A Golfer's Life

by Arnold Palmer

  During my peak performance years, I’d always relished the chance to get away from the Tour and go home and do nothing but putter around the house and my workshop, play with the girls and go hunting with Pap, have dinner with friends, and be a nuisance underfoot to Winnie as she prepared the house for the holidays. One thing that was clearly missing now, as she pointed out, was that month of rest I once customarily took after Thanksgiving.

  I was reluctant to admit she was right—but, as usual, she was right. We agreed after that disappointing “slump” year of 1965 finally came to an end that I needed to get back to the basics of family life, slowing down to enjoy it more.

  I canceled a lot of engagements and took the rest of the year off to be with Winnie and the girls. It was almost like the old days, and the rest clearly did me good.

  In the first tournament of the new year, 1966, the Los Angeles Open, I birdied seven holes in a row en route to a third-round 62, matching my career low and producing a three-shot victory over Miller Barber and Paul Harney.

  I kept telling reporters and just about anybody else who would listen that my only focus for the year was winning golf tournaments, and in successive weeks, falling briefly off the cigarette wagon and puffing the odd coffin nail here or there on the sly, I placed second in the Crosby, third at the Lucky International, and lost in a playoff to Doug Sanders at the Bob Hope Desert Classic.

  My Army was clearly pleased that “Arnie was back,” and I wasn’t at all disappointed myself.

  After sixty-two holes at the Masters, I was tied for the lead, but I faltered and faded to fourth. Still, heading into the 66th U.S. Open at San Francisco’s Olympic Club, our destination when Winnie and I had made our first big trip west more than a decade before as newlyweds, I was pleased that I’d made one of my best starts ever.

  This time we stayed with our friends Ed and Rita Douglas, in their lovely home not far from the University of San Francisco. The Douglases had become close friends of ours over the years, and it was Ed, a regional manager for Pennzoil, who helped create a strong commercial affiliation that I enjoy to this day.

  I’d made a few changes to my swing, learning to hit the ball with a slight fade that would fit Olympic’s predominantly left-to-right features. It seemed to work pretty well, though I completed my first round in 71 despite some typically shaky putting on those billiard-table-fast greens. The first-round magic belonged to Al Mengert, a part-time tour professional from Washington State, who shot 67.

  The next day I caught fire, and if I hadn’t missed putts of less than four feet on each of the closing two holes, I would have matched the Open record of 64. As it was, my round of 66 and 137 total left me in a tie for first with Bill Casper.

  Bill—as I preferred to call him instead of Billy—was a bit rejuvenated himself, having shed a lot of weight on a strange diet that reportedly involved buffalo and bear meats. The story goes—and I’ve never asked Bill about this, so who knows if it’s true—that one morning before his round he ate swordfish and tomatoes, which would be enough to give me serious stomach distress. But the point is, Casper was leaner and meaner and had a more serious look in his eye than most of us had ever seen before. He was also one of the best short-game players who ever walked on an Open course, especially in the putting department.

  For reasons both commercial and logistical in nature, the USGA’s executive committee had decided to abandon “Open Saturday’s” double rounds. Starting with Olympic, the tournament would conclude on a fourth day, a move most players applauded.

  My third round wasn’t particularly sensational, a steady 70, but it allowed me to open up a three-shot bulge over the slimmed-down Bill Casper, who completed his round with 73.

  I felt the old adrenaline pumping, and I was once again attacking the golf course as I had in my younger days. Going into that final round, my feeling was that Olympic’s front nine was more difficult than the back nine. If I could post a low score there on Sunday, I could play home with the confidence that it would take an extraordinary feat of shotmaking—or at least a spectacular collapse on my part—for somebody to catch me.

  Everything just seemed to click. The shots were solid, the putts dropped. I’d posted a 32 by the turn and opened a commanding seven-stroke lead over Casper. To be perfectly honest, though, I wasn’t thinking too much about Bill and what he might have to do in order to catch me. He was a steady player and sensational putter, but frankly not the sort who was known for last-minute heroics. The guy I had my eye on, and feared most, quite honestly, was a couple of strokes back of him: Jack Nicklaus.

  How do you explain what happened over the next ninety minutes or so? I’ve spent nearly three decades attempting to do just that—explain to myself and to a lot of other sympathetic people the rhyme and reason of what transpired.

  The simplest explanation is that, believing I had the Open already won, I quit playing Bill and Jack and started playing Ben Hogan’s old 1948 Open record of 276. I’d done the same thing at Augusta when I almost gave away the Masters while chasing his mark there. I knew that if I could just finish the back nine in 36, a stroke above par, the new record of 275 would belong to Arnold Daniel Palmer.

  In retrospect, it was the biggest mental error of my career.

  In daring to think about breaking Hogan’s record, I violated the very rule Pap had spent all those years drilling into my head—never quit, never look up, and, most of all, never lose focus until you’ve completely taken care of business. As we started together down the tenth fairway, Bill looked at me and made what sounded an awful lot like a concession speech. No doubt feeling Jack in hot pursuit, he reflected: “I’m going to have to go just to get second.”

  “Don’t worry, Bill,” I replied, uttering the words I was doomed to have to eat. “You’ll finish second.”

  The nightmare began at that same hole, a bogey for Palmer at ten. Bill parred. Advantage Casper.

  After that, like some ghostly newsreel playing in my head, I recall it going like this: I birdie at the 12th, but so does Bill. I remind myself that I’m still six ahead of him with six holes to play—no place to panic. At the par-3 13th, I miss the green with my tee shot and settle for bogey four. Maddening, but not fatal. We move to 14, where we both make pars; I’m still five up, but thanks to that bogey I now must par my way home to beat Hogan’s old mark.

  Fifteen is another par 3. The pin is tucked in the right-hand corner behind a bunker. Instead of playing safe, I decide this is the moment to put the tournament on ice. I attempt the perfect shot and go straight at the flag, watch my ball catch the edge of the green and tumble into the bunker. Another bogey. Then Casper, who has played safely to the middle of the green, thirty-five feet from the pin—I remember being annoyed by his strategy, wondering what he had to lose by not going for the pin—smoothly rolls home another birdie putt.

  Thoughts of Ben Hogan and his record instantly vanish from my mind, replaced by the first rising vapors of genuine alarm. For the first time, it dawns on me that Bill Casper is the real threat here, not Ben Hogan. My lead has dwindled to three. We walk on to the 16th, the big par 5, 604 yards with a sweeping right-to-left curve that fits my natural ball flight. Most golfers would settle for two safe hits and a careful pitch to the putting surface, but all I can think at this point is how irritated I am that Casper has been “playing safe” and is catching up on me. I tell myself there is no way I can allow that to happen. There is no way I’m going to allow him to beat me by playing safe. I decide I will win or lose exactly the way I’ve won or lost every golf tournament I’ve ever played.

  The long draw is my bread-and-butter shot, but either nerves or perhaps the fact that I’ve been hitting fades all week finally takes a toll. An untimely duck hook sends the ball off a tree into the deep left rough. I compound the situation by trying to slash a 3-iron out of the heavy rough. The ball squirts across the fairway, advancing less than a hundred yards. It stops once more in the heavy grass, leaving me no chance to reach the putting surface
on my third. Now I still have over three hundred yards of fairway to negotiate and only three shots left for par. I chop the ball back to the fairway with my wedge and drill a 3-wood into the greenside bunker. You don’t want to know what’s going on in my mind here. It feels as if a volcano is about to erupt in my head. I blast out of the bunker and am fortunate to make no worse than six. Bill, playing impeccably safe golf again, scores his second consecutive birdie.

  I have now lost four strokes on two holes, and my lead is one.

  On 17, the hardest hole at Olympic, 435 yards uphill to a small green on the shoulder of the hill, I hook my drive into the long grass again, miss the green on my approach, but finally make a decent chip that leaves me ten feet for par. My putt just grazes the right edge of the hole. Bill, meanwhile, makes his par 4 and we are suddenly tied for the lead at the 66th U.S. Open.

  At 18, Bill plays quickly, splitting the fairway with his drive. I tell myself there is still no reason to panic but certainly a need to get the ball into the short grass. I choose a 1-iron for accuracy but am so wound up I even pull that shot. I stare after the ball with a slumping heart as it scampers into the heavy left rough and disappears from my sight. What I wouldn’t have given for an L&M cigarette about then.

  Walking down the fairway, shaken to the core, I doubt if I have ever felt as alone or as devastated on a golf course. I know what a train wreck the world is witnessing, but I tell myself that I am still in the thick of it. I can glance at faces in the gallery and see their shock and grief, too. People call out reassuringly, and I don’t even know if I acknowledge them. Perhaps I scan the crowd for Winnie, because her emotional thermometer is always set on seventy-two degrees and it never fails to calm me to see her. (Mark McCormack, on the other hand, was often such a visible nervous wreck, it made me feel nervous just to look at him—he often left the course at such moments to make business calls, for both our sakes.)

  I try to relax and remember my father’s lessons about keeping my head and body still, making a slow backswing and solid contact. All I need is one good shot. This one looks almost impossible, but I must somehow get it on the putting surface. I know Bill will get his shot on the green, and if I want any hope of making a playoff, I simply must have a par.

  I decide on a wedge and set up over the ball, then hit it hard, slashing it out of the long grass. An instant later, still leaning over, I glance up to see where it is going. I watch the ball fly extremely high and appear to settle somewhere in back of the dangerously tiny green. The gallery there lets out a roar, and I know I’ve still got at least a chance to save par and halve the hole.

  On the green, I face a difficult thirty-footer downhill to the cup across the lightning-fast putting surface. After a moment or two sizing up the situation, I stroke the putt and slightly misjudge the line a bit, leaving myself as tough a side-hill six-footer as I’ve ever faced to salvage par. Under the rule then in effect, I am forced to putt out first, which I do, then I step back to wait and see if Bill can beat my four. He misses his birdie attempt and we both finish with 278.

  As Bill and I shake hands, all I really feel is a sense of deep relief and perhaps a bit of disbelief at what has just happened. My anger at myself will come later. In time, I realized I knew what Hogan must have felt like when Fleck caught him in exactly the same spot in 1955, forcing a playoff at the final hole of the Open—a tournament the greatest player in the game at that moment felt confident he’d won. My own confidence now shaken, I sign my card and walk slowly to the press tent, where a hundred unanswerable questions await. My friends in the press corps all look a little embarrassed to have to ask them. I can’t wait to get to Ed and Rita’s place for a drink.

  There will be yet another U.S. Open playoff for me.

  * * *

  The playoff was an eerie reprise of the fourth round. Once again I played solid shots and went out in 33 against Bill’s 35, and once again he started picking up strokes the way he had the previous day. He dropped a dramatic fifty-footer for a birdie two at 13, going ahead for the first time. In all the high drama of my collapse, it’s sometimes forgotten that Bill Casper played almost flawless golf down the stretch. That point can’t be driven home enough. I didn’t just lose the 1966 U.S. Open—Bill Casper’s brilliant play won it.

  He finished with a 69 and I managed a 73, once again letting an Open championship slip through my fingers. Afterward in the pressroom, the shock of the previous day’s free fall had begun to wear off, and I detected a swell of great sympathy about what those on hand had witnessed, the most historic collapse in Open history. As a postscript, or epitaph, to the event, some would write that the disaster only humanized Arnold Palmer even more—simply proved he was more like the people who admired him than any professional golfer in history.

  I don’t know whether that’s true or not. All I know is that, curiously, afterward I was bitterly disappointed but I didn’t feel the least bit sorry for myself. Why should I? It wasn’t a disaster. A plane crash or an earthquake is a disaster. This was a golf tournament—admittedly a huge one and one I’d desperately wanted to win. But, as I consoled myself, I’d won it before and would probably have a chance to win it again. I was only the second man in history to break 280 and not win a U.S. Open. (Jimmy Demaret was the first, in 1948, losing by three to Hogan.) I’d played well enough to win the Open. But Bill Casper had played slightly better. That’s all I can really say about it.

  Fact is, I really felt worse for my fans and for those people with long faces waiting for me at Ed and Rita’s house. I walked in following the playoff and discovered Winnie, both Douglases, and Mark and Nancy McCormack sitting silently around the kitchen table, as if they were at a wake. I didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for me. That feeling extended to my own friends and family.

  “What’s wrong with you people?” I bellowed at them, forcing a halfhearted smile. “You look like you’ve been to a funeral.”

  I guess they thought they had.

  Well, that’s golf. My kind of golf, anyway.

  Losing three Opens in playoffs was tough, but life is tough, and even though I felt emotionally drained and a little cheated by Old Man Par at Olympic Club, I wasn’t through with the United States Open, nor it me.

  The next summer, 1967, I chased Jack Nicklaus and his painted white Bullseye putter around Baltusrol’s Lower Course and was tied for the lead with him for 54 holes. I shot a 69 to his 65 in the final round, becoming the second player in history to twice break 280 and fall short of victory, this time by four strokes.

  At Champions Golf Club in 1969, I three-putted the 15th hole after making a great recovery from the woods. A birdie there would have put pressure on the leader (and eventual winner) Orville Moody; maybe that would have created an outcome more to my liking. Instead, I wound up three strokes back, in sixth place.

  Playing the 14th hole at Pebble Beach in 1972, I had a putt of about eight feet for birdie that would have placed me in the Open lead with just four holes to play. Nicklaus was sizing up a similar-length putt on 12 for par. If I had made my putt and he had missed, the Open would probably have been mine. Instead, he converted and I failed—and the Open was his.

  If only I could have had one of Doc Giffin’s magic mulligans …

  Then there was my return to Oakmont the very next summer. By then, of course, a host of new names were regularly pegged to the leader board: Lee Trevino, Raymond Floyd, Johnny Miller, even a bright young prodigy from Kansas City who looked as wholesome as a face off a cornflakes box. His name was Tom Watson.

  At the par-4 11th hole during the final round, I was four under, facing a short, four-foot birdie opportunity that would have put me five under and in command of the tournament. I made what I thought was a good stroke, and watched in disbelief as the ball grazed the hole, staying out. Two more shocks to the system followed. First, thinking I was still in the lead at four under, I glanced over at a distant scoreboard and could make out that someone else had just posted a red five. I asked my playing
partner, John Schlee, who that could have been. “Miller,” he answered, meaning twenty-six-year-old Johnny Miller, who’d just finished with a sensational 63.

  A few moments later, I struck what I was sure was a terrific drive at 12, only to discover a few minutes later that the ball lying in the fairway, which I thought was mine, really belonged to Schlee. Much to my surprise, my ball had caromed left instead of right and was in deep grass on the 603-yard hole. Now, instead of being tied for the lead and in good position in the fairway at a hole where I often made birdie, I was a stroke behind and facing a desperate situation. All I could do was thump a medium iron shot back to the fairway. With a four-wood, though, I attempted to reach the green but pulled the shot into the deep rough above a greenside bunker, pitched well past the hole, and made bogey six. I felt devastated and it quickly showed—two more bogeys at 13 and 14. I finally birdied 18, but it was meaningless. Once more I’d been unable to rally from my own mistakes, and someone else’s good golf had cost me the Open.

  Following a pair of top-ten finishes in ’74 and ’75 at Winged Foot and Medinah, respectively, my Open career began to fade. I played hard and never gave up; I gave my fans a few thrills here and there, but somehow I could never summon back any magic.

  Then, in 1984, I came up two strokes shy at sectional qualifying on the outskirts of Cleveland. That ended my streak of thirty-one consecutive U.S. Open appearances, a record I shared with Gene Sarazen. I’m still very proud of that.

  In the summer of 1994, by special invitation from the USGA, I made one final journey to Oakmont, where I had played my first National Open, as an amateur (failing to make the cut), in 1953, for my last appearance at the U.S. Open. What an emotional roller-coaster ride that week was, with parties and dinners and private conversations with old friends who’d followed my Open escapades for several decades. I must have signed a thousand autographs. The letters and telegrams poured into the Latrobe office, and it was all I could do to keep myself together emotionally, if not on the golf course.