A Golfer's Life Read online

  More praise for A Golfer’s Life

  “A Golfer’s Life—the writing, which is simple and excellent, is by James Dodson, a contributing editor at Golf magazine—is not sanitized and predictable. There’s a refreshing level of candor, and it yields interesting and unexpected stories about Palmer’s mistakes, disappointments, and personal failings.… There won’t be another Arnold Palmer. [His] rugged charm could be produced only in a certain time and place, and that’s where this enjoyable book, every bit as unpretentious as its author, is rooted.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Palmer is a wonderful raconteur, and some of the best stories concern the presidents he befriended, from Eisenhower to Clinton.… Palmer offers realistic accounts of his life and times. It is well worth reading.”

  —New York Post

  “Vintage Palmer … An engaging book with great appeal … Straight from the heart … You’re soon rooting for him to win his first tournament, and then the next one.… As Palmer says in the opening pages, ‘Remembering one’s life is to live twice.’ And it’s fun for us to tag along with Arnie and join the army of readers reliving some of his legendary tournament victories.… He also shares his feelings about a tough, but loving, father who taught him so much about golf and life. And he even elaborates on the now-famous handshake agreement with sports marketing guru Mark McCormack.”

  —Tampa Tribune

  “Palmer was the greatest golfer of the 1960s. For his many fans, this book is a must.”

  —Toronto Globe & Mail

  “Superb reading … Fabulous … [Palmer is] refreshingly candid about his relationship with Nicklaus, his ongoing problems with golf’s rule makers, and his own occasional overreaching on investments.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1999 by Arnold Palmer Enterprises, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-91814

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77572-6

  First Trade Paperback Edition: March 2000

  v3.1

  To my wife, Winnie, and my daughters, Peggy and Amy

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue - Once Upon a Time

  1. GOOD HANDS

  2. MOTHER

  3. WAKE FOREST

  4. TURNING POINT

  5. WINNIE

  6. THE TOUR

  7. AUGUSTA

  8. D. D. E.

  9. CHERRY HILLS

  10. THE CLARET JUG

  11. MISSING LINK

  12. THE HANDSHAKE

  13. THE LEFT SEAT

  14. BAY HILL

  15. HAT’S OFF

  CAREER SUMMARY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Perhaps the best way to put together your autobiography would be to isolate yourself from all distractions for a few months and write away. In my case, that simply was not possible. I had too much going on … then, and now, ahead of me. Quite obviously, I needed some help in getting all of my words down on paper in proper, thorough, and interesting fashion and then in being certain that what I had roughed out in my dictation was complete and accurate.

  Certainly, the most important assistance would have to come from the writer who would collaborate with me in creating the finished manuscript. Through the years I have known most of the finest golf writers in the world, but, at the urging of my wife, Winnie, we wound up entrusting this job to a talented man we had just met. Winnie had read his book Final Rounds, a wonderful account of a father and son’s long-planned and final golfing trip to the British Isles. Winnie thought that the son, author Jim Dodson, would be the perfect person to work with me on this project. I agreed. Jim has been wonderful, and I think, or at least hope, that this book bears out the wisdom of this decision. Considering that Jim is a three-time winner of the Golf Writers Association of America Award, a longtime contributing editor to Golf magazine, and the Golf Editor of Departures magazine, and that Final Rounds was picked as the top golf book of 1996, the choice was obvious.

  Jim has shaped and organized my words and thoughts into a flowing account of the wonderful life I’ve had the good fortune to live. I am most grateful to him for his dedication, understanding, and reliance on others when appropriate, and his diligence in completing the manuscript in a timely fashion.

  Both Jim and I relied heavily on my family and close friends and associates in getting everything right. You can never depend totally on your memory to come up with all the facts and stories of a lifetime of nearly seventy years and get them just right every time. That’s where Winnie, Doc Giffin, and Bev Norwood, in particular, came in. Winnie and Doc, who both have been encouraging me to undertake this autobiographical effort for many years, but only under the right circumstances, made many suggestions as I began to present my thoughts to Jim Dodson and pored over the manuscript as it took shape in his hands. Nobody, of course, knows more about me and the last forty-five years than Winnie, so her input and total interest in achieving just the right story of this golfer’s life was invaluable.

  To a lesser extent and from a slightly shorter period of acquaintanceship, Doc Giffin, my personal assistant and confidant for the last thirty-three years, contributed significantly to bringing this story to life. I’m certain—and I think Jim Dodson will agree—that we could not have done as well without him. A journalist by profession, Doc might have been the “with” on the cover of this book himself. Realizing that he could not relinquish his other duties to give full attention to the project, Doc instead devoted himself to a careful, superb editing of the manuscript, suggesting additions, corrections, and deletions when appropriate. Most of the time they were.

  We had the benefit of another journalist, too, in Bev Norwood, who was involved with this book as a literary executive at the International Management Group and is also a good friend, knowledgeable about golf and my career. He also read the first draft of the manuscript meticulously and made a number of valuable suggestions that prevented inadvertent mistakes and enhanced the finished product.

  My siblings—brother Jerry and sisters Lois Jean and Sandy—were particularly helpful in reconstructing the early years in Latrobe and Youngstown. So were my daughters, Peggy and Amy, in bringing back family memories. When we turned to the significant business side of my life, we counted heavily on the input of Mark McCormack and Alastair Johnston as well as that of Ed Seay, my frequent traveling companion, when we got into the exciting (to me) subject of golf course architecture and design, which became more and more important to me as the years went by.

  Since this is the last of my books, I have been able to draw from the work and words put down by previous writers I’ve collaborated with—Tom Hauser, William Barry Furlong, Ernie Havemann, Norman Cousins, and Bob Drum—so their fine efforts have been renewed, in a way, in these pages.

  Finally, I must offer sincere thanks to Judith Curr, Senior Vice President and Publisher at Ballantine Books, who originally approached me with the idea of finally writing my autobiography. Perhaps the timing was right, but so were Judith’s guiding editorial insights. She was ably assisted in the production of the manuscript by Gary Brozek, Editor at Ballantine Books, and the ever-diligent
Managing Editorial and Production departments there.

  Thank you all, from the bottom of this golfer’s heart.

  PROLOGUE

  Once Upon a Time

  Clear September evenings are beautiful in the little town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, where I grew up and still live. A few days after my sixty-eighth birthday, on just such an evening, my wife Winnie and I left home and drove down the hill to the township road that hasn’t changed much in the past half-century, crossed over, and started up the winding driveway of Latrobe Country Club.

  The driveway crosses a small brook and two fairways, the steep downhill first and the long uphill 18th. We paused to allow a couple of late finishers—two boys carrying their own bags—to hit their final approach shots on 18. Winnie reached over and took my hand and commented that I seemed awfully quiet—and was driving awfully slowly—for a man who had a big speech to make in a few minutes.

  Under normal circumstances I enjoy giving speeches, and I seldom use a prepared text, because years ago I discovered that speaking to people straight from the heart about a subject you love may be a bit more risky, but the rewards are almost always greater in the end. That’s just my style, I guess—the way I prefer to play golf and the way I prefer to speak to people.

  This crowd was different, however. The occasion was my fiftieth high school reunion, and at that moment almost two hundred people from Latrobe High’s Class of 1947 were gathered in the upstairs dining room or sipping cocktails on the adjacent lawn, waiting for their unofficial host to arrive and get the festivities under way.

  I hadn’t seen many of these folks in over half a century—a thought that probably astounded them as much as it did me. How could that time have gone by so rapidly? Most of those in attendance, I knew, now lived other places and had come back to Latrobe from great distances. Others there were some of my closest friends on earth. But all of them had known me long before I became a famous public figure named Arnold Palmer. To them, I was simply “Arnie” Palmer, the skinny, golf-crazy son of Deke and Doris Palmer, the boy who would grow up and do well enough to buy the club where once upon a time he was permitted on the course only before the members arrived in the morning or after they had gone home in the evening.

  I peered through the windshield and watched as one of the boys made a strong swing, and I remember commenting to Winnie, as his ball flew away in the twilight toward an unseen flag up the hill, “He may like that better than he knows.” I knew what that boy was feeling, because I’d hit that final shot—perhaps from that very spot—thousands of times myself over the past fifty or sixty years. And every time, it filled me with a mixture of hope and wonder.

  The boys picked up their bags and moved on. Wrapped in the spell of the game, they probably didn’t have a clue or a care in the world who was watching them, and that’s exactly as it should be, a tribute to this marvelous game we play. There is something magical about finishing a golf round in the dusk.

  Driving on, I admitted to Winnie that I was a bit worried about what I was going to say to the folks on the hill, and she knew why without my having to say anything more. It wasn’t being sixty-eight that was chewing away at me or even the slight bittersweet feeling I often experience with September’s arrival—brought on by the knowledge that another golf season is slowly winding down. The truth was, several things had happened to us in the preceding year that made this homecoming all the more poignant, and therefore somewhat difficult for me.

  She simply squeezed my hand and assured me that when it came time to speak, she knew I would do just fine.

  “Oh really?” I said, with mock annoyance. “And what makes you so sure about that?”

  She smiled that simple, no-nonsense smile of hers I’ve always loved and found so comforting, whether I set the course record or shot 80 in the final round.

  “Don’t forget, lover,” she said, “I’ve known you a few years, too.”

  In life as in golf, we all encounter turning points, moments of trial when everything accomplished up till then falls away and everything we stand for and believe is summoned forth for thorough examination. On the golf course, I’ve been fortunate enough to come out on the happy end of several such trials. But a few days after the 1997 New Year’s holiday, I faced a more urgent moment of self-reflection. The phone rang at La Costa Resort and Spa, in Carlsbad, California, where I was preparing to give a speech and present the Arnold Palmer Award to Tom Lehman at the annual PGA Tour Awards dinner at the kickoff event for the PGA Tour’s new season. Winnie was on the other end of the line, and her voice immediately told me something was wrong. A moment later I knew what it was. For several years during my regular periodic physical examinations, I’d scored elevated PSA tests, but several precautionary biopsies had all come back negative. The most recent one, however, had not. Winnie had called to inform me I had prostate cancer.

  The very word cancer can send a cold blade of terror cutting through the strongest man or woman. I remember feeling a great gutted hollowness inside, followed by a wave of anger at the injustice of the verdict. Why me? Why now? My physicians were quick to point out that there was no particular hurry to confront this frightening opponent—I could delay surgery indefinitely, even decline it, if I so chose. There were even other procedures and treatment strategies available. The decision was up to me, they said.

  “Well,” I remember replying almost without hesitation, “if you’re leaving it up to me, I think there’s only one thing to do. Let’s get the damn thing out.”

  In retrospect, this was the only course of action I could honestly think to follow. Get it out, get it done with, so I could get on with my life—back to the golf course and back to my work and family. I had so much I still wanted to do, so many things I still wanted to accomplish; why, even my golf game was showing new signs of vitality after a few years of less-than-inspiring play. The cancer couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient moment (if there ever is a convenient moment). I’m sure everyone who faces this terrifying news has felt this way at some point or another.

  I promptly canceled all my business appointments and withdrew from the following week’s Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, a tournament I had played in since it was started in 1960 and had won five times. Then I flew home to Orlando to be with Winnie and my daughter Amy and consulted with my doctors. The next day, we flew north to the famed Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and three days after that the job was done.

  For the first time in my adult memory, I didn’t play much golf that spring. I spent weeks recovering at our condo at the Bay Hill Club and Lodge in Orlando, watching the golf season unfold on television and reading an avalanche of get-well cards and letters I received from concerned people all over the world. I can’t really express how grateful I was for these cards and letters. Cancer can make you feel so alone. Friends I hadn’t spoken to in twenty years got in touch, strangers shared their own inspiring medical stories with me; some simply offered prayers, while others sent small gifts. It was powerful medicine to think I’d somehow touched so many lives—and now they were touching mine.

  It’s also probably just as well that I can’t tell you how frustrated I was—what a pain in the rear end I must have been to Winnie, who had the unenviable task of trying to keep me in one place, off the golf course and out from underfoot at the office—to have to sit on the sidelines while one of the most memorable golf seasons in history was brilliantly unfolding. Within weeks of the new season’s debut, it was clear young Eldrick “Tiger” Woods was going to fulfill his early promise of greatness and make maybe the most sensational rookie entrance to the professional ranks since a fellow named Jack Nicklaus came along in 1962 (an event I happen to remember very well), and I set my goal to be back on my feet and playing—perhaps even playing decently—by my own Tour event, the Bay Hill Invitational, in mid-March.

  Thanks to Winnie and others who stayed after me to give my body proper time to heal, I was able to be back on my feet and
functioning pretty normally by early March. My golf game even showed flashes of surprising sharpness, but I found I tired with almost frightening suddenness—a phenomenon that’s not at all unusual, as it turns out, after cancer surgery. My stamina simply wasn’t what it had always been, and I reluctantly had to accept that it would be months, instead of weeks, before I really began to feel like my old self again.

  Even so, playing two rounds with Jack Nicklaus at the Masters was a boost for my morale, a real tonic for what ailed me, certainly one of the year’s highlights. Proving perhaps that time is no friend of champions, Jack was limping a little bit, too, from a nagging painful hip. But we had a lot of laughs and both agreed we wouldn’t have missed it for the world. The Augusta crowds gave us a lavish welcome, and it seemed somehow fitting that Tiger Woods demolished the field to capture his first major, a breathtaking performance that will live in Masters history.

  Unfortunately for me, by the time I began to get my old energy back and was charging to the golf course again, it was almost September—the American Ryder Cup team was headed to Spain and Valderrama and the golf season had come and gone almost without me. Well, I told myself, the important thing is to realize that I’ve licked a big opponent, or at least subdued him, and it’s time to set my sights on next year.

  That’s when the second blow came.

  Ken Bowman was one of my oldest and dearest friends. We’d palled around together since our school days in Latrobe, and his father, Lloyd, a vice president with Vanadium Alloy Steel, had belonged to the club where my father, Deacon Palmer, was head professional and course superintendent. Ken was your basic “Hill” boy, as we called kids who grew up on the more prosperous side of the spur of the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks that bisected the town of Latrobe from east to west. But early on, perhaps because of our mutual passion for sports, Ken and I developed a strong attachment to each other. We were best pals in high school, dated some of the same girls, and when I started playing in state golf tournaments, his father generously helped underwrite some of my traveling expenses. Ken himself often caddied for me in big tournaments, including the first state championship I ever played in. He went off to Amherst College; I went to Wake Forest. He joined the U.S. Navy; I enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard. But we always stayed in touch. He eventually married Susie Cook, and I met and married Winnie; we built houses on the same wooded ridge across from Latrobe Country Club, raised our families together, played bridge and golf, and for well over thirty years developed as close a bond as two neighbors possibly can.