A Golfer's Life Page 11

  “You’re engaged and you’ve got an obligation to that girl back in Pennsylvania,” he snarled at me.

  “But, Pap—” I began.

  “Do you love her?” he snapped, cutting me off.

  “Well, sure I love her. I asked her to marry me, didn’t I?”

  Pap gave me a look I’ll never forget. It was withering. I think he and my mother were so fond of Winnie they couldn’t stand the idea of losing her. I think they were fonder of her than of me, their own son. Pap chose his words very carefully.

  “Then you better go get her and get married and get on with your business and quit screwing around like a college boy. Do you understand me?”

  I did indeed.

  “Okay,” I said. “Then how are you going to get home?” I offered at least to drive him. He would have none of it.

  “Just do what you have to do. Let me worry about myself.”

  Early the next morning, I dropped him off at the Miami airport and turned onto U.S. Highway 1, headed north. Fifteen or sixteen hours later—pretty late, as I recall—I arrived at Winnie’s parents’ house in Coopersburg and found her waiting up for me. The next morning, after a good sleep, we went into Bethlehem to Christmas shop and I suggested to Winnie that I wait in a local bar while she shopped. She agreed, and I was soon sitting alone over a beer smoking L&Ms and wondering if she would agree or tell me to hit the bricks when I laid my latest idea at her feet.

  “Are you ready?’ I asked when she joined me.

  “Ready for what?” she asked innocently.

  “To hear me out.”

  “I guess so.”

  So I laid it out. I told her I thought we ought to go get married right away, elope if we had to, just get the job done and get on with it. I explained to her about being out with the model and what Pap had said to me—and admitted that I knew, as usual, he’d been right.

  Winnie sighed. I think she would have ordered a double Old Fashioned if she’d been old enough to legally drink. Unfortunately, she wasn’t even old enough to legally marry, and Pennsylvania law required that we have her parents’ consent. I knew we could count on her mother, but Shube still acted as if he thought I was asking his precious daughter to marry a convict.

  “Boy, this won’t be easy,” she admitted.

  I told her I already had a plan in mind. We would call my sister Cheech and her husband, Ron, in Alexandria, Virginia. Cheech would arrange the church and party afterward. We would invite both sets of parents and maybe a few other people. We could drive down and be married before Thanksgiving Day.

  “My father will never let that happen,” Winnie promised me.

  “Then we won’t tell him,” I said.

  We did inform her mother that night, though. I think Mary was alternately thrilled by the romantic haste of the plan and worried sick what her husband, Shube, would do when he found out what we were up to.

  In any case, the next morning when Shube was already safely out of the house, Winnie and I quietly hustled our bags out to my Ford, bid goodbye to her mother—who promised to try and intercede with her husband on our behalf—and hit the road for Alexandria.

  Cheech arranged everything—the church, the minister, and the reception, everything except the actual wedding license. We called my parents, and they enthusiastically agreed to drive down. We called Winnie’s parents and found Shube had no interest whatsoever in being party to our elopement. The next day, the whole plan nearly came unraveled when Winnie and I went to get a marriage license. The clerk, an older man who probably had a daughter at home about Winnie’s age, behaved as if he, too, thought the idea was completely ridiculous. “How old are you?” he demanded, looking at me.

  “Twenty-five,” I said, truthfully. My birthday was a few days after Winnie and I met.

  He glared at Winnie for a moment and then glared at me. I was terrified he knew the truth, that she was underage by two years.

  “Is she old enough?”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered solemnly, sweating bullets.

  The next afternoon, license in hand and blood tests complete, we had a brief little ceremony at Falls Church Presbyterian Church, and a nice little party at Cheech and Ron’s house afterward, and then we climbed into my car and started up the highway as man and wife. We spent our honeymoon night at a trucker’s motel off the Breezewood exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It wasn’t terribly romantic, and in retrospect it makes me realize what a true gem I had found in Winifred Walzer. Here was this classy, educated, beautiful girl who risked her father’s eternal wrath and gave up her girlhood wedding dreams and goodness knows what else to follow a guy who’d never made a plugged nickel as a professional golfer. It was the beginning of a host of disappointments both large and small that she and any other Tour wife in those days would have to endure. Winnie never complained, though, and I’ve spent years trying to make it up to her in various ways. She would tell you it was no big deal, honeymooning that first night in a trucker motel off a lonely turnpike. But I know it was, and I also know we’ve done all right ever since.

  There was one problem with her, though.

  Winnie couldn’t cook a lick. Actually, that’s not entirely correct. She could make great icebox cake, a recipe she’d been taught as a girl. But when it came, say, to boiling water—she was out of her depth. Our first tiff developed over the subject of cooked sausage, and I still feel a little bit bad about it. After spending a quiet Christmas holiday and calling Shube to see if he was adjusting any better to the news (he wasn’t), Winnie and I went to the club for a New Year’s Eve party. Afterward, as I prepared to drive the baby-sitter home—my brother, Jerry, and sister Sandy were still young enough to require one—I suggested to Winnie that she fry up some country sausage and make us a great midnight breakfast. She probably aired her insecurity about cooking, and I must have laughed and told her not to be ridiculous—how hard could cooking sausage be? Anyway, a short time later I returned and found the sausage cold in the pan and her tears flowing. Boy, did I feel like a real heel. I apologized and cooked the sausage myself and told her not to worry because my mother was a great cook and would teach her all she really needed to know.

  Mother did, too. Like Pap, she adored Winnie, and she knew that Palmer men could be somewhat insensitive to certain needs of a young woman. For instance, several weeks before, Winnie had taken the train to Latrobe to spend Thanksgiving with us. I’d grumbled how blasted cold it was in Latrobe and how I dearly wished I could hit some balls in the warmth because the start of the new Tour season was only a few weeks away.

  “Well,” Pap had proposed, “why don’t we just get in the car and drive down to Pinehurst and play.”

  He meant just the two of us, not the women in our lives. I regret to say that it never occurred to either of us to invite them along. The next day, Friday of Thanksgiving weekend, mind you, we tossed our clubs into the car and drove to Pinehurst, leaving Winnie and my mother to face the long holiday weekend without us. I failed to realize how much the holiday meant to Winnie, who was devastated by this impulsive act. In her family’s tradition, Thanksgiving meant a lot, and she normally would have been surrounded by family and childhood chums at the big Walzer celebration back home. When we left she burst into tears and no doubt wondered what kind of life she was getting herself into. I later learned that Jerry and Sandy were very comforting to her, agreeing that their older brother was being a jerk, and once again my mother came to the rescue by proposing that the girls simply put the kids in her car and drive to see Cheech in Virginia. They did just that—and had a swell time without us, we later learned.

  On the second day of the New Year, 1955, I left for the McNaughton Pro-Am at Normandy Isle in Miami. Winnie and I had been married for ten days, but I went alone. As it wasn’t an official Tour event, I stood the chance of picking up a few much-needed bucks. I didn’t play particularly well, but I picked up $750, enough to afford a plane ticket to the next event, another unofficial tournament, the Panama Open, which preceded
the official start of the Tour season out west.

  I flew down to Panama with Porky Oliver, Lew Worsham, Chick Harbert, Ted Kroll, and Bob Toski. The tournament was a seventy-two-hole event, and Panama City was a pretty wide-open place for a good time, if you know what I mean. I was down there to try to make some serious money and prove to Winnie that she hadn’t married the golf-world equivalent of a carnival-ride operator. On the first night there, a number of the guys invited me to go out drinking and looking for homegrown female companionship. I don’t think they took me seriously when I protested that I was now a married man and, tempting as it was, I didn’t go in for that sort of thing anymore.

  They left, and I pulled my mattress out onto the hotel room’s veranda because the night was extremely hot and sticky. I stretched out on the mattress and went to sleep, only to awaken a while later from what I thought was a provocative dream about my bride. I was startled to find a naked Panamanian girl cavorting around the porch and the guys laughing their backsides off. They’d brought a local lady of the night back to the room to try to test my newlywed resolve. I bolted up off that mattress ready to flatten somebody, and after I came to my senses I threw them all out of the room in a rage, locked the door, and went back to sleep on the balcony, worrying about how in the world I would tell Winnie about this.

  If this was a glimpse of the rollicking Tour life to come, it would be good to have Winnie and her common sense by my side. Perhaps still annoyed at the guys for their drunken stunt, I fired a blistering 65 in the tournament’s opening round, followed by rounds of 68, 70, and 71. I lost by a stroke to Argentine Tony Cerda, but my second-place finish was good enough to earn me a thousand dollars. Really pleased with myself, I phoned home to break the good news to Winnie and suggested she meet me in Miami so we could drive west and start the PGA Tour together.

  I still wrestled with the question of whether or not I should tell her about the incident on the hotel balcony, and finally I decided to risk it. Winnie and I had such an honest relationship, she simply had to know everything. So I told her the story and waited in a bit of suspense to hear her response.

  I should have known she would laugh. I’d married a woman who knew how to roll with the punches and keep things in perspective. She knew what was important and she knew I loved only her. That was the beginning of a forty-five-year journey of learning, through the usual marital ups and downs, through Tour triumphs and personal disappointments she’ll never speak of, all magnified by my evolving success, how extraordinary my wife truly is. No wonder Shube Walzer was such an unyielding papa bear on the subject. He knew he was losing more than a strong-headed daughter who could keep his books and decorate his summer cottage on a frugal dime.

  I was just beginning to discover what I’d really found.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Tour

  Winnie and I had a great time driving across America in my old coral pink Ford. In many ways, the trip west to join the Tour in California amounted to a perfect honeymoon. It’s worth remembering that Winnie and I had known each other less than four months, and if you ever want to learn a lot about somebody fast, good and bad, driving across the country with them is one way to do it. I drove, and Winnie navigated. We also decided her experience keeping accounts for Shube Walzer made her an invaluable asset, the logical choice for the traveling Palmer team secretary and bookkeeper. We had an offer of a place to stay in California but really didn’t know a soul along the way, so we drove leisurely through the days and slept in inexpensive motels and motor courts, stopped wherever and whenever the spirit moved us, ate in cozy roadside diners and cafés, saw a few tourist sights, talked about children and plans for a house, and held hands like the runaway newlywed lovers we were, falling more deeply in love.

  Most of the regulars on the Tour were starting play at the Thunderbird Invitational in Palm Springs, but I hadn’t been invited to play there; I was signed up to try to qualify for the Brawley Open in Brawley, California, scheduled to begin the same day as the Thunderbird. I remember that we drove to Palm Springs anyway to see what it was like. I guess that because we knew of it only by reputation and all the glamorous associations we made with millionaires and movie stars, we were surprised at how small it was—why, it was hardly bigger than Youngstown! On the other hand, it was also incredibly beautiful, with its swaying palms and pretty sun-splashed streets tucked in a majestic bowl of desert mountains under an always-blue winter sky. We found a nice inexpensive place to have lunch, then cruised over to the tournament site to take a peek at the proceedings—literally looking in from outside the gate, dreaming of the day we would be invited in.

  Then we drove on to Brawley and met Grace and John Stadler, a farmer and his wife who were friends of someone we knew, two of the most gracious and welcoming people Winnie and I ever met in our years of travels. They put us up in a pretty room in their little farmhouse and fed us handsomely, and I went out that Monday and qualified and shot a total of 277 in the tournament against a strong field, good enough for seventeenth place. Not a bad start, except for the fact that it would be six months before I’d have an official Tour payday.

  So on we motored to Phoenix. Somewhere en route it occurred to us that we were spending far too much for motel rooms. By the time we hit the city limits of Phoenix we’d more or less made up our minds to go shopping for an inexpensive trailer. Given the nomadic nature of the PGA Tour in those days, it’s not surprising that there was a thriving culture of trailer-haulers on tour. Several of the young professionals and their wives even traveled in caravans from one Tour site to the next, including Bill Casper and his wife, Shirley, the Doug Fords, the Littlers, the Dick Mayers, and several others. (Impressively, they hauled everything from their china to family heirlooms and were able to set themselves up with all the comforts of home in no time flat.)

  The trailer we found was a neat little rig shaped like a loaf of bread, nineteen feet long, with a small kitchen, small bedroom, and a very small bath. The key word here is small. The only thing that wasn’t particularly small about it was the price. To afford it, we had to phone my father and—even more difficult—Shube Walzer and ask to borrow $500 from each. Pap readily agreed, and I was surprised by Shube’s willingness to chip in on the trailer. Perhaps the ice was beginning to thaw after all.

  Speaking of ice, our first morning in that little love nest on wheels turned out to be an adventure neither Winnie nor I will ever forget. After hooking up the trailer and provisioning it with homemaking supplies, we drove to a trailer park near the tournament site and set up housekeeping, both so proud of our little place-on-wheels we were about to pop. Later, at the tournament site, I invited a fellow professional and his wife over for breakfast. (By then my mother had given Winnie her crash cooking course, and Winnie could do a pretty fair breakfast.) Anyway, perhaps forgetting that we were parked in the desert in winter, I got up early and went to shower, only to find there was no water. It was so cold outside, I quickly discovered, the trailer’s hose line to the spigot was frozen solid. Well, I thought, no problem. I went back inside and heated some water in a pot and poured it on the frozen line. I must have done this half a dozen times, but the line remained frozen as a Popsicle. Finally, I lost my patience altogether and kicked the spigot in frustration. The head snapped off clean as a whistle and water spouted up like a baby geyser. “C’mon, Winnie. We’re going over to the club for breakfast!” I shouted to my bride. And that’s exactly what we did—leaving that gusher for the management to handle.

  I finished tenth at Phoenix, and we moved on to Tucson and then San Antonio, followed by Houston and Baton Rouge. My best finish in those initial tournaments was sixth place at San Antonio. What I remember most about that period of time, aside from wrestling with and cursing at that trailer, was practicing my rear end off before and after each round.

  I seemed to live on the practice tee and putting greens, beating balls off the rock-hard ground from dawn till dusk. In those days, it was kind of a running joke that th
e trajectory of my tee shots was so low you could always tell when Arnold Palmer had been on the tee—the grass in front of it was scorched by the ball. It’s true a lot of my tee shots rarely got higher than twenty feet off the ground and did indeed occasionally ricochet off the turf. I could still outdrive almost anybody out there, but I knew I would need a broader range of shotmaking skills if I wanted to win the two tournaments that most interested me—the Masters and the U.S. Open.

  Earlier in this account I talked about my father’s stern admonition that the quickest way to wind up back in Latrobe was to accept swing advice from other players or fall under the spell of teachers. I pretty much accepted his words as gospel, but I did receive help of a sort from a larger-than-life character named George Low.

  George was the son of a famous Carnoustie golf teacher and a widely acknowledged putting genius whose professional career was marginal at best on these shores but who epitomized the kinds of characters who were still around the professional tour in those days. Like a figure out of a Damon Runyon tale, George was a charming rogue who lived off a small inheritance from his father and whatever he could make at the horse track, at cards, or from the big-money private matches he always seemed to be in the middle of somewhere. He was proud of his Scottish heritage and not opposed to making an easy buck and supposedly once dressed up in a kilt to play the “part” of the “Scottish” professional in George S. May’s elaborate Tam O’Shanter productions. As I fondly recall, old George always had some kind of action going somewhere—a putting match he never lost, if nothing else. Anyway, though Tony Penna questioned whether my swing would keep me out on tour long, George had no doubt about my abilities whatsoever. He took a shine to me very early—perhaps because I was a professional’s son like him—and gave me the one putting lesson I ever had. It was short and sweet, as I’ll explain.