A Golfer's Life

by Arnold Palmer

  I overcooked my swing and hooked the drive into some snarly grass near television transmission cables. Watching me pull the 3-wood to go for the green, Doc Giffin, who was on the scene, later said he felt the way Tip Anderson felt at Birkdale when I took out that 6-iron. In other words, he couldn’t believe I was going to try as risky a low-percentage shot as that. A fairway wood from the deep rough is one of the toughest shots in the game, but the way I figured it, I might never get this close to the prize that had eluded me most, so I pulled out the wood and went for it.

  I hit what was probably the finest wood shot of my career. The ball landed on the green and checked up eight feet above the cup. If I made that short putt, I would be tied with Boros, who was then standing on the tee. The ball went straight at the hole but curled off and rolled several inches past. I slumped over in despair. Boros made it an interesting finish, though, dramatic to the bittersweet end. Unable to reach the green in two, he made a superb pitch to get up and down in two, to win the championship. I finished in second place, tied with Bob Charles. A bridesmaid once again, I mentally kicked myself for having missed that putt.

  Exactly two years later, at Southern Hills in Tulsa, another short-game master, Dave Stockton, worked his wedge magic on the closing holes to figuratively snatch another PGA Championship from my grasp. During the final round, at the dangerous 13th, a par 5 that had been converted into a par 4 for the tournament, Dave plunked his second shot into the pond, while I put mine on the green with an excellent chance at birdie. I was four down at that point, but it appeared there was going to be at least a two-, perhaps even a three-shot swing.

  I watched as Dave dropped a ball by the hazard and made a sensational clutch recovery pitch, very nearly holing his wedge shot. He tapped in for a bogey, and I missed the birdie. The give-back was just a shot, but the disappointment I experienced at not taking fuller advantage of the opportunity was like a punch in the gut. Whatever momentum had been building suddenly vanished. Dave won by two over Bob Murphy and me. Another PGA almost.

  In retrospect, for a variety of reasons, perhaps the one loss that hurt the most was the PGA Championship I hosted at Laurel Valley in 1965. In a sense, I suppose I’d rescued the PGA from the horns of a serious dilemma. Across the board in American sports, times were changing, but the PGA was reluctant to change with them. In professional baseball and football, for example, racial barriers had fallen, and blacks and other minority players were finally being accorded the respect and paid the money they deserved. Given certain antiquated policies of the PGA, though, it was inevitable that the organization would run into trouble with politicians. With the PGA set to take place the summer of 1965 at San Francisco Golf Club, the attorney general of California used the golf organization’s exclusionary “Caucasian only” policy to bar the tournament from his state.

  I’ve been criticized by some who contend I didn’t use whatever clout I may have had at the time (which I personally don’t think was all that much—at least with PGA members) to publicly oppose the discriminatory policies and encourage minority participation in the game. I suppose by some yardstick measurements, that’s true—if by that my critics mean I never called a press conference to confront such issues or even challenge the organization’s policies in conversations with reporters.

  On the other hand, given the way I was raised by Pap, to respect any man regardless of his skin color or nationality—to say nothing of my irritation over the infamous “cripples” clause—it wasn’t in my nature to openly attack the organization or lead the crusade for change, actions that probably would have made me a lot of enemies in an organization that had done so many good things for the game of golf and was otherwise honorable and well intentioned. I, and many others, wanted to see the PGA change, to have its racial policies, and other policies, evolve with the times, but I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

  Consequently, at the height of this first racial flare-up, I saw an opportunity to be of service to golf and the PGA of America by suggesting that the PGA move the championship to Laurel Valley, which was done. Unfortunately, as black golf stars like Charlie Sifford and Lee Elder can tell you, though, it really took many more years—decades, in fact—and a lot of quiet soul-searching and campaigning from within to finally get rid of the exclusionary language that I believe hurt the PGA’s prestige. Inevitably, it took another nasty racial flare-up—this time after Hall Thompson made his controversial remarks at Shoal Creek in Alabama in 1990. The flood of negative publicity and public outrage that followed the incident prompted a thorough self-examination by the PGA of America and the PGA Tour and ultimately resulted in the establishment of new anti-discrimination policies that, I believe, have finally made professional golf a tent large enough to accommodate everybody.

  As for staging the event at Laurel Valley in 1965, I wanted it to be picture perfect in every way, so, experiencing a kind of large-scale host anxiety, I worked and worried myself into a frantic state of mind, checking and rechecking on every detail in the days leading up to the championship. Perhaps I should have gone fishing in one of the nearby trout streams instead, because it was quickly clear from my play that I had invested far too many hopes and high expectations in the tournament. What a perfect setting Laurel Valley would have been to get the PGA monkey off my back once and for all.

  The way I played the first hole of the championship nicely sums up my fate there that week. My 7-iron approach shot missed the green left and wound up just short of a small, temporary footbridge, which was directly in my line to the putting surface. Almost before anybody noticed what was happening, a gallery marshal with the wonderfully ironic name of Miles Span removed the bridge’s railing. I pitched up and salvaged par, but I was informed a few holes later by an official that, by permitting improvement of my line of play, I’d violated a rule. I was assessed two penalty strokes. The wind went right out of my sails.

  I finished with an even-par 72 but never summoned the focus to take my scoring any lower in the three succeeding rounds. I completed the tournament with 294, thirty-three places behind the winner, my good and gentle friend Dave Marr, who made it nerve-racking by not going for the green in regulation on the 72nd hole. He made a great long pitch to save par and win.

  I gave Dave a good chewing-out for that strategy. Then I grinned and slapped him on the back and congratulated him on winning his first major championship. If I couldn’t win it that year, I was very pleased Dave Marr had.

  After the “near miss” at Southern Hills in 1970, I never really challenged in the tournament again, though in 1989 Jack Nicklaus and I did briefly give the boys in the press tent something to write home about. At Kemper Lakes outside Chicago, Jack and I both opened with 68s, and at one point near the finish of the opening round I actually held the lead and was cruising toward a 66. I was later informed that when word spread what Jack and I were up to on the golf course, something rare happened: the press tent virtually cleared out. Nearly all the scribes, including my crusty old friend Dan Jenkins (who rarely ventured onto a course unless a national emergency had been declared) came out to see for themselves what some hoped would be a reprise of the old Nicklaus-Palmer magic. Unfortunately, I treated them to a pair of untimely bogeys and finished with 68.

  Despite ending the round that way, it felt great to briefly be atop the heap, and Jack agreed with me. And though I was one month shy of my sixtieth birthday, it was almost like the good old days. Jack and I had managed to turn back the calender a few years, and I couldn’t recall the last time I’d made five consecutive birdies in competition. That really got the gallery buzzing, and it raised goose bumps on my own arms. Curiously, there was another champion lurking at the top of the leader board, quietly stalking the one major golf title that has forever eluded him, as well.

  Tom Watson didn’t take home the Wanamaker Trophy that year, and neither did I. With a 74 in the second round and a free fall to an awful 81 in the third, I finished in a disappointing tie for six
ty-third place.

  But at least I’d briefly felt that old current of excitement that comes with being in the chase, and perhaps that set the stage for my final appearance in the championship, in 1994. There comes a point when you have to say goodbye, and that point came for me, fittingly enough, at Southern Hills in August of that year. In an emotional setting that was similar in scope to my farewell to the Open at Oakmont just weeks before, I could barely get around the course in one piece—and barely get the words out afterward to express what the tournament and my long association with the PGA of America meant to me. I played poorly and missed the cut, to nobody’s surprise, but I thanked the organization from the bottom of my heart for being such an important part of my life. As you well know, you can’t have a long-term relationship with anyone or anything without some conflict along the way.

  And as I finished my final competitive round in the PGA Championship, I was reminded of the long and sometimes rocky road I’d traveled with the PGA of America.

  All families have honorable internal disputes, and one of those conflicts helped to create the modern PGA Tour. Jack Nicklaus and I lent strong hands to the creation of the organization when a players’ revolt threatened to tear apart the PGA of America in the late 1960s.

  Here’s my take on what happened:

  As I’ve said, as early as the mid-fifties, top players like Ben Hogan and Sam Snead openly complained that it wasn’t in the best interests of professional golf for the PGA of America, essentially an organization for the game’s club and teaching professionals, to be running golf tournaments with an iron hand, making schedules, determining purses, and setting the rules by which players who made their incomes from playing in those tournaments simply had to abide.

  The PGA’s rationale for maintaining stewardship of the Tour, of course, was that it had not only created the road show of tournaments as a way to enable its members to pick up extra income playing in tournaments when their clubs were closed down for the winter. It had also supervised, maintained, and eventually (by the mid-sixties) made the Tour into an impressive and increasingly popular and profitable entity.

  The increasingly sharp public debate was about control—who should be in charge of a tour that was growing by leaps and bounds as the popularity of golf exploded thanks to the exploits (among others) of Nicklaus, Player, and me? Should it be the club professionals or the tournament players themselves? Of course, the PGA of America had one answer, and an increasing number of tournament players had another.

  As crass as it sounds, the issue was really money—more precisely, television money. For some players the last straw came when, in the summer of 1968, it was discovered that the PGA had entered into “secret” contract meetings for the television rights to Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf and the World Series of Golf without consulting us. Gardner Dickinson, one of the player representatives on the PGA’s tournament commitee, led an angry contingent of tour stars—including Doug Ford, Jack Nicklaus, and Frank Beard—out the door to start their own golf tour.

  They formed a new entity called the Association of Professional Golfers, or APG; hired the PGA’s own fine fieldman, Jack Tuthill, to act as interim tournament director for the fledgling tour; then began the complicated process of trying to bring existing tournament sponsors on board. They were damned effective, I might add. By the year’s end, I believe they had something like twenty-eight tournaments lined up for the approaching season and a tour qualifying school established at Doral in Miami. At one point, Jack Nicklaus wrote a thoughtful essay for Sports Illustrated explaining the revolt and outlining why the move was in the end entirely necessary. My impression remains that the general public was wholly in favor of the split.

  I’ll admit that at first I was a bit reluctant to join the rebelling palace guards. For all its warts and arrogance, the PGA of America was the goose that laid the golden egg, and I am nothing if not loyal to those who have helped me. Even if on more than one occasion they stood in my way.

  The irony, of course, is that Mark McCormack had been battling the PGA for years on my behalf over restrictive contracts and the issue of limiting the participation of foreign players. Mark knew the PGA’s outdated rules were taking lots of money from the pockets of players and, consequently, some worthy charities as well. For example, in July 1964 we had scheduled an exhibition match in Princeton, New Jersey, with proceeds to go to the New Jersey Heart Association. At that time the PGA had something called the “Three Point Rule,” which stated that a player could be off the Tour playing golf for prize money only three times a year while a PGA Tour tournament was in progress someplace else. That week the Tour stop happened to be the Insurance City Open in Hartford, Connecticut, a tournament I had not intended to play. So far, no problem there—I wasn’t violating the Three Point Rule.

  Unfortunately, the PGA had another restrictive clause that stated that no exhibition could take place within two hundred miles of a PGA tournament site, a sensible enough edict when you consider the kinds of crowds Jack, Gary, and I—and other stars of the Tour—were capable of drawing for an exhibition match. Since we were told that our exhibition was 202 miles from Hartford, we didn’t anticipate any problem with the Princeton exhibition. The match had been set and advertised, and thousands of tickets were sold.

  The day before the match, however, the PGA informed us that it would have to be canceled. They said that I could not play in Princeton because the site of the Hartford tournament had been switched to another country club in town that was only 196 miles from the site of the Princeton exhibition.

  I thought they were joking, and I was baffled and later enraged to learn that they weren’t. The PGA promised I would be fined and suspended if we went ahead with the charity exhibition. At the eleventh hour, Mark tried his best to persuade the PGA to yield, noting that the events were two states apart and that surely they could make a four-mile exception. But his mediation efforts failed. The sponsors of the heart exhibition were left holding an empty bag and had to cancel.

  Who was the big loser? Not me. I lost a decent exhibition fee, but the Heart Association and the people of New Jersey, as Mark passionately argued, were the real losers in the absurd dispute. While I believe in strictly adhering to the letter of the law in following the rules of the game, this kind of hard-line, strict interpretation benefited no one.

  Now consider the PGA’s muddled thinking on the issue of participation in foreign events and the status of foreign players who wished to play on the American golf circuit. In March of 1961, Sam Snead and I were selected to represent the United States in the Canada Cup matches, scheduled that year to be held in Puerto Rico. But about two weeks before the event, the PGA notified us that I was ineligible to play because—under a PGA rule that involved my position on the money list—I had to either play in the PGA tournament in Memphis that week or not at all.

  To make matters worse, the PGA powers that be decided that no foreign player to whom this rule applied could play in the Canada Cup either. Among others, that meant Gary Player couldn’t represent his home country, South Africa, and Stan Leonard couldn’t play for Canada. It was as outrageous as it was ridiculous, and believe it or not, the People-to-People Sports Committee even appealed to the PGA, pleading that their actions reflected “discredit on the United States and its sporting traditions.”

  Those pleas were met with unyielding silence. Jimmy Demaret played for me, Harold Henning played for Gary, and Al Johnston filled in for Stan Leonard.

  The absurdity of this rule and other restrictive clauses like it—for example, the insane attempt in 1966 to restrict the number of tournaments foreign players could enter unless they went to a PGA school and became officially approved by the PGA—guaranteed that the revolt Jack and Gardner and the others led in the summer of 1968 would succeed.

  As early as November 1963, at a time when the PGA was considering new regulations that would strengthen restrictions on U.S. players playing abroad, entering foreign tournaments, playing in exhib
itions, and even appearing on television shows, I wrote a long letter to the PGA exhorting them to consider the consequences of their actions. I pleaded the case that golf was rapidly expanding in popularity beyond America’s borders and that as worldwide interest in the game grew, it could only be good for the game itself and all of us individually to participate in the international growth and act as ambassadors of the game. Golf was much larger than any single organization, I said, arguing that it was not only unfair to restrict American players from playing overseas, but that limiting the exposure foreign players could have on our tour would ultimately damage professional golf in America. After a lengthy and frank airing of my concerns, I concluded with the following words:

  I sincerely hope that the action of the PGA tournament committee will reflect careful thought and consideration, not only for the good of the United States PGA but also for the good of the individual players who make up the tournament organization as well as for the game of golf in general throughout the world. If this is the case, then I am sure nothing will transpire now or in the future to seriously damage tournament golf as we now know it.

  Sincerely yours,

  Arnold Palmer

  The PGA’s lack of response effectively told the tale. The irony of my being hesitant to bolt with the others, of course, is that within a year, my unhappiness with the provincial attitudes and general arrogance of the PGA led me, at Mark McCormack’s urging, to make some serious private explorations into the possibilities of starting a new tour. At that point Mark had convinced me that the restrictive clauses of the PGA bylaws would never hold up in a court of law, and at one point he counseled me to violate an exhibition rule, suffer a fine and suspension, then sue the PGA of America to draw public attention to the situation.