by Tom Callahan
Winnie was sitting by herself in the grillroom at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland while Arn (as she called him) was out on the back nine in the 1995 Senior British Open finishing up a 71 on his way eventually to 32nd place. He was playing in a threesome with Englishman Neil Coles, the best and most accomplished golfer America has never heard of, and Irish folk legend Christy O’Connor (Himself, as the great man was known throughout the British Isles, especially in the public houses, where he liked to say, “God created Guinness so the Irish wouldn’t rule the world.”) Christy’s grandson/caddie pulled a trolley behind them.
“Is there a big gallery along?” Winnie asked me.
“No, quite small,” I told her. “It’s a wonderful golf course, but not a layout conducive to big galleries.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Arn always plays better in front of a crowd of people. He’s a ham. He got that from his mom.”
The obvious question every writer had for Winnie was: How did she tolerate, or how did she come to terms with, Arnie’s well-known womanizing? But no one knew how to put that to her in words that were as gentle as she was. So, instead, she was asked things like “What can a wife do to help a husband who’s a golfer?”
“A great deal,” she said, glancing out the window at the static clouds and racing years. “She can pick him up when he’s down. That’s the biggest thing. She can believe in him enough for the two of them when he’s momentarily lost faith in himself. She can even give him a golf lesson—’You’re moving your head,’ ‘Crack your knees a little more,’ ‘Stand closer to the ball,’ ‘You’re way too close to the ball’—even if, like me, she doesn’t know one thing about it. He’ll try whatever she says because he knows she loves him, and that’s how desperate he is.”
For the advice or for the love?
“For both,” she said.
In 1960, when Arnold became the definitive golfer, Winnie was the picture of the golfer’s wife. That year, the Associated Press distributed a photograph of “the Palmers at home” with Winnie in a housedress and apron looking like Jane Wyatt, and Arnold in an easy chair and a sweater à la Robert Young. He’s glancing up from a magazine and lifting his feet as she pushes a vacuum cleaner under the hoisted slippers. An accompanying article begins: “Mrs. Arnold Palmer, cute as a button in tan shorts and polka-dot blouse, sorted a huge pile of mail in the redwood paneled den of the trim ranch-style house tucked away in the rugged foothills of the Alleghenies hard by Route 30, or the old Lincoln Highway, at Latrobe, Pa. She came upon a familiar envelope and shuddered slightly. It was a telephone bill. ‘Here’s the war debt again,’ she said . . .”
It wasn’t exactly like that.
Desperation, advice, love, she had said. Losses:
“Being overtaken at Olympic by Billy Casper wounded Arn terribly, of course. I still think losing the Masters to Gary Player with that bunker shot at eighteen may have hurt him worse. It did me. Gary calls golf ‘a game of sorrows.’ A wife has to be the first to get over them, so she can help her husband go on. There’s always tomorrow.”
Winnie wasn’t much for expressing her own regrets—although, truth be told, she’d always had a kind of yen to live in New York City, and sometimes wished she’d seen her French studies through to completion at Pembroke. Oh, well. Ray Cave’s Sportsman of the Year story in Sports Illustrated had a couple of disquieting sentences: “Winnie is not permitted to wear fingernail polish” and “Dyed hair is a Palmer anathema.” But maybe that was just 1960.
Arnold and Winnie had daughters instead of sons: Peggy and Amy. (“Amy was supposed to be Arnold II,” Winnie said, “so we gave her a name as close to that as we could.”) When Amy was five or six and beginning to notice the multitude of writers camped out in Latrobe, she asked her mother, “Why does Daddy have to answer so many questions from all those detectives?”
It’s the perfect word. Detectives.
(“Isn’t it?” he said, sitting at his desk.)
If only on their mother’s behalf, Amy and Peg must have been awfully mad at him at times. “I felt bad for my mother,” Peg once said, referring only to the fact that, like many husbands and fathers, Arnie was gone so much. “But I always understood. It made total sense to me that he didn’t want to be sitting around Thanksgiving dinner, learning about everybody’s backaches. He always wanted to be doing something. The guilt involved in being a family man and balancing your life—yeah, that’s all true, but you have to want to do it. If you don’t want to do it, it just isn’t that meaningful. He didn’t want to be there; he wanted to be out on the golf course, and we were welcome anytime. It was hard for my mother, but there was a thrilling side that she loved in spite of her issues. Everything is a tradeoff.”
“They don’t agree with their father about a single thing,” Winnie said of her daughters, “except the things that truly matter.” Then she pointed out a misspelling on the Portrush wall—Varden for Vardon (six-time Open Champion Harry Vardon)—as an excuse to move the conversation away from the girls.
Winnie Palmer and Barbara Nicklaus were unshakable allies throughout their spouses’ cold war. “The ten years difference in their ages might have had something to do with it at the beginning,” Winnie said, “but I remember many kindnesses, too, on both sides.” “It was certainly never a problem between Winnie and I,” Barbara said.
The industry considered Mrs. Nicklaus to be the model golf wife. A girl whose maiden name was Bash could hardly have married anyone else. The extent of Barbara’s devotion to her husband and his game was as legendary as he was. What other woman on her honeymoon would stay outside Pine Valley’s perimeter while her man played the course? Even she might not do it today. In the fourth year of their marriage, lying beside Jack on a Saturday night in a Las Vegas hotel, she lost a pregnancy. But, wanting him to get his rest at all cost—he was leading the tournament—she waited until 8:00 a.m. Sunday morning to shake him gently and say, “Jack, I have to go to the hospital.” After he took her there, he went out and won the tournament. Of course, Barbara knew the other Jack, too, the one who fainted at the birth of every child.
Peg might have exaggerated slightly when she said, “Everything is a tradeoff.” But in matrimonial markets, at least, tour golfers do transact a lot of trades. Lee Trevino had two wives named Claudia. How many Claudias have you known in your lifetime? Lee married two of them. And in his heyday as a player, part of Trevino’s standard uniform was a Band-Aid on a forearm covering up a homemade tattoo that read “Ann.” (His first wife’s name was Linda.) Like Johnny Carson and Trevino, John Daly was prone to wed women with the same first name—in Daly’s case, Plaintiff. Stepping onto a tee in California, Daly encountered four blondes wearing T-shirts that said, “Bob,” “Hope,” “Desert,” and “Classic.” Abandoning Hope, he married Classic. She was his third wife, but not his last.
It’s true that there have been great athletes who never let anyone down. Arthur Ashe, Roger Staubach, Wes Unseld, Tony Pérez, Raymond Berry, Stan Musial, Doak Walker, Gordie Howe, Ernie Banks, Brooks Robinson. But the absolute greatest ones, like Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods, seem almost required to have at least one imperfection that should disqualify them as heroes but doesn’t.
Ali could be as cruel as boxing. Contemptibly, he socked wife number two, Belinda, while he was breaking in number three, Veronica. Fighters think with their hands. He had many wives and demi-wives, and children with most of them (all of whom he adored). But something else about Ali, not just his love for his own and everyone else’s children, was redeeming.
Muhammad was what Waite Hoyt would have called a perfectly imperfect man. “Schoolboy” Hoyt, Hall-of-Fame pitcher for the incomparable 1927 New York Yankees—the kid who said, “It’s great to be young and a Yankee”—was one of Ruth’s pallbearers in 1948. “Babe was a perfectly imperfect man,” Hoyt told me in 1972, riding in a Pittsburgh cab on his way to broadcast a Cincinnati Reds playoff game with the Pirates, “so crude it took your
breath away but so generous it made you cry. Not because he was so good at his game, but for some other reason, he was easy to forgive.”
“Here,” croaked the Babe, wracked with cancer, handing Waite’s wife an orchid near the end, “I never gave you anything.”
Winnie died of cancer in 1999. Arnold built a second hospital in her name and memory. “She knew me,” he said, his voice cracking, “and she knew how to handle me.” Strange said, “She had a way of keeping him in line. When he’d get high on his horse, she would kind of rein him in. Sarah and I were staying with them in Latrobe when Winnie called him out on something or other, some story he was embellishing a little. ‘Now, Arnie!’ she said. ‘ARNIE!’” Palmer lifted his wife up into his arms and danced her around the room, laughing.
A few years after Winnie died, Arnold and Kathleen (“Kit”), a five-time grandmother from California he’d known for years, fell in love. They were married in 2005, when Palmer was 75. “Arnold and I managed a very quiet private wedding in Hawaii,” she said. “Those present were Pastor Ron, Arnold, me, and a stray cat on a beach.”
Families don’t always embrace second wives, but he had someone with whom to unveil the morning again, and his daughters and their children cheered. Quickly, Kit came to know him well.
“He loves to watch Westerns on TV,” she said, “he occasionally wins when playing dominoes with me, he can pack away four dozen oysters at a sitting, he would much rather be too hot than too cold, after buying sweatpants he cuts the elastic off the leg bottoms, he often takes a power nap at his desk, he often cries during the National Anthem, his pet peeve is men wearing hats indoors, he considers a drive more than five miles to be a major journey, he loves country-western music, he frets a lot before public speaking, bologna alone could sustain him, he will not have a cat as a pet, he prefers men to be clean-shaven, he often wears loafers without socks, when writing longhand only his signature is legible, he does not care for designer food, and dark chocolate is his all-time fave.”
Touchingly, almost unbearably so, Kit was a dead ringer for Winnie. “I looked at her”—Player shook his head—“and thought, ‘This is a twin.’ I think it’s very sweet.” And maybe just a little sad, if tinged with that vague feeling of regretful longing that only old men ever know.
Palmer was a perfectly imperfect man. Not because he was so good at his game, but for some other reason, he was easy to forgive.
19
2000
“I’d be doing everything you’re doing.”
IT CUSTOMARILY FALLS TO the first grandchild to name the grandparents. “That’s right,” said Sam Saunders, Palmer’s grandson via Amy. “Emily, my sister, was the one who named him ‘Dumpy.’ She tried for ‘Grumpy,’ but it came out ‘Dumpy.’”
Precisely as Pap had placed Arnie’s hands on a golf club, Dumpy carefully braided Sam’s small fingers, cautioning him, “Don’t you ever change this grip, boy.” “And I never have,” said Sam, the father of two sons now. “Just about as sternly, I told my seven-year-old, ‘Here’s where your hands go. Don’t ever move them.’”
When Arnold Palmer is your grandfather, it takes courage to choose tournament golf for a life’s work. And then, when a transforming success doesn’t materialize overnight, it takes something more than courage to keep going. Not that Saunders didn’t have obvious talent: he was a decorated junior golfer and a club champion at Bay Hill multiple times, starting at the age of 15.
When did he first realize Dumpy was Arnold Palmer?
“The way you mean it,” he said, “not for a long time, until I was like sixteen or seventeen, and getting serious at amateur tournaments. I always knew he was a very good golfer, of course. I just didn’t realize exactly how good, and how important.”
At Arnold’s final Bay Hill tournament and Masters in 2004, 17-year-old Samuel Palmer Saunders caddied for him. “I had no clue what I was doing,” he said. “I wish I could remember more of the little details of those rounds.” Facing a second shot on his valedictory hole at Bay Hill, a par four, Palmer was determined to hit a driver off the deck. “I tried to talk him out of it,” Sam said, “and into a three-wood. I hated the idea of him possibly going out on a water ball in front of everyone. But he wasn’t the slightest bit afraid. Somehow he just hooked that driver right up there and ran it down the left side of the fairway onto the green to within about fifteen or twenty feet of the cup. I can still hear the roar. He two-putted it for par.”
Saunders has kept his caddie suit from the Masters, what 1948 champion Claude Harmon called “that white tuxedo” by way of ridiculing one of his sons. (“You just keep wearing that white tuxedo, and I’ll take care of the green jacket.”) “It’s one of my most precious possessions,” Saunders said.
While instructing Sam on the practice tee, Arnold was a minimalist, like Pap. Snappy lessons, then go work it out for yourself. “We don’t spend hours,” Palmer said. “We spend ten, fifteen minutes, and I give him what I think is necessary and he goes with it.” “Often,” Sam said, “I wished he’d say more, because every simple seed he planted kicked in eventually on the range. Something small about the right hand, or the elbow, would suddenly hit me as I practiced, and I’d get it.”
“He is a very polite young man,” Palmer said. “That’s one thing I’m very proud of. As long as his manners and his characteristics are as good as they are, I’ll be happy. But don’t forget, I’m not his father.” Which was a way of saying he didn’t want to poach on Saunders’s dad, Roy.
“No, certainly not,” Sam said. “Dad and I have a very good relationship. He’s the one who took me to all the junior tournaments. I’m grateful that Arnold Palmer is my grandfather. I think very highly of him. I think very highly of my other grandfather, and of both of my parents. I’m proud of my heritage and feel very fortunate to have all of these wonderful people in my life. But only one of them am I able to talk to man-to-man about the ups and downs of a pro’s career, about the toughest sides of it, the terrible disappointments.”
For a Monday qualifier, Saunders once had to borrow his caddie’s irons and shoes, shot 67, and still didn’t get in. “Hey, I know what that’s like,” Arnie told him, “and I know what it’s like when you’re out on the golf course and everything is out of control and you just want to go hide.” Sam said, “It’s neat for me to have him, you know, to be able to relate to the bad times, because he had so many good ones. I’m probably able to talk to him probably like nobody else in the family can, and we get along pretty well.”
In his support of Sam, Arnie was his mother’s son: “Her mellowness, willingness to feel things and to show her feelings, was a salvation for me. She was a gentle, generous person, but I never felt as if I was being soft by going to her. I sought her out because she was the counterbalance I needed to Pap, who was tough and hard-core and refused to give me a compliment. I was always afraid to lose because of my father’s reaction, but I never felt that way about my mother. No matter what, she was the one who understood. She always took up for me. All that was so important—much more important than I realized at the time.”
Saunders said, “As desperately as I wanted to be my own man, have my own identity—and nobody ever wanted those things more—I still needed him to believe in me, to pull for me, and he did. When I married, when I moved to Colorado, he told me all the things I had to hear. I went to see him in Latrobe [in 2013] and he said, ‘If I were you, I’d be doing exactly what you’re doing, as far as moving somewhere else, starting your own life, getting away from me. I know how hard it is to be my grandchild and to want to be a tour golfer. And I know how much more difficult the profession is today, how much longer the courses are, and how many more competitive players are out there now. But just keep at it. You’re on the right track. I couldn’t be prouder of you.’”
Sam had grown tired of playing the Web.com tour. “I was at the point of wondering if I was ever going to make it onto the PGA Tour,” he said. “I had one child already, another on the way. W
as it time to do something else? But when he said he was proud of me, it gave me just that little extra bit of confidence to keep chasing my dream. He didn’t look down on me, saying, ‘You should be better by now.’ He said, ‘Go get ’em.’ The next year I had a great season and finally got my PGA Tour card.”
“I think Sam has taken the right approach,” Arnold said. “He’s come a long way in the last couple of years, and I really feel that he has a shot at it now. But he has to work. He has all the ingredients that are necessary. It’s just going to take time. Stick to the basic fundamentals of the game of golf. Sure, there’s going to be a little change here, a little change there. But don’t listen to all the instructors out there with a new way. Trust what you have, if it’s sound. Trust yourself.”
Though still a journeyman, Sam was on his way. “Of course,” he said, “I don’t expect to have a career even in the same universe as his. But I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. The players on tour know who I am, but they also know I don’t consider being Arnold Palmer’s grandson any kind of accomplishment. That’s just being born. They might ask me how he’s doing, but they treat me as one of them.”
20
2004
“I know everybody by their first names.”
ON AN APRIL SUNDAY in 2004, his 13th year as a pro, Phil Mickelson surrendered the title of “best player never to win a major.” Two days earlier, he heard Sunday roars at Augusta on Friday, “echoing through the valleys and hollows,” as he said, “starting at the first hole and building all the way to the eighteenth.” That was Arnold Palmer’s last round at the Masters.
Palmer played in 50 Masters exactly, missing his 21st straight cut in 2004 at the age of 74. Even “lifetime” exemptions run out, as Billy Casper, Doug Ford, and Gay Brewer learned the hard way, by mail. “I don’t want to get a letter,” Arnold said, explaining the nice, round number on which he volunteered to take his leave.