A Golfer's Life Page 10
The truth is, I loved these stories. Not only were they the first to identify a host of personal characteristics and eccentricities people would come to associate with the name Arnie Palmer and apparently admire in coming years, but they also confirmed what I dearly hoped was true—namely, that for all my rough edges and boyish lack of refinement, I belonged among golf’s elite. When Jack Clowser of the Cleveland Press wrote that “Arnold Palmer was born to be a great golf champion,” I daresay my pride and confidence grew immeasurably, as they did a few days later when John Dietrich of the competing Plain Dealer informed his readers that the Amateur had witnessed the birth of a “new super champion.” My crusty old friend Bob Drum of the Pittsburgh Press, who’d been writing about me since my schoolboy days in Pennsylvania golf, wrote slightly less breathless dispatches from the front lines about my alleged heroics at Detroit, while the major wire services sent these stories flying to all corners of the globe. I still get chills thinking about those first stories.
Lightning had struck, and my life would never be the same. In hindsight, though, it’s amusing how I misjudged the effect of the Amateur. Suddenly the press wanted to know about my future plans and any aspirations to turn professional. I remember hearing Pap reassure a reporter that I wouldn’t turn pro. Well, he was my Pap, and I dutifully echoed, “I like selling paint. I have no intention of turning professional. I am very happy, and my new title automatically puts me on the Walker Cup team.” At the moment I said this, I really meant it. With a six-month apprenticeship required by the PGA Tour, a period during which you could take no official prize money, I simply couldn’t imagine how I could make a living out on tour. So I pointed out that the Walker Cup would be contested in England the next spring and I couldn’t wait to go there. I also noted that my next golfing goal was the British Amateur crown.
They say lightning never strikes the same spot twice, but my tale is proof that it sometimes can strike you again when you least expect it to. In this case, lightning of a very different nature struck me within days of hoisting the Amateur trophy. My words—to say nothing of the direction of my life—abruptly changed.
Mother hadn’t been back home in Latrobe for more than a few days when she got a phone call from Fred Waring, the celebrated bandleader of the Pennsylvanians, inviting me to play in his annual golf tournament, the Waite Memorial, at Shawnee-on-the-Delaware. Fred had invited me to his annual golf shindig before, but I could never afford to go. Now that I was the new National Amateur champion I was even more anxious to go, but I’d been away from my job so much of the summer I felt bad asking Bill Wehnes for yet another week off.
Bill solved the problem nicely by telling me, “Tell you what, Arn. If you can get Mr. Waring to invite April [Bill’s wife] and me to the tournament, we’ll all three drive down there.”
I placed a call to Fred, who happily extended the invitation, and almost before I knew it the three of us were rolling down the highway to Shawnee-on-the-Delaware in Bill’s big Cadillac.
The tournament festivities began over Labor Day weekend. We arrived on Monday and checked into the Shawnee Inn, a beautiful rustic lodge abuzz with tournament activities. I immediately went out on the golf course to play a practice round, and as I was coming back into the inn I saw a couple of pretty girls coming down the stairway that led to the main lobby. One of them was Dixie Waring, Fred’s daughter. But it was the quieter, prettier, dark-haired one that really caught my eye. She had smoky good looks, and her demeanor had a clear sheen of class. Fred’s longtime secretary, Cora Ballard, a whiskey-voiced redhead, paused and introduced me to the two girls she was chaperoning for the week, the tournament’s official “hostesses,” and I shook hands with Winifred Walzer.
“If you don’t have anything to do,” I said jauntily to her, “why don’t you come out and watch the golf.”
“Perhaps I will,” she replied demurely, and smiled at me.
I think I learned she and Dixie Waring were old chums from Shawnee, and I must have been thinking Winnie must be a rich girl from Philadelphia’s Main Line. She was so refined and polished. Little did I know she was really from the village of Coopersburg, just outside Bethlehem, and though her father, Shube, was successful enough in the canned foods business to afford a summer cottage at Shawnee, the Walzers were by no means wealthy in the sense of Philadelphia wealth. She only hobnobbed with girls from the Main Line. Winnie was nineteen, studying interior design at Brown University’s affiliated design school at Pembroke College, aiming to be an interior decorator. Unbeknownst to me she was a veteran of Shawnee’s social swirl and had even dated some of the most eligible bachelor golfers, including my old adversary Harvie Ward.
I don’t think I saw her at the dinner that was held that evening, but I was pleased when I glanced over the next afternoon and saw her watching from the edge of the 11th fairway. Years later I learned that was purely an accident—she was really en route to watch her “Uncle Fred” Waring play golf. Fred, who was in the foursome directly behind mine, was deeply fond of Winnie and almost jealously protective of her. Anyway, I sauntered over and asked if she “planned to tag along” and made small talk with her and wondered if she would be interested in sitting with me at the dinner dance scheduled for later that evening. She said she would, and I went on about my business with a new spring in my step.
Winnie, I began to learn that night, was unlike any girl I’d ever met, not just pretty and comfortable in almost any social situation, but also smart, well traveled (she’d just come home from a big European trip), engagingly independent minded, even something of a would-be social rebel. The only girl in a close-knit Moravian family that included two brothers and a host of boy cousins, she had a grandfather who was a minister and uncles who were college professors. She had grown up absorbing blows from baseball games and kick-the-can with her male cousins, but also kept her father’s books from an early age. She had pluck and ambition, and she didn’t suffer vain or pretentious fools easily. Her mother, Mary, was something of a sweet social butterfly who may have entertained hopes that Winifred would become a proper debutante in due course, but feisty Winnie Walzer wanted none of that.
We became inseparable for the rest of the week, but that first evening at the dinner dance she got a taste of the unexpected impact sudden “fame” can have on a young man’s life. I happened to be dancing with an older golf professional’s wife when she suddenly seized my shoulder and whispered damply into my ear, “Take me away from all of this. Let’s me and you run away together!”
The poor woman sounded desperate—and frighteningly serious. She had four children and a swell husband, and she scared the daylights out of me. So I slunk back to the table. After a while, I told Winnie what had happened, and she laughed. That was another thing I loved about Winnie Walzer, her robust and infectious laugh. She had a no-nonsense, down-to-earth way of placing everything in perspective, I was discovering, including alcohol-fueled dance-floor confessions from older married women. What I didn’t know then was that, despite our wonderful week of intimate conversation about family and golf and life in general, typically held after my rounds in the club bar where underage Winnie could sip her favorite Fitzgerald Old Fashioneds, come Friday night my beautiful escort was watching me go through the buffet line with more than casual interest. One subject we hadn’t touched upon was religion, and I later learned she was watching to see if I ate meat on Friday. Apparently one of her suitors at Brown had been a passionate Catholic boy. For reasons I can’t begin to understand or explain, Shube Walzer took pains to chase him away from his only daughter, and she wasn’t anxious to repeat the experience. She later admitted that she was deeply relieved when I took a healthy helping of roast beef.
What I guess I failed to notice, smitten as I was with her, was that almost everybody around us save Shube Walzer (who was back home in Coopersburg, by the way) was shamelessly promoting a match—and all these years later it amuses me how many people claim they had the critical hand in bringing us together.
Nobody had to bring us together or promote the match. By Friday night my amateur partner, Tommy Sheehan, and I were leading the tournament, but more important, I was completely taken with Winnie Walzer and a plan was forming in my brain. At the dinner, I reached under the table and took her hand and said, “What would you think if I asked you to get married?”
The question appeared to startle her—though only for a second or two. “Well, I don’t know. This is so sudden. Can I have a day to think about it?” she replied.
“Not too long,” I said to her. “I’ve got places to go.”
I told her my grand plan: we would get married in the spring and use the Walker Cup tournament as our honeymoon. She assured me that her mother and aunts would love that romantic plan—as they did. She told me her father would probably grumble a lot but would eventually come around because he wanted his only daughter to be happy. For such a crack judge of character, she either overestimated her father’s capacity to appreciate romance or underestimated his contempt for unconventional suitors for his daughter. As it turned out, the last thing Shube Walzer wanted was his daughter marrying a golf bum, which is pretty much what he thought of all tournament golfers in those days.
But, of course, my “grand plan” was to be a highly successful businessman who could not only support a wife in the manner to which she was accustomed but also have the time and financial wherewithal to play top amateur golf. If paint selling wouldn’t do it, maybe I’d switch to selling insurance; insurance men always had time to play golf.
I suppose it was no surprise that word quickly leaked out about the proposal. Winnie quickly informed her mother, who was happy as expected, and her mother broke the news to her father—who wasn’t remotely happy to hear about it. Shube had heard such declared attentions from his headstrong daughter before and, I think, felt love would run its course in due time. At the final presentation dinner, Fred Waring startled everybody by announcing that I wasn’t taking only the tournament trophy home from Shawnee-on-the-Delaware, but a fiancée as well.
My mother and Pap took an instant shine to Winnie when they met her the following week in Latrobe. Back in Coopersburg, the female family think tank already had big wedding plans well under way, but there was still no movement on the Shube Walzer front. Shube was a tough customer, a successful businessman who loathed Roosevelt and the socially liberal policies of just about any other Democrat. Pap, on the other hand, was a strong Democrat and devoted Roosevelt man who thought the late president hung the moon. In some ways, the families hailed not just from different ends of Pennsylvania but different ends of the planet.
* * *
Winnie assured me all would be well in time.
What was really missing, I quickly realized, was some material sign of my intentions—namely, an engagement ring.
Back in Cleveland, my old golf gang from Pine Ridge helped solve that problem. Art Brooks, Bill Wehnes, and Ed Preisler all chipped in a couple grand each to help me purchase a decent ring, and Bill even managed to get a good deal from a local jeweler. My salary didn’t pay me enough to afford even the payments on the ring, and I now had an $8,000 debt on top of everything else.
It was about this time that one of them proposed a weekend golf trip to Pine Valley. It would be a way, I realized, to maybe pay off my borrowings—or go even deeper into debt. Pine Valley, the famous George Crump layout that meandered through the scrub and sandy hills in the New Jersey pine barrens, was a place I’d always heard about and dearly wanted to play but had never had an opportunity to. Before I knew it, two foursomes were headed that way. On the drive down, the guys started telling me how ruthless Pine Valley was and how even I probably wouldn’t break 90 on it.
“Ninety?” I looked at Bill Wehnes incredulously.
“That’s right.”
Well, one thing led to another and I soon had half a dozen wagers going, $20 nassaus with automatic presses and an intriguing side bet with Bill: for every stroke I was 70 or under, he’d pay me $100, and for every stroke I was 80 or over I’d pay him the same.
In retrospect it was pretty foolish. I could have really lost my shirt and been so indebted to the gang I would never get out of Cleveland. But you’re only young and cocky and in love once, I suppose, and I had no doubt I could bring celebrated Pine Valley to heel.
Foolish thought number two, or so it appeared from the outset.
Day one, hole number one: I pull-hooked a 5-iron approach over the green into the brush, chipped over the green, and was forced to make a thirty-footer for bogey five.
Pine Valley certainly had my respect and full attention. I think Bill and the guys must have been mentally spending all of my money, and for a while I thought I was in big trouble.
Frankly, I’d never seen anything like the place, the way holes were integrated so beautifully into the rolling scrubby sand landscape. It looked wild and manicured. The greens were immaculate, with slopes so subtle or murderous I could see why many famous pros had come there only to be reduced to screaming fits of despair. At nine, I made a bogey and shot 36 out, thanks to a flurry of much-needed birdies. Not bad—but still a long way to go.
The back nine treated me a little better. I holed a fifteen-footer for birdie on the tough finishing hole to card 67. That was four hundred Ben Franklins in my pocket. I cleaned up on all the nassaus and that night even cleaned up at gin rummy. The next two rounds I went 69 and 68, and by the time the weekend was through I had pocketed nearly five grand, almost enough to pay off the ring.
It was while we were there in that ultimate golf terrarium that I had time to think about what Winnie and I were really up against. My salesman salary scarcely covered my own expenses, much less those of a married couple in need of a first house and possibly children in the near future. Winnie was still scheduled to begin classes at NYU in a few weeks—practical girl that she was, she’d transferred there from Brown to begin studying business—and as much as I liked the proposed scenario of a big church wedding in the spring and steaming off to England for the Walker Cup, in my heart I saw only one way for us to make it as man and wife.
I would need to turn pro.
Instead of heading straight back to Cleveland, Bill and April suggested we go to New York City for a few days of dinners and shows, their treat; I called Winnie, and she enthusiastically agreed to meet us there. Shube wasn’t budging any on her momentous decision, but she could get away because she needed to register for fall classes anyway. We met in the afternoon at the New Yorker Hotel and—talk about a potentially bad omen—checked in just as some poor chap committed suicide by leaping from an upstairs window. A little later in the bar, still shaken, Winnie probably thought our plans were crashing, too, when I informed her of my change of strategy—namely, that I’d decided to turn pro and that we should probably get married as soon as possible, certainly before the start of the new Tour season out west. England and the Walker Cup were out; the uncertain life of a Tour rookie’s bride was in.
Her face fell, but she didn’t seem as upset as I thought she might be at this idea, though she needlessly pointed out that her father wasn’t going to like this news any better than the last. Through shows and dinner, we talked about this all weekend long, and I convinced her that she shouldn’t enroll at NYU after all, but maybe should return to Coopersburg and take courses in the local business school, a plan Shube Walzer would have eagerly endorsed under other circumstances. She agreed, and we parted with a whole new game plan established.
On November 18, I drove by myself to Chicago and met with the marketing people at Wilson Sporting Goods Company. Preceded by a long line of golf champions, amateur and professional (Sam Snead and Byron Nelson had represented Wilson on tour), I was pleased to represent them, too, though the endorsement contract I signed was hardly the stuff of princes. It was Wilson’s standard contract and amounted to $5,000 per year as a base, plus a $2,000 signing bonus. Under the terms of the Tour’s established apprentice program, I wouldn’t be able to earn
a nickel of official money until sometime the next summer. By my rough calculations, though, with luck and good bookkeeping, if we watched our coins carefully, Wilson’s money and whatever else I might pick up at pro-ams and unofficial events just might get us to the heart of the next summer, when I could begin earning official prize winnings.
I remember feeling pleased and deeply relieved when, prior to meeting with Wilson, I broke the news to Pap and he nodded his head and said he thought it was the right thing to do. I couldn’t do any worse selling paint, to be honest. And who knew? Maybe I’d break in the way guys like Doug Ford and Ken Venturi and Gene Littler and my buddy Dow Finsterwald were already doing, making names for themselves as up-and-coming Tour professionals and banking a few bucks to boot.
I asked Pap to accompany me to my first event, the Miami Open. We drove down in my two-door Ford and checked into a motel, and I went out to the course a bundle of nerves but also pumped up with a lot of confidence. After all, I’d recently beaten guys like Ted Kroll and Bob Toski and Tommy Bolt at the Azalea Open in Wilmington, so I knew in my heart I could compete.
Perhaps I was too pumped, though. I missed fairways right and left and couldn’t sink a putt to save my life. A funny thing happened that afternoon, though, something that quickly helped me get my priorities straight.
I missed the cut and was boiling mad at myself. I returned to the motel only to find a message from my old girlfriend, the Cleveland model; she was in town working and wanted to get together for a few drinks. That seemed like just the remedy I needed, so I went out and returned sometime after midnight only to find Pap waiting up for me—and as mad at me as I’d ever seen him. Through clenched teeth he asked me where the hell I’d been and I told him truthfully—out for some drinks and a few laughs with an old friend, nothing too serious, all pretty innocent.