a PGA pro. I’d love to be able to say ‘Hey, I won the PGA’ for him.”

  Three times Palmer finished second (in 1964, ’68, and ’70), three other times top 10. In 1964 at Columbus, Ohio, Bobby Nichols opened with a 64 to Palmer’s 68. A second 68 drew Arnold within one, but then to his 69–69 on the weekend Nichols went 69–67 to win his only major. In 1968, Julius Boros beat Arnie by a shot on the last day (69 to 70), the margin of victory in the tournament at San Antonio. A sublime 3-wood Palmer hit out of trouble at the final hole, the best shot Doc Giffin ever saw him hit, gave Arnie a chance to tie, but he missed a 10-footer. In ’70 he made up three final-round strokes against Dave Stockton at Tulsa—two too few. “You don’t dwell on your near misses,” Palmer said. “No, as a matter of fact, you do.”

  In Tom Watson’s majors cache, he also lacked the PGA; Lee Trevino lacked the Masters, Sam Snead and Phil Mickelson the U.S. Open, and Raymond Floyd the Open Championship. All of them looked back on their narrowest misses with the same dismay.

  Coming to his fifties, Palmer’s enthusiasm for the budding senior tour was muted. He disapproved of riding carts, an option available to the liver-spotted geezers. He despised driving from the shorter tees. Returning to Nicklaus’s tournament at age 53, Arnold elbowed a writer and whispered jubilantly, “Back to the r
eal tees, brother!”

  Not that he didn’t appreciate the mulligan that senior play represented, especially at the outset, for the likes of Tommy Bolt, Roberto De Vicenzo, Boros, and Snead (while Don January and Miller Barber seemed to do most of the winning). But he didn’t care for the joyless cast that came over the tour when the money got serious. “The problem with the senior tour,” he said, sitting at his desk, “is the guys who were pricks the first time around are still pricks. They need to remember how things came to be what they are.” Raymond Floyd would second that. And Barber said, “The complainers now are the same ones who were complaining twenty, twenty-five years ago when I first went on tour. Shoot, it’s a convention of old farts.”

  In 1980, the first formal year of the Senior PGA Tour, only four tournaments were conducted. The first three, all paying $20,000 to the champion, went to Don January in early June (the Atlantic City Senior International), De Vicenzo in late June (the U.S. Senior Open), and Old Charley Horse, Charlie Sifford, in November (the Suntree Classic). Charlie sure was a master. The fourth was the PGA Senior at Turnberry Isle in Aventura, Florida, in December, also paying twenty grand.

  “It had the name ‘PGA’ on it,” Palmer said. “That’s all I cared about.”

  Arnold opened with a par 72, three shots worse than Paul Harney, a pro’s pro from Massachusetts, who 10 times finished in the top 10 at the U.S. Open, failing to join Boros, Cupit, and Palmer in their 1963 playoff by just a stroke. Four times Harney was in the top eight at the Masters, including fifth in 1964, when Palmer won his fourth green jacket. As almost no one but the participants could tell you, Harney and Palmer were paired together on the final 36-hole day in the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills.

  Friday at Turnberry Isle, Arnie shot 69, moving himself into the lead. But neither Palmer nor Harney could manage par the next two blowy days, and they finished tied at the top. In their slipstream was a roll call of the old names: January, Wall, Sifford, Boros, Finsterwald, Ford, Kroll, Dickinson, Souchak.

  “If I had made a six-footer at eighteen, I could have avoided the sudden-death playoff with Paul,” Palmer said. “I have to admit, that six-footer didn’t feel quite as automatic as they used to, but I was still pretty sure I’d make it.”

  When he didn’t, the two men went back to the 15th hole, a 388-yard par four, where Arnold hit a squirter to the right not unlike the one on the 16th at Royal Birkdale in 1961. He was back in his old Latrobe element, in the matted rough. (“Watch me, Pap! Look at me hit this one!”)

  “Trees were in my way—what else is new?” Palmer said, “and I couldn’t hit anything more than a nine iron and still clear the top branches. But I hit the hell out of that nine.” His ball landed on the green and moonwalked to within seven feet of the cup. After Harney missed a long birdie putt, Palmer settled in over his shorter one. “This time,” he said, “I had absolutely no doubt. It felt automatic again. Automatic. I made the three, looked up at the sky and thought, ‘Well, we finally won a PGA, Pap.’”

  He won 10 senior tournaments, including another PGA, by two strokes over January; a U.S. Senior Open by two over Billy Casper and Bob Stone (making Palmer the first man to win a U.S. Amateur, a U.S. Open, and a U.S. Senior Open); and a pair of Senior Tournament Players Championships, by three over Peter Thomson, and by 11(!!!) over a gang of four. His victory against the Australian Thomson, five-time winner of the Open Championship, was at Canterbury Golf Club in Cleveland, Arnie’s old Coast Guard station. “If I could have—and I couldn’t—I wouldn’t have dared beat him there,” Thomson said.

  Nicklaus said, “I doubt the senior tour would have happened without Arnold. Nobody would have bought into it if he didn’t buy into it. He played it just a little bit at the start. So, once more, one by one, we all followed him and did the same.”

  16

  1982

  WINNER:

  Marlboro Senior Classic

  Denver Post Champions of Golf

  “I live that moment still in my mind.”

  TO WARD OFF THE senior malaise, Palmer gravitated toward younger players, like Peter Jacobsen and Rocco Mediate (“Arnold Palmer is timeless,” Rocco said, “that’s all there is to it”), and several generations of Arnold Palmer and Buddy Worsham golfers at Wake Forest, from Lanny Wadkins and Curtis Strange to Webb Simpson and both father Jay and son Bill Haas. They were all recipients of one of the two golf scholarships Wake established for Palmer and Arnold established for his best friend.

  “I know I like to think young,” he said. “I’m not much for sitting around and thinking about the past or talking about the past. What does that accomplish? If I can give young people something to think about, like the future, that’s a better use of my time.”

  “I first met Arnold my first year on tour, nineteen seventy-seven,” Jacobsen said. “Trying to Monday qualify, I missed out three straight weeks; then, on the fourth Monday, played my way into a field at the AT&T, the old Crosby. I was so excited, nervous. I went back out with just my caddie to play ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen at Monterey Peninsula Country Club. Now it’s, like, five thirty in the afternoon. I jumped across to sixteen to play in, and had hit three drives off sixteen tee, when, out of nowhere, around a corner, came this caravan of four hundred or so people led by Arnold Palmer and Mark McCormack.”

  Jacobsen suddenly realized he had cut in. “He could have big-timed me,” Jake said. “He could have called me out. ‘Step aside, kid, I’m coming through.’ But instead he walks up to me, tucking in his britches, sticking out his hand, saying, ‘How are you? I’m Arnold Palmer. May we join you?’ He introduces me to McCormack, who later became my manager for twenty-five years. Then he hands me a sleeve of golf balls. ‘Here, these are in the developmental stage,’ he says, ‘let me know what you think of them.’ After we play sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, he says, ‘You’ve got your card, you’re on the circuit, good for you. We’ll be seeing each other every week from now on.’ And, just like that, I felt accepted. A kid out of Oregon who dreamed of playing golf. I don’t have to tell you, golf isn’t the most inclusive sport. In all games, for that matter, the stars tend to be exclusive. ‘Stay away. Get away. I have my inner circle.’ But he included me. He made me feel I belonged. I think he made everyone feel that way.”

  Jacobsen won the AT&T in time and a score of other tournaments. He served two Ryder Cup teams and played presentably in the majors, finishing as high as third place at the PGA Championship twice, along with a personal best of seventh in a U.S. Open, if you don’t count the Open he won in “Tin Cup.” Jake was a logical character to portray himself in a movie, being a natural entertainer. He made a lounge act out of practice tee impersonations, dumping a bucket of range balls down his shirt before doing Craig Stadler. Palmer always came last.

  “First I’d make sure I unbuttoned my collar and spread the flaps. Then go: ‘Huh? Huh?’ Snort a bunch of times. Tear out a few chest hairs and toss them into the wind. ‘Did you see that lady over there by the tee, Arnold?’ ‘Talked to her already.’ Waggle. Two or three club dips, a neck dip. Then you had to go to the pants with your elbows. Finally that whirligig of a swing. Always followed by ‘Where’d it go?’”

  Palmer and Jacobsen became regular partners in Fred Meyer Challenges and Shark Shootouts, doubles events in the so-called silly season. But Palmer didn’t think they were silly. “I can’t add up the number of times I played golf with Arnold,” Jacobsen said, “but we were partners in seventeen Fred Meyer Challenges, my tournament in Oregon, and probably ten of Greg Norman’s Shootouts. We had a good chance to win Greg’s event one year at Sherwood. On the sixteenth, a reachable par five, we were two back and I hit a nice drive and had a long iron or a hybrid into the green. He walked up to me and grabbed me by my shirt. He got that look in his eye and said, ‘Do you know how much it would mean to me for us to win this tournament? Knock it on there and make an eagle.’”

  Jake did both, “more because of him, less because of me,” he said. “But we st
ill lost in the end, and he was so deflated. ‘That competitive fire,’ I thought to myself, ‘it never goes out.’ Not in him anyway.”

  Well beyond his prime, Palmer remained a useful teammate, “because Arnold was still just about the best driver of the golf ball anyone ever saw,” Jacobsen said. “It’s nice when you can depend on your partner to hit it straight down every fairway with no side spin. A year finally arrived, as I was calling him to another Fred Meyer, when he told me, ‘You know, my game’s not what it used to be.’ And I replied, ‘Arnold, is that why you think I’m playing with you?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, why are you playing with me?’ The true answer is we had become a team. But the answer I gave him was ‘The reason I want to play with you is you’re the only one I can outdrive anymore.’ ‘Screw you!’ he said. They punched each other in the arm and played on.

  “The hell about a golfer growing older,” Palmer said, “is it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process over a period of years. You have that moment after a long lull when you hit a two-iron just right and say to yourself, ‘OK, it’s back again.’ I used to consider myself a realist as a golfer and a romantic as a pilot. I don’t know when I became a romantic as a golfer and a realist as a pilot. I just know I did, involuntarily.”