A Life Well Played

by Arnold Palmer

  And so now you know the rest of the story. Whether it was 1-up or 2-up, who really cares. I just know that the “up” part was next to my name. And my career seemed to just keep going up from there. And I was riding a wave of great fortune at that time that carried over to the following week. I’ll get to that soon enough.

  MISSING IN ACTION

  I SHOT MY LOWEST 72-hole score in my first PGA Tour victory, the 1955 Canadian Open at Weston Golf and Country Club, where I came in with a 23-under-par 265 total after rounds of 64, 67, 64, and 70 to beat Jackie Burke by four strokes. My score in relation to par set a Canadian Open record that has yet to be broken.

  It was a victory I almost didn’t get to enjoy, but for the fact that I knew well the rules of golf.

  Just as I had been in the third round, I was paired in the final round with Tommy Bolt, who was known as a rather ill-tempered sort, but that was only with a golf club in his hands. He built up quite a reputation because he tended to throw a club here and there in frustration, but he was one of the nicest men you could know. In fact, he sort of took me under his wing in my rookie year, and Winnie and I even traveled with him and his wife, Mary Lou.

  With just a few holes left to go my lead was comfortable enough over Jack Burke, the third member of our group, that I wasn’t too concerned when I hit a tee shot into the woods left of the fairway. As I was milling about assessing my option on my next shot, I felt a tug on my elbow. It was Tommy, and he whispered to me that I should just chip it out into the fairway. I pulled away and continued to look at my options. I heard what he said, but I had to pretend that I didn’t, because getting advice from anybody but your caddie is a two-stroke penalty. All I could think at this point was that he was going to cost me the tournament.

  So I go walking forward real fast, pretending to look at the line of the shot to the green through the trees. When I got back close to the ball, Tommy is still hovering nearby, and he says again, this time quite a bit louder, “Chip it out safe. Don’t do nothing silly.” Well, I’m not worried about doing anything silly. I’m worried about Tommy continuing to do something silly, which is trying to “help” me. He had the best of intentions, granted, but I was getting pretty annoyed.

  I still pretended not to hear him, and I continued to pretend to look at my options. Tommy now has turned his back, and before he can turn around again I grab an iron and quickly hit the ball through the trees right at the green. I got there, too. Was I crazy? No. But that choice was the only option I had left to me. I certainly couldn’t chip out.

  Of course, no one was happier for me than Tommy was when I won the tournament. You can be sure I was darn happy. The breakthrough meant a great deal to me beyond the $2,400 first prize. Unfortunately, my elation was short-lived.

  I can honestly say that I probably never putted better in my life than I did those four days at Weston. But something troubling happened in the aftermath of the tournament, something that I didn’t even realize until I got to the next event, also in Canada, the Labatt Open at Summerlea Golf & Country Club near Montreal. When I got there I looked in my bag, and my Wilson putter was not in it.

  I called club officials at Weston, but nobody had seen it, and neither had the man who caddied for me that week. Somebody apparently had walked off with it sometime after I holed a ten-footer for my last putt of the tournament. There was a lot of excitement in the aftermath. Fans were on the green before I could even pick that last putt out of the hole, and I remember shaking a lot of hands and accepting pats on the back as I was engulfed by well-meaning folks.

  The newspapers hailed me as the favorite at Summerlea after my big victory (Gene Littler ended up winning), but no one knew that I had lost my putter. I borrowed a putter from Fred Haas to practice with, and a couple of new putters arrived from Wilson before the tournament began. But those new putters just weren’t the same. They didn’t have the same feel. Plus, that putter that I lost was hot. By that I mean I had a great deal of confidence in it and felt I could hole putts from anywhere. On the sentimental side, I sure hated to lose the putter that gave me my first PGA title. To this day I’ve never discovered what happened to it, and it would have been nice to be able to have it for posterity’s sake.

  Painfully, I learned a new rule that week. Don’t let your clubs out of your sight.

  BIG PICTURE

  I WENT TO THE BRITISH Open in 1960 for all sorts of reasons, some of them selfish and personal—for the thrill of playing in an Open Championship and the thrill of playing at the Old Course at St. Andrews.

  But my motives were many.

  Wouldn’t it be just wonderful if we had a sport that was a more prominent means of solving problems around the world? What if golf could be something that brought us together? It might even be that sport could be the focus of political situations, and that it could help solve disagreements, that it could replace war and strife on the front pages of newspapers. I know all of that sounds quite fanciful, but that was how I was thinking.

  Couldn’t we bring disagreements to the sporting field?

  That kind of thing, where we have guys trying their guts out in a Ryder Cup or a Presidents Cup or any of the other international events, and why are they doing it? It’s for national pride. That’s quite a thing. They are competing in sport, and that is honorable, and it’s a far sight better than seeing people going at each other on a battlefield somewhere.

  That was an ambition of mine in 1960. There was no better place in the world to try and do that than at the Open Championship at St. Andrews. I feel we have succeeded to some degree. Golf is a worldwide sport with a lot of great tournaments and team events, and there is great interest in those events. And now golf is in the Olympics as well, which is very important. Has it solved a lot of world problems? Well, unfortunately, the answer is no, but I won’t give up thinking it can get the conversation toward problem solving started.

  Now, there were certainly legitimate golf reasons for me to go to St. Andrews. I had planned on going over to Scotland even before I won the Masters that year. Some people thought that after I won the U.S. Open at Cherry Hills that I suddenly decided to head to St. Andrews to try to complete the “modern” Grand Slam. Well, that wasn’t even a thing then, although the concept had been percolating in my mind for some time, and having thought about it for some time, I had cause to mention it in my post-championship interviews with the press.

  Indeed, once I won the U.S. Open, I knew I was onto something special, and in the aftermath of my victory at Cherry Hills I mentioned to some media members that, “I’ve got Grand Slam ideas of my own,” as I was quoted in some papers. “I’d like to add the British Open and the PGA Championship to those Masters and U.S. Open championships this year.”

  It’s true that my comments became a more earnest topic of conversation between myself and Bob Drum, a writer friend from the Pittsburgh Press who had covered much of my golf for a number of years, on the flight from Denver to the United Kingdom, where I first was going to play in the Canada Cup, an international two-man team competition now known as the World Cup, with Sam Snead before heading to St. Andrews. Drum and I further fleshed out the idea of a Grand Slam that would include the Masters, the two Opens, and the PGA, and when we got to Ireland for the Canada Cup, Drum talked up the concept of such a new achievement in golf to some of the international press members. It sounded like a fine idea to me, especially since I was the one who had a chance to do it, but the whole thing really just evolved from ideas that I had been formulating for some time.

  Over the years people have asked me frequently why I went to Scotland, and my answer is that I was truly motivated to be a great player, and I didn’t feel like you could be a great player if you couldn’t win internationally, something Pap often mentioned. So I had to go to the British Open, and in 1960 I was finally in a financial position to do so. It was not an inexpensive proposition to go there, but now I had the wherewithal to include it in my schedule.

  At that time I had a singular
focus. The goal was just to win it once; it wasn’t a question of winning multiple British Opens or some newfangled Grand Slam. But I had to win it for history’s sake. Unfortunately, I didn’t win it on that first trip to St. Andrews. I lost by a shot to Australia’s Kel Nagle (who passed away in 2015 at age ninety-four), but even losing was a kick; it was something that pleased me very much, the whole experience, and it drove me to keep going. And, of course, I did win the British Open in 1961 and 1962, and I proved a lot to myself—and others—about the quality of my golf game.

  But, again, it wasn’t all about me. Bottom line, I had great hope for the sport of golf and for the world at large when I went to St. Andrews. And when I returned to St. Andrews just last year for the 144th Open Championship, I felt that renewed sense of hope because of the way the game is being conducted and how much it is embraced around the world. Golf has brought people together and generated a common interest and a bond that so many of us are able to share. That’s a great feeling, and it pleases me greatly to know I played a small part in that.

  ACES

  I’VE MADE 20 ACES in my lifetime, which doesn’t sound like very many when you consider I’ve played golf since I was four years old, but the odds of making a hole-in-one are around 2,500-to-1 for a professional (and 25,000-to-1 for an amateur).

  My last ace occurred not long ago, in 2011. I remember it clearly. I was playing a friendly round on the Charger Course at Bay Hill with friends Will Carey, Bill Damron (father of tour player Robert Damron), Dick Ferris, and Bruce Walters on a sunny and breezy afternoon in early November. At the 163-yard par-3 seventh hole, I pulled out a 5-iron—a club that has been very good to me through the years when it comes to aces—and played a shot into a crosswind coming from the left. The ball landed ten feet short and rolled right into the hole. I was pretty excited about it until I got the bill later in the club bar. I’m joking, of course. I was only too happy to splurge a little that evening, hosting a dinner party for some two dozen friends. The wine and the good-natured barbs were flowing that night.

  Among my four playing partners and me we figured out that we had made a combined 50 aces. So much for those supposed odds.

  It had been eight years since my last previous hole-in-one, which also came at Bay Hill. Another interesting thing about the ace in 2011 was that I was using new Callaway irons for the first time that day. Needless to say, they felt pretty good. I finished with a 79, which allowed me to beat my age by three strokes.

  It doesn’t matter how long you play the game, it never gets old when you make a perfect shot like that. I was in high school when I made my first hole-in-one, at the short par-3 second hole at Latrobe Country Club. I hit a wedge from 134 yards. My second hole-in-one was at the same hole, also with a wedge.

  My first ace as a professional came on the 16th hole at Desert Inn Country Club in the first round of the 1959 Tournament of Champions when I holed a 6-iron. I shot a 2-under 70 that day, but I wasn’t very excited about it at the time. The tournament was being played in late April, only a few weeks after I had come up short in defense of my first Masters title, and the setback was still on my mind. When asked about the ace after the round, I told the press, “I’d trade that hole-in-one for a couple of putts I missed in the Masters.” I had blown a three-foot par putt at the 17th and a four-footer for birdie at the 18th at Augusta National to finish two strokes behind Art Wall Jr., and those misses sure stuck in my craw.

  Easily the most exciting ace of my career came on Wednesday, September 3, 1986, on the third hole at TPC Avenel in Potomac, Maryland. And it didn’t come in an official tournament round, nor did it lead to a victory. No, it was during the pro-am for the Chrysler Cup, a tournament on the Senior PGA Tour, but, nevertheless, it was easily among the best shots I’ve ever made in my career, nailing a 5-iron from 182 yards that looked good all the way and rolled right in the cup.

  It looked awfully similar to the shot I had hit the day before on the same hole using the same club from the same distance. That’s right, during Tuesday’s pro-am round I aced the hole with my 5-iron, which made a bit of news. The next day I got on the tee and there was a larger crowd waiting for me, as well as a television news crew from a local NBC affiliate. I heard one of the spectators say, “Hey, Arnie, I came all this way to see you make another one.” I just smiled at him. It never entered my mind about knocking the ball in the hole. But I did it, with cameras rolling, no less. I found out a bit later that I was the first American professional golfer to ace the same hole on consecutive days. According to Golf Digest, at the time only five Americans, all amateurs, had ever done that. I’ve had some things happen to me, but never anything close to that. I’d never heard of anyone doing that before. Newsweek and Time came to the event later in the week to further cover the occasion, which was flattering.

  I got a kick out of Chi Chi Rodriguez’s comment afterward when he said, “I thought Arnie walked on water before this. Now I know he does. You could give Clark Kent ten balls and he couldn’t do that.”

  To commemorate the occasion, I have the two golf balls (Maxfli DDH III) from those aces hanging on the wall in my office in Latrobe. Former PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman had them mounted for me. I cherish that simple plaque that reminds me of two of my fondest days in golf.

  AUGUSTA

  I FIRST VISITED AUGUSTA, GEORGIA, and Augusta National Golf Club while I was still attending Wake Forest College. I remember peering through the fence and wondering—and wishing and hoping and dreaming—if I would ever get the chance to play in the Masters. And, of course, after winning the 1954 U.S. Amateur, my wishes came true when I competed in the 1955 tournament. I won $695.83 for finishing tied for 10th, not a bad debut. I remember my first trip down Magnolia Lane: I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It was perfect. I don’t think I’d ever been more in awe.

  I had been playing some pretty rough tournaments on some pretty rough golf courses that winter. But when I went out for my first Masters practice round … it’s a memory still very fresh in my mind, because it was wonderful. Every bit of it. So well manicured and beautiful. I felt a powerful thrill and unexpected kinship with the place; I think because it was purely devoted to golf, and so was I.

  While the Masters is first-class all the way, Winnie and I didn’t exactly arrive in town in a similar fashion. The tour rookie and his young wife had traveled the first half of that year living in a trailer that we pulled behind our car, and when we arrived in Augusta, we parked it by the railroad tracks on the other side of Daniel Field.

  The golf course, though beautiful, was very difficult and it didn’t particularly suit my game with its low, boring shots. I adjusted to Augusta National in time by learning to hit the ball a little bit higher and placing the ball in the right parts of the fairways to offer me the best angles to go into the greens.

  I always felt something powerful in Augusta. Something magical. I suppose just about every player who has the privilege of playing in the Masters feels it, too. But the key is, can you harness that feeling? I didn’t that first time around, although I had an outside chance of winning when I shot a third-round 72 and followed with a closing 69 after a pair of 76s. My hopes were dashed on the 10th hole that final day when I made a double-bogey. You could say my first Masters ended on the back nine on Sunday.

  Augusta is probably the ultimate in terms of presentation of a golf tournament and a golf course, its design and condition. It has been an inspiration in how I try to conduct my golf tournament at Bay Hill. If you are going to emulate a standard, I don’t think you can do better than the Masters. That’s why I played in fifty of them. And each year I had the same feeling as I drove down Magnolia Lane: “This must be heaven.” I also feel a renewed sense of gratitude.

  The year after winning my fourth and final Masters as well as my last major title, Clifford Roberts, the chairman of Augusta National and cofounder with the incomparable Bobby Jones, asked me if I had any suggestions about how the golf course could be improved. Now I
had just won a fourth Green Jacket, and had done so convincingly by six shots over Dave Marr and defending champion Jack Nicklaus. That win by that wide margin meant a great deal to me, because it meant I finally had a chance to stroll up to the 18th green without a great deal of pressure or concern. I could enjoy the moment.

  Given the proceedings of that previous April, I wasn’t about to suggest he change one thing. And that’s exactly what I told him. But it wasn’t out of any sense of self-interest. I just didn’t see how the wonderful golf course created by Bobby Jones and Dr. Alister Mackenzie could be made better. I believed it wouldn’t have been right to tamper with it. Of course, changes have had to be made over time, and the recent moves to lengthen the layout to 7,445 yards I fully support because of the advancements in equipment that would have made the course obsolete had it not been upgraded.

  I have called the changes at Augusta a “quiet evolution, but the overall effect is one of gracious permanence.”

  I played in my final Masters in 2004. I was invited to become the ceremonial starter in 2007, and it’s a role that I regard as special as anything I have done in golf. In 2015 I almost didn’t make it to the tee. I had taken a tumble the previous December in my home at Bay Hill and had dislocated my right shoulder. My recovery was going so slowly that I had to forgo playing in the Par-3 Tournament. But on Thursday morning, despite not hitting many balls in the previous four months, I made it to the appointed tee time. I had a cortisone shot a few days before just to make sure I was able to take a decent cut at the ball. That’s how much I love the Masters Tournament.

  The only thing that matched winning the Masters four times was being invited to join as a member, the first Masters winner extended such a courtesy. I accepted, of course, after thinking it over very carefully for five or six seconds. That was a special day. So was Tuesday, April 4, 1995, when the club dedicated a bronze plaque in my honor to commemorate my four victories, joining Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and Gene Sarazen as players given such a wonderful honor. It now rests on a drinking foundation behind the 16th tee. Jack Nicklaus has since joined that club, and rightly so with his record six Green Jackets.