Arnie

by Tom Callahan

  “I had never played with Mr. Palmer before,” said Lawrie, the 1999 champion, whose Sunday 67 and pristine playoff got lost in Jean van de Velde’s baroque collapse at Carnoustie. “As soon as the draw was announced,” Lawrie said, “I texted Darren. He was just as excited as I was.”

  Palmer hit only a shot or two, and didn’t have to take a second one at the second hole, where the Scot struck a full-blooded 8-iron into the cup for an eagle. “Playing with him was inspiring,” Lawrie said, “and the reception we got at every green was supercool. He was the boy, wasn’t he? For all of us.”

  Sir Michael Bonallack, past secretary of the R&A, twice the low amateur in the Open Championship, was in their gallery. Asked how important Palmer had been to the world’s oldest tournament, he answered, “Enormously. Let’s face it, he revived the championship. He’s the one who got the other Americans to come over. Everywhere he went in golf, they followed.”

  Team Player was finished and leading by one when Palmer’s group reached the last hole. “By then he was riding in a wee buggy,” Lawrie said. “I had about a twenty-footer at eighteen, Darren a fifteen-footer, both for birdie. ‘One of you has to make this putt,’ Mr. Palmer said. ‘We have to beat that [adjectival] Player.’ The age of him, and still so competitive. When my putt went in, he came and threw his arms around me. ‘But it’s only for a tie,’ I said. ‘No, you don’t understand!’ he said. ‘Combined ages! That’s the tiebreaker!’ And he knew it going in. [Largely thanks to Arnold, their combined ages were 239.] We won. It was fantastic.”

  Photographs were snapped on the Swilcan Bridge. The caddies just wanted to touch him. “Everyone was asking him to sign stuff,” Lawrie said. Player said, “My God, look at this, isn’t it great? He loves it, he really loves it.”

  To every winner of the Claret Jug, a quiet moment eventually arrives when he is alone with the chalice, to study the engravings in wonder, smearing his fingerprints up and down the silver list of names that now includes his own: Willie Park, Tom Morris Sr., Tom Morris Jr., John H. Taylor, Harry Vardon, James Braid, Ted Ray, Jock Hutchison, Walter Hagen, Jim Barnes, Robert Tyre Jones Jr., Tommy Armour, Gene Sarazen, Henry Cotton, Sam Snead, Bobby Locke, Ben Hogan, Peter Thomson, Gary Player, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Roberto De Vicenzo, Lee Trevino, Tom Watson, Severiano Ballesteros, Greg Norman, Nick Faldo, Nick Price, Tiger Woods, Ernie Els, Phil Mickelson.

  Lawrie remembered pausing just an instant at Palmer’s name, carved in 1961 and ’62, but being a Scot and a European, he took a longer moment at Sandy Lyle’s, then stopped entirely, and for some time, at Ballesteros’s.

  Seve was their Palmer.

  “My idol,” Lawrie said, “my hero growing up.”

  The American media never “got” Ballesteros, so the American public never got to know him. A lot of lazy matador-and-cape and hitting-it-into-the-car-park stories were written. Europeans loved Seve not for how much he won (though he won quite a bit, including three Open Championships and a couple of Masters) but for how much he cared, how hard he tried. All champions hug their trophies, but Ballesteros caressed the Claret Jug like an awed parent safeguarding a newborn’s head. No other golfer, no other anything, ever bounced in place with the ineffable joy of Severiano. Like Palmer, he played golf the way everyone wanted to.

  Seve’s birthday always fell during Masters week. In 1997, when Woods won his historic first Masters by 12 strokes, the Spaniard turned 40 the day before the tournament began. Seve, countryman José María Olazábal, and Tiger played a practice round together that morning. Or half of one. Following nine holes, Woods broke off to go another nine alone, with just caddie Mike “Fluff” Cowan at his side.

  “And if I could have gone out without Mike, I would have,” Tiger told me that night. “I just wanted to try some things Seve showed me with nobody watching.”

  For the rest of Seve and José María’s round, they capped each hole with a putting contest, a 100-footer to a wooden tee they stuck in the green. Coaxing the slow-rolling balls up, down, and around Augusta’s penny arcade, they cheered like schoolboys.

  When Seve walked off the 18th, passing under a spreading oak by the clubhouse, a writer standing there asked him, “Does forty feel any different?”

  “How you know I shoot forty?” he said.

  “Happy birthday.”

  Ballesteros walked over with enfolding arms, and said, “Mi amigo.”

  How do you explain this man to the public?

  “He was a man,” Player said, “you wanted never to be unhappy. We were paired together when I won my third Masters. [Seve was 21.] He ran across the eighteenth green and just put his arms around me, saying, ‘I’m so happy for you, Gary.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry for you.’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘don’t you see? You teach me to win Masters today.’ Which he did two years later, and again not long after that.

  “The last time I saw him was very sad [at the 2007 tournament]. I had just come out of the bottom locker room and was standing in front of the clubhouse as his car was going by. I called out, ‘Adios, compadre!’ He stopped, turned the window down, and said, ‘Gary, why are you always so happy?’ ‘Well, because I’ve got a great wife, because I’ve won a lot of golf tournaments, because I have my health . . .’ He said, ‘I wish I knew how to be happy,’ and a tear rolled down his cheek. ‘Adios, amigo,’ he said.”

  Ballesteros’s brain tumor had been stalled (but not stopped) by the spring of 2009 when a photograph postmarked Pennsylvania arrived in northern Spain. With a needed laugh, Seve told a friend, “Arnold Palmer just sent me a dog [a big yellow dog]. In a picture. His dog, called ‘Mulligan.’” The Spaniard got the message and understood it for what it was: a prayer. (“Palmer always did the right thing,” Player had said. “More than anything else, always doing the right thing was what made him Palmer.”)

  “The doctor saved my life,” Seve said, “and now I use my mulligan.” Adopting his own yellow Labrador puppy (that could have been Mulligan’s offspring), he named it for the Palmer who followed him.

  Phil.

  Alicia Nagle represented her grandfather, Kel, in the champions’ gathering at St. Andrews. “Mr. Palmer was sitting behind me at breakfast,” she said. “I wasn’t going to bother him at first, I didn’t want to intrude. But when I stood up to get a coffee, he smiled at me such a welcoming smile that I told him who I was, and he jumped up and shook my hand, and kissed me on the cheek, and said, ‘Your grandfather beat me here in nineteen sixty.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but you beat him at Troon two years later.’ ‘Aw,’ he said, ‘I was lucky. Kel was a great golfer and a great guy.’”

  Six months earlier, she had received a call at her London home to come to Sydney, and hurry. “He was ninety-four,” she said. “We only had ten days left, but we had some lovely chats during that time. In our final conversation, I promised him I’d go to St. Andrews in his place.”

  Palmer told her, “It’s so wonderful that you’re here. What a gentleman Kel was. Gary! Gary! Here’s somebody you have to meet!” Player won an 18-hole U.S. Open playoff against Nagle in 1965 at Bellerive in St. Louis. “Gary had lots to say,” Alicia said. “He’s so full of life. He told me he had made thirty-one trips to Australia. [See these hands? They’re going to hit more golf balls, and I’m going to travel more miles to do it, than any man who ever lived.] And he said, of all the men he has known in golf, my grandfather was the finest. I’ve heard that so many times, it must be true.”

  Palmer and Player took Alicia, each by an arm, and walked her over to the 18th grandstand to show her Kel’s name on the list of champions, the registry of saints. “‘See,’ Mr. Palmer said, ‘he’s looking down on St. Andrews, and he’s looking down on golf, and he’s looking down on you.’ I cried.”

  23

  2016

  “I couldn’t have enjoyed it more.”

  A THURSDAY CAME AGAIN. ANOTHER U.S. Open was under way at Oakmont, 42 miles to the northwest. In Latrobe, Doc Giffin had said on the phone—“How about eleven?”—
and it was almost that time now. Traffic was light on State Route 30 driving past Arnold Palmer Buick, Arnold Palmer Cadillac, and Arnold Palmer Motors, rolling under an overpass carved in concrete “Legend Arnold Palmer” on one side and “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” on the other, turning left at the sign for Arnold Palmer Regional Airport, veering right onto Arnold Palmer Drive, and then left at Legends Lane, parking in front of the familiar building that held his office.

  Years earlier, sitting in that office, Palmer was on the telephone giving somebody the bum’s rush, saying, “Listen, I have to go. There’s a guy here in my office. Talk to you later.”

  “Who was that?”

  “The king of Spain.”

  Of course it was.

  “Pardon me for not getting up,” Palmer said now, already seated behind his desk. Moving at all, especially walking, had become an ordeal. (Though he had been trying to chip golf balls just an hour before, slapping rubber. “Golf never ceases to be a challenge, even when it really is just you and the ball out there and nobody else.”)

  “How many times have you sat in that chair?” he asked. “Four or five,” Doc estimated from across the room. “I thought so,” Palmer said. “Do you remember when I asked you, ‘Doesn’t your ass hurt from all this sitting?’ and we went and played a few holes?”

  Arnold was vain about his unfailing memory. During the last press conference he was able to tolerate, the day before round one of his Bay Hill tournament in 2015, a local reporter inquired, “Mr. Palmer, on your love for the Central Florida region, the very first time you visited Orlando, I read Wake Forest had a match against Rollins College. I’m wondering if you recall the very first time you played a match here at Bay Hill with Don Cherry, Jack Nicklaus, and—”

  “Dave Ragan,” Arnold said. “No, I don’t remember.”

  Along with everyone else, he laughed. “Well, there are some fun things about what you just went over. I came here in nineteen forty-eight. I was a sophomore at Wake and we played the men’s golf team at Rollins. Our coach was a guy named Johnny Johnston and he asked us what we wanted to do. ‘We can stay here and practice or we can go on to the next stop.’ We all voted to stay at Rollins because we could play the girls’ golf team for the next two days. That was a hell of a lot more fun than playing the men’s golf team. Betty Rowland played for them. She became a national amateur champion and she’s still a good friend of mine from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Bud Worsham was my roommate at the time and we were both approached by Rollins with an offer to transfer, but we stayed at Wake. Have I answered the question?”

  Sitting at that press conference, alongside comedian Kevin Nealon and NASCAR’s Brian Vickers, his fellow Xarelto pitchmen, Palmer for the first time looked fragile at 85. He had tripped on a rug at home (“Did a three-sixty,” he said), unhinging his right shoulder. That expressive putty face wasn’t just pale, it was gray. The hearing aids he’d worn for decades didn’t seem to work anymore. “Don’t use the microphone, just talk to me,” he kept telling the questioners. (“It’s genetic. My grandfather lived to a hundred and wore hearing aids for fifty-five years.”) But his mind was terrific, his memory astonishing, and his sense of humor intact.

  “As I told someone who asked me about my prostate problem [cancer, in 1996], ‘I don’t have a prostate problem. I don’t have a prostate.’ I got rid of that thing twenty years ago and moved on. Oh, and I have a pacemaker in my heart [as of 2014]. Big deal.”

  When he saw me in Orlando, he asked, “What are you doing here?”

  I had come just to look at him, to see if he was OK.

  “What do you mean? This is a big tournament.”

  “Don’t give me that shit,” he said.

  Now, at 86, he looked much worse, but, having to do with the nature of expectations or something—wishes, hopes, I don’t know, something—he seemed a little better. He was wearing a bright plaid sport shirt, not a golf shirt, with a couple of top buttons unbuttoned. A V-neck white undershirt showed underneath. He was so gaunt that he swam in both shirts. His smile looked different, too, sawed-off somehow. His thinning white hair gleamed like wadded cotton.

  We talked about nothing and everything—for instance, Mark McCormack. I mentioned the “Pope and a Smile” headline. After he and Doc had a laugh, Palmer said, “Ours was a successful partnership, but I didn’t agree with him, either.” We spoke of Johnny Unitas (who in retirement needed a strip of Velcro to hold on to a golf club, even a putter, his hands were so badly damaged from football) and of Muhammad Ali, who had died 13 days earlier. I said, “Ali always greeted me the same way. ‘How’s Angie? I like her better than you.’ And he never met her.” One time, unable to get off the phone with Ali as the deadline was bearing down, I handed it to her and went into the next room to write a column. An hour and a half later I came out and they were still talking. “I can believe it,” Palmer said. “I spoke with him on the phone a number of times. Sometimes you could hardly hear him. Other times he hurt your ears.”

  Doc said, “Arnold, Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Ted Williams, Wilma Rudolph, and Arthur Ashe were honored once at the White House with what was supposed to be an annual sports award, called the National Sports Award, but it turned out to be a onetime thing.”

  Palmer picked up the thread: “I was seated next to Ali, and when President Clinton called him ‘a man who has unfailingly stood by his principles and his beliefs,’ I reached over and squeezed his arm. He gave me the most beautiful smile.”

  Of Palmer, Clinton declared, “He revolutionized his sport. It’s been said that when television discovered golf, the world discovered Arnold Palmer. Fans all over the world grew to love his unique style, his boldness, and his daring. To many he is the American ideal: the perpetual underdog falling behind and then charging down the stretch and tearing up the golf course.

  “Who could forget the nineteen sixty U.S. Open? Before the final round he trailed in fifteenth place, and a reporter [Bob Drum] said he was no more in contention than the man operating the hot dog concession. In one of the most memorable examples of grace under pressure, he birdied six of the first seven holes and went on to win the tournament. Of all the perks that have come along with being president of the United States, the best one was being able to play eighteen holes with Arnold Palmer this morning. I saw that, even today, when he tees it up, Arnie’s Army is as faithful and enthusiastic as when he marched through Augusta to win his first Masters. We thank him tonight for all he has given us, for all the thrills. And I can tell you that, on the basis of a wonderful few hours, he’s just as much of a gentleman and a competitor as he always seemed to the public. Congratulations, Mr. Palmer.”

  I’d been wondering something: “Are all Western Pennsylvanians the same guy?” Along with incredible memory banks, both Palmer and Unitas had that unusual blend of humility and self-confidence. Doc, Drum, Art Rooney, too.

  “I think probably so,” Palmer said, his face alit with mischief.

  Mr. Rooney enjoyed the company of sportswriters more than of his NFL partners. Avoiding owners’ boxes and suites, he sat with Drum in the back row of the press box watching his Steelers play. The Drummer died a few weeks after the 1996 Masters, of heart failure officially, of everything, really. “When I think of Drum,” Dan Jenkins said, “I think of laughter.” During the ’97 Masters, early in the morning, sons Bob Jr. and Kevin carried their father’s ashes out to Amen Corner, sprinkling them in the azaleas at the 13th hole. “We said some prayers and we cried a little,” Bob Jr. said. “Then we thought it would be great to have a beer. Dad would want us to have a beer. So we went to a concession stand and had a beer.”

  The photographs surrounding Palmer in his office had been shifted around. Babe Didrickson Zaharias was reassigned to an adjoining room. Norman Rockwell’s painting of Arnie was brought from the main house to an alcove of the office building not far from Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year amphora and the Associated Press’s Sportsman of the Decade (the sixties) pro
clamation. But the low table inlaid with gold and silver medals hadn’t moved, continuing to show three openings.

  “They still would be nice to fill, wouldn’t they?” Doc said.

  “Oh, boy,” said Palmer, “I would do it.”

  Two of the choicest slots belonged to Royal Birkdale (1961) and Troon (1962). In 1989, when he and Tip Anderson returned to Troon for another Open Championship, Arnold confused the two courses. “I can’t find our monument,” he told Tip, rooting around the 16th hole. “Where is it?”

  “About two hundred miles that way,” Tip said, “you senile git.”

  (Palmer took that from him. What a grand man he is.)

  Tip died in 2004 at age 71. They had been comrades for 22 Open Championships.

  Arnold began to talk about flying, his favorite subject.

  “I started out loving airplanes,” he said, “and haven’t ever finished. Still love them. I logged twenty-five thousand hours in the left seat, not giving up my personal flight certification until twenty-eleven [at age eighty-one]. Every year I took all the tests again and passed them all again.”

  “The examiners had a nickname for him,” Doc said. “‘Flying Colors.’”

  “That’s a lot of hours in the air, you know,” said Palmer, “in just about everything that flies.”

  Including jumbo jets?

  “Oh, yeah. I went out to Boeing. I knew the chairman of Boeing. [Of course he did.] He asked me, ‘Would you like to fly a 747?’ I said, ‘I’d love it.’ ‘Well, we’re about to do some testing on one. You can take her up.’”

  That must have been like piloting a skyscraper.

  “From the top floor,” he said.

  Palmer once spoke of flying with the Navy’s acrobatic Blue Angels in an F9F Panther two-seater. “We’re 50 feet off the ground and the pilot says, ‘All yours, Arnie.’ The first thing I know, I’ve got her in a six-g turn. We gain some altitude, and the pilot tells me how to roll her. I give her a little flip, and there we go corkscrewing across Florida. We get up to twenty thousand feet and the pilot says, ‘Point her straight down and I’ll pull her out.’ So I stick her nose at the beach and down we go at six hundred fifty mph. We pulled out at fifty feet.”