From the beginning, my putting stroke was also the subject of some conjecture on the parts of commentators and other professionals and observers. The way I hunched over the ball, knock-kneed and leaning, and gave the ball a firm, wristy rap that often sent it speeding ten feet past the hole seemed to trouble some people, who thought I should stand straighter, use less body English, and make a smoother stroke rather than the stab that sometimes crept into my putting technique. I rarely left a ball shy of the cup, figuring it was easier to make the comebacker than a putt that never reached the target to begin with.
I also learned early on from my own experimentation that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having “wristy action” in a putt if you’re able to keep the putter head square and the face on target, which I was able to do by standing very close to the ball, allowing my wrists to “hinge” back and forth. George was from the old school—the school where players taught themselves to play and used whatever worked for them—and gave me the most useful putting lesson I ever had. After watching me putt for a while, he took me aside and growled: “Listen to me, Arnie. There’s not a damn thing wrong with the way you putt. You putt great. Don’t ever let anybody fool with your putting stroke or you’ll be damned sorry.” George Low believed in the Gospel of Deke Palmer, and I was deeply grateful to have his support. It may or may not have been George who gave me an interesting tip—namely, to dig the ends of my thumbs into the putter grip whenever I felt undue pressure or my stroke wasn’t up to snuff. I used that technique a few times in big tournaments when I really needed to get the ball in the hole or felt my stroke wasn’t working quite right.
Early on, George sort of adopted Winnie and me out on tour, and a few years later when Peg and Amy came along he served as a kind of Dutch uncle to the girls. Once, in Phoenix, when the girls were maybe four and six, “Uncle George” showed up at the hotel and insisted on baby-sitting while Winnie and I went out to dinner with some other folks. I remember how reluctant we were to leave the three of them, but George was nuts about the girls and vice versa, so we eventually gave in and went out to dinner. Much later we returned to find the girls still up and having the time of their lives. Uncle George had taught them how to play poker and, for all I know, roll dice. Peg and Amy adored him even before the time, some years later, when Uncle George showed up in Latrobe with bicycles for them, a gift from his “winnings.”
With George, a good rule was to not ask too many questions. I remember the time in Palm Springs he came to the house for dinner with a paper sack—what we used to call a “poke” back in Latrobe—in hand and asked Winnie and me to keep it for him “for a while.” But there was a catch: he also asked us not to look in it under any circumstances. We reluctantly agreed, but not long after he was gone curiosity got the better of us and we opened the bag to find it was full of money. We knew it had to be George’s winnings from the track. Winnie and I looked at each other and shook our heads. Later, when I handed the bag back to George, I told him there was no way Winnie and I could keep money for him and he ought to put it in a bank. George screwed up his face and told me he didn’t trust banks. Especially not with $27,000. Winnie and I nearly fainted.
Anyway, I practiced hard, a slave to the range before and after each round, and by the time of our arrival at St. Petersburg, Florida, the seventh week of the season, all that heavy-duty practicing had taken an unexpected toll on my body. One morning I woke to discover an excruciating pain in my upper torso; I could barely lift my arms above my shoulders without severe pain. I’ll admit to being a bit panicked—I had no idea what was wrong with me.
Some players were superstitious about how they practiced and played golf, and others—like Frank Stranahan, who passed along his weight-lifting and fanatical conditioning regimes to some extent to his protégé, a young man named Gary Player—performed elaborate pregame routines, always eating certain kinds of meals, abstaining from sex and alcohol, wearing certain types of clothes. You name it and they did it, all in an attempt to find the mental comfort zone where good golf is played. Still others carried four-leaf clovers or rabbit’s feet or lucky charms from their travels. Some openly prayed to God to let them win.
I’ve never been very superstitious, and my religious faith is more like my father’s, a strictly private matter between my maker and me. I did say prayers but never asked the Almighty to let me win a golf match or a tournament. My prayer was basically pretty simple and direct: Please let me stay healthy enough to compete. That was my biggest fear—that an injury or illness would keep me from being able to use my God-given physical abilities to win a golf tournament.
Now, in St. Petersburg, I faced the first test of my faith—this horrifying pain in my arms and shoulders. It had me shaken up because I couldn’t imagine what the hell was wrong. I somehow got through my practice round, and that evening Winnie and I went out to dinner with professional Skip Alexander and his wife and their friends, a Dr. Needles and his wife. Dr. Needles was a heart specialist, and when I mentioned my problem to him he explained that I’d nearly beaten my shoulder and arm muscles to death, or at least to the point of extreme exhaustion, and that I would have to give them a rest or at least be very careful not to do serious or permanent injury.
He suggested I come to his office, adding that he had a brand-new “wonder drug” that might ease the inflammation. The next day, the aptly named Dr. Needles administered several injections of cortisone directly into my shoulder muscles. For several long minutes, I wondered if I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. Those injections hurt more than the sore muscles they were supposed to be helping. For a while it seemed as if the medicine might kill the patient, rather than cure him. The inflammation grew worse overnight, but somehow I gutted out the tournament, managing a 68 in the third round for a total of 284, good enough for seventeenth place. I joke about the episode now, whenever I feel a twitch of pain in those muscles after a round. But this experience gave me the first taste of what it’s like to play with serious pain, and I wouldn’t wish that fate on anybody.
As sore as I was, I suppose I must have been tempted to withdraw from the tournament. I did that five times that first year, pulled out of tournaments when things for one reason or another weren’t going to my liking. Today, when a professional pulls out of a tournament it’s considered big news—I suppose because the financial commitments are so large and the press corps so hungry for any whiff of controversy. In those days it wasn’t such a big deal. That’s not an excuse for quitting. Life sometimes gets in the way of golf, and life invariably comes first. I’m not proud of the fact that I pulled out of those five tournaments, but on the other hand, if I hadn’t done it I wouldn’t have eventually learned the larger value of sticking with the game to the very end, regardless of the outcome. In time, as my name became better known to the galleries, I became aware of my obligation to stay in a tournament that wasn’t going particularly well, out of respect to the sponsors, to the galleries, and even to myself, who I was and where I’d come from—the son of a man who never abided the word “quit.”
Anyway, that week in St. Petersburg wasn’t exactly our best—on top of the acute pain in my shoulders we had trouble with our elderly Ford two-door. I remember taking the car to a service station to have the oil changed and the alignment checked out—there was a funny shimmy at sixty or seventy miles per hour—and the service attendant put her up on the lift and had barely begun examining the front tires when the left front wheel simply fell off. It startled us both, and the attendant remarked on the obvious—we were lucky that that wheel hadn’t snapped off while we were hauling a trailer at seventy miles an hour.
Speaking of the trailer, our little Phoenix love nest, its diminutive size was now too much—or, rather, too little—to bear. Winnie and I decided it had to go in favor of something larger and more accommodating. More phone calls to Latrobe and Coopersburg ensued, followed by two more loans of $500 from each of our families. A day or so later, we rolled into a trailer park in Flor
ida pulling a new trailer that was twenty-six feet long.
This was living, but my shoulders were still killing me. I went to Seminole Golf Club to play in a pro-am where I could pocket money and shot a dismal 87 and 86 on successive days. Luckily, by the start of the Miami Open a day or so later, the pain had backed off enough to permit me to find my stroke again, and I recorded three rounds in the 60s, a respectable warm-up for my first appearance at the Masters.
I remember like it was yesterday the feeling as I drove up Magnolia Lane into Augusta National Golf Club for the first time. I’d never seen a place that looked so beautiful, so well manicured, and so purely devoted to golf, as beautiful as an antebellum estate, as quiet as a church. I remember turning to Winnie, who was as excited as I was by the sight of the place, and saying quietly, probably as much in awe as I’ve ever been: “This has got to be it, Babe …” I felt a powerful thrill and unexpected kinship with the place. Perhaps that’s partially because Augusta was built by Bob Jones, who was one of my childhood heroes, but also because the Masters, though still a relatively modest event in terms of money, was like a family gathering of the game’s greatest players, ruled with a firm, unbending hand by Clifford Roberts. They were all there—Jones, Sarazen, Snead, Nelson, Hogan. Though I’d met them all before, just seeing their names together on pairing sheets or chatting with each other on those perfect putting surfaces was an almost religious experience for me. Privately, I admitted to Winnie that it was like dying and going to heaven. I was there, of course, courtesy of my National Amateur title, and though I was rendered a bit agog by the lush surroundings and famous players, I was also surging with confidence. After weeks of playing courses on tour that were rock hard and in some cases in pretty woeful shape, coming to Augusta’s exquisitely manicured fairways and pristine greens was a royal treat I was anxious to experience. As it was not an official Tour event, I also stood to pocket some much-needed moola.
I played pretty well, all things considered, in that first Masters outing. I opened with a pair of discouraging 76s, but then settled down a bit and shot 72 in the third round, followed by a final round of 69. Ironically, standing on the tenth tee on Sunday, I calculated that if I got home in 32 on Augusta’s famous back nine I might be a serious factor in the tournament’s outcome. That realization got me so worked up, I regret to say, I made a double-bogey six on ten and wound up finishing in tenth place. I made a paycheck for $696 that week—money that came just when we needed it most—but more importantly, I had made the acquaintance of a special place and numerous people who would soon mean more to Winnie and me than I could ever have imagined.
At first glance, the course, designed by Alister Mackenzie with helpful insights from Bob Jones, didn’t particularly suit my style of game. There were numerous places where a high, soft fade worked best, and the undulating and fast putting surfaces favored approach shots that stuck like darts rather than ricocheted like bullets, as mine sometimes did. I quickly saw there were things I would need to learn to do if I intended to conquer the golf course and win the Masters—notably, hit the ball a bit higher and know when to back off intelligently at a hole where finesse and not power would bear more fruit.
As Pap would have pointed out, though, you’re invariably stuck with the golf swing you’re born with, and I wasn’t going to alter that much of my game to try to tailor it to Augusta’s swirling winds and daunting putting surfaces. I learned, instead, where to hit my drives in order to have approaches to greens I was comfortable with—in other words, put the ball where I could hit into the green on a straight, low line. In time I became pretty adept at knowing Augusta’s “angles,” as I thought of it, knowing where I could roll a ball through an opening or use a mound or hillside to pull off a shot and snug the ball close.
I remember meeting Clifford Roberts, the club’s legendary chairman, then at the height of his power, and being almost instantly scared to death of him. Though a New York investment banker by profession, he reminded me of an old schoolteacher, reserved, tough, a headmaster brooking no opposition or even debate on any subject. He was clearly a one-man show, and the small membership of Augusta National obviously liked it that way. I was determined to stay out of his way, recalling that a few years before he’d tossed Frank Stranahan off the premises for allegedly hitting extra practice balls during a round—something that was against the club’s policy. Being friends with Clifford Roberts, I would discover, was like learning Augusta National’s proper angles—it took time, but the friendship, when it evolved, would be a lasting and genuine one.
I met Bob Jones there, too—by then far past his playing prime and only a year or so away from being stricken by the illness (syringomelia) that would rack his body and eventually force him to use a customized golf cart to get around the grounds to see players and meet people. Mr. Jones, as I called him from the outset, was as unfailingly polite and kind-spirited as anybody I ever met at Augusta. Perhaps because amateur golf had meant so much to him—he won the Grand Slam as an amateur in 1930 and then retired from the game, as he described it, before he “needed” to make money in order to play—Jones harbored a special affection for amateur champions who found their way to Augusta, treating each and every one like the special young men he thought they were, myself included.
I’d seen Ben Hogan at various tournaments and even played in a group close to him at Wilmington, but I met him for the first time in Augusta. To be honest, I was so in awe of the man, and so naturally shy, I felt he was utterly unapproachable. At the Masters someone introduced us, and we shook hands. He was polite enough, but I felt the cool distance others sensed while in his presence. Hogan was still limping from his 1950 car crash but remained the most dangerous player of his age, maybe the best ball-striker who ever lived. I was at first surprised by—and later angered about—the fact that he never, in the years I knew him, called me by my first name. Ten million golf fans have felt completely comfortable calling me “Arnie,” but Mr. Hogan never spoke my real name. He only called me “fella.” To give him the benefit of the doubt, he called lots of young, ambitious players “fella.” Perhaps he couldn’t remember their names (after all, a lot of talent was streaming out of the college ranks into the professional ranks), or maybe he sensed the others and I were gunning for his records, which of course we were. But he was a living legend and inspiration. Golf is, at its core, life’s most good-hearted and socially complex game—one of the “most humbling things on earth,” as my good friend George Low once quipped—and I wouldn’t have minded being called “Arnie” by a man I only admired from afar and played for on a Ryder Cup team. But it never happened. You draw your own conclusions from that.
I learned a valuable lesson at that first Masters—that wanting something so much I could almost taste it wasn’t the best approach to winning golf tournaments, especially major ones. I learned that, at a place like Augusta National, where every shot is potentially so decisive, I couldn’t afford to get ahead of myself as I did that Sunday afternoon on the final nine, blowing myself right out of contention. I had to play my own game, shot by shot, and not permit myself the luxury of thinking what it could mean—a lesson I was destined to learn and a mistake I was destined to repeat. But that’s a tale to come.
Sam Snead and I had met before, but we got to be pretty good friends at that first Masters. I always enjoyed my time with Sam, the rounds we played together, the rustic pearls of wisdom he dropped about the game and life, even the colorful and sometimes downright raunchy jokes he told and tall tales he spun. Sam had a dark side that emerged when his game faltered, but he was at heart a big old country boy who loved golf and had a zest for life, swallowing it in gulps (especially if someone else was buying the beer—he was also one of the tightest guys with a buck I ever met), and surely one of the most natural talents who ever swung a golf club. He and I took an instant liking to each other, and it was Sam who personally invited Winnie and me to his own little shindig, the Sam Snead Festival, which was scheduled, as I recall, to t
ake place the week after the Tour stop at Greensboro, North Carolina, a tournament with lots of Wake Forest alums in the gallery. For that reason alone, I always dearly wanted to win there. Unfortunately, I never did. Once again, perhaps I could taste my desire to win a little too much. I shot four rounds in the 70s and wound up thirty-third. Not a great showing, and proof we needed some rest. We headed on north for home.
Our old Ford needed rest, too—perhaps a permanent rest. That much became clear when we got off the Pennsylvania Turnpike at the Donegal exit to take a familiar shortcut to Latrobe out of the mountains. Big mistake. The road was narrow and steep, and we’d not even reached the summit when the radiator began to spew. We had to pull off and wait for the engine to cool down before we could add more water. Then we resumed our crawl to the top. The trailer we were pulling was so loaded down with all our stuff, Winnie and I actually had to get out and push the car at times. So much for shortcuts.
What should have taken a few minutes required several hours’ worth of work and worry until, mercifully, we reached the top. It didn’t dawn on us until we had started down the mountain into Latrobe that the final five miles (down the same road where Cheech and I used to ride a toboggan) could be an even bigger problem. Within minutes of starting our descent, the Ford’s brakes were smoking, and it was all I could do to keep the car from running away and the trailer from running over us. We finally got stopped on the shoulder and basically had to inch our way that last mile down to Latrobe. Wheezing and exhausted, car and owners, we crept into my parents’ driveway by the 15th hole at the club and switched off the engine. As long as I live, I’ll never forget Winnie’s reaction.
She got out of the car, shut the door, turned and looked at me with her jaw set, and calmly declared, “That’s it. I’m never going anywhere in that trailer again.”
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