A Golfer's Life

by Arnold Palmer

  As we headed over the rails to the Hearst tournament, though, Bud’s bright idea was that maybe he could convince the powers at Wake Forest, specifically Jim Weaver, the school’s athletic director, to give me a similar deal. It was almost too late—the start of the fall term was literally days away at that point—but Bud called Jim Weaver from California and I called my mother and asked her to hurriedly send my high school transcripts to Wake Forest, a place I knew nothing about except it was somewhere in North Carolina and sounded like heaven.

  My disappointment at being knocked out early at the Hearst tournament was quickly tempered by a letter I received a few days after I got home. My mother, fittingly enough, gave me the letter from Wake Forest offering me the same full scholarship deal as Bud Worsham got.

  I’d never been south of the Pennsylvania state line, but there was no question which direction I was headed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Wake Forest

  In the spring of 1997, a special gathering took place at the Bay Hill Club and Lodge in Orlando, Florida. Twenty-six of the world’s finest collegiate golfers assembled to contest the first-ever Palmer Cup, a three-day team match-play tournament modeled after the popular biennial Ryder Cup matches, pitting the best young players of America against their British and Irish counterparts. The event was the brainchild of several prominent college golf coaches, and I was proud to have my name on the cup and be a title sponsor and host of the fledgling event, because, as the Ryder Cup’s success proves, playing for pride and country invariably makes for thrilling drama. This tournament was no exception. The Americans won going away, but everyone who was involved with the event, I think, went away smiling, and believing that a valuable contribution to the game had been made and perhaps a new tradition born.

  On a more personal level, though, the Palmer Cup symbolizes the deep and somewhat complicated feelings I have about the amateur golf of my own collegiate days playing for Wake Forest College. In many ways, they were among the happiest years of my life, where, out from under my father’s stern sphere of influence for the very first time, I spread my wings and had a hell of a lot of fun, forged a host of lifelong friendships, and got my first taste of winning golf tournaments on a national level. With freedom comes joy and pain, though, and in other ways the education I got at Wake was far more than I bargained for. Amid the winning and friendships I learned what real emotional pain felt like, because of some of the saddest days of my life.

  When I periodically go back to visit the sprawling modern Wake Forest University campus that now occupies a particularly lovely corner of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I’m struck by how powerfully life can change in half a century. To begin with, obviously, Wake is no longer the sleepy Baptist college I discovered tucked off in the pine woods east of Durham—it’s now a major, thriving university with over 6,000 undergrads and graduate students, home to a world-class medical teaching hospital and a respected law school. Its academic programs are distinguished, and its sports programs, as they say, are big time. Eventually, if plans go as hoped, and my lobbying efforts on the board of trustees yield dividends, Wake may eventually become home to a world-class collegiate golf course facility created by Palmer Course Design.

  That eventuality would have more than symbolic meaning to me, because fifty years ago, using wheelbarrows and shovels, during a lull in studies during our sophomore year, Bud Worsham and I and a few other members of the Wake golf team built the college’s first grass greens, replacing the modest nine-hole course’s original sand greens with something that at least resembled a competitive putting surface. As I recall, the athletic department paid us fifty cents an hour for our efforts, and we were very proud of our handiwork, though I doubt very much that the administration—or, for that matter, anybody but us really—expected the improved practice grounds to increase Wake’s chances of achieving golf prominence.

  The truth is, in those days Wake’s golf team was something of a doormat in the old Southern Conference. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was the dominant conference power, underscored by the presence of Harvie Ward, the best amateur player in the country at the time. Duke University was a close second, thanks to Art Wall and Mike Souchak. Sixteen miles to the south, North Carolina State was also considered a comer, with Jim McNair and a host of young and promising southern-bred golfers on board.

  Nationally, it was a fertile time in collegiate golf. Dow Finsterwald, who would win the 1958 PGA Championship and become one of my closest friends on the PGA Tour, was at Ohio University, and Ken Venturi—the man I would battle down to the wire in the 1960 Masters and then again in the 1964 U.S. Open—was already making a name for himself at San Jose State. Gene Littler, the Open’s 1961 champion, was at San Diego State. And North Texas State, meanwhile, was something close to a collegiate golf dynasty with the likes of Don January, Billy Maxwell, and Joe Conrad.

  Wake had a long history of producing great teachers and ministers, not athletic stars—certainly not golf stars. In a sense, my unheralded arrival at the campus in the fall of 1947 pretty well summarizes that complacent atmosphere. After a long overnight bus ride from Pennsylvania, during which I slept only in fits and starts, I literally got off the bus in the hot and sleepy village of Wake Forest with only my golf bag and suitcase in hand. The bus drove off, and there I stood on a loop of U.S. Highway 1, the town circle, wondering where the blazes to go next.

  I saw a group of handsome brick buildings and decided that must be the college and started walking that way, ending up a little while later by an open office door in the school gymnasium. Two men were sitting in a small office talking. When they saw me, timidly loitering just outside the doorway, the larger one asked with a deep southern voice what I wanted. I told him I was looking for Jim Weaver. I saw the men exchange glances. The other man, I soon learned, was Peahead Walker, the school’s football coach.

  “Who the hell are you?” the first man asked.

  “Arnold Palmer,” I told him, swallowing dryly.

  He gave me a small smile. “Well, Mr. Palmer,” said Jim Weaver, getting up to offer me his hand, “welcome to Wake Forest College.”

  I was told to report to a rooming house on the circle that was owned by Johnny Johnston’s mother. Johnny, the school’s golf coach, was finishing his military service, and except for weekend leaves wouldn’t return to campus until the spring of my freshman year, so in the meantime we had Jim Weaver as a coach. What I failed to realize then was that Weaver, who really didn’t know all that much about golf, was itching to show the rest of the conference that Wake would be a pushover no more. Weaver was a born competitor and terrific motivator, a large man with a big heart and bear-like enthusiasm, qualities that made him a great choice to become the Atlantic Coast Conference’s first commissioner. Jim was still smarting, I think, from a remark made to him not long before by Carolina’s golf coach, Chuck Erickson, who confidently assured him Carolina’s crop of golf prodigies would wipe Wake’s collective derriere on the golf course, though in language slightly less suitable for use on a Baptist college campus. These were fighting words to Big Jim Weaver.

  Besides, Wake Forest wasn’t without promising young guns of its own. Mickey Gallagher and Sonny Harris were solid veteran players and constituted the team’s nucleus, while Bud Worsham and I were the highly touted newcomers. Jim Flick was also there on a combined golf and basketball scholarship. And a year behind us would come a couple of fellas named Dick Tiddy and Sandy Burton.

  The highlight of my freshman year, just about the time Johnny Johnston returned from the U.S. Air Force, was beating Harvie Ward and Art Wall at Pinehurst Number 2 to win the Southern Conference championship. I’m sure many of the reporters on hand considered this a major upset—Harvie, after all, was considered by many to be the best collegiate player in the country—but I never had any doubt in my mind that I could beat them or anybody else. The tournament was medal play, and I remember watching Harvie play the final hole, needing to make two to tie me.
He made it very interesting to the last shot—nearly holing out his approach. When my heart started beating again, I realized I’d won my first Southern Conference championship and Jim Weaver was nearly out of his mind with happiness.

  I came home that summer bubbling with confidence and with a college-boy spring in my step and won the Sunnehanna Amateur and reached the semifinals of the North and South Amateur. My routine was now a little more varied and fun. I still worked most mornings for my father at the club—mowing grass or tending the shop, whatever he told me to do—but thanks to Harry Saxman and other prominent members at Latrobe, I was more or less accorded membership status and was free to play the golf course as much as I wanted to in the afternoons. I suppose it’s fair to say I was thoroughly obsessed with golf, thinking of little else and practicing long hours every day before hanging out with my old gang at night. That summer I flew to Memphis, Tennessee, and met a man named William Barrett, Jr., in the first round of the United States Amateur championship at Colonial Country Club. I felt pretty confident about my chances, but as one of the youngest players in the field I also remember feeling a little awed by the fact that this was the most coveted amateur event in the world.

  As strange as it sounds, perhaps I was both a little bit too awed and cocky—both being major sins in my father’s eyes. I failed to play as well as I should have and was beaten fairly handily, 6 and 5, by the much older Barrett in the first round. I took losing hard, mentally kicking myself for a number of missed opportunities. But once I’d resolved to fight my way back to the Amateur the next year and go deeper into the rounds of competition, the pain of disappointment was muted by a friend of my father’s named Bob Thompson. He invited me over to a big invitational tournament in Indiana, where we really cleaned up in the Calcutta portion of the tournament and I almost won the regular tournament. I did win several smaller pro-am and regional invitational tournaments that summer, and I had more pocket change than I’d dreamed of.

  By summer’s end, though, I couldn’t wait to get back to Wake and see Bud and resume my college life. Wake Forest was a Baptist-affiliated institution, which, in those days, allowed no drinking or dancing on campus. Students were required to take their partying and social life elsewhere, usually to taverns and hotels in Durham or Raleigh, a drive of about twenty miles over twisting backcountry roads. I understood the scriptural basis for such a policy, but, quite frankly, even now I question the wisdom of segregating a young person’s academic life from his social one. The fact is, there were a lot of unsupervised parties off campus in those days. Like Pap used to, I now think the school’s rigidity on this issue probably contributed to underage drinking problems and made consuming alcohol seem much more glamorous than need be, by extension increasing the possibility of irresponsible driving.

  Socially and academically, Bud and I had a system of sorts worked out where we more or less looked after each other. Our strengths and weaknesses beautifully complemented each other’s. I had a stronger physical constitution that allowed me to handle alcohol, sometimes showing little or no effects, so I was always the one who drove Bud’s Buick when we went out on dates or in a group to party in Durham or Raleigh. As I’ve said, Bud was shyer than me, so it was left to me to speak to girls and arrange our “dates,” if you want to call them that.

  On the academic front, Bud had a strong work ethic and was forever on my case about keeping up my grade point average to avoid losing my scholarship and being put on academic probation, or worse, getting kicked out of school and probably drafted. Quite honestly, I really wasn’t much of a student. For a while I thought fleetingly about a career in law but then switched to a business major, figuring that I could at least graduate to a nice businessman’s job somewhere that would allow me the freedom to make a decent living and play the kind of top amateur golf I envisioned myself playing.

  The idea of turning touring professional was also always somewhere in the back of my mind, I must confess, but not if it involved having to do the kind of demeaning jobs I’d always seen Pap do in order to support my family. Several years after my college days, I commented to a reporter that above all else I was determined to avoid the second-class life of my father’s profession. I meant no disrespect to Pap and the life of a club professional. Back then a club professional’s status was so different from that of today’s professional, and I knew in my gut there was no way I could put up with the things I’d seen Pap put up with over the years.

  Golf would be my ticket somewhere, I told myself, I just couldn’t say where it would lead me. But life at Wake for the time being, even with the social restrictions, couldn’t have been better. After constructing the new grass greens on the school golf course, I was free to play as much as I wanted and sometimes even invited my dates to be human targets on the greens. God only knows why they agreed to do it; perhaps I had more charm than I realized in those days, except with a certain academic dean who took to summoning me to his office for friendly chats about my casual academic performance.

  During my sophomore year, I captured a second straight Southern Conference championship and became the medalist (or low qualifier) at the National Intercollegiate finals at Ames, Iowa, where I lost to Tom Veech of Notre Dame in the semifinals. Harvie Ward beat Veech in the final match to take the NCAA championship. I remember being furious with myself because I’d never lost a match to Harvie Ward, and it would have been great to have the two of us, both representing the Southern Conference, vying for the national collegiate championship. It wasn’t to be, though.

  What was to be, however, in the summer break between my sophomore and junior years, was another West Penn Amateur title—I beat Jack Benson over a difficult Oakmont Country Club course, my first real glimpse of the famous course set up to tournament specs—and once again I was a semifinalist at the North and South Amateur. In midsummer, I managed to make it to the third round of the U.S. Amateur at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester before being eliminated with surgical precision, 4 and 3, by Crawford Rainwater of Pensacola, Florida. Two steps closer to the big prize, but ultimately another disappointment and a new resolution.

  My junior year at Wake was, in retrospect, maybe the most fun of all my college years. There were plenty of parties and plenty of pretty girls and lots of laughs and more competitive golf than I suppose I’d ever played in my life. Bud and I grew socially more confident but were still basically inseparable, always ready to drop everything at the chance to beat each other on the golf course. This had been our standard operating procedure since our very first week at Wake Forest, when we managed to cajole a couple of coaches into taking us over to the Carolina Country Club in Raleigh for a four-ball match. Bud shot 67 that day, and I beat him by a stroke—on a course neither one of us had seen before. That set the tone for our matches, which always had something riding on them—at least the drinks afterward. My grades still weren’t great, but, once again, thanks to Bud Worsham, I was holding my own, and with Johnny Johnston’s return as the golf coach, I found a true friend and confidant for life.

  On weekends, I sometimes went to Bud’s home in Maryland, or he went to Latrobe with me. My younger brother, Jerry, and little sister Sandy (my parents had another set of children almost twenty years after Cheech and me) fell in love with Bud, and we both grew close to each other’s families. It was while we were hitchhiking back to school one weekend with our golf bags in tow that we met George Fazio. We had our thumbs out on U.S. 1 south of Washington when a big Cadillac pulled over. I recognized Fazio instantly, but he didn’t know us from Adam’s house cat until Bud told him who his older brother was. We told him we were headed back to college at Wake Forest, and he told us to hop in, asking if either of us was old enough to drive a car. I said yes. He promptly told me to drive, climbed in the back, issued firm orders to shake him awake when we got to North Carolina, then fell into a deep, noisy sleep. That was the first Cadillac I ever drove. I remember being impressed by that car, its big purring engine and nice interior, a true symbol of Ame
rican success.

  We failed to win the Southern Conference team title, but my game had never been sharper and I captured the Southern Intercollegiate championship and once again was low qualifier at the NCAA finals, firing a record pair of 68s at Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a tournament that featured Billy Maxwell, Don January, and Jack and Jimmy Vickers, gunning for All-American fame. Unfortunately, as often happens after a record-setting performance, I let down my guard and played poorly in the semifinal round, and was beaten by a dark horse named Eli Bariteau of San Jose State. Being sent home early really hurt, but it only made me buckle down and practice that much harder. Later that summer the intense work paid dividends; I won my third West Penn Amateur and the Greensburg Invitational, tune-ups for what I hoped would be my big breakthrough at the U.S. Amateur at Minneapolis Country Club in Minnesota.

  Frank Stranahan of Toledo, Ohio, was my opponent in that first round. To be honest, this sort of pleased and worried me. Stranny, as I called him, was a pretty good friend against whom I’d competed several times in our amateur playing careers, most notably at the North and South Amateur in both ’48 and ’49. Curiously, in 1948, Harvie Ward beat me in the semifinals and Stranny in the championship match; the next year, I played Stranny in the semis and he really cleaned my clock, something like 11 and 9 over a thirty-six-hole match, before going on to whip Harvie. The way I figured it, I was a good-luck charm for both of them.

  Maybe this time Lady Luck would be in my corner for a change and my third trip to the Amateur would prove the charm.

  My other nickname for Stranny was Muss. He was not only a tenacious competitor but also something of a weight-lifting addict and health nut to boot, a classy fellow whose father was chairman of Champion Spark Plugs in Toledo. Early on I learned never to take our matches lightly, because Muss was a steady player who was capable of going on a sudden birdie binge like nobody you’ve ever seen—as he did at Minneapolis, beating me once more, 4 and 3, to knock me out of the National Amateur yet again. If I had to lose in the first round, I suppose it helped slightly that it had been a friend who beat me.