A Golfer's Life

by Arnold Palmer

  I knew she was dead serious about that, and I didn’t disagree. The novelty and charm of traveling America in a trailer had run its course. The next day, we put the rig up for sale in the Latrobe newspaper. A newlywed couple bought the thing and, I gather, lived quite happily in it for years somewhere just outside of town. The only people who were really disappointed to see that trailer vanish for good over the hill were my little brother, Jerry, and even younger sister Sandy. For several days they got to use it as a playhouse, their very own palace on wheels.

  The message was pretty clear that life on tour wasn’t going to be easy on either of us and might possibly be very tough on a prospective family. Though we didn’t know it, Winnie was already pregnant, or shortly would be, and there had to be a better way to travel than a small trailer and a worn-out Ford.

  After all those weeks beating across America, Sam Snead’s invitational tournament at The Greenbrier in West Virginia was just the tonic we needed, in more ways than one. First of all, it was an unofficial event with a large Calcutta (where teams are purchased in a wagering pool), meaning I stood a decent chance of picking up some needed money. A little like Fred Waring’s shindig at Shawnee, there were a lot of parties and socializing in addition to the golf tournament. The event took place at the luxurious old Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs. Speaking of luxury, a friend in Latrobe who was a pilot offered to fly us to the site, so we chartered a small plane and spared ourselves the long drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  By some stroke of fortune, I got paired with an amateur partner named Spencer Olin, the chairman of a large chemical firm, who not only had a splendid private plane of his own but turned out to be a pretty fair player as well. Spencer bought our team in the Calcutta and followed up that confidence by playing just great, shooting several strokes beneath his handicap. The first day I shot 69, and we were leading the field.

  On an amusing note, after that nice opening round, I remember Dutch Harrison sidling over to me and telling me he had arranged for me to have Spencer Olin as a partner. “Don’t you forget ole Dutch, Arn,” he growled at me, and winked. Quite frankly, I didn’t know whether to believe him or laugh in his face. Dutch was a character in the same way George Low was—you never quite knew what sort of action he had going. All I knew was, hard pressed as Winnie and I were for funds at that moment, regardless of whether or not Dutch had somehow arranged the pairings, the last thing I wanted to do was give him a percentage of my winnings as some kind of personal gratuity!

  The pressure seemed to get to Spencer a bit; he blew to a 94 on the second day, but I shot 67—good enough for third in the professional division and enough for us to tie for first in the pro-am team division. I collected $1,500.

  The PGA Tour stop the next week was the Colonial in Fort Worth. But before that I had arranged to play an exhibition, and Spencer graciously offered to fly us there in his private DC-3. I remember thinking, as we got airborne, that this was the only way to go to golf tournaments; perhaps it was then and there that I made up my mind to get that pilot’s license I’d always dreamed about and maybe to buy a plane. In any case, especially in light of Dutch’s less than subtle request, Spencer Olin made the trip even more memorable by coming to me and saying, “Arnie, it’s traditional for the winner of the Calcutta to give his pro partner a percentage of the winnings. Here’s yours.” He presented me with $5,000, bringing my total earnings to a princely $6,500. What a great weekend it had been!

  I played poorly that week at the Colonial and then missed the cut at Kansas City, before flying on, after a stopover in Latrobe, to Fort Wayne. This was the the first event where I could take official money. My six-month apprenticeship was finally up. Perhaps I tried too hard, or maybe I was just a little road weary. I wound up twenty-fifth and took home $145 as my first official tournament paycheck.

  No matter how much I’d made, it was good to go home to Latrobe for a couple weeks of rest and relaxation before playing in my first National Open as a professional. Winnie went to visit with her folks in Coopersburg for a few days, and I hung out at the club with Pap. He was busy planting trees on the golf course and talking about making other changes. (As long as he lived Pap was always making changes to the golf course at Latrobe, a trait I inherited.) When Winnie came back, we took our Sam Snead Festival money down to Forsha Motors in Latrobe and purchased a brand-new, beige-and-tan Chrysler New Yorker, a real sweetheart of a car, and a few days after that, loaded up with golf clubs and clothing, we hit the turnpike headed west.

  That trip—our second across America inside a year—was memorable and fun for a number of reasons. First of all, we saw more sights and our trip was still a little bit like a honeymoon; the big difference was that this time the car was a sheer joy to drive. Winnie wasn’t crazy about the fact that I got the New Yorker up to 120 miles per hour while crossing the Great Salt Lake, but that evening in Elko, Nevada, we put up in an inexpensive casino motel. We had decided we didn’t have enough money to risk any gambling, but returning from a hamburger and a beer, just for fun, I dropped our dinner change on the roulette table—double ought—and hit the jackpot, collecting thirty-five silver dollars! Talk about a couple of naive kids; we hustled straight back to our motel room, showered and got in bed, clutching our winnings. I was so worried about being robbed of our bounty, I propped a chair against the doorknob just like I’d seen in the movies!

  The next day, Winnie took over the driving, and she was no slouch in the speed department either. In fact, at one point we roared over a hill, and I suddenly saw cops on motorcycles scattering wildly in several directions, looking like Keystone Kops. Without knowing it, she’d nearly wiped out several young state patrolmen who were on a routine motorcycle training mission! Sirens wailed, and the police gave brief chase. Winnie, bless her, was scared out of her mind, and the captain who asked for her license must have known that. To tell the truth, I wondered what he was going to do to her myself.

  “Young lady,” he said sternly. “I see you’re from Pennsylvania.”

  “Yes, sir,” she answered meekly.

  “Well, you’re in California now and I really want you to obey the speed laws. I want you to drive very safely from here on out. Is that understood?”

  A solemn nod.

  The officer smiled. “I’m going to let you go this time. But you remember what I said, all right?”

  Winnie smiled sweetly up at him. Luck is a lady, and this seemed to be our lucky week. First we win $35 out of the blue, then we don’t have to part with the cash for speeding!

  Perhaps Lady Luck would be with us at San Francisco’s famed Olympic Golf Club, too. That was my hope, anyway, because I’d never played the famous narrow, eucalyptus-lined Lakeside Course, which sits mere yards from the Pacific Ocean. The world’s greatest golfers were gathering, and Ben Hogan was gunning for the record books and a fifth U.S. Open championship.

  We drove straight into San Francisco and found the Olympic Club, met official hosts Ed and Rita Douglas (who would become cherished longtime friends), and they directed us to a reasonably priced motel not far away where, as coincidence would have it, we found Tommy and Shirley Bolt checking in.

  I was quite fond of Tommy Bolt. He was ten years my senior and was generous enough to take me under his wing and explain to me how things worked on Tour. It’s a shame that Tommy is best known for breaking clubs over his knees or throwing them around (like at the U.S. Open I won at Cherry Hills where he hit a poor drive and hurled his favorite driver into a lake, then chased the kid who retrieved it). In fact, Tommy was one of the most able ball-strikers I’ve ever seen, with a skill that made him dangerous anytime he was around a leader board. Tommy’s temper, his inability to control his impatience and rage at the game’s small injustices or bad luck, really proved his undoing far too many times. Off the course, Bolt was justly known for his quick-witted one-liners, and you’ve never met a more charming and interesting fellow. To this day, I’m convinced his temper is the only thin
g that stood between Tommy and the Hall of Fame status he’s always greatly desired and probably deserves. As I say, I was lucky to have Tommy as a friend early on, because I learned an awful lot from him—not least of which was the importance of harnessing my own temper on the golf course, a lesson I would soon need.

  Anyway, sometime that week at Olympic, Tommy and Shirley and Winnie and I agreed it might be fun to travel together from one Tour stop to the next, and that was the plan we made. The Western Open was the next scheduled stop, but before that Tommy and I both had our sights set on Olympic.

  From the outset, it appeared to be Tommy’s week. Of the 162 starters, eighty-two—more than half the field—failed to break 80 that first round, and only Tommy Bolt managed to break par, cruising around the course in a smooth 67 thanks to eleven one-putt greens and some superb chipping. I carded a miserable 77, hacking balls out of calf-deep rough and getting to know some of Olympic’s 43,000 eucalyptus and pine trees far more intimately than I had planned or wanted.

  Bolt slipped to 77 in the second round, still good enough to give him a share of the lead with Harvie Ward at 144; I failed to improve my chances by firing a discouraging 76. The dangerous Ben Hogan and the then-unknown Jack Fleck were a mere stroke behind Bolt and Ward, and by the end of the third round it appeared Ben Hogan was en route to a record fifth Open. The best I could accomplish were closing rounds of 74 and 76, good enough for twenty-first place. But no one noticed what I was doing, because the real drama belonged, of course, to Hogan and Fleck, an outcome that many think of as the biggest upset in all of golf history. Early in the afternoon of Open Saturday (in those days the tournament concluded with two rounds on Saturday), Hogan finished with a surgical round of 70 and, amid 6,000 wildly cheering fans gathered on the amphitheater hillside by the 18th hole, was all but presented the Open trophy by a beaming Gene Sarazen, who was doing television commentary of the great moment.

  The rest of the story proves what a wonderfully mysterious game golf really is, but it proved a sad tale to Ben Hogan. Out on the course, Fleck’s putter got hotter than it had ever been before, and a couple of hours later he holed an eight-foot putt to force a playoff. By then Hogan was showered, dressed, and had packed up his clubs to head home to Texas. Fifty-four years old, still hurting from his terrible car accident injuries, the last thing he wanted or expected was to have to play some unknown guy from Iowa for the National Open title. Now he would have to wait one more day to collect his record fifth Open, but his legs—and possibly his heart—really weren’t in it.

  All the betting was in Hogan’s corner the next day, but it was Ben who faltered. He needed a birdie at the 18th to tie, but drove into the ferocious rough and made six; Fleck parred for 69 and became maybe the greatest human curiosity in the history of golf—the “Giant Killer,” as the papers hailed him, who never managed to win anything significant again.

  Was it a fluke? Some called it that. But nobody I know who’s played this game on the level we played it that week at Olympic would dare call it that. It took courage, great intelligence, and superb shotmaking for Jack Fleck to win that U.S. Open, knowing that virtually everybody watching was rooting against him. Contributing to that anti-Fleck sentiment was Jack’s appearance. He was not a glamorous figure. Though he’ll go into the history books as a giant killer, he looked more like a beanstalk—tall and gangly and undernourished. He also seemed uncomfortable at times—at war with himself—so reserved he seemed almost dour. Aptly enough, his hero was Ben Hogan himself.

  In any event, people wanted to see history made, and he made it in a most unexpected way. You’ve got to give Jack his due. It was a great performance, and if you get only one great performance in your life, may yours be on as grand a scale as Jack’s.

  The next week at Portland Golf Club, site of the Western Open, I learned something about my own composure under fire on the golf course. I was playing with Doug Ford and Marty Furgol in the first round when we came to the par-5 tenth hole, a hole I planned to try to reach in two. Both Furgol and Ford had played their second shots and the group ahead of us was still putting, so I had to wait before shooting. Doug Ford was a pleasure to play with—he’d come out on tour a few years ahead of me and enjoyed early success, giving me a boost of confidence—but Furgol’s host of eccentricities made Jack Fleck’s personality quirks look tame. As I was preparing to hit, I saw Furgol standing down the fairway between me and the green. I yelled at Doug to ask him to move and Doug did, but Marty moved only a few feet. I yelled again, and he moved a couple more feet. With each passing moment I grew hotter and hotter. I swung too hard and the ball flew over the green right, and I should have chipped up for an easy bird, but I missed the putt, too.

  Coming off the green I was as mad as I’d ever been on a golf course. I seized Furgol’s collar and said to him, “Let me tell you something, Mr. Furgol. If you ever pull a stunt like that again I’ll take my fists and beat the hell out of you, and if I can’t do it with my fists I’ll use a golf club.”

  I think it really shook him up, and probably a few of the spectators watching, as well. Marty knew what he’d done, but he feigned complete innocence. The truth is, I really wanted to flatten him on the spot, and that really shook me up, too, because I’d never lost my composure like that during a golf tournament. One consequence of the blowup was my score, an opening 76. That night at dinner I observed to Winnie that Pap would have been furious with me for losing my cool like that, and I vowed to myself, and to her, that I wouldn’t let my temper get the best of me again. I shot 66 the next day and finished the tournament with a respectable 284. I also reported Furgol to Ray O’Brien, the Tour’s head man. He admonished Furgol, telling him to avoid such stunts in the future. For years Marty and I kept our distance from each other, which was probably a good thing for both of us.

  The next four weeks were an adventure, traveling with the Bolts up to Vancouver for the British Columbia Open, then on to St. Paul, where Tommy won and I scored my first top-five finish, a third—worth $1,300 to the family till. Then it was on to Milwaukee, Toledo, and George S. May’s All American and World Championship at Tam O’Shanter in Chicago.

  I failed to play well there, but I felt my game was getting closer to really clicking—a hunch that proved correct the very next week in Toronto at the Canadian Open. I opened with a blistering 64, followed that with rounds of 67 and 64, and enjoyed a six-stroke lead at the start of the final round. One of my playing partners was none other than Tommy Bolt, and at one point a funny and revealing incident occurred. I duck-hooked my drive into the woods on the sixth hole and found my ball lying near an old fallen tree. There was no penalty for moving a loose obstruction, but as I was pushing the tree aside, Tommy suddenly appeared and growled at me, “For God’s sake, Arnie. Chip it out into the fairway. You’ve got a six-stroke lead!”

  “Tommy,” I said evenly to him. “You mind your own business and I’ll mind mine.” There is, after all, a penalty for accepting advice from and giving advice to other players. More than anything, I wanted him to shut up and go away.

  I’d seen a small gap through the trees and was determined to fire my ball through there and up onto the green. Tommy left me, shaking his head as if I were the kid who would never learn. I took my 6-iron and hit the ball cleanly. It flew through the gap and landed on the green. The gallery let loose a tremendous cheer. I think that made Tommy even madder at me!

  I held on to shoot 70 and win my first professional golf tournament by four strokes over Jackie Burke. Talk about timing. I was so elated with my first win that I failed to realize it was one year to the day since I had captured the National Amateur Championship. I believe it was Winnie who finally pointed this sweet irony out to me. My oh my, how my life had changed in just one year!

  All was forgiven by the time Tommy and Shirley and Winnie and I got to the fish camp east of Toronto where we had planned, some weeks before, to stop and relax for a couple days before the start of the Labatt tournament in Montreal. I was the
new Canadian Open champion, I’d won my first PGA tournament, and, sitting on the end of a small dock fishing and drinking cold beers in the beautiful summer dusk, I couldn’t have felt happier or more at peace.

  Too bad the goodwill didn’t extend to the Bolt cabin, where post-tournament cocktails fueled one of the Bolts’ legendary arguments. Shirley and Tommy were pretty well matched in the temper category, and as Winnie and I watched in horror through the screen door from several yards away, the yelling escalated to pan throwing, and soon steak knives were flying through the air.

  “Winnie,” I said with quiet conviction, “I think our time traveling with Tommy and Shirley just came to an end. We probably ought to get out of here. Don’t you agree?”

  She agreed, but we wondered how to do it without hurting either Tommy’s or Shirley’s feelings, assuming one or both survived the night. Shirley’s teenage son, Richard, had just shown up, and we had planned to go to Montreal together. Winnie was looking forward to trying out her finishing-school French on Montreal’s waiters but was already suffering from morning sickness.

  We departed before dawn the next morning, leaving the Bolts a friendly goodbye note. Not a mile down the road, we found Richard by the side of the road with his thumb out. Apparently the fireworks had been too much for him, too. He was hitchhiking, and we offered to give him a ride to Montreal, but he said he was headed back to the United States.

  A week or so later, we made the same trip south toward home, and a few weeks after that, I completed my first season as a professional golfer with a record of one win and $7,958 in official prize money. By Christmas, Winnie was well along with our first child and we were talking about buying the piece of land near Latrobe Country Club. Living out of a suitcase, we agreed, was no way to raise a baby, and we really needed a home of our own.

  A few weeks after that, we bought the land from Ed Anderson, a wealthy member of Latrobe Country Club who owned perhaps a hundred acres on a hillside across from the club. Mr. Anderson didn’t take me seriously when I explained to him I wanted to buy as much of that parcel as he would sell me. I’m afraid he didn’t think I would be able to come up with the money. He thought about it a bit and finally agreed to sell me a three-acre lot on the property where so many years before Pap and I used to hunt pheasant and once upon a time came across that extraordinary honeycomb.