Arnie

by Tom Callahan

  In all their many collaborations, never once did Jacobsen see Palmer bristle under the responsibility of being Palmer. “Not a single time, in all the places we went,” he said, “when people were falling all over themselves to get a picture or autograph or just shake his hand, did I ever hear him say, ‘Geez, get me out of here. This is ridiculous. Get me away from this guy.’ And whenever tournament organizers offered him security, say, to escort him to his car, he declined. He’d go with the people, no matter how long it took. And he never hurried them. ‘What’s your name? Great to see you. Oh, is this your wife? How did you get a wife so good-looking? What do you do? You must be rich.’ Everyone felt like they were part of his group. Come on in, join the conversation. He let the whole world inside.”

  Jacobsen had a theory: “When you’re in a position like Arnold Palmer and Muhammad Ali—maybe we should stop with them, though I guess there are a few others. But when you’re in that position, I think you have an innate ability to read the people standing in front of you. Not only members of the media, the press, but also everyday fans. It could be an asshole media question—sorry—or a well-thought-out question from just about anyone. He would craft every response specifically to the individual, with graciousness. He was just so accepting. He might be the most accepting person who ever lived. Some people walked up to him a little afraid, others not the least bit intimidated. But, whoever was standing there, Arnold knew how to make it easier for them, and did. Whether it was a five-year old boy, or a forty-year-old trembling woman, or somebody in a wheelchair, or a fellow who actually thought he could outdrive Arnold Palmer. To whomever it was, Arnold adjusted.”

  It’s a natural grace.

  Jacobsen’s best memory was from a game he had with Palmer, Ben Crenshaw, and Bruce Lietzke. “Arnold jumped on a drive,” he said, “and popped one past the three of us. ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh,’ he said. ‘Let me see, now. There’s one. There’s two. There’s three. Looks to me like you boys are away.’ We had caught ours pretty good, too, but he was three or four steps out in front, and I’ll tell you something, we were just as thrilled as he was. I’d give anything to see that again today. I live that moment still in my mind.”

  In 1982, Arnie got boiling mad at Curtis Strange, whom he loved.

  “I misbehaved a little bit,” Strange said, “at the Bay Hill tournament.” Curtis doused a photographer with a thousand-gallon flume of profanity and then turned the hose on a female scorekeeper, a long-standing volunteer. “Of course my language got back to Arnold,” Strange said, “and he made a public example of me—made me apologize to everyone concerned. The reason he was so goddamned mad at me, I think, was because he did like me. I loved him. If Arnold just gives you that wink or grin, or ‘Do well,’ or whatever, it means everything to you. Then, if you disappoint him, oh, man.”

  Palmer and Worsham scholars Strange, Wadkins, Haas, Billy Andrade, were all Arnie’s boys but, for some reason Curtis was especially. His father, Tom Strange, was a Virginia club professional who could really play: a five-time winner of the state open, a five-time qualifier at the U.S. Open. He died of cancer when his twin sons, Allan and Curtis, were 14.

  “My dad competed against Arnie as an amateur,” Strange said, “and served on his equipment staff as a pro. I played Arnold Palmer clubs all through my junior career. Pretty early on, I came to know him and tried to be like him. Arnie played golf with a certain edge. I played with a certain edge, too. We had a conversation about it once. He told me you have to be on edge in order to play well.”

  When Curtis married Sarah in 1976, they spent their first night as husband and wife at Arnie’s house in Latrobe. Strange said, “I was playing an exhibition in Pennsylvania the next day, where he of course was the headliner. I was getting fifteen hundred dollars. I needed it. But being with Arnie and Winnie meant so much more than the money. I say it like this: we all have idols, people we respect as kids, and very few of us are lucky enough ever to meet those people. And many, many times when we do, they don’t quite live up to what we hoped they’d be. But Arnie did. That and beyond. For a younger guy, he was a good man to hang out with. He was real. He cared about you, cared enough to get mad at you. When Palmer looked you in the eye and said ‘How are you?’ he really meant it. Almost everybody says that, but almost nobody really means it.”

  After Strange won his consecutive U.S. Opens in 1988 and ’89—making a commendable run at a third one, too—he and Sarah had dinner with Arnie and Winnie the following week at the Canadian Skins Game. “We talked about our Opens,” Strange said, “about all the Opens.” Tom Strange’s dream at his five Opens had been to play well enough to get into a Masters, which he never did. Curtis qualified for 20 Masters, finishing second in 1985, the year he won his first of three PGA Tour money titles and took a turn as the world’s best player. In 1989 he won three tournaments besides the Open and became the first man ever to earn an official $1 million in a season.

  Palmer had been the first to win $100,000 in a season, and was the first to win $1 million in a career. It took him 13 years to do it. “When I started out,” Arnold said, “we were getting twelve hundred for first place and only fifteen places paid out. I’m pleased to see what has happened to the game and to think that I might have had something to do with it.”

  Jay Haas and Strange, Wake teammates as devoted to each other as Arnie and Buddy, regularly sought Palmer out at U.S. and British Opens for practice rounds. They knew enough not to give him the dean treatment; instead, to give him their best games, and the business. “We all had the needle out,” Strange said, “because that’s the way he wanted it and, I think, needed it, to still be one of the guys.” Haas, almost the last person you’d associate with off-color humor, collected dirty jokes all year to regale Palmer. “We’d play for five dollars, ten dollars,” Strange said, “and never pay. If Jay or I laid up somewhere, he’d say, ‘You pussy!’ And, let me tell you, he’d rip your heart out to win. Talk about competitive. He just couldn’t wait to beat Haas and Strange. He didn’t go in for the modern fist-bumping, either, if his opponent holed a putt. Not while the match was still undecided. Uh-uh. Afterward, maybe.”

  In 2016, when Palmer was 86, Strange dropped by his office at Bay Hill and they talked away an afternoon. “He was giving me a lot of grief,” Curtis said, “telling me, ‘You might not have been the worst actor on tour, but you were the second-worst.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘and you were a piece of cake, too, a rosebud, weren’t you?’ He loved it. ‘How many times,’ I asked him, ‘have you gotten so goddamned mad on the golf course that you couldn’t spit?’ He laughed. I loved to hear him laugh.”

  Strange said, “Think how normal he seems to you and me. Yet presidents and kings wanted to be Arnold Palmer.”

  On the second day of 2007, Palmer, Strange, Haas, Wadkins, Andrade, and others—a stunning assembly of gold-shirted Demon Deacons—congregated at the Orange Bowl for about the least likely occurrence any of them had ever imagined happening: Wake Forest’s appearance in a Bowl Championship Series football game. The opponent was the University of Louisville. Wearing jersey number 66 (for six-under-par presumably, certainly not for the ’66 U.S. Open), Palmer was Wake’s honorary captain.

  Muhammad Ali, a Louisville native, wore 19 for the Cardinals, presumably a nod to Johnny Unitas, though Unitas’s Louisville number was 16. When the Baltimore Colts signed him off a Bloomfield, Pennsylvania, sandlot, 16 was available. But John being John, he took the number the equipment man handed him and said nothing. “That was Unitas all right,” Palmer said of his fellow Pittsburgher, whom of course Arnold knew well.

  The kickoff was delayed a few minutes because Ali, sitting in a cart, was talking to Palmer about golf. He spoke softly, slowly, and with that horrible palsy, but enough of him was still there. The only two golf swings Muhammad ever tried, splay-legged with an 8-iron at the Stardust course in San Diego’s Hotel Circle, came while Ali was training for the first Ken Norton fight, which he lost. Muhammad was trying to tell Pal
mer something about that, and about lovely little trainer Eddie Futch’s belief that it was a fascination with golf that doomed Joe Louis in the first Max Schmeling fight.

  “I didn’t completely get what Muhammad was telling me,” Palmer said, “but I knew that, whatever it was, it was important to him, and I wouldn’t let anybody stop him. I was in Ali’s company a number of times through the years. He was my friend.”

  Wake alum Ernie Accorsi, the former Colts, Browns, and Giants general manager, was also at the game, sitting with the golfers. “I’ll never forget two things,” Accorsi said. “Curtis turning to Andrade, saying, like a twelve-year-old kid, ‘Billy, did you ever dream we’d be here in the Orange Bowl?’ A guy with two U.S. Open championships. Then the way Arnie’s boys followed him with their eyes as he made his way up through the stands . . .”

  Louisville won.

  17

  1986

  WINNER:

  Union Mutual Classic

  “I don’t think you can know me if you don’t know Doc.”

  “FOR AS LONG AS I’ve been with Arnold,” Doc Giffin said, “I’ve never stopped thinking of myself as a newspaper guy.”

  Doc’s first paper was the Pitt News at the University of Pittsburgh, where, his junior year, he served as sports editor and, his senior year, as editor in chief. That earned him a scholarship at Pitt and later a starting position in the profession with United Press International in Pittsburgh ($47.50 a week). Ordinarily the Pitt News sports editor penned the column, but Giffin deferred to a pint-sized dynamo a semester behind him, Myron Sidney Kopelman, who wrote under the byline Myron Cope.

  “‘Cope, you’re gonna write the column,’ I told him, because I knew he could write rings around me as a columnist.” In later years, when Cope was dropping indefinable terms like yoi and double yoi into Steeler broadcasts while devising something called the Terrible Towel to the enormous enrichment of children’s charities, Pittsburgh forgot what a splendid writer Cope was. But the evidence can still be found in the archives of Sports Illustrated and the Saturday Evening Post.

  “Doc’s a good writer, too,” Palmer said. “I correct his stuff, but that’s all right. No, to hear him tell it, everyone else is better. But that’s Doc.”

  It was Bob Drum who put Arnold together with Doc, a fellow scribbler at the Pittsburgh Press. Giffin was the man in the composing room who with a radio and a typewriter got out the “extra” when Bill Mazeroski’s homer in the bottom of the ninth inning beat the New York Yankees in the 1960 World Series. “We were on the street in ten minutes,” Doc said, the excitement still bubbling in his voice. And it was Drum who closed the deal when the tour offered Doc the position of press secretary in the ’60s. “Doctor, if you don’t take this job,” Bob told him, “I’ll never speak to you again.”

  Giffin gave the tour a shot of humanity. Any time Lionel Hebert was in the hunt, for instance, Doc made sure a trumpet was handy. “One year at Memphis,” he said, “Hebert, Gene Littler and Gary Player played off. Lionel birdied the first playoff hole to win, and at the awards ceremony, just before he put the horn to his lips, he turned to Gene and said, ‘Hey, Lit, do you want me to play you some blues?’ Gene laughed. They could get away with things like that in those days because they loved each other.”

  Doc said, “I’ve been called Arnold’s ‘handler,’ but while he’s trusted my input into places he should go or people he should talk to, I’ve never been his handler. He doesn’t need a handler. I’ve been asked, ‘Why is Arnold Palmer so popular?’ The answer is simple. He likes people, and they know it. His public face and his private face are exactly the same. He’s not one of those guys who turns it on in public and turns it off in private. He’ll tolerate fools that most of us won’t, myself included. He just likes people. There are vice presidents and everything else in the company now, but I’m still ‘assistant to Arnold Palmer.’”

  “Maybe Doc’s real title,” Palmer said, “should be ‘friend,’ or ‘everlasting friend.’” Ten months Arnold’s senior, Doc had similar perspectives and the same memories. At the end of every workday, they convened, just the two of them, for a cocktail and what they called “debriefing.”

  “We’ve done that every day, every year,” Palmer said, “since the sixties. We enjoy it. They’re just bull sessions, really. We start off discussing the tasks at hand but end up talking about everything. Old victories. Old losses. Life. Before he married, I used to call him ‘the highwayman.’” In those days, Doc patrolled Route 30 sweet-talking Latrobe’s eligible women and teaching its bartenders how to mix a proper Manhattan.

  “Doc is someone you can trust with your life,” Palmer said, “a good guy who always steers you in the right direction. I can think of a player or two—so can you—who could have used a Doc Giffin. Along with everything else he does around here—and he does a lot—he’s been a guardrail for me, and I don’t think you can know me if you don’t know Doc.”

  In 1986, Gary Player was lingering beside a par-3 green where he had just putted out, at a senior tournament in a Maryland suburb of Washington. Looking back at the tee, he watched Palmer, playing in the group behind, make a hole in one. “As I was getting ready to swing,” Arnold said, “I saw Gary standing there. I got to thinking about him, and us, and everything. You know, I wanted to hit a good one.”

  “That’s it! That’s it!” Player said later in the locker room. “He always knew how to share a moment of triumph, yours or his. Sometimes in life, it can be very hard to find someone to share your moments of triumph.”

  The next day, at the same hole, with the same 5-iron, Palmer made another ace. Not surprisingly, then, on the third day, he drew a media crowd at that tee. It was a little like going to a random airport just on the chance Amelia Earhart might land. The third shot did not go in the cup. Stop the presses.

  In fact, it airmailed the green. A 5-iron was too much club for the new day’s conditions, but he was too sentimental to change. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, the fifth human being to walk on the moon, and the only person ever to play golf outside of the atmosphere, brought his collapsible 6-iron and the sock he used to smuggle it aboard Apollo 14 into a tournament pressroom at Winged Foot. “If you had it to do over, Alan,” a comedian wondered, “would you still go with the soft six or change to a hard seven?” “I was committed to the six,” he said with a grin, as Palmer was to the five.

  When the shot went long, Arnold looked over at the witnesses and said sheepishly, “I didn’t want to leave it short.”

  “Doc,” I whispered to Giffin, “Time is holding a page for me. I can’t wait for the end of the round.”

  “OK,” he said, running to Palmer and back again.

  “Can you do it in two walks down the fairway?”

  “I’ve hit my share of unusual golf shots,” Palmer said as we walked, itemizing a number of them, like a backhanded wedge out of a gum tree in Melbourne. He slammed drivers off of department store roofs in Japan (where the Japanese regarded him as John Wayne), anthills in Africa (“man-eating ants, now”) and volcanoes in the South Seas. Wearing a three-piece pin-striped business suit, he punched a ball down a narrow corridor of Wall Street, and, from home plate at Fenway Park, lifted a short iron over the Green Monster.

  “In Paris,” he said, “I drove a ball off the top of the Eiffel Tower. It must have carried four hundred yards, straight down mostly, putting a hell of a ding in a passing bus.” His eyes were dancing.

  “But when that second ball went in the cup yesterday, I don’t know how to describe the feeling. I’ve never felt anything like it. Idiot that I am, I just kept muttering, ‘Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness. Holy mack’rel, Andy.’”

  Sometime later I told Palmer, “You know, every one of the writers has the equivalent story of Doc and a deadline.”

  “I hope so,” he said.

  18

  1995

  “A perfectly imperfect man.”

  PALMER WASN’T A PLASTIC saint. He didn’t
glow in the dark. For 45 wedded years he worshipped Winnie, but he loved all women, and more than a few loved him back. PGA champion Bob Rosburg, Palmer’s occasional roommate in the hungry days on tour, spoke of fielding a phone call once from an especially agitated husband. Rossie said he tried to placate the man but, never wanting to come between Arnie and buckshot, signed off by saying, “My bed is the one by the window.”

  This is the hilarious way golfers of Palmer’s generation, and not just golfers (and not just his generation), dealt with the subjects of sex and infidelity. Remember, Palmer and John F. Kennedy both came to power in 1960, and both knew Frank Sinatra. When I told Rosburg’s joke to Gary Player, Dow Finsterwald, and Curtis Strange, all three laughed. None of them said it wasn’t a laughing matter. “I heard Rossie tell that story a dozen times,” Strange said. “He’d say to Arnie, ‘I won’t be answering the door tonight.’”

  At least once, during the 1980s, Winnie laughed along. Asked about the task forces of women flying reconnaissance missions over her husband, she said, “I don’t have a jealous bone. And he is handsome and sexy. Sometimes I have to walk away and laugh. In Oklahoma City, two women in the gallery were giggling, each saying to the other that she was the one he was winking at. I turned around finally and told them, ‘He’s winking at me, his wife.’ That’s the only time I ever identified myself in a gallery.”

  In 2013, Tom Watson complained to me about a Golf Digest cover photo posing 84-year-old Palmer with supermodel Kate Upton in a parody of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Mimicking the sober farmer, Arnold is holding a bunker rake instead of a pitchfork. “He looks doddering,” Watson said. “If they had only shot him sneaking a peek at Kate—eyes twinkling—that would have been all right. That would have been Arnie.”